The High Rollers

1778, British-occupied Philadelphia. The American alliance with France and defeat at Saratoga have depressed the British outlook on the war. General William Howe pays the cost, resigning his command of British land forces. Only days from the order to withdraw from Philadelphia,  Howe's officers organize a fabled farewell blowout called the Meschianza, which is as much about releasing anxiety and reimagining how the war ought to have gone as about bidding Howe adieu. When patriots retake Philadelphia in July, official Independence celebrations are subdued, but the common folk organize a memorable parade that Richard Henry Lee writes home about. Listen now to learn how a parading prostitute with big hair raises a window on simmering political and cultural tensions in Philadelphia.   

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Transcript

Stratford Mail 

2.1: The High Rollers

INTRO

This month: occupied Philadelphia and the politics of ‘Big Hair’.

On the 18th of June, 1778 British troops under the command of General Sir Henry Clinton ended their 8-month occupation of Philadelphia. The very next day General Washington ordered Major General Benedict Arnold to secure Philadelphia until civilian government could be restored. Convening in exile at York, PA, the Continental Congress resolved (Jun 24) to reconvene at the capital on July 2nd, and appointed a 3-man committee to plan a “public celebration of the anniversary of independence, at Philadelphia.” The public celebration opened with a mixed civilian and military parade; fireworks flowered in the night sky above crowded streets to conclude the festivity. In the afternoon 80 odd congressional and municipal VIPs tucked into a modest banquet at City tavern, where William Ellery of Rhode Island was favorably impressed by a large baked pudding staked with a crimson flag depicting the providential triumph of liberty over oppression: beneath a vigilant eye, a man with a sword in one hand and our Declaration in the other trampled underfoot Parliament’s 1766 Declaratory Act. Ellery was also witness to an extraordinary procession that wasn’t on the official schedule of events:

“In the afternoon a strumpet, I suppose, with a head-dress in imitation of those worn by the Tory Ladies while the British Army held the City, was paraded thro' the Streets attended by a crowd of the vulgar. What a strange vicissitude in human affairs! These, but a few years since, colonies of Britain, are now free, sovereign and independent States, and now celebrate the anniversary of their Independence in the very city where but a day or two before Gen Howe exhibited his ridiculous Champhaitre!”

We’ll circle back to the strumpet, 18th century vernacular for a female prostitute. Of more immediate interest is the contrast Ellery draws between Independence celebrations and the “ridiculous Champêtre” of General Sir William Howe. Howe was commander-in-chief of British land forces occupying Philadelphia from September 26, 1777 until his resignation in April 1778. Fifteen-thousand odd redcoats luxuriated in Philadelphia while the Continental Army shivered at Valley Forge. Before Howe returned somewhat ingloriously to Britain (where he was unpopular due to his perceived mismanagement of the war), his officers funded a gaudy farewell bash in Howe’s honor. Ellery calls it a ridiculous ‘outdoor festival’; in point of fact, it was called the Meschianza. Meschianza improvises on several Italian words meaning medley, mingling, and mix, a reference to the set of extravagant entertainments orchestrated for the departing Howe. The mastermind behind this 14-hour blow-out was Captain John André, later and better known as the British spymaster executed for his role in a failed conspiracy with the traitor Benedict Arnold to surrender the fort at West Point to the British. In occupied Philadelphia André relished his role as event-planner, publishing a full account of his Meschianza in Gentleman's Magazine No. 48 for 1778. In partial explanation of the Meschianza André effused: “I do not believe there is upon record an instance of a commander-in-chief having so universally endeared himself to those under his command, or of one who received such signal and flattering proofs of their love.” One such proof of love for Howe were the elaborately engraved tickets to the 400 odd guests carrying the Latin inscription translated: I shine in setting, I shall rise again in greater splendor. In point of fact, Howe’s light was ever after timid and flat.

