William Paca's "Sleeve Buttons"

Dusty, dog-eared reports that seem to sit unloved on office bookcases can bring to light a wealth of fascinating information; the William Paca cuff-link is a good case in point. Though this artefact has been known to us for some time, and even exhibited, it is revealing to revisit it and deepen our understanding of William Paca and late-eighteenth-century Annapolitan society as a whole. This brass cuff-link (or sleeve button as they were called in the 18^th century) was recovered from the archaeological excavations of the William Paca garden in the 1960s. From pottery fragments in the same archaeological layer, we can date this sleeve button to the time when William Paca lived in Prince George’s Street meaning that this sleeve button was almost certainly worn by William Paca himself. Although the design has lost its clarity over the centuries, we can still make out the image of a running fox and the word “tallio”. This gives the sleeve button a novelty appearance and shows that during his free time, William Paca was a keen foxhunter (as well as a snappy dresser) . William Paca was not the only colonial to own such a cufflink. The same design was incredibly popular in eighteenth century America and identical sleeve buttons have also been found at Williamsburg and Ferry Farm, George Washington’s childhood home.[1] The use of accessories to express a love of a particular sport is still practiced by many Americans today. Think of the modern baseball cap. Originally an essential and purely practical element of the outfit, the baseball cap (like Paca’s cufflink) now carries various baseball related designs intended to mark the user out as an enthusiast. The men of the 18^th century would have used their sleeve buttons to show that they were a fan of foxhunting much in the same way.

Figure 1:  Brass ‘tallio’ cufflink. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Museum Purchase.

Hunting in Colonial America

The motif and lettering gives us a clear indication that the owner enjoyed foxhunting. “Tallio”,  a quaint misspelling of Tally-Ho, demonstrates that the vernacular of the British hunting gentry was easily transferred to America where the sport continued to be practiced. The British citizens of colonial America wished to continue the leisurely pursuits of their homeland.

Who participated in American foxhunts? In Britain, hunting was a marker of high society. Due to the Game Laws Act of 1671 which ruled that one’s land had to be worth upwards of £100 per annum to participate, hunting in Britain was restricted to the landed gentry.[2] The right to foxhunt was less restricted in colonial America. However, only the Anglo-American landed elite would have had enough leisure time and have owned enough hounds and horses to be able to run their own pack. Though slaves and servants did not hunt the foxes on horseback, they still participated in the sport as huntsmen who controlled the hounds.[3] 

American fox-hunting in the colonial period did not generally consist of organized clubs. Instead, men would hunt in informal packs.[4] An exception to this was the Gloucester Fox-hunting Club, probably the first formally organized club of this kind in America. Formed in 1766 in a Philadelphia Coffee house, this club was full of important men such as Benjamin Chase who each paid a subscription fee of £5 for the maintenance of foxhound kennels.[5] William Paca himself probably hunted in private, informal packs with men of his station, perhaps on their plantations. His interest in hunting is clear from his sleeve button. It is also known that he had a keen interest in horse sports as he was a member of the Maryland Jockey Club.[6] Its members in 1783 included other Annapolitan elites such as Charles Carroll of Carrollton.[7] Charles Carroll was known for his love of foxhunting; perhaps the two neighbors and signers spent a few afternoons hunting together.

Many of William Paca’s contemporaries expressed in writing their fondness for the sport. George Washington in particular records diligently in his diary the pleasant and sometimes frustrating hours he spent indulging his hobby. In September of 1768 he laments that he “Went fox hunting in the Neck. Started and run a fox or foxes three hours and then lost”.[8] John Adams, at a Sons of Liberty meeting in 1769 records in his diary that they watched a Mimickry of “The Hunting of the Bitch Fox” indicating that it was an accepted part of the culture of the Anglo-American elite.[9]

Figure 2: Fairfax Fox-hunting with Washington. Engraver Henry Bryan Hall (after Felix F.O.C. Darcey). in: Irving, W. (1855) The Life of George Washington.

Maryland: The home of American fox-hunting?

Colonial Maryland had a special association with fox-hunting and it is apparent that its residents had a particular fondness for the sport. Maryland, like other the other prominent hunting colonies, Virginia and Delaware, was free from a puritanical influence which condemned sport.[10] Foxhunting could therefore flourish free from any moral condemnation. It was in Maryland that the sport first came to America. An English settler to Queen Anne’s County brought his pack of foxhounds and held the first fox-hunt on record in America around 1650.[11] It was also in Maryland in 1730, on the Eastern Shore that a few tobacco planters, talking wistfully of the red foxes of ‘merrie England’, decided to import eight red foxes from Liverpool to hunt in place of Maryland’s native gray.[12]

