I spy a patriot: the art and espionage of Patience Lovell Wright

Keep your eyes open in the remarkable colonial community of Bordentown, and you'll find the intersection of art and patriotism. Standing directly across the street from the home of composer, poet, satirist and statesman Francis Hopkinson is the former dwelling of America's first native-born sculptor, Patience Lovell Wright. Justifiably admired for her artwork, she's also rumored to have been a spy during the Revolutionary War.

Like Hopkinson, Wright wasn't born in New Jersey, but the then-colony was important to her formative years. A few years after her 1725 birth in Oyster Bay, Long Island, her family settled near the Delaware River in a community that would later be named Bordentown. Strict Quakers, her parents adhered to a rather hard-core lifestyle, demanding that Patience and her sister Rachel wear white in public and conform to a strict vegetarian diet. Nonetheless, the girls found an outlet for their creativity by molding forms from clay they made from flour and water.

Patience is said to have been a headstrong young woman, leaving her parents' home at the age of 16 to live in Philadelphia. Several years later, she married the much older Joseph Wright and returned to Bordentown. Though she later observed that her husband had "nothing but age and money to recommend himself," the couple had four children; a fifth was born not long after Joseph's death in 1769.

Left with the family house but no other allowances from Joseph's estate to support her children, Patience turned to the craft that brought her so much pleasure as a child: sculpting. The fashionable medium of the day was wax, and with the endorsement of her neighbor Hopkinson, she soon became well known for her extraordinarily accurate, life-sized renditions of human subjects.

She and Rachel opened waxworks in New York and Philadelphia, and Patience in particular drew attention for her particularly earthy work practices. One could say that she set the standard early for the quirkier American artists to come. Given the properties of wax, the medium had to be kept warm to be pliable, an especially important detail for Patience's lifelike renditions. She'd cradle the large blocks of wax under a cloth in her lap, engaging in frank conversation with her subjects as they sat for her. When she finished sculpting a bust, she'd unveil it dramatically, as if she were giving birth to it.

Following a fire at her New York studio, Wright left the colonies for London in 1771 at the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin's sister Jane Mecom. The Franklin connection was her entre to the upper classes of English society, who were fascinated by her talent and her plain-spoken, egalitarian ways, as much as they were taken by the flattery she lavished on them. It's said that King George III and his wife Charlotte even allowed her to address them by name rather than honorific. She knew how to work her audience.

All the while, revolutionary sentiment was growing in the colonies, and Wright was an ardent supporter, even going as far as reprimanding the king for refusing to granting independence. She quickly recognized that the warm relationships she'd cultivated with members of Parliament gave her access to information her fellow patriots would find useful. Using sculpted heads and busts as cover, she sent several messages to Franklin, detailing her conjecture on which influential British leaders might be persuaded to take up the patriot cause.

Wright's candor and relentlessness seem to have backfired on her after the events of Lexington and Concord in 1775. While her egalitarian manner of relating to her patrons might have been endearing to nobles and the king in the past, her strident refusal to stop talking about the Revolution made her persona non grata in society. Left without her pipeline of sources, she became less useful as a spy, even as she reportedly pleaded with Franklin to support a British rebellion against the crown.

It's not clear how she made a living during the first years of the Revolution, but a move to Paris in 1780 was largely unsuccessful. Returning to England two years later, she continued beseeching her former patrons in America for opportunities to sculpt the Founding Fathers. Some sources say that only George Washington responded favorably, but Wright died before they could arrange a sitting.

Interestingly, the only work of Patience Lovell Wright's that survives is of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, a supporter of American independence. And despite her reported desire to be buried in her beloved United States, she rests somewhere in London. Rachel had pleaded with both Congress and her sister's former supporters in America for funding to bring her remains back; her requests went unanswered.

Francis Hopkinson: bringing wit to the Revolution

The dry history lessons of our school days often did a disservice to some really cool and interesting people. Without checking out the stories much further than we did in grade school, we often miss the true spirit of some dynamic, clever and even fun people who shaped the world we live in.

Hopkinson's Bordentown residence, where he
presumably wrote his satirical ditties.

Take, for example, Francis Hopkinson, signer of the Declaration of Independence and resident of Bordentown during the Revolution. As we found out during our August visit, he was a bit of a renaissance guy, having also designed the state seal while dabbling in science and the performing arts. He's acknowledged to be the composer of the earliest surviving secular song written in the United States, and he invented a floating lamp.