But on May 18th, 1778 John André made Howe the luminous center of British North America. The Meschianza opened around 4 pm with a ceremonial regatta, a flotilla of colorfully festooned barges floating down the Delaware river to artillery salutes from the anchored warships HMS Roebuck and Vigilant. Landing near Old Swede’s Episcopal Church, the revelers processed with musical accompaniment to Walnut Grove, the south Philadelphia estate of the late Joseph Wharton. There a tourney ground edged by tiered pavilions had been set up for a joust. You heard right, a joust with hardwood lance and shield! Two make-believe orders of ‘knights’ (complete with their own heraldry) would compete in mock combat for the honor of corresponding orders of “fair damsels.” The damsels were young women picked from elite loyalist and nonaligned Philadelphia families, among them Becky Franks, Peggy and Sarah Chew, and Willamina Smith. In this masquerade, British officers costumed as knights of the Bourbon court (minus the armor) exchanged blows as “proofs of love” for young American women costumed as turbaned Ottoman maidens. Suffice it to say that neither the Bourbons nor the Ottomans were authentically represented in this British fever dream. Of her turban headdress participant Jane Craig later said that it was “more towering than the drawing,” André’s drawing, which survives to this day. André designed the participants’ wardrobe and is the source of its unsubtle messaging: The impeccably chivalrous imperial British lovers simultaneously vanquish the resistance of these exotic American inferiors and liberate them from their unchivalrous American ‘sultans.’ With the war thus relocated to a fantasy realm, guests retired indoors for a magnificent ball punctuated by fireworks and midnight banqueting. André reported that the guests “danced and drank till day light,” departing “highly pleased” with “the most splendid entertainment … ever given by an army to their general.”      

Not everyone shared André’s assessment of the event. Ambrose Serle, private secretary to Admiral Lord Richard Howe, the honoree’s brother, whispered to his diary that André’s Meschianza was “folly & extravagance,” and that “every man of sense, among ourselves, tho’ not unwilling to pay a due Respect, was ashamed of this mode of doing it.” Loyalist Philadelphian Joseph Galloway did not mince words: “We have seen the same General, with a vanity and presumption unparalleled in history, after this indolence, after all these wretched blunders, accept from a few of his officers a triumph more magnificent than would have become the conqueror of America, without the consent of his sovereign or approbation of his country, and that at a time when the news of war with France had just arrived, and in the very city, the capital of North America, the late seat of Congress, which in a few days was to be delivered up to that Congress.” Philadelphian Quaker Elizabeth Drinker confided to her diary: “This day may be remembered by many from the scenes of folly and vanity promoted by the officers of the army under pretext of showing respect to General Howe. … How insensible do these people appear, while our land is so greatly desolated, and death and sore destruction has overtaken and impends over so many!” Perhaps incongruity was the point, that in the face of sore destruction and wavering confidence in the outcome of this war, British occupiers fled temporarily to fantasy, to romance, to a Camelot where bloodless contests between virtuous men overcome contrary inferiors and resolve harmoniously into feasting and dance. It is difficult to evade the suggestion that André’s spectacle was an attempt to annihilate reality. 

Reality reasserted itself a few days later (May 21, 1778) when the order to end the occupation and to withdraw from Philadelphia was announced. The next day Ambrose Serle wrote in his diary: “I now look upon the Contest as at an End.” By June 19, Elizabeth Drinker observed “The English have in reality left us.” Cannon fire welcomed the return of the Continental Congress to Philadelphia on July 2nd, and Independence Day festivities were (as I’ve described) austere and muted by contrast to the Meschianza and even by contrast to Independence Days past. This was perhaps to acknowledge the sore destruction lamented by Elizabeth Drinker, and to spare the material stores of wartime Philadelphia. And yet the streets of Philadelphia did not let the opportunity pass both to celebrate the day and to take a poke at Philadelphians whose commitment to the patriot cause was as uncertain as their hair was outsized.

Richard Henry Lee of Stratford and Chantilly was another witness to the curious procession reported by Ellery. In a letter dated July 5, 1778 from Philadelphia, Richard Henry updates his brother Frank, that’s Francis Lightfoot Lee, at his Richmond County home, Menokin:

“My dear Brother

We had a magnificent celebration of the anniversary of Independence, yesterday, when handsome fireworks were displayed. The Whigs of the City dressed up a Woman of the Town with the Monstrous headdress of the Tory Ladies, and escorted her thro’ the town with a great concourse of people — Her head was elegantly & expensively dressed. I suppose about three feet high and of proportionable width, with a profusion of curls, etc., etc. The figure was droll and occasioned much mirth — It has lessened some heads already, and will probably bring the rest within the bounds of reason, for they are monstrous indeed. — The Tory wife of Dr Smith has christened this figure ‘Continella, or the Duchess of Independence,’ and prayed for a pin from her head by way of Relic -”

The Tory women are very much mortified notwithstanding this —”

The monstrous headdress of the Tory Ladies refers to the heavy, elaborate, and soaring hairstyle called the high Roll, adapted from France by fashion-setting peers of Georgian London and transplanted to the colonies. [click here for John ‘s 1778 pencil sketch of the infamous Margaret “Peggy” Shippen in a high Roll–Peggy was wed to Benedict Arnold in the spring 1779]. The height of the high Roll was achieved using pillows, wool pads, wire frames, additional hair from human (sometimes deceased human) and animal sources, and lavish amounts of scented pomade for shaping the do upwards. It would be stabilized with pins and finished with ribbons, feathers, fabrics, wax fruit, wooden totems, and sundry other objects. The coif took hours to perfect, and once erected, transmitted the message that here was a woman of quality. It was nevertheless difficult to square the high-rolled American Lady (invariably an avid consumer of British imports) with the austere Daughter of Liberty, whose low hair and homespun attire expressed values prized by Whig patriots like simplicity and self-sufficiency.

