Social Standing and the Right to Bear Arms

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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05 January 2016 14:29
 

I salute Joe on his research. Meanwhile, it seems that it would be germane to examine heraldry’s trajectory in the U.S. since the Early Republic period. I get the impression Joe is about to go there. At any rate, if what we’re ultimately trying to get at is what sort of assertion bearing arms makes right now, and whether or not any hypocrisy is involved in an American armiger’s condemning the use of arms with nobiliary additaments by another American, this intervening period would seem to be relevant. I am in no position to undertake serious research on the subject, but my general impression is that the bearing of arms entered a period of disfavor and desuetude for most of the 19th century—partly for reasons of taste acknowledged by Joe—and reemerged as a strategy for asserting gentility and superior bloodlines in the face of massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, and perhaps, too, as a dimension of Northern and Southern elites’ efforts to establish solidarity after the Civil War. Anyway, it seems to me that gentility and superior bloodlines are pretty well what bearing arms are still generally taken to assert, and that no one really believes the legitimate heraldic franchise is wide open. I would welcome evidence to the contrary. I haven’t seen it yet.

I take Joe’s argument with me to boil down to this: "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."

 

That’s fine as far as it goes, but I see no effective rebuttal here to my contention that an American’s bearing a coat of arms with nobiliary additaments that have been legitimately acquired according to a foreign scheme of some sort indicates that he believes he is a nobleman in the framework of the United States (which has, of course, no nobility). Like any coat of arms, it asserts high birth and high social status, but if one is into asserting things like that in the first place, where does he get off attacking the guy whose coat of arms sports supporters?

 
snelson
 
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snelson
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05 January 2016 21:36
 

Quote:

I am in no position to undertake serious research on the subject, but my general impression is that the bearing of arms entered a period of disfavor and desuetude for most of the 19th century—partly for reasons of taste acknowledged by Joe—and reemerged as a strategy for asserting gentility and superior bloodlines in the face of massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, and perhaps, too, as a dimension of Northern and Southern elites’ efforts to establish solidarity after the Civil War.


The Journal of American Studies recently published an article that touches on how some Americans viewed coats of arms and their use by fellow Americans during the 19th century.  The author of the article, Dr. Forrest D. Pass, describes the adoption of coats of arms by various American industrialists and robber barons during the Gilden Age of the late nineteenth century, and the subsequent negative reactions printed in American newspapers describing these coats of arms as un-American symbols of aristocracy. The author then goes on to write about various American bucket-shop operators, and how they popularized the now-common misconception that there is a coat of arms “for every surname” through the mass marketing of armorial trinkets and souvenirs. If I read and understand the article correctly, the author then claims that, motivated by profits, the efforts of bucket-shop operators to market their wares to Americans of all social classes helped to break down the perceptions held by many Americans that coats of arms are necessarily associated with class or aristocracy: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9701329&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S0021875815000675

 

Apparently the article’s author, Dr. Pass, is an historian at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, and was Saguenay Herald and Assistant Registrar at the Canadian Heraldic Authority from 2009-2013.

 

I’ve been a great fan of this thread.  I hope that further research can help show how the residents of other American colonies, including the French in places like Louisiana and the Spanish in places like New Mexico, viewed coats of arms before and after becoming citizens of the expanding US.

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
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06 January 2016 03:04
 

We will obviously, and inevitably, have further debate after Joe’s final posting in this lecture series; but as noted earlier, I’d prefer to hold off until then - or if you prefer, until all of Joe’s cards are on the table wink

 
JJB1
 
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06 January 2016 16:33
 

Here’s an 1893 New York World article with comments from Ward McAllister on the subject:

http://oldnews.aadl.org/node/112285

And a few comments on it from some editors of other papers at the time:

https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=UxAaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=byAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4099,487597

 
David Pope
 
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06 January 2016 20:42
 

JJB;105347 wrote:

Here’s an 1893 New York World article with comments from Ward McAllister on the subject:

http://oldnews.aadl.org/node/112285

And a few comments on it from some editors of other papers at the time:

https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=UxAaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=byAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4099,487597


Great find.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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10 January 2016 12:27
 

Getting nearer to the denoument; just a few more installments.

The other day, I left William H. Whitmore of the NEHGS Committee on Heraldry in a box.  He sort of found his way out in 1868, with a proposal developed in response to an initiative in Congress to tax the use of armorial bearings [an initiative that was referred to and immediately died in the House Ways and Means Committee].  In a nutshell, Whitmore’s scheme would have required Americans to register their inherited or assumed arms with the appropriate Federal district court for a fee of “at least” $50 (equivalent to $825 adjusted for inflation).  The arms could then be used publicly subject to a tax of $10/yr.  Any other use of arms (with a handful of exceptions of heirloom pieces and existing memorials) would be punishable by a fine of $500.  The full text of his pamphlet can be read at http://www.americanheraldry.org/pages/index.php?n=Documents.Whitmore.

 

Whitmore’s proposal incorporates the constructive (if, to us, obvious) suggestion that proven first use should determine superior title.  He explicitly recognizes the need to make room for the bearing of arms by “new” families (“Certainly we do not desire to prevent any man from distinguishing himself, nor his children from cherishing a proper pride in his acts”).  But the idea was informed by several principles that were untenable, either historically, logically, or politically.  The first, if least explicit, of these was the continuing supposition that society is divided between those who are worthy to bear arms (descendants of old families and those who have more recently distinguished themselves) and those who are not.

 

More explicitly, Whitmore’s proposal is founded on the bizarre premise that everything Americans do, at least with regard to heraldry, must be either explicitly forbidden or explicitly permitted. “The use of coat-armor,” he laments, “is not prohibited by the Constitution, and yet, from some unwritten prohibition, it has never been officially allowed.”  On just what constitutional basis he could justify Federal involvement in regulating personal heraldry Whitmore doesn’t say, let alone whence Congress could conceivably derive the power to prohibit its use.  This Orwellian notion that “what is not permitted is forbidden” seems to derive from Whitmore’s counterfactual supposition that the contemporary English theory of the significance of arms applied everywhere else, that “in nearly all the civilized countries of Europe these few marks and combinations [i.e., coats of arms] have a certain meaning and value, and that every government which recognizes their use is bound to assent to the general agreement as to their meaning.”  Of course, as we have seen in this series of essays, there is no such consensus among different countries about the meaning and value of arms and never has been.

 

Whitmore’s proposal is also characterized by an almost phobic horror that a new coat of arms might be mistaken for an old one.  I suppose this would be a concern if you think, as Whitmore did, that the principal purpose of heraldry is as a genealogical tool, but of course the issue arises equally with newly granted arms as with newly assumed ones, yet Whitmore doesn’t seem to have suggested that his correspondents at the College of Arms mandate the prominent display of the date of the grant or first use with every emblazonment of an English coat of arms, as he would have required for all American emblazonments.  This, he tells us, is “perfectly in accordance with the rules,” as “every one who has studied the science of heraldry will agree.”  Except, of course, that in no other country, emphatically including England, is there any such requirement.

 

Finally, Whitmore is also horrified with what the neighbors will think, especially the English neighbors.  He comes across as obsessed by the notion that the United States is embarrassing itself in the way heraldry is used:  “One thing is evident; every where in our cities the assumption of coat-armor is daily growing more frequent. We can no more avoid the imputation of being delinquents in this respect, than we can repel the criticisms formerly justly made on our national peculiarities.”  Whitmore refers to “the ridiculous aping of foreign heraldry now prevalent” in the United States, that “as it stands it is but a mockery.” For him, the unregulated use of heraldry is a “reproach” to the “national character.”  “Is it not possible,” he asks, “that our foreign friends will laugh at a government which gives John Smith a license to display the coat-armor of the Duke of Norfolk, [etc]?”

