History battles with fallacy in Hubbardton
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Students from Currier Memorial School in Danby re-enact the Battle of Hubbardton at the battlefield with the help of a living history group. FILE PHOTO BY VYTO STARINSKAS |
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By MARK BUSHNELL - Published: May 30, 2010
History would have been better off without Thomas Anburey. I don't mean that as a personal attack. (I never met Anburey. The man died a couple of centuries ago.) What I mean is that history, in the sense of the study of the past, would have been better off if Anburey had never picked up a pen, or rather a quill.
Anburey's "contribution" to history was to write an account that muddied the facts surrounding the Battle of Hubbardton during the Revolution and to drag the reputation of American troops who fought there through that mud.
Ennis Duling is hoping to clean up Anburey's mess. Duling, who is communications director at Castleton State College and a part-time historian, writes about Anburey in the current issue of Vermont History, the journal of the Vermont Historical Society.
Anburey's errors in describing the July 7, 1777, battle would be comical, if others hadn't taken them as facts and tracked them through the historical record.
Anburey, who apparently was a British soldier, makes mistakes of chronology and geography and, more seriously, adds details that defame the abilities and honor of American troops. He suggests that Col. Seth Warner failed to post sentries on the night before the battle — a major breach of basic battlefield tactics. And he accuses American soldiers of feigning surrender before suddenly raising their muskets and firing into a group of stunned British troops.
Though Anburey was discredited by some of his contemporaries, some present-day historians still mistakenly include his invented details in describing the battle.
Among the many suspicious things that Duling found in Anburey's account, "Travels through the Interior Parts of America," are the very circumstances under which it was supposedly written. Anburey passes himself off as an eyewitness, an amazing one at that. Duling notes that Anburey managed at times to be in two places at once.
Anburey claims that his accounts originally were written as letters to an unnamed recipient, whom he addresses simply as "my dear friend." The letters mix detailed descriptions with some thoughtful reflection on events, just as a gifted letter writer would.
Anburey says that starting in September 1776, he traveled through Canada, sailed down Lake Champlain as part of Gen. John Burgoyne's invasion force, and fought at Hubbardton, before being taken prisoner during the British defeat at Saratoga. Later, he writes, he was able to see the country as far south as Virginia.
Anburey published his accounts in two volumes in London in 1789. On the face of it, the timing would have made sense. Here was a veteran returning home and, at the request of friends and acquaintances, taking the time to organize his correspondence into book form. The upper reaches of British society certainly bought it. Anburey's 600 subscribers included military officers, ladies and at least one earl.
Even Burgoyne, leader of the British invasion, was among the subscribers. Parts of the book must have seemed awfully familiar to him. Anburey had borrowed and slightly rewritten entire sections of Burgoyne's memoirs. Anburey also plagiarized mercilessly from numerous other works. "Anburey's borrowings were wholesale," Duling writes; "this was not petty theft, but grand larceny."
From the start, some people had doubts about Anburey's accounts. The Monthly Review, a literary journal in London, noted the author's take on events was distinctly anti-American and keenly noted that one of the passages had been lifted from another work.
That was just the beginning. Another English publication, The Critical Review, found more purloined prose and stated that "we can pronounce this work, in its most essential parts, to be an ill-digested plagiarism from general Burgoyne's Narrative" and other contemporary sources. That Anburey's plagiarism was caught so quickly (in a time long before Google searches) suggests just how blatant it must have been.
Despite his apologies that they were "the rapid effusions of a confessedly inexperienced Writer," Anburey's brazen borrowing helps prove that he didn't write the letters during the period they describe. Indeed, works from which Anburey plagiarized were written as late as 1787.
In further nailing down the case against Anburey, Duling notes that his numerous plagiarisms from earlier works couldn't have been done on the battlefield either, unless we imagine Anburey lugging a considerable library as he trekked with the British army through the wilderness and later when he was a prisoner of war.
Duling might have left Anburey alone if his account had remained obscure. Unfortunately, some of his fabrications have been picked up as fact, even by some noted historians, and repeated. Once a lie gets into the historical record, it can be hard to remove.
Anburey's description of a mad scramble by British grenadiers up a life-threateningly steep incline has left historians scratching their heads. Pittsford Ridge, which Burgoyne mentions in his narrative, isn't as steep as it appears from a distance, Duling notes, and certainly is not dangerous to climb. Hoffman Nickerson, a historian writing in 1928 about the battle, surveyed the scene and decided that Anburey (and Burgoyne) must have meant that the troops had climbed nearby Mount Zion. Nickerson's theory, which Duling says makes no military or geographical sense, has become part of the battle narrative.
Worse, historians continue to repeat Anburey's mistaken suggestion that Warner failed to post pickets the night before the battle, which has unfairly harmed Warner's reputation ever since.
In this section of his book, Duling writes, Anburey was cribbing from Burgoyne's own report to Parliament on the battle. But Anburey removed the section where Burgoyne writes that British scouts "discovered the enemy's centries (sic)." In its place, he wrote that British troops surprised the Americans, who were busy cooking their breakfast. Later, Anburey mentions an attack on American "picquets." But apparently Anburey's image of soldiers being surprised over breakfast was just too colorful for some historians to ignore, and it lives on as part of the common understanding of the battle.
Perhaps worst is Anburey's claim that American troops had slaughtered British soldiers by first pretending to surrender. Duling finds it inconceivable that in the heat of a fierce battle a large group of troops could have hatched the scheme and that the experienced British troops toward whom they marched would have fallen for it.
Anburey's work isn't without charm, however. Duling refers to it as the "most readable" account of the battle. Still, he finds little value in it. Even if you took out all the known cases of plagiarism — and Duling found new examples during his research — can we really trust what's left? Duling suggests we consider the source.
Anburey even gets details wrong about immutable bits of geography, suggesting that he never visited at least some of the places in his book. Furthermore, apparently he didn't even bother to consult a map.
How else can you explain his description of Lake Champlain as being too wide in places to see across or the stretch of lake between Thompson's Point in Vermont and Split Rock on the New York side (a distance of three-quarters of a mile) as being almost too narrow for a British warship to navigate?
With all these discrepancies, Duling takes nothing for granted about Anburey, even his identity. British military records of the period show no Thomas Anburey, but there is a Thomas Anbury and an Ensign Hanbury, who Duling believes were the same man, his name perhaps misspelled by a clerk.
Duling theorizes that Anbury or Anburey may have written a fictionalized version of events to curry favor with members of the upper class. Or perhaps he was a "London hack, borrowing the ensign's name just as he borrowed innumerable sources."
Whoever Anburey was, he left his mark on history, to the chagrin of Duling and his fellow historians.
Mark Bushnell's column on Vermont history is a regular feature in Vermont Sunday Magazine. A collection of his columns was published in the book "It Happened in Vermont." He can be reached at vermontpastlane@gmail.com.
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