Thread by @cgdhopkins

In honor of the #1620project and other 19th-century fables, allow me to tell you about the legend of Mother Goose and how it is actually about Antebellum Bostonians denying their complicity in slavery.

#vastearlyamerica

In 1860, a column ran on the front page of the Boston Evening Transcript: “Many persons imagine that Mother Goose is a myth — that no such person ever existed. This is a mistake. Mother Goose was not only a veritable personage, but was born and resided many years in Boston.”

The writer, John Fleet Eliot, claimed that the first edition of Mother Goose’s Melodies was printed in Boston in 1719 by Thomas Fleet, based on the songs and stories that Fleet’s mother-in-law, Elizabeth Foster Goose, sang to Fleet’s nine children.

Eliot, a great-grandson of Thomas Fleet, portrayed Mother Goose as a humble woman who delighted in sharing, “the songs and ditties which she had learned in her younger days, greatly to the annoyance of the whole neighborhood — to Fleet in particular, who was a man fond of quiet.”

He even described the 1719 edition: “Something probably intended to represent a goose with a very long neck and mouth wide open, covered a large part of the title page, at the bottom of which, Printed by T. Fleet, at his printing house, Pudding lane, 1719. Price, two coppers.”

All of this was bullshit. The 1719 edition never existed. But the Fleet-Goose myth got repeated in editions of Mother Goose in the 1870s. By 1876, the story was so well established that Rev. JM Manning of Boston’s Old South Church was proposing a monument to Mother Goose:

In 1877, Old South held a Christmas Fair as a fundraiser to restore the building — they turned the balcony into a twee English cottage with signs that said

“ELIZABETH:GOOSE:HER:HOUSE”
“THOS:FLEET:PRINTER”
“PUDDING LANE”

They sold copies of Mother Goose to raise $$$.

The legend of Mother Goose became well known in Boston. If you go to the Granary Burying Ground, there is a special little path leading specifically to the graves of Thomas Fleet and Mary Goose (doubly strange because the story is about Isaac Goose’s 2nd wife Elizabeth, but ok).

Why the little American flags on Mary Goose's grave??? The woman died in 1690! But you can see there is an extra special path to her grave. (Thomas Fleet's stone is to the right of Mary's.)

#FreedomTrail #Boston

What does any of this have to do with slavery?

Well, in 1860, New Englanders were reeeeeeaaaaallllly hoping that people would forget that slavery had been legal in Massachusetts for 150 years. Especially people whose ancestors had made their livelihoods from slavery. Ancestors like Thomas Fleet.

Thomas Fleet was a printer. He owned the Boston Evening Post, a newspaper that ran ads for the sale of enslaved people, the capture of runaways, and a variety of slave-made goods. Fleet also enslaved several people, including 4 of the craftsmen who worked in his printing shop.

One of the enslaved printers was Peter Fleet, a skilled woodcut artist who “cut, on wooden blocks, all the pictures which decorated the ballads and small books of his master.” Caesar, Pompey, and Newport also worked in the shop, printing the newspaper and Fleet’s books.

Including his children’s books! Fleet did print books for children, including the New England Primer and chapbooks like the Prodigal Daughter, which had woodcuts by Peter Fleet (signed!). But no Mother Goose.

Prodigal Daughter (1736) from @harvartmuseums
h/t Gloria Whiting

Thomas Fleet also enslaved women and children. Some of these enslaved women cared for Fleet’s 9 children. How do we know? In 1735 and 1737, Fleet advertised a woman “to be sold by the Publisher of this Paper” who was “a great lover of children.”

@Readex

To be clear, an enslaved woman who loved *her own* children was of no use to Fleet. In 1745, he advertised the sale of "A Very likely healthy Negro Wench, a notable Breeder, under Twenty Years old, with a fine Male Child at her Breast, to be sold by the Publisher of this Paper.”

The sale may not have been successful — in 1751, Fleet advertised again, this time trying to get rid of a woman (possibly the same woman) whose frequent pregnancies inconvenienced him. In 1756, he tried to give a baby boy away for free so that the mother could return to work.

Most of these women are unnamed in the ads, but we do know the name of one: Venus. When Thomas Fleet died in 1758, she was listed in his estate inventory along with her children, 2yo Abram and 6yo Jenny.

During Fleet’s last illness, his sons tried to sell Venus and her children. They listed Venus and 2yo Abram for sale together, but they separated 6yo Jenny. They also listed an unnamed man who might have been the children’s father. The man drowned himself before the sale.

Thomas Fleet did have a grotesque and whimsical sense of humor. When he advertised enslaved women for sale, he sometimes wrote whimsical little lines, as in the 1742 ad for a woman who was “as hearty as a Horse, as brisk as a Bird, and will Work like a Bever.”

@TradeCardCarl

Some enslaved people tried to escape from the Fleets. In 1745, a man named Newport ran for it and Fleet sent slavecatchers after him. In 1775, printer Caesar Fleet ran away from Fleet’s sons and went to Halifax with the British — he’s in the Book of Negroes.

Who was caring for children in the Fleet house? Enslaved women.

Who was making books in the Fleet shop? Enslaved men.

When John Fleet Eliot wrote his Mother Goose fable, he definitely knew that Thomas Fleet was a slaveowner. Eliot quotes from Isaiah Thomas’s History of Printing in America (1810), but not from the parts where Thomas clearly writes about the people Fleet enslaved.

@jmadelman

In 1860, white Bostonians wanted people to forget their slaveowning history. So they made up new histories. Histories with more twee English grandmas and fewer enslaved babies being given away so they wouldn’t distract their mothers from caring for white children.

That fake Mother Goose house at the Old South Christmas Fair? They set it up in the balcony of the Old South Church, which is where enslaved people were forced to sit. But that was embarrassing in the 1860s, so they just covered it up with nonsense.

An important bit of context: the "brisk as a bird" ad was reprinted as a humorous anecdote in dozens of newspapers between 1820 and 1860, with Thomas Fleet's name attached. Eliot may have printed the Mother Goose myth as a sort of 19th-century Google bombing.

I should also add, that yes, Mother Goose has other antecedents, but I am specifically talking about the effort to claim her for Boston in the 19th century, which was a whole made up thing that no amount of debunking has been able to extinguish completely.