 

Whitmore was undoubtedly stung by the mockery leveled at American heraldry by his English friend John E. Cussans, whose Handbook of Heraldry (published the same year as Whitmore’s proposal) excoriates American heraldry for its lack of regulation, with what to Cussans and Whitmore are predictable consequences:  “Many people imagine—and none are more loud in the assertion than Americans themselves—that in the great Western Republic the species of gentilitial registration denominated Heraldry is uncared for.  This, however, is far from being the fact.  Even amongst the partisans of political equality, there is a large majority anxious to exhibit their individual superiority….  Unfortunately, there is not in the United States of America any Institution analogous to our College of Heralds; the consequence is, there are probably more Assumptive Arms borne in that country than any where else.”

 

(As an aside:  Undoubtedly there was a great deal of armorial usurpation and assumption going on in the United States, but we should take Cussans’s comparison with what was happening elsewhere with a grain of salt.  In the first place, Cussans does not seem to have visited America to see for himself what was happening armorially; he is almost certainly merely echoing what he was hearing from Whitmore.  In the second place, Cussans himself acknowledged the existence in England of what we would now call “bucket shops,” “advertising London tradesmen” in armorial bearings, he called them, who, if they can’t find a client’s arms in Burke, merely invent something “from the depths of their inner consciousness”.  Moreover, it was commonplace at this time for English heraldic writers to decry the tidal wave of armorial assumption in their own country.  Thus, the Rev. Charles Boutell writes in the 1864 edition of Heraldry, Historical and Popular that, “In modern Heraldry Cadency is but little used, since its operation is almost superseded by the simple process of assuming arms without any shadow of claim to them, beyond such claim as is supposed to exist through the fact of bearing a particular name…. [Now,] when a person determines to have ‘arms,’ he looks out his own name in an armory, and the arms he chances to find assigned to some one having the same name he forthwith assumes and uses as his own.  Or he may obtain assistance, and his own consciousness of heraldic inexperience may be satisfactorily set at rest by gentlemen who, for a consideration, and a very trifling consideration too, finds arms for hesitating aspirants to heraldic honours.”  [Italics in original.]  And, Boutell says later, “It is indeed true that every one is at liberty to call anything whatever his ‘arms,’ as he may determine either the colour and fashion of his costume, or the shape of his house; but, nevertheless, the Heralds’ College still exists, and is the fountain head of true Heraldry; and, until it is true to itself, Modern Heraldry must continue to be but a degenerate representative of what Heraldry was about half a thousand years ago…”  A few decades later, A. C. Fox-Davies (writing under the name of “X”) embarked on his famous rants about the prevalence of “bogus arms.”  Neither Boutell nor Fox-Davies was writing about America.)

 

Whitmore closes his essay by calling for American heraldry to be either regulated—according to his particular plan—or outlawed.  “To the man of wealth it would offer an inheritance for his children, founded on a truth; to the man conscious of a distinguished ancestry, a recognition of the fact; and to the man who had risked his life for his country, an acknowledgment of his services, the more to be prized since it could always be borne without ostentation.  If all these inducements should fail to render the use of coat-armor popular [sic! Presumably Whitmore means popular among the rich, well-born, and valorous] , then surely it is time to prohibit it entirely. As it stands it is but a mockery, and nothing but the breath of authority can give it life. If it be declined after being proffered on such honest and intelligible grounds as those we have named, let us have no more of it, and let the law destroy it.”

 

So there ("my way or the highway") let us leave Mr. Whitmore’s solution to the American heraldic quandary.  Fortunately for us, William Barton had figured out a better way forward some fifty years before, which we’ll examine next time.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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13 January 2016 13:54
 

As I mentioned last time, in my view it was William Barton, who first proposed an American heraldic authority in 1788, who did the best job prior to the 20th century in reconciling the use of personal heraldry with American mores.  He did this in a second, unpublished, essay on heraldry that he wrote in about 1814.  I am indebted to our former member John DuLong for a transcript of the manuscript, which he found at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and later published in the ACH journal, The Armiger’s News.  Rather than reinventing John’s wheel, let me just share the relevant portion of his summary, and then follow with a few direct quotes from Barton’s essay, which is entitled “Observations on the Advantages to be Derived from a Proper Use of Coats-of-Arms in the United States.”

First, from John’s introduction:


Quote:

In this essay Barton has abandoned a public effort to regulate heraldry and suggests a private initiative.  His concern is not only to recognize the armorial bearings of Americans, but to also provide a register of genealogical facts for American families.  Barton does not shy away from accepting assumed arms.  While condemning the appropriation of surname arms, he values family arms without mentioning the necessity of differencing arms for descendants of original armigers.  He views family arms as being able to serve the important function of acting as a marker to distinguish descendants of the same armiger.  Ultimately, Barton’s proposal for an office and registry is perhaps too ambitious, but what a wonderful gift to genealogists and heraldists this register would have been had Barton been able to fulfill his plans. [Note:  Whether the idea was practical or not, Barton died in 1817, shortly after this essay was written and long before it could have been carried out in any case.—JMcM]

Putting this essay in context, it is important to remember that Barton wrote it during the War of 1812 when there was open hostility towards the British.  Apparently, Barton, not wishing to appear as an Anglophile, felt it necessary to add a long insertion of text ... reminding his readers that nations may struggle with one another, but once peace is established, animosity diminishes.  He wants people to cherish heraldic traditions that many in America associated with the British.  Furthermore, Barton, with the sad exclusion of people of color, is inclusive in regarding as valuable the heraldic traditions of Americans of all European origins.


And a few quotations from the essay itself:

 

* “In consequence of the multiplied migrations of many of the descendants of those Europeans, who have from time to time, established themselves on the shores of this northern continent, distant separations of members of the same family have been produced, in numerous instances: so as to form, in every such instance, a new family, apparently, in descendants from a common progenitor—the original American settler.  These branches, properly considered of the same family—in many cases very far removed from each other in locality—either wholly lose, in process of time, all recollection of their kindred; or, at best, retain only an indistinct and uncertain knowledge of them.  In such cases, the mere identity of a family name…cannot long serve to distinguish their lineage, from that of other persons bearing the same name, although of different families.”

 

* “The more, therefore, the science of Blazonry shall be cultivated among the citizens of America, the more highly will it be held in estimation by men of well informed and unprejudiced minds; while the benefits deducible from it, will be proportionally experienced.  Nor can any possible disadvantages result from a due and regular appropriation of armorial bearings to American families of reputation and worth, in the assumption and use of them by their proper owners: because these heraldic ensigns confer neither privileges nor titles; and are, in themselves, as perfectly inoffensive to the community, as the surnames which denote different families.”

 

* “It may, perhaps, be objected to what may be deemed a general use of family armorial ensigns, in this country, that a great proportion of the people in the United States are not entitled to bear them, by reason of their forefathers having had no legitimate claim to such appropriate badges of families; and, that, even where a right of that kind actually exists, it must in many cases be extremely difficult, if not altogether impracticable, at the present day, to ascertain the paternal coats-of-arms properly belonging to such American families as are entitled to them.  This, it may be presumed, is in some measure the fact, with respect to paternal arms.  In reference, however, to some of the more beneficial purposes to which these heraldic badges of different families may be applied, those objections have little weight; indeed they are destitute of any, in a prospective view.  For those arms which are called assumptive, when they are once appropriated to a particular family, and do not belong to any other—-at least in the same country-—will serve to distinguish that family, together with their descendants, from others.”

