My first story on Henry Tufts can be seen here.
Henry Tufts
was a villain.
He stole, he
cheated, he lied.
He was a bad
father, husband, soldier, citizen.
Wherever he
went, and whatever he was doing, he was probably doing something bad.
Every honest
person bearing the name of Tufts (and readers of this blog will know,
undoubtedly, there were many!) since then has cringed, at least somewhat, at
the sound of his name. Others have tried to make his book disappear altogether.
But I'm glad
they failed.
If you are
one who wishes such a man as Henry had never lived, or at least never written
about his life, step back a second. Imagine Henry was someone else's ancestor
or far-removed cousin, and hear me out.
That Henry
was a Tufts is not what's important (though one can certainly wonder how such a
bad seed came from the line of a Harvard Divinity graduate!). He didn't
intentionally disgrace his family name. He was merely who he was.
He could
have been better, but that's what's so important about him, and that's why I
have published The Narrative of Henry Tufts: Second Complete Edition. Henry
Tufts' perspective is completely unlike any of his contemporaries, and his book
is all the better for it.
The book is
rife with anecdotes of jailbreaks, horse thefts, quack doctoring and so much
more, all of which—though part of the experience of the time—are little
discussed in contemporary literature of the time.
Where else
than Henry Tufts can you read of prison life in “The Castle” in Boston Harbor,
and even find a glossary of the prisoners' dialect? Here we can learn all
manner of odd terms not recorded anywhere else, such as “evening sneak” meaning
“Going into a house by night the doors being open,” and “going to the nipping
jig to be topt” meaning “He is going to the gallows to be hanged.”
Here we also
gain a more nuanced perspective on how at least some ordinary Americans
regarded fighting in the War for Independence—we see Henry enlist for the wrong
reasons, that “a soldier in fact, may be a thief,” and then shortly thereafter
desert the army altogether. His actions are damnable, of course, but reading
this helps us understand better that the cause of George Washington and the
Continental Congress were not at the forefront of every person's mind. We could
dismiss Henry as an aberration in this case, but I think it teaches an
important lesson: actually living in a historical period can be quite different
from how it is represented later. For some, mere self-interested survival was
of the greatest importance, far outweighing any higher cause.
The point
is, history is complicated. There are as many perspectives as there are people,
and we should not take it lightly that we can read the perspective of a man as
bad as Henry Tufts. The continued existence of his book is necessary so that we
can understand that not everyone in the past fit into the box of whatever
common perception imagines. One may object that his is a book of lies (See
Pearson's The Six Silver Spoons on my website), but outside of factual
accuracy, there is a truth to Henry Tufts: the truth of how he presents himself
and his outlook on his life and times. The very existence of this account—even
if it were to be found that not a single event in it ever occurred—shows us a
side to early America that was never well known. Not that of the good and
pious, but of the lawless, who, bad as they were, still need to be understood
for a more complete—and therefore true—picture of history.
The
Narrative of Henry Tufts: Second Complete Edition, the first reprint edition of
Henry Tufts' book ever to contain the complete text and original illustrations,
is now on sale at Amazon here Visit henrytufts.com for more information. Daniel Allie is not believed
to be in any way related to the Tufts family.