The high Roll came under fire on both sides of the Atlantic: on the British side, printers represented the high Roll in much the same terms Ambrose Serle used to describe the Meschianza: as folly & extravagance, which is how the British might also have described the ongoing American insurgency. On the American side the high Roll carried the nuance of dependence, perhaps of being dictated to culturally in the same way that John André had literally dictated their Meschianza wardrobe to the daughters of Philadelphia. As Noah Webster (famed for his Dictionary) put it in 1789: “As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” And, we might add, in coiffure or hairstyles. Yes, the high Roll was a clue (not quite a smoking gun) to mixed-up priorities and uncertain loyalties, and it came to signify for some betrayal of the most intimate sort. A mezzotint circulating under the title The Wishing Females captured the moment–it depicted two high-rolled women (one equipped with a handheld telescope) gazing through their parlor window at British troops mustering in a staging area. The subtext of sexual desire was stark. In an August 1778 letter to his wife, Josiah Bartlett of New Hampshire confirmed what The Wishing Females suggested, that when Congress returned to Philadelphia they “found the Tory Ladies who tarried with the Regulars wearing the most Enormous High head Dresses after the manner of the Mistresses & Wh[ores] of the British officers.” 

Parading an absurdly high-Rolled prostitute through the streets was a dire editorial on the values of Philadelphia high-Rollers. One variant on the tale sharpened the barb by racializing it, by making the woman black, another by making her a him. In any case, “the Tory wife of Dr Smith,” that would be Rebecca Moore Smith, mother to Willy Smith, one of the faux Ottoman maidens at the Meschianza, attempted to deflect the takedown by naming the high-Rolled prostitute Continella, Duchess of Independence, thus making her the poster-girl for lowborn upstarts with pretensions to equality with their betters. But her deflection fizzled and Richard Henry reports the parade induced some high-Rollers to repent of their skyscraping coifs. And it may be that this unofficial street theater prompted an abatement of lofty high Rolls, but big hair didn’t evaporate overnight, and between 1778 and 2024 it would make its mark on several decades. And hairstyle remains today a contested ground where different social, cultural, and political views vie for dominance and recognition. That Richard Henry takes note of this droll figure is unsurprising given his own dalliance with street theater in the prior decade, but that is a story for another day.     

OUTRO

BONUS CONTENT:  In her delightful poem of 1779 titled "Mischianza. Answer to the Question, ‘What is it?’ by a Lady of Philadelphia," Hannah Griffitts offers these nicely turned lines:

A shameful scene of dissipation,
The death of sense and reputation
A deep degeneracy of nature
A Frolick, for the lash of Satire;
A feast of grandeur, fit for Kings,
Formed of the following empty things:
Ribbons and gewgaws, tints and tinsel,
To glow beneath the Historic Pencil

and, more,

Triumphal Arches raised on – Blunders,
And true Don Quixotes made of wonders;
The Song of Victory Complete,
Fondly reechoed from – Defeat.
The Fair of Vanity Profound,
A madman’s Dance, a Comin’ Round

See Hannah Griffitts, "Mischianza. Answer to the Question 'What Is It?' by a Lady of Philadelphia," Watson Notebook, MS Am. 30163, Library Company of Philadelphia

For André's accounts of the Meschianza, see “Particulars of the Mischianza, exhibited in America at the Departure of General Howe. Copy of a Letter from an Officer at Philadelphia to his Correspondent in London. May 23, 1778,” The Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. XLVIII (August 1778): 353. Or see his letter to Peggy Chew: 

For more on the high Roll or colonial fashion, see the work of Kate Haulman, Ph.D., especially The Politics of Fashion in EIghteenth-Century America (2011), “Fashion and the Culture Wars of Revolutionary Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 62, no. 4 (October 2005), 625-62, and  "A Short History of the High Roll" at Common Place.

Sound effects courtesy of Pixabay and DeadSounds.com
Music is William Ross Chernoff's "In Shadows"
AI voices courtesy of Play.ht (except Dr. Steffey)

© Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, 2024