 

* “Arms recently assumed by a family will not, indeed, enable the original bearers of them to trace back their ancestors; nor will they be generally esteemed equally honourable with the arms of inheritance not being retrospective.  But even these assumptive arms, in order that they may be rendered in some degree useful, must not only exhibit on the face of them a peculiar and distinguishing character; but they must also be appropriately used by the several contemporary branches of the same family, and their descendants.”

 

* “Every man, therefore, who holds a respectable standing in society must be desirous not only of avoiding, in the first instance, mistakes of this nature [using ‘arms of the surname’ that rightly belong to someone else]; but of having them rectified, as speedily and as far as possible, after it shall be discovered that they have been actually committed.  Because, independently of the consideration, that no person of reputable character would wish to use, and thereby probably perpetuate in his family, any armorial insignia, which might evidently appear to be the right of another—-every abuse of this sort tends to diminish the usefulness of coat-armour.”

 

* “To render the use of armorial bearings subservient to valuable purposes in the United State, the writer of these observations has established [sic; actually, at the time of writing, ‘intended to establish’], in the city of Philadelphia, an Office, denominated “The American Heraldic Institution” … In this office, Books [will be] opened for registering, on applications for that purpose, genealogical accounts of all such American families as may be desirous of establishing some permanent memorials of their origin, descent, alliances and kindred; and also the armorial ensigns, (usually called coats-of-arms,) severally appertaining to those families; together with the evidences, of what nature so ever, which shall either be furnished by the respective applicants or obtained for them, of their right to such arms.”

 

* “Many valuable institutions of great public utility have been planned and carried into execution by men in private stations….  In the United States, the establishment of an Office for the uses and purposes herein designated, can only be an Institution of a private nature; but this circumstance will not diminish its usefulness.”

 

In summary, Barton sees the value of arms as not merely retrospective (as Whitmore and most other 19th century American heraldists did) but as prospective, looking not just toward ancestors but also toward progeny.  He retains the idea that arms are appropriately used only by “families of reputation and worth,” but proposes no mechanism for adjudicating who meets that standard, and in fact says that his proposed American Heraldic Institution will be open to all interested American families.  Barton also retains the notion that some arms are more honorable than others, but in his view the degree of honor is completely disconnected from the source of the arms, e.g., in a grant from a king of arms or even a king; it is all a matter of antiquity—the oldest arms are the best, an attitude that also prevailed in other countries until heraldic publicists were able to persuade certain classes otherwise.*  He recognizes that heraldry in the United States is a matter for the private, not governmental, sector, and that preventing the abuse of arms must essentially be on the honor system.

 

What relevance does Barton’s approach have for us today?  We’ll look at that next time.

 

___________________

* A story appearing in a book review in the English journal, The Athenaeum, in 1876, is apposite:  “There is a tale told of a certain northern squire who, when served at the instance of Sir William Dugdale with a summons to attend his visitation, to prove his arms and pedigree, replied, “Tell this new knight that the Watertons bore the bloody crescents for five hundred years before the usurper, Richard [III], incorporated his college [of arms], and that Watertons will continue to bear them a thousand years after some righteous king has suppressed it.”  Whether this be a fable or, as we think more likely, a slightly decorated version of a real message, it is certain that many of the nobler of the untitled houses did not acknowledge the authority of the heralds.  With the lesser gentry it was much the same.  Their arms might not have got into rolls or printed volumes, but they possessed plate carvings and embroidery which showed that they had borne them in days gone by; and, as their position was well known and acknowledged among their own neighbours and kinsmen, they were little concerned to avail themselves of the services of the London office.  Then, as now, the chief occupation of the heralds was with the new men, who wanted, as far as armorial bearings could do it, to be put on the same platform with the older families.” [emphasis added]  Note that this is essentially the same attitude expressed by John Custis IV, which I cited in an earlier installment, toward arms bought from a herald by “any scoundrel with money.”

 
David Pope
 
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13 January 2016 17:12
 

Joe,

I continue to be intrigued.  Thanks.

 

David

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
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13 January 2016 22:23
 

I wonder if John DuLong and the ACH would allow the posting of Barton"s unpublished second essay; or if it’s already on their website, maybe a link cited in something posted on our home page?

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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14 January 2016 12:07
 

To understand how Barton’s 1814 "Observations" are relevant to American heraldry in the 21st century, we have to revert to the path pursued by William Whitmore and his colleagues in the 19th.

In 1898, Whitmore’s successors on the NEHGS Committee on Heraldry stunningly recommended that “As there is no person and no institution in the United States with authority to regulate the use of the coat of arms, your Committee discourages their display in any way or form.”  The members, clinging to the notion that the only real arms were those blessed by royal authority, seem to have been demoralized by the realization (stemming from the publication of the records of the heralds’ visitations by the Harleian Society and other English organizations) that many of their own ancestral arms didn’t measure up to the standard they’d been insisting upon since the committee’s establishment.  They discovered that Burke’s General Armory, which they had been accepting as a quasi-authoritative record, included many arms that were not "of record" at the College, and were probably also influenced by Arthur Fox-Davies’s strident tirades against what he called "bogus arms."

 

But then, amazingly enough, a new group of members of the committee drove through a 180° reversal of position in 1914:  “Our predecessors [in 1898] thought that the armiger was a sort of lesser noble and that a man who used a coat of arms pretended to a kind of rank created and bestowed on his ancestor by royal authority. Consequently they were horrified by unscrupulous assumptions, and were fearful of claims to arms which might look plausible but which might by any chance prove to be false. Rather than incur the risk that some men might impose on their fellow creatures by false pretentions of this sort, they were in favor of discouraging the display of arms in any form.  In accordance with the same general views in respect to the nature of arms they laid down the propositions that no arms could have been borne rightfully by subjects of the King in the American Colonies unless the arms had either been granted or confirmed by the Heralds; and that arms cannot properly be borne to-day by anybody who has not an authenticated pedigree direct from a man to whom arms had been so granted or from some member of a family whose arms had been so confirmed. We neither entertain such views nor assent to such propositions [emphasis added].”

 

There is no evidence that any of the signatories to this statement had any knowledge of Barton’s 1814 essay.  Their position was primarily informed by the serious, scholarly reexamination of the premises on which the traditional position had been constructed, work carried out by historians and genealogists such as Sir George Sitwell, J. Horace Round, and Oswald Barron in England, Marion Chadwick in Canada, and Henry Stoddard Ruggles in the United States, all of them writing in vociferous refutation of the Fox-Davies view of heraldry.  But, although not directly influenced by Barton, the logic of the new NEHGS position tracked very closely with his “Observations.”  I will not repeat the full report, which we have on our website at http://www.americanheraldry.org/pages/index.php?n=Documents.NEHGS14, but it is nevertheless striking how similar some of the passages are:

 

• “[F]rom our point of view there is nothing any more aristocratical or undemocratic in cherishing a family coat of arms, and in continuing to use it here in unpretentious ways as a mark or symbol of one’s family stock, than in cherishing a family name which is associated with historical events or with respectable social position.”

 

• “Your Committee would rather find some way in which the use of arms could be made more general — some way in which they could be assumed and borne without any false claim to strictly armigerous descent — than endeavor to suppress the display of arms by those who can produce reasonable evidence in support of their hereditary right.”

 

• “While it is inconceivable to us that the Society would ever sanction in any way the use of arms which were stolen or which were assumed here for no better reason than that they were once borne by a family of the same name, we are aware that strong arguments can be advanced in favor of recognizing and recording new coats which were heretofore or may hereafter be assumed in this country, and the use of which tells no genealogical lie. The frank and fearless assumption of arms has much to commend it.”