Interestingly, the plaque on his house also noted that he was a 'great satirist,' a designation you don't often see on historic markers. During the Revolutionary War, he wrote several poems to tweak the British, one of which memorializes an act of harassment on the Delaware River that started in Bordentown and ended in Philadelphia.

It all started on January 6, 1778, when a substantial number of ships in the British fleet were located in the Philadelphia harbor. Working at the behest of several patriots, a cooper in Bordentown constructed several kegs which were then loaded with gunpowder and outfitted with trigger mechanisms. These makeshift mines were then floated down the Delaware, intended to detonate and damage British ships which were assumed to be at anchor in the river.

The scheme didn't go quite as planned. Due to icy conditions in the river, the Redcoats had docked most of their ships at port, leaving little opportunity for the kegs to collide with them along the flow of the river. Only one of the incendiary devices exploded, killing four crew members who'd attempted to haul it up onto a British barge.

In response, British officers ordered their men on shore to fire at any mass floating in the river. Given that it was nighttime, soldiers couldn't differentiate between the kegs and other flotsam, leading them to fire wildly at ice floes and logs as much as the explosive barrels.

While the keg plot itself was a failure, Hopkinson saw the episode as opportunity to promote the hapless British response. When you need fodder for propaganda, nothing bolsters the spirits quite like your opponents' miscues. The Battle of the Kegs is a spirited ditty when sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle, though Hopkinson cheated on the meter a bit by including far too many "sirs." By tweaking the poor judgment of the British on that chilly evening, it demonstrated that the Americans weren't cowed by their opponents' military might.

Had Hopkinson been born 250 years later, he might have used his talents on Saturday Night Live. Instead, his poems and songs traveled by word of mouth, encouraging his fellow patriots to continue the fight and consider independence a wholly realistic possibility.

History at every turn: strolling through Bordentown

Fresh off our Clara Barton discovery, Ivan and I drove to downtown Bordentown to see what other treasures were there for the finding. What we found was a quaint downtown, more of a 19th century feel than Burlington or Mount Holly, but still a throwback. Bank buildings were large and stately, the streets were wide and welcoming, and the architecture is Colonial with a mix of Classical and European influence.

Some of the yards were fenced off with very cool wrought iron.

Oh, and there were some cute shops and eating places, too. It's a nice place to stroll and browse on a summer afternoon.

Important to us, sites of note were clearly marked. Bordentown is clearly proud of its heritage, both as a hub of transportation and as home to a cast of characters who might be considered rabblerousers of the Revolution. Starting in colonial times, the town's location made it a key spot for travelers between New York and Philadelphia, so it was a natural base of operations for revolutionary notables.

Since it's the kind of place where we could reasonably expect that the attractions listed in the WPA Guide to New Jersey still exist, I took it with me after we parked the car. I didn't want us to miss anything important. Within walking distance, we found a wealth of history:

• Thomas Paine, the noted patriot and author of Common Sense, lived in Bordentown when he wasn't in France. You may recall that we first ran into his New Jersey exploits at New Bridge Landing, where Washington's 1776 retreat inspired Paine's classic, The American Crisis.



Francis Hopkinson's house.

• Lawyer and artist Francis Hopkinson stayed in town after marrying the daughter of the man for whom Bordentown is named. Hopkinson not only signed the Declaration of Independence, but was a talented satirist and is credited with designing the New Jersey state seal. He's definitely a subject for a future Hidden New Jersey post, but for now we'll say that his poems and jingles inspired patriots both to fight for independence and to have a good laugh at British military.
• The tracks of New Jersey's first railroad, the Camden and Amboy run on the bed of a sub-surface cut through downtown. Just a mile away, the state's first steam locomotive, the John Bull, was built and tested in 1831.
• The Delaware and Raritan Canal's western end is at the base of a steep embankment just outside the business district.
• The home of Patience Wright, who was America's first sculptress of note, well, when she wasn't spying for the colonists in London.

We also found a bit of fun in the shops around town. Crammed with all kinds of pop culture musts, Randy's Man Cave lacks for floor space to walk on, but more than makes up for it with Beavis and Butthead bobbleheads, loud music and Quisp cereal (really!). There was a bit too much Phillies memorabilia, but given the location, I guess that can be forgiven.

Apparently the entrance to Bonaparte's estate.
We heeded the sign's direction.

The marquee explorer's site in Bordentown, of course, is Point Breeze, home of the exiled Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain and Naples. Much of the site is overgrown and foreboding, with the remainder taken over by the Divine Word Seminary, so we left it unexplored, regrettably. Given the dense vegetation and the connection to noted ornithologist Charles Bonaparte, it would have been a kick to do some birding there.