An apocryphal tale of Charles Carroll of Carrollton demonstrates the distinct sense of pride that Marylanders had in their sport. The story goes that Charles Carroll claimed that “fox-hunting was the grandest sport ever invented by man and [was] sanctioned by an all-wise providence”.[13] In response, Light-Horse Harry Lee commented that “tis hell if your nag is slow and your hounds poor”.[14] Charles Carroll immediately responded, with an unabashed sense of state pride, “I refer to fox-hunting in Maryland, sir”.[15]

Fox-hunting held a special place in the heart of Marylanders in the colonial period, so much so that it altered the lawmaking process. The 1765 Dog Bill which imposed a tax on owning more than two necessary dogs faced so much outcry and opposition that it was later amended to include the exception that

the keeping of Fox Hounds for destroying of Foxes is usefull and Necessary and that therefore they should be Allowed to be kept Tax free.[16]

Considering all this, one can imagine William Paca riding out on his prize horse, wearing his Tallio sleeve buttons and spending an enjoyable afternoon hunting.

Bibliography

Black, J. (2005) A Subject for Taste. Hambledon and London.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Museum Purchase [http://emuseum.history.org/view/objects/asitem/search@/0?t:state:flow=3744955c-83b4-4822-b4ea-ee4b940333e4] Last Accessed: 09/04/2014

Culver, F. (1922) Blooded Horses of Colonial Days: Classic horse matches made in America before the Revolution. Kessinger Publishing.

Fine, N. (2010) “Tally-ho Back”Foxhunting in North America and the MFHA. Centennial View. MFHA Foundation.

Founders.archives (2014a). Washington Papers. Online [http://founders.archives.gov/?q=Series%3AWashington-01&s=1511211112&r=1561] Last accessed: 09/04/2014

Founders.archives (2014b). Adams Papers. Online [http://founders.archives.gov/?q=%20Author%3A%22Adams%2C%20John%22&s=1511211112&r=1] Last accessed: 09/04/2014

Schemmer, C. (2011). Scanning pieces of past. Online 

[http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2011/092011/09272011/654031/index_html?page=1] Last accessed: 09/04/2014

Hiss, H. (1897) The Beginnings of Fox-hunting in America. Outing Magazine.

Maryland State Archives (2014). Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly, 1766-1768 vol. 61. Online [http://aomol.msa.maryland.gov/000001/000061/html/am61--242.html] Last accessed: 09/04/2014

Stewart, S. (1971) A Historical Survey of Foxhunting in the United States, 1650-1970. Ma Thesis. Denton, Texas.

South, S. (1969) The Paca House: A Historical Archaeology Study. Contract Archaeology Inc, Alexandria, Va.

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[1] Schemmer 2011

[2] Black 2005, 72

[3] Stewart 1971, 47

[4] Stewart 1971, 38

[5] Stewart 1971, 45

[6] Culver 1922, 70

[7] Culver 1922, 70

[8] Founders.archives 2014a

[9] Founders.archives 2014b

[10] Stewart 1971, 40

[11] Hiss 1897, 13

[12] Fine 2010, 3

[13] Hiss 1897, 160

[14] Hiss 1897, 160

[15] Hiss 1897, 160

[16] Maryland State Archives 2014

Would the Paca House have kept a cat?

As part of our new 'Ask the Curator' initiative at the William Paca House, we have been researching the likelihood that the Paca House would have kept a cat. If not a cat, we asked, what other animals might have been family favorites? This blog is a place for us to share this research - and hopefully many more interesting findings in the future.

Background

Archaeological evidence from Maryland and Virginia indicates that there were many cats living in this area in the late eighteenth century and earlier. In one seventeenth-century well shaft alone, the remains of thirteen cats were discovered.[1] Many of these cats would have been kept in households to reduce the population of rodents and insects. In wealthier homes they would be fed by servants, and kept away from the family.

Domesticating wild animals

It was during the eighteenth century that pet-keeping for pleasure became commonplace in America and Britain. Pets were referred to as “favorites”; the modern meaning of ‘pet’ was not widely used until the nineteenth century.[2] From the beginning of the eighteenth century wild animals such as squirrels and deer were tamed and taken into the home for the amusement of young children, a phenomenon peculiar to prosperous households in Colonial America (and to the astonishment of their European guests). These animals would be cared for by the family personally, and often at great expense.

Philip Mercier, The Sense of Touch, 1744-47

Contemporary thought on animals

By the late eighteenth century, previously popular sports which encouraged violent treatment of cats were regarded as terribly cruel, with the advent of an intellectual movement towards humane treatment of animals. The earliest legislation against cruelty to animals had come from Puritan Massachusetts in 1648,[3] but this “humane” attitude was not fully and widely established until the 1790s in the early United States and Britain.[4] From then on it became popular for families to keep household animals, so that children may learn the quality of benevolence by caring for their cats and dogs.