 

• “The use of such a [newly assumed] coat, as matters stand to-day, involves a false pretense only in this one respect, that it now seems to say that the arms originated in England or some other European country…. But the use of such arms would be purged of all falsehood if the practice of using them were recognized and if the facts were made a matter of quasi-public record in the archives of a Society like this.”

 

• “While an old coat possesses dignity and sentimental value merely by reason of its age, any coat, whether new or old, may acquire a truer dignity and a more substantial value by reason of the character and qualities of those who have borne it in more recent times or by reason of the character and qualities of one who bears it in our own day and generation.”

 

I see the Committee on Heraldry’s 1914 report as the intellectual basis that permits personal heraldry in the United States being anything more than an exercise for genealogists, antiquarians, and crypto-monarchists.  It led to the registration of inherited arms and the recording of assumed ones still carried out by the NEHGS COH today, and laid the foundation for all the other serious private registries (excluding for-profit bucket shops and things like the SCA) established since then.

 

I was going to attempt to wrap all this up in a coherent fashion in the next installment, but recalling that Fred asked that I also address the “trajectory” of American heraldry in the 19th century (beyond the writings of Whitmore, I take it), I will digress to that topic next time, even though I think it really has little bearing on the subject at hand, and then conclude in a final installment after that.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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25 January 2016 15:44
 

TRAJECTORY OF HERALDRY IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA

After having dug through piles of notes and, more recently, piles of snow, I’m going to take a crack at Fred’s request that I address what he called the “trajectory” of heraldry in the 19th century United States.  I’m actually going to start a little earlier, since the issue is really how Americans thought about and used arms in the post-Independence era.  As usual, I deluded myself about how brief I could make this; it turns out that there’s more information than I expected.

 

For a quick bottom line up front:  what I’ve found is that there seems to have been little if any drop in heraldic use in the first several decades following Independence, what we typically label the Federal period, although there was clearly some anti-heraldic sentiment among the public.  The more serious deprecation of heraldry starts showing up during the Jacksonian era, and then toward the Civil War with complaints about use of arms by parvenu families.  The revival began around 1880.  There are a number of developments to which the revival might be connected, which I’ll get to when I get to it.

 

It has long been taken for granted that, as the Virginia antiquary Lyon Gardiner Tyler wrote in 1894, “heraldry fell into utter disrepute” in the wake of the Revolution, along with the monarchy with which it was thought to be associated. Dom W. Wilfrid Bayne repeated this assertion in a 1963 article in the journal The Coat of Arms, stating that the Founding Fathers rejected a college of arms as inconsistent with American ideals—an odd interpretation of what George Washington actually said on the subject—and that heraldry consequently “suffered a temporary eclipse.”

 

There was clearly a substantial element of the post-Independence American public that believed heraldry was unrepublican.  For example, we have the incident in which John Adams instructed Abigail to paint over the armorial bearings on her carriage in the lead-up to his 1797 inauguration, to avoid exciting “popular feelings and vulgar insolence.”  Indeed, that William Barton felt the need to justify the use of heraldry in a republic indicates the existence of a strong anti-heraldry current of opinion.

 

Whatever some portion of the public thought ought to be the case, however, it’s difficult to find anyone in the first 50-60 years after Independence claiming that heraldry had actually been “eclipsed” in practice.  The first statement I can find saying anything of the kind is an 1834 editorial in the New England Magazine:  “Thank Providence we dropped our coats of arms when we ceased to pray for the king!”  True, there is a handful of anecdotes of people who previously bore arms renouncing them.  Bayne tells us that a member of the Blount family of North Carolina destroyed a plate engraved with the family arms “in a fit of republican zeal”; Tyler cites Commodore Jacob Jones (a naval hero of the War of 1812 and the Barbary Wars) melting down his armorial silver; and the historian of bookplates Charles Dexter Allen reports that Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, is supposed to have destroyed all the prints of his own armorial bookplate that he could find.

 

But these seem to have been isolated cases.  The broader evidence seems to show that arms were used after the Revolution pretty much the same way they’d been used before.  On the official level, the United States itself, two of its departments, eight of the 13 states, and the two largest cities either adopted new armorial devices or kept using their old ones.  The national and state arms were employed for all the same purposes the royal arms would previously have been used:  on seals, military colors, coins, currency, and even tax stamps; as decoration on the outside and inside of public buildings and theaters; on medals and monuments and tavern signs; on the mastheads of newspapers; in at least one case even in a church (St. Paul’s Chapel in New York).  The arms of Pennsylvania were printed on the title page of the first Bible published in the United States, where the royal arms would once have been.

 

In the huge processions held up and down the colonies in 1788 to celebrate or urge the ratification of the new Constitution, many of the trade organizations comprising the parades (in Philadelphia and New York well over half of them) carried banners emblazoned with coats of arms, some expressly designed for the occasion.  The extensive use of armorial bearings in such overtly political settings, by organizations of working craftsmen, strongly calls into question the notion that heraldry as such was widely viewed as incompatible with republican values.  Indeed, at the most plebeian level, we find that nearly a quarter of the tattoos on sailors enlisting aboard the frigate USS Independence in 1815 included some kind of representation of the national coat of arms.

 

But perhaps it was only personal heraldry that was antithetical to republicanism.  Here again, however, barring isolated cases like those mentioned above, families who used arms before the Revolution kept using them after it and in all the same ways.  Even John Quincy Adams, who wrote in his diary in 1819 that “arms are emblematical hereditary titles of honor, conferred by monarchs as badges of nobility or of gentility, and are incompatible with that equality which is the fundamental principle of our Government,” never abandoned the use of personal heraldry for personal purposes, only for official ones.  (I will return to this distinction in the final installment of these essays.)  In fact, if we examine actual use, it’s hard to find evidence that Independence had much immediate impact on the use of personal heraldry at all.

 

Among the founders themselves, of the 80 men who signed the Declaration of Independence and/or the Constitution, 41 are known to have used coats of arms after they did so.  (This excludes those appearing on the AHS Founding Fathers’ rolls of arms solely on the basis of ancestor or relative using arms, or a later attribution.)  A few of the 41 actually began using arms only after Independence, such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  Our first three presidents, the three American signatories of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, our first and greatest chief justices (Jay and Marshall), the first Catholic bishop in the United States (Carroll) and at least three of the first Protestant Episcopal bishops (Seabury, Provoost, and Claggett) all used personal heraldry.  The Quaker preacher Elias Hicks used a coat of arms on his bookplate after Independence just as the Quaker botanist John Bartram had done before.  Jacob Jones may have melted down the family silver, but far more distinguished naval heroes such as John Paul Jones, Edward Preble, and Stephen Decatur used heraldry just as openly and in the same ways as their adversaries in the Royal Navy.  Even as ardent an anti-royalist as Paul Revere made and used engravings of his own arms.

 

Thus far this is all anecdotal, but where statistics can be generated they tend to support the hypothesis that the purported “disrepute” or “eclipse” of heraldry in the Federal period is a myth.

 

For example, since the early 1700s, it had been the practice in girls’ finishing schools in New England for each student to embroider her family’s arms as a capstone project in needlework.  Of almost 100 reported examples that I can find of such embroideries, 81 can be dated with reasonable precision.  Thirty-three of the 81 were produced in the 40 years following 1780, compared with 26 in the previous 40 years (the other 22 pre-dating 1740).  Even allowing for a margin of error in the dating and the unsystematic nature of the sample, there is no detectable drop-off in this use of heraldry by middle- and upper-middle-class New Englanders.  (Very few of the embroideries show the arms of notable Brahmin families.)

