Jonathan Mayhew Was the Neglected Prophet of Pre-Revolutionary Boston

The Rev. Jonathan Mayhew--a religious and political radical and visionary of old Boston.

When the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew died in Boston on July 9, 1766 his moral, religious, and political legacy was far from accomplished.  Indeed, years and decades would unfold before the depth of his influence became apparent in a new nation and in a new faith.  Mayhew, then only 46-years-old, was the minister of Old West Church, and much beloved by his congregation and admired by the hot heads and radicals being rallied by Samuel Adams who would soon become the Sons of Liberty.  He was decidedly unpopular with the majority of his ministerial peers, conservative civic leaders, and with the Royal Governor of Massachusetts and his Council. 

Mayhew was born on Martha’s Vineyard on October 8, 1720, a fifth generation descendent of Thomas Mayhew, the Elder who first arrived in the New World with the Great Migration fleet of Puritan settlers in 1631.  Ten years later the original Mayhew secured a proprietary colony grant for Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, the Elizabeth Islands, and other small islands.  Installing himself as governor he began populating his grant with new immigrants and also established his own farm and whaling operations.  Thomas, his son, and grandson also were missionaries among the local Wampanoag and established such fair and friendly relations with the natives.  They made it clear that religion and governance were separate.  The tribe was welcome to embrace Christianity, but Mayhew was at pains to assure them that their governance and lands were secure on their own.  Relations were so good that despite vastly outnumbering the settlers the local Wampanoag did not join the general uprising known as King Philips War that almost wiped out the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1675-76.

Although the small proprietary colony was absorbed by Massachusetts after 1688, the family, or much of it, remained on the island in relative isolation from the mainstream of Puritan society.  Devoutly religious, their local version of the Congregationalist New England Standing Order drifted from the harsh and rigid Calvinism of the mainland.

Young Jonathan, noted for his scholarly bent, left the island to pursue the Lord’s work as a student at the factory of divines, Harvard College.  Upon graduation Mayhew he found New England in a religious upheaval.  

Puritan firebrand Rev. Jonathan Edwards appalled Mayhew.

The Connecticut minister and theologian Jonathan Edwards helped inaugurate the first round of revival meetings in the 1730’s. In 1841 he scared the hell out New England with his fiery sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God which quickly became the first big best seller in the Colonies in pamphlet form.  Mayhew rejected Edwards view declaring that “total depravity [is] both dishonourable to the character of God and a libel on human nature.”  He likewise rejected the five points of Calvinism including the doctrine of irresistible grace and the doctrine of the Trinity as taught by the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds.

At the same time Mayhew also rejected the Great Awakening—the first of a series of huge revival movements that have periodically swept Americans up into a religious frenzy.  Mayhew saw the principal mover of the Awakening, the English preacher and revivalist George Whitefield, an Anglican preacher who became a founding figure in Methodism, at camp meetings in what is now Maine.  He was repulsed by the mindless emotionalism he witnessed which he suspected would burn brightly but soon extinguish itself.  He found Whitefield’s followers, ‘of the more illiterate sort,” and the preaching “confused, conceited and enthusiastic.”  He was repelled by the “extravagance and fanaticism, and violent gestures and shrieks” of people in the throes of religious ecstasy.

Mayhew made his views publicly know.  He proposed a third path based on religious rationalism and a view of a loving, but firm God as Father as revealed in a careful reading and analysis of The Bible.  

Boston's Old West Church called Mayhew.  It's working-class members responded to Mayhew's radicalism.  The steeple shown was torn down by the British during the Siege of Boston in the American Revolution in part to prevent it from being used to signal Colonial troops in Cambridge and in part as punishment for being Mayhew's pulpit of rebellion.

These views made it difficult for the young minister to find a parish.  But in 1747 West Church in Boston, one of the city’s nine Congregational Churches—and the least prosperous—called him to be their minister.  Only two of the other ministers in the city would even agree, as was customary, to be at the service of installation and ordination for the customary laying on of hands, symbolizing a welcome into the ministerial community.  One prominent minister is known to have scolded his barber when the man expressed interest in hearing Mayhew warning him not to go hear “that heretic.” 

Shortly after assuming the pulpit Mayhew crossed the ocean to pursue his Doctor of Divinity at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, an intellectual hot bed of the Scottish Enlightenment.  Although the liberal ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment were taking hold among a young and rising generation of Virginia Tidewater aristocrats, they were a novelty in New England where most ministers who pursued advanced degrees in the Mother Country did so at firmly Puritan institutions.

Despite the cold shoulder of his colleagues, Mayhew perused a ministry that presaged Unitarianism—a theological position that did not even yet have a name—by more than two decades.  His belief in a firm, fair, and loving God/king led him to believe that even the worst sinners, after a period of punishment and reflection, could be reconciled and dwell thereafter in Heaven with the saints and the angels.  This was a kind of universalism, making Mayhew probably the first North American preacher to combine the two ideas which became the two streams of modern Unitarian Universalism. 