Slaves would often own dogs, for hunting, protection, and companionship. This was more common near plantations than in a house such as the William Paca House. Slave owners would not give animals to their slaves as favorites, because ownership of animals indicated authority over the household.[5] Sarah Hand Meacham claims that ‘Chesapeake elites … kept favorites in part because doing so gave them unconscious validation of their right to have slaves’.[6]

Gifts of domestic animals were highly gendered. Women and girls would be given small ‘decorative creatures’ such as birds and squirrels,[7] which they would take care of themselves. Birds were particularly popular because they were thought to be signs against witchcraft,[8] even at the end of the eighteenth century, and unlike the traditional ‘familiar spirits’ thought to be kept by witches.

 
The Annapolis gentleman’s animal of choice: a cat or a dog?

Towards the end of the eighteenth century cats became popular domestic animals amongst urban professionals, merchants, bankers and the like in Britain. While the trend for importing, or capturing and keeping, animals to domesticate was as evident in Colonial America as it was across the Atlantic, cats were rarely the animal of choice. Very few letters and journals from the Chesapeake Bay area mention cats, and there are no advertisements for missing cats in the Maryland Gazette or Virginia Gazette. Significantly, although many portraits of the time feature birds, squirrels, and dogs, nobody in the Chesapeake area chose to pose with a cat.[9]

John Singleton Copley, Young Lady with a Bird and Dog, 1767

Men in this region tended to keep working animals as “favorites”. Working dogs were significant as indications of an individual’s connections and social standing. Emotional attachment to a dog displayed that a man was in touch with English cultural trends. George Washington is said to have proudly informed visitors that he had paid two hundred dollars for a “superb bull[dog] of English breeding”.[10] Greyhounds, pointers, and spaniels were popular English breeds. Eighteenth-century men knew each other’s dogs by sight, taking advantage of opportunities to return dogs to their owners as a sign of goodwill and friendship. When Washington admired the female spaniel belonging to Richard Sprigg in Annapolis, Sprigg sent Washington one of the spaniel’s pups.[11] The exchange of animals was an arena for the demonstration, and even formation, of social connections.

There were some men who owned cats at this time, but it was not fashionable to do so in Maryland and Virginia. Robert Wormeley Carter of Virginia recorded the death of “our old cat Corrytang” in his diary in 1780. The animal had been “a favorite cat of my fathers [sic]”, and Carter had “taken great care of him on that account, tho’ troublesome”. Taking good care of the cat, and doing so personally, was a means of demonstrating filial duty to Carter’s young son.[12]

However, Charles “Nasifer Jole” Cole was ridiculed at the Tuesday Club, Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s social club in Annapolis, for his attentions to his cats. Hamilton commented that “Some may think it very Strange, that Mr Jole, a gentleman born and bred in a christian [sic] land, should pay so much deference and respect, to these brute creatures”.[13] It was highly unusual for a grown man to take an interest in cats.

Conclusion

In 1790, Thomas Jefferson arranged for a pair of angora cats to be transported to his residence in New York City from Paris.[14] However, these cats were likely purchased for the entertainment of guests – to be displayed as exotic animals. If William Paca kept a favorite animal, it was probably a dog. An English dog would have represented Paca's English connections and status. The women of the house were more likely to have favored birds and squirrels above cats. The cats that almost certainly resided in and around the Paca household would probably have remained out of his sight, curtailing the local population of rodents and insects behind the scenes.

Written by OUIIP intern, Elena Porter

[1] Sarah H. Meacham, ‘Pets, Status and Slavery in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake’. The Journal of Southern History. vol. 77, no. 3, August 2011, p.540
[2] Tague, ‘Dead Pets: Satire and Sentiment in British Elegies and Epitaphs for Animals’. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2008, 41, 3, 289-306, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
[3] John D. Blaisdell, "An Ordained Compassion: The New England Puritans and Their Laws against Cruelty to Animals," Argos, Speciale Uitgave, Zomer 1991. 11-17.
[4] John D. Blaisdell, ‘A Most Convenient Relationship: The Rise of the Cat as a Valued Companion Animal’. Between the Species. Vol. 9, (1993). Issue 4. p.227
[5] Sarah H. Meacham, p.525
[6] Ibid., p.524
[7] Ibid., p.525
[8] Ibid., p.541
[9] Sarah H. Meacham, ‘Pets, Status and Slavery in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake’. The Journal of Southern History. vol. 77, no. 3, August 2011, p.540
[10] Ibid., p.531
[11] William Oxley to William Galt, July 29, 1837, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 35 (October 1927). Quoted in Sarah H. Meacham, p.539
[12] Sarah H. Meacham, p.540
[13] Ibid., p.548
[14] Silvio A. Bedini, Thomas Jefferson Statesman of Science, McMillan Publishing, New York, 1990, 201. Quoted in Blaisdell, 1993.