 

The same finding applies to the armorial ex libris.  Between them, Charles Dexter Allen and Charles K. Bolton identified some 915 such plates used by Americans before 1830, most of them armorial.  Despite the growing fashion from the late 18th century onward for new, non-armorial styles (portraits of book-owners, engraved pictures of libraries, allegorical scenes), there is little if any drop-off in the number of dated armorial bookplates produced before and after the Revolution.  The relatively small number bearing dates seemed too small to draw any conclusions, however, so I expanded the data to take into account the period the engraver was working (for plates whose engraver is known or can be reliably attributed).  If the engraver was unknown, I relied on the style of depiction of the arms, which evolved with artistic tastes over the period concerned.  I used Allen’s categorization and the range of years in which each style was dominant.  Rounding off to the nearest ten to avoid implying greater precision than the data will bear, the armorial plates fall into the following periods before and just after Independence:

 

- 1760-1780:  230

- 1780-1800:  250

- 1800-1820:  230

 

And I swear I didn’t jigger the numbers; they just came out this way.

 

Finally, we have the strange enthusiasm for armorial tombstones that swept Presbyterian congregations in and around Charlotte, N.C., in the last two decades of the 1700s.  Such tombstones were largely démodé almost everywhere by this time, abandoned in favor of monuments in a more contemporary Greco-Roman taste.  Yet the presumably tight-fisted Scotch-Irish executors of at least 60 deceased residents of an area that Lord Cornwallis called a “damnable hornet’s nest of rebellion” were willing to lay out extra cash for the Bigham stonecarving firm to adorn their loved ones’ headstones in a style that is supposed to have been in “utter disrepute” as a relic of monarchism!

 

The number of artists and artisans in American cities who were in business producing armorial items further undercuts the myth of the eclipse of heraldry.  Heraldry was popular enough in the 1790s that New York, a city of some 30,000, could support at least a half dozen engravers who advertised their services cutting coats of arms on seals, bookplates, and silverware—the same number that advertised that service in the same city in the 1770s.  (In the Washington, D.C. area today, with a population of nearly six million, there seems to be only one.)  In addition, one company advertised etching of armorial bearings on glass, and there were two firms of heraldic coach-painters.  In New England at roughly the same period, enough public demand existed for heraldic decoration that a number of artists—most notably the father and son team of John Coles senior and junior—were able to earn a living producing stereotyped armorial paintings for middle class families.

 

Before someone else points it out:  yes, many of the arms on these embroideries, paintings, and bookplates were “bogus” by one standard or another.  Almost all the Bigham tombstones were bogus by just about any standard.  But the issue at hand is not whether people used heraldry correctly; it’s whether they used it at all.  As Bolton says of the New England paintings, “In some cases [these water-color coats of arms] were used of right, but the owner of the painting cared little about ‘right.’”

 

Next time, the Jacksonian era and beyond.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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25 January 2016 16:28
 

By the way, on the bookplates:  I sorted the data various ways before deciding the best way to present it, but it occurred to me in writing that I should have given the distribution of the plates for which a specific year of manufacture is known.  I don’t remember how I grouped them and concluded "little if any drop-off ... before and after the Revolution," but just to double check I just went back and recounted, grouping them into the 20 years prior to the Revolution (1755-74), the period of the Revolution (1775-81), and the 20 years after the Revolution (1782-1801) and found:

- 1755-1774:  36

- 1775-1781:  11

- 1782-1801:  36

 

I know, I know, it sounds too exact to be true.  Nevertheless!

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
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Michael F. McCartney
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26 January 2016 12:59
 

Joe’s discussion of "Trajectory of Heraldry in Post-Revolutionary America" triggered a thought along the lines of "trajectory of American society."

Our Guidelines address American Heraldry in the context of both generally accepted international heraldic practice, and the the larger American legal and social context, which trumps when these collide.  E.g. 1.5.1 "consistent with ideals characteristic of the United States"; 2.5.5 "underlying rational for [heraldic]practice consistent with American conditions and values"; and 1.5.5 "consistent with modern American mores [and] take account of contemporary laws and customs".

 

Joe’s discussions so far covered changes in English society and relevant social status leading up to the Revolution, how those changes were or were not reflected here, and the heraldic implications, touching on historical social changes such as the transition from the Founders to Jacksonian democracy.  Hopefully his final installment(s) will address the trajectory of more recent changes in the larger American context - Civil War, emancipation, racial and gender equality, and other legal and social changes - and how they have or haven’t, should or shouldn’t, impacted the current and future cultural sidebars of American heraldry.

 

Easy for me to ask; maybe not so much for him to actually do! wink

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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26 January 2016 15:41
 

19th C. TRAJECTORY CONCLUDED

I should begin by adding to the previous section that, of course, none of the numbers I’ve presented shows that personal heraldry was a popular phenomenon in the United States in any sense of the word.  The extent of heraldic usage was tiny compared to the scale of the population.  But then that’s true most places and most times, including in pre- and post-Independence America, and including England both before and after 1776.  So if the challenge is to prove that the use of personal arms was widespread in that sense, neither I nor anyone else can do that.

 

Anyway:  why do I see the Jacksonian period (1829-1827) as a turning point of the negative kind?  Several reasons, I think.

 

First, new official and corporate heraldry pretty much stops appearing during this period.  Eight of the 13 states that ratified the Constitution in 1788 had more or less correct heraldic arms (62%), four of those of completely new designs post-Revolution.  By the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1826, it was 10 of 24 states and 2 of 3 territories (44%).  By 1861 it was 13 of 34 states, including the two former territories that had since become states (and stretching a point for Michigan’s regression from fairly decent territorial arms to its present landscape on a shield) and 1 of 6 territories (35% overall).

 

The three oldest colleges in the country (Harvard, William and Mary, Yale) had heraldic arms before Independence, but only Brown could be added to the list (1833) until the 1880s.  As for ecclesiastical heraldry, most bishops’ seals by the end of the 19th century were (in the words of Pierre de Chaignon La Rose) “a wilderness of inappropriate, absurd, inarticulate, grotesque, and utterly unheraldic caricatures.”

 

Secondly, with Jackson’s successor Martin Van Buren we start seeing more outspoken ridicule of politicians who used arms.  In Van Buren’s case the attacks were part of the campaign accusing him, with his aristocratic manner and name, of betraying Old Hickory’s populist legacy.  Van Buren was accused of having imported “high-backed, four-horse, soft-cushioned, coat-of-arms paneled” carriages from England to ride in while he was President, and John Tyler is recorded as having joked with Senator Henry Wise about the display of armorial bearings by one of Van Buren’s cabinet officers, “Democracy blazoning its coat of arms!” as Wise put it.  It was the age of the “log-cabin” President, and even those who had been born in log cabins with names like “Berkeley,” “Sherwood Forest,” and “Hare Forest,” surrounded by thousand of acres of plantation, tended to eschew any display of heraldry.  (That there was probably a certain amount of hypocrisy involved in this is suggested by an 1832 letter from Tyler to his son, Robert, expressing pleasure that the young man was “employed in making yourself acquainted with the armorial bearings contained in the encyclopedia.  To many persons, it would seem but a mere waste of time; but I look upon it in a very different light.”)

 

This trend was not universal, by the way.  Daniel Webster and Gen. Winfield Scott both used armorial bookplates and John C. Calhoun evidently used the Scottish arms of Colquhoun of Luss.  All these men had presidential ambitions at one time or another.  But if not universal, the relative invisibility of heraldry among politicians appears unmistakable compared to what we saw with the generation of the Founders.

 

It is also interesting to consider how heraldry was treated in American literature during this period.  For Longfellow and Hawthorne, arms carry connotations of gentility, but decayed, decrepit, dying gentility:

 

- “It was an old-fashioned equipage, hanging close to the ground, with arms on the panels…. An old man possessed of the heraldic lore so common in that day examined the shield of arms in the panel….  The last inheritor of its honors was recently dead… ‘He left no child,’ continued the herald, ‘and these arms, being in a lozenge, betoken that the coach appertains to his widow.’  (Hawthorne, “The White Old Maid,” 1837)

 

-  “The coat of arms of the dying year hangs on the forest wall, –as the coat of arms on the walls of a nobleman’s house in England, when he dies.” (Longfellow, Journal, 1838)

 

- “Standing on that miserable eminence she [Hester Prynne] saw again her native village in Old England and her paternal home, a decayed house of gray stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half-obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility.”  (Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850)

 

- “Let us behold, in poor old Hepzibah [Pynchon], the immemorial lady—two hundred years old, on this side of the water, and thrice as many on the other,—with her antique portraits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and traditions…  Hepzibah brought out some old silver spoons with the family crest upon them… With her crested teaspoons and antique china, she was flattering herself with ideas of gentility.” (Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, 1851)

 

- “But first the Landlord will I trace;/Grave in his aspect and attire;/A man of ancient pedigree,/A Justice of the Peace was he,/Known in all Sudbury as ‘The Squire.’/Proud was he of his name and race,/Of old Sir William and Sir Hugh,/And in the parlor, full in view,/His coat-of-arms, well framed and glazed,/Upon the wall in colors blazed;/He beareth gules upon his shield,/A chevron argent in the field,/With three wolf’s heads, and for the crest/A Wyvern part-per-pale addressed/Upon a helmet barred, below/The scroll reads, ‘By the name of Howe.’ (Longfellow, “The Wayside Inn,” 1863)

 

Note here that Longfellow is describing the “landlord” of an inn, i.e., the innkeeper.  In this case the decayed gentility is less physical than social.  It’s also interesting that the scroll reading “By the name of——“ is typical of the armorial paintings of the Coleses, suggesting that the arms in the inn are not quite as ancient as the landlord would like to pretend.

 

In any case, skipping forward to Mark Twain’s 1873 work The Gilded Age, we find this use of arms to connote decayed gentility with another running theme of 19th century commentary on heraldry in America, namely nouveau riche social climbing:  “The first fashionable call she received [in Washington] from a member of the ancient nobility … was paid by Mrs. Major-General Fulke-Fulkerson and daughter.  They drove up at one in the afternoon in a rather antiquated vehicle with a faded coat of arms on the panels, an aged white-wooled negro coachman on the box and a younger darkey beside him—the footman.  Both of these servants were dressed in dull brown livery that had seen considerable service.”  By contrast, “From the other extremity of the Washington aristocracy…  The three carriages arrived at the same moment from different directions.  They were new and wonderfully shiny, and the brasses on the harness were highly polished and bore complicated monograms.  There were showy coats of arms, too, with Latin mottoes.  The coachman and footmen were clad in bright new livery…”

 

European commentary on this phenomenon of rich but low-born Americans taking coats of arms for themselves appears as early as the late 1700s.  For example, the English musician William Priest’s Travels in the United States of America (published in 1802 describing a visit in 1793-97) relates the story of Peter Brown, a Philadelphia blacksmith, who “having made his fortune, set up his coach; but so far from being ashamed of the means by which he acquired his riches, he caused a large anvil to be painted on each panel of his carriage, with two naked arms in the act of striking.  The motto, By this I got ye.”

 

Similarly, the English actress Fanny Kemble relates in her Journal, published in 1835, the story of an unnamed man who, “wishing to have his crest put on his gig harness, sent a die of it to a manufacturer.  The harness was sent home when finished, but not the die; after sending for such sundry times, Mr.
<hr class=“bbcode_rule” >
called to inquire after it himself, when the following was the reply.  “Lord!  why, I didn’t know you wanted it.”  “I tell you, I wish to have it back.”  “Oh, pooh!  you can’t want it much now, do you?”  “I tell you, sir, I desire to have the die back immediately.”  “Ah?  well, come now, what’ll you take for it?”  “D’ye think I mean to sell my crest?  why, you might as well ask me to sell my name.”  “Why, you see, a good many folks have seen it, and want to have it on their harness, as it is a pretty good looking concern enough.”  This happened a few years ago;—so much for the American idea of a crest.”  (Coincidentally, Miss Kemble’s father-in-law was a signer of the Constitution who bore a validly inherited coat of arms.)

 

Francis J. Grund, a German nobleman who became a naturalized American citizen and a prominent Jacksonian Democrat, brings together the European and populist American views on this practice, in the form of a dialogue in which his interlocutor describes “an honest shoemaker, who has become very rich by his industry, and is bitterly grieved by the aristocratic haughtiness of his daughter.  I have heard it asserted that he often threatened her to hang up a last in his parlour, instead of a coat of arms, to punish the ridiculous pretensions of his family.”  The unidentified interlocutor goes on to relate the example of a Bostonian “who has found a signet among the rubbish of his household, and now swears that it belonged to his great-grandfather… or that of Mr. * * *, who has discovered some faint analogy between his name and that of a certain animal, which he now uses as a coat of arms….”  When Grund objects that “the same ridiculous folly…you will find in England, and especially in Scotland, his friend replies that “the English do not pretend to be republicans,” clearly implying that heraldry and republics are incompatible. (Aristocracy in America,1839)

 

And in his American Commonwealth (1888) the very astute British observer Lord Bryce notes that, “In the Eastern cities, and at fashionable summer resorts one begins to see carriages with armorial bearings on their panels, but most people appear to disapprove or ridicule this as a piece of Anglomania, more likely to be practised by a parvenu than by the scion of a really old family.”

 

James Fenimore Cooper, in an 1836 book entitled America and the Americans, tried to square the use of heraldry with republican principles.  The book contains a transcript of a letter he wrote to Count Jules de Béthizy, in which he recounts coming across “a great number [of armorial bearings], emblazoned in different materials, suspended from the walls of the dwellings, especially in New England.  They are frequently seen on carriages, and perhaps oftener still on watch seals.  My travelling companion was asked to explain why these evidences of an aristocratical feeling were seen among a people so thoroughly democratic.  The substance of his answer shall be given:  ‘Though the Americans do not always venerate their ancestors, for precisely the same reasons as are acknowledged in Europe, they are nevertheless descended from the same sort of progenitors.  Those who emigrated to this hemisphere, brought with them most of the opinions of the old world.  Such of them as bore coats of arms did not forget the distinction, and those that you see are the relics of times long since past.  They have not been disposed of, for no other reason that I can discover, than because it is difficult to find a use for them.  Most of the trinkets are heir-looms; though many individuals find a personal convenience in the use of seals which are appropriate to themselves.  There are others who openly adopt arms for the sake of this convenience, sometimes rejecting those which have long been used by their families, simply because they are not sufficiently exclusive; and there are certainly some who are willing to creep under the mantle of gentility at so cheap a rate.  Foreigners, when they see these exhibitions, and find self-established heralds in the shape of seal cutters, &c. in the country, sometimes believe that wealth is gradually producing a change in the manners of the people to the prejudice of democracy.  But they fall into an egregious error.  The fact is, that even this innocent, though perhaps absurd vanity, is getting rapidly into disuse, together with most of the other distinctive usages of orders in society, that are not purely connected with character and deportment.  No one, for instance, thinks now of exhibiting the arms on any portion of the dwelling, in hatchments, or on tomb-stones, though all were practised openly within thirty years.’”

 

Other American observers tended to take the same tone as the foreigners.  The monthly magazine The Galaxy lamented in 1867 that “there are certain persons, somewhat numerous among us, who, after having accumulated a goodly heap of dollars by some of the various modes of buying cheap and selling dear, begin to look about for a coat of arms for their coach panels; and it is well known that the book most frequently consulted at the Astor Library is Burke’s “‘Dictionary of Heraldry’....  The result of this is that any visitor of the Central Park on carriage days, who is familiar with the heraldic bearings of the British nobility, might suppose himself among representatives of all the great families known to history, from the time of William the Conqueror to the present, and that men who hardly know their own grandfathers, and who would be ashamed to own them if they did know them, display the bearings of the noble houses of Norfolk, Derby, Northumberland, Bedford, Montrose, Kingston, Somerset, and the like.”  If this sounds reminiscent of the jeremiads of William H. Whitmore and his English friend John E. Cussans, it should not be surprising, for the comment is contained in the same issue of the Galaxy as an article by Whitmore deploring the trend of Americans traveling to England in the self-delusional belief that they were entitled to claim noble titles and estates.  The Galaxy’s anonymous commentator goes on to observe scornfully that “although it costs much money, vanity spent, to claim an estate, it costs none to assume arms and claim connection with nobility.”

 

The overall tone of discourse began to shift somewhat in the late 1870s and definitely in the 1880s.  On the one hand, condemnation of all heraldry as un-American continued as before, if anything with greater prominence and virulence.  For example, the strongly pro-Democratic Washington Post conducted something of a running jihad against heraldry and similarly “aristocratic” trappings:

 

- “In all the larger cities of the United States there is a class which openly calls itself, and is openly called by others, the aristocracy; and the more modern members of it are endeavoring as much as possible to adopt the manners and customs of aristocracies in other countries, to contract matrimonial alliances with them, and to bow down before them.  They put their servants into livery and emblazon the panels of their carriages with heraldic devices in which coronets and other insignia of nobility, and even of royalty, are visible.  Some have purchased property abroad and call themselves by its well-sounding foreign name; others have adopted the names of noble families, and some have even gone so far as to assume foreign titles, which they use when abroad, and with the crests and armorial bearings of which even at home they stamp their not paper and decorate their dinner menus.  The demand has become so extended in this direction that two heralds’ offices have actually been opened in a fashionable part of New York to meet it, where coats-of-arms, crests and mottoes may be obtained to suit the name, taste, rank and pedigree of the purchaser.”  (13 March 1879)

 

- “There are thousands of Americans who have been suddenly raised from poverty to affluence by such avenues to wealth as were opened up during the war and the corrupt administration of Grant, who have a profound veneration for nobility, royalty, the clap-trap of titles, coats of arms and all the nonsense that pertains to monarchical institutions.  These persons hate democratic institutions and customs.  They affect foreign airs and ways.  They never omit an opportunity to disparage all that is purely American.” (31 August 1880)

 

- “We don’t know, and can’t guess why it is, but it is a fact all the same, that a gnawing hunger, a continuous hankering after Old World titles, decorations and other rubbish of the same character, has seized and possessed the minds—small minds, to be sure, but yet seizable and possessable—of thousands of Americans…  They have ransacked their pedigrees until they fancy that they may claim descent from some barbarian baron of semi-civilized times.  They have gotten up coats of arms which you may see on the panels of their carriages.  They have put their coachmen and footmen and other servants in livery, and in all things possible they have copied their twenty-third cousin, Lord Damphool, who is quite unaware of their existence and cherishes a robust contempt for America and Americans.”

 

Even among portions of the burgeoning community of hereditary societies, which popped up like mushrooms in the years following the 1876 Centennial of Independence, heraldry remained suspect.  The prominent lawyer and subsequently U.S. senator Chauncey M. Depew told the members of the Sons of the American Revolution in 1891 that “Fortunately, we have in our country no pride of birth which seeks to claim the right to wear armorial bearings and heraldic devices, to be connected with noble houses and foreign aristocracies.”

 

Yet while this is all going on, political candidates start coming out of the armorial closet, at first suggesting a right to arms while professing at the same time not to take it very seriously.  Thus the author of Rutherford B. Hayes’s semi-official campaign biography wrote in 1872, that “the Hayes family, in its prosperous days, before any of its descendants ever visited this country, and before the intermarriage with the Rutherfords, had for a coat-of-arms a shield [which the author proceeds to describe in absolutely incomprehensible terms].  But, whatever may have been the shape or the color, no one but curious antiquarians would care to know; and the least interested researcher of all would be Gen. Hayes himself.  There is no pride of ancestry to be found in his character:  and, in fact, it is doubtful if he ever took the pains to ascertain whether his progenitors had either nobility or a coat-of arms.”  James A. Garfield’s campaign biographers wrote in much the same terms about the Garfield coat of arms in 1880.  (In fact, both Hayes and Garfield were quite aware of their families’ armorial pretensions; see my articles on their badge and arms respectively in our presidential arms series.)

There was much public mention of Garfield’s arms following his death, and his successor, Chester Arthur was so comfortable with the subject that he drove around Washington with what purported to be his personal arms emblazoned on the carriage door.  By 1889, the idea that a president might have a coat of arms had become so routine that even the anti-Republican, anti-heraldry Washington Post published a serious story about President Benjamin Harrison’s genealogy and supposed arms—almost all of it utter nonsense.

 

So where did all of this leave American heraldry at the turn of the 20th century?  The answer will be a good way to open the final installment of these essays.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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04 February 2016 12:13
 

Promises, promises…

I thought I could wrap this all up in one more installment, but you’ve all been patient so long that I’m going to solicit your forbearance one more time.  So herewith the really, truly penultimate bite at the apple.

 

As a reminder of the issue at hand, the discussion stems from the position expressed by Fred White that personal heraldry implies the existence of a &#8220;feudal hierarchy&#8221; or at least &#8220;a stratified society&#8212;and placing oneself rather high within it.&#8221; Armorial bearings, he contended, are &#8220;a symbol explicitly designed to affirm inequality&#8221; in the places where [heraldry] evolved&#8221; and that &#8220;to denude heraldry of any traditional social status connotations&#8221; is therefore to &#8220;make it something fundamentally different than it generally has been (here or anywhere else).&#8221;  The notion that everyone has a right to assume arms independent of social criteria is therefore contrary to the spirit of heraldry.  Moreover, since the Founding Fathers took for granted that the bearing of arms was linked to status, we cannot interpret their denial of a contradiction between heraldry and republicanism as an implicit endorsement of universal armorial assumption.  And if we discard the connection between status and arms themselves, how can we not also discard the notion that certain armorial elements are themselves status-linked?

 

I think, based on the research I&#8217;ve done for these essays and a lot of reflection prompted by it, that what a coat of arms signifies is entirely dependent on the nature of the society in which it is used, and even of its polity.  In the first several posts of this series, I presented evidence that the use of arms during their early period of development was in fact not restricted to specific ranks of society.  Over time, because arms were used more widely by people higher up the ladder than by those lower down, they came to be viewed as assertions of status.  But even so, perceived association between arms and rank always varied widely depending on the society concerned.  In other words, heraldry was employed differently in places characterized by huge landed estates and a strong chain of feudal relationships than it was in medieval mercantile cities, the bureaucratic state of late Bourbon France, or in mountainous regions of independent small farmers like Switzerland, Vorarlberg, and Tyrol.

 

Now I must say that I don’t find it at all obvious that Americans at the time of Independence universally saw a coat of arms as inherently an assertion of elite status.  There are too many examples of armorial use in which this doesn&#8217;t seem plausible.  But even supposing that this was the majority view, we must keep in mind that it was a view rooted in a specifically British theory of heraldry that had been concocted relatively recently (200 years or so prior to independence, as compared to the roughly 600 years that armorial bearings had been in existence).  Moreover, this theory was primarily propagated in fairly explicit support of a particular social-political agenda, namely to shore up and preserve the kind of stable, hierarchical, divinely ordained social structure that served as the conceptual bedrock for the entire Tudor-Stuart approach to government.

 

As Janet Verasanso shows in her article &#8220;The Staffordshire Heraldic Visitations&#8221; (Midland History, 2001), the demand that every gentleman&#8217;s arms and genealogy be collected and recorded in a central royal repository was a core aspect of &#8220;a period when stratification was considered essential to maintain an ordered society.&#8221;  In 16th-17th century England, &#8220;a traditional ordered society constructed on deference, degree, and precedence, where the basic division was defined by who was or was not a gentleman,&#8221; the possession or lack of a duly recognized coat of arms served as a line of demarcation between the man who was qualified to have a say in affairs of state and the man who wasn&#8217;t.  Heraldic regulation was thus an attempt to control society by controlling social symbols.  Of course, social and political change happened anyway, and &#8220;new&#8221; families who wanted coats of arms got them, either with the heralds&#8217; approval or without, until William III eventually decided that trying to control it all was a waste of time and money.

 

I spent a good deal of time in these essays trying to tease out how American colonial conceptions of gentility came to differ from English conceptions, but having run across a forgotten copy of Verasanso&#8217;s article on my hard drive the other day made me realize I could have cut to the chase.  This becomes even clearer by juxtaposing her observations with several that I cited earlier in these essays:
<ul class=“bbcode_list”>
<li>Patricia Fortini Brown&#8217;s explanation that displaying a coat of arms in late medieval Venice was not regarded as a claim of nobility, but as a declaration that the family possessed &#8220;a certain level of politia,&#8221; or "urbanity," "civility," a term embracing not only culture and manners but also the collective competence of the family&#8217;s members to participate in the affairs of the republic (suggested by the roots polis, urbs, civis.)

</li>
<li>Cornelis Pama&#8217;s contention that nature of society in the Dutch Republic gave heraldry in that country a permanently bourgeois, unaristocratic, character, and his observation that &#8220;after the Netherlands, it is mainly in Switzerland that bourgeois heraldry is most deeply rooted.  Here, as with us [the Dutch], there was a great desire for freedom that expressed itself in urban privileges and civil liberties, and which finally found its culmination in a free republic, where the bourgeois element set the tone.  Hindered by no imperial or royal power, citizen [burgher, bourgeois] heraldry could develop freely in these countries, and flourish.&#8221;

</li>
<li>Ludwig Biewer&#8217;s linkage between the growing use of arms by the medieval artisan class in Germany to their attainment of &#8220;a greater role in city government following the social upheavals of the Middle Ages,&#8221; and his noting that the German-speaking areas where the use of arms by small farmers was most extensive were those in which peasants had been able to achieve their personal freedom:  Lower Saxony, Frisia, Tyrol, and Switzerland.</li>
</ul>


This line of reasoning leads me to conclude that, if English heraldic norms as we know them are the product of the 16th-17th century concept of the ideal society, then the fundamental differences between what Henry VIII and Charles II saw as desirable for England and what the American Founders saw as desirable for the United States made it logically impossible for heraldic practice to continue in America according to the English model.  Where Henry sought to preserve a &#8220;society constructed on deference, degree, and precedence,&#8221; Charles Pinckney rejoiced that America in 1787 was already a society where there were &#8220;fewer distinctions of fortune, and less of rank, than among the inhabitants of any other nation,&#8221; a place with &#8220;a greater equality than is to be found among the people of any other country; and an equality which is more likely to continue.&#8221;

 

We all know that the institution of slavery cast a dreadful pall on these fine words of equality, and we know that politicians like Pinckney sometimes describe things in rosier terms than the facts will bear.  But the observations of scores of European visitors, those who despised the United States as well as those who admired it, make clear that the most salient characteristic of American society&#8212;compared to the Europe of the day&#8212;was indeed the social and political equality among its (white) citizens that Pinckney had acclaimed.  In the very first paragraph of Democracy in America (1835), Alexander de Toqueville says that "amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.  I readily discovered the prodigious influence which this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society.&#8221;  This was the same aspect of American life that most impressed de Toqueville&#8217;s compatriots Michel Chevalier, who condemned our &#8220;system of absolute equality&#8221; (his italics) for distributing political power equally &#8220;to the intelligent and the ignorant" (Society, Manners and Politics in the United States, 1839), and Gustave Beaumont, who detected the extent of American equality in everything from the lack of class barriers constraining young (white) men and women in choosing whom to marry, and the readiness of Americans in high office&#8212;even the President&#8212;to shake hands with ordinary folk (Marie, or Slavery in the United States, 1844).  Even today, European visitors are struck by the relative lack of deference with which Americans interact with the President; see John Keegan, Fields of Battle (1995), on his experience of a White House briefing and dinner during the Clinton Administration.)

 

Americans&#8217; insistence on equality and individual political capacity did not only endure, as Pinckney had foreseen, but grew stronger and more deeply engrained than the Founders could have imagined, and perhaps more than many of them would have wished.  The late 19th century British visitor Lord Bryce astutely recognized the forces at work:  &#8220;As the Republic went on working out both in theory and in practice those conceptions of democracy and popular sovereignty which had been only vaguely apprehended when enunciated at the Revolution, the faith of the average man in himself became stronger, his love of equality greater, his desire, not only to rule, but to rule directly in his own proper person, more constant.&#8221; (The American Commonwealth, 1888).

 

Now contrary to the way many seem to imagine it, American society was not totally re-born tabula rasa, on July 4, 1776.  We retained the English common law&#8212;as it had been adapted to our own purposes over the preceding 169 years.  The new political arrangements were not made out of whole cloth but adapted and adjusted from the previous colonial systems.  As Barton observed in 1788, post-Revolutionary Americans did not &#8220;relinquish their [English] family names&#8221; or &#8220;disuse the English language&#8221; simply because they were no longer Englishmen.  They didn&#8217;t suddenly change their forms of courteous address or their style of clothing.  And, overwhelmingly those who were accustomed to using coats of arms didn&#8217;t stop using them.

 

But all of these things, to the extent that they were shaped by the surrounding social environment, were transformed to meet American mores and conform to American needs.  A century after Independence, Lord Bryce was struck that seemingly familiar English governmental constructs, like &#8220;county&#8221; and &#8220;township,&#8221; had come to mean something completely different in America than they had meant in England.  They were, &#8220;like nearly everything else in America, English institutions which have suffered a sea change" (my emphasis).

 

If the institution of heraldry as inherited from England had not undergone a similar sea change&#8212;if whatever residual connection still existed between arms and officially sanctioned social rank had not been allowed to wither away&#8212;it seems likely in retrospect that personal heraldry probably could not have survived.  But it ultimately did evolve and adapt to the nature of the surrounding society, despite the worst efforts of some of its friends to preserve it in its full 16th century character.  What made this possible?  My truly last word next time.  Or at least the last until someone responds.