But Mayhew, however far seeing as a religious pioneer, is best remembered for the political sermons that helped stir rebellion. 

His most famous and influential sermon was preached on the centennial of the execution of King Charles I, January 30, 1750.  Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers refuted the growing opinion that the king was a martyr.  It was a long, scholarly history of the monarchy and the development of the English constitution and built a Biblical argument against the Devine Right of Kings and in favor of popular resistance to unjust government in answer to a higher law.  He concluded that the execution of Charles was justified when he when he “too greatly infringed upon British liberties."  It was also a lesson for any future monarch with inclinations to despotism.

The sermon was widely printed and circulatead pamphlet, for a while supplanting Jonathan Edwards's old screed in popularity.  It was also reprinted in London in 1752 and again in 1767 as relations between the Mother Country and the Colonies were reaching crisis.  Mayhew became an international celebrity, albeit a highly controversial one.  His radicalism was denounced from other pulpits, and, of course, condemned by authorities.

But Sam Adams and his boys and a rising generation of patriots did listen.  Years later Sam’s cousin John Adams recalled, that Mayhew’s sermon “was read by everybody.”  Some would call it the intellectual opening salvo in the run-up to the American Revolution.  

Mayhew's words inspired the Sons of Liberty, seen here burning copies of the Stamp Act.  They were "read by everybody" recalled John Adams.

Mayhew continued to preach influential, widely circulated sermons including two election day charges in 1750 and 1754 espousing colonial rights and the civic duty to resist tyranny.  He became particularly aroused with the imposition of the Stamp Act in 1765.  The essence of slavery, he argued in a new sermon, consists in subjection to others—“whether many, few, or but one, it matters not.” The day after his sermon, a Boston mob attacked and destroyed Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s house.  Mayhew and his sermon were held responsible by the “respectable citizens of Boston.” 

Powerful Lt. Governor Thomas Hutchinson blamed Mayhew's sermon for the mob that burned down his house.

In 1763 Mayhew rebuked the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel for its plans to dispatch missionaries, priests, and teachers to the Colonies as well as the eminent appointment of an Anglican Bishop.  He regarded all of this as a camel’s nose under the tent meant to bring the colonies back into conformity with the Crown and its institutions.

In 1765 Mayhew was invited by Harvard to deliver the annual Dudlean Lecture on religion. This was a rare show of approval from the New England establishment and an acknowledgement of his popular leadership against the Crown.

The Snare Broken was a thanksgiving discourse preached by Mayhew on May 23, 1766 occasioned by Parliament’s repeal of the Stamp Act.  It was a warning to William Pitt and others in England who he knew would read it that taking self-government into private hands in some circumstances must surely proceed from “self-preservation, being a great and primary law of nature.”

Weeks after delivering this last famous salvo, Mayhew died.  Most of the Boston clergy still avoided his funeral as did virtually all officeholders.

In addition to his influence on the Sons of Liberty and the American Revolution, Mayhew’s religious ideas, except for his proto-universalism, were quietly adopted by a new generation of Harvard graduates and ministers.  In the years following the revolution all most all Boston churches affiliated with the Standing Order were quietly but unofficially unitarian.  An open break with the Congregationalists however did not come until William Ellery Channing’s Baltimore sermon in 1819.  Ironically Mayhew’s old congregation Old West was one of only two Boston churches to remain with the orthodox Congregationalists. 

After Conquering California The Victors Turned on Each Other

 

U.S. Marines from the Navy's Pacific Squadron under Commodore John Drake Sloat conduct a bloodless amphibious operation to seize the Alta California provincial capital, Monterrey. 

Other men get most of the credit for the annexation of Alta California during the Mexican War of 1846-’48.  But Commodore John Drake Sloat, commander of the U.S. Navy Pacific Squadron, sailed into the harbor at Monterrey, the provincial capital, and after a bloodless skirmish with a small force of Mexican Coast Guard and silencing shore batteries with a few well-placed salvos, landed with a complement of sailors and Marines. Sloat raised the flag over the Customs House on July 7, 1846 and issued an edict annexing Alta California to the United States. 

Two days later he sailed up the coast and took Yerba Buena—today’s San Francisco.  He acted as self-proclaimed Military Governor of California until relieved by Commodore Robert F. Stockton, who reprimanded him for exceeding his orders.  That reprimand was later echoed by President James Knox Polk. 

Exceed orders of not, with a state of war between the counties, Stockton was not about to hand California back to Mexican authorities.  

                       

                                Commodore John Drake Sloat.

Sloat was a veteran Naval officer.  An orphan from New York he entered the Navy as a midshipman in 1800.  He left the service but re-enlisted for the War of 1812.  He was serving as Sailing Master under Captain Stephen Decatur on the frigate USS United States when it captured the British frigate HMS Macadonian and was promoted to Lieutenant for conspicuous gallantry under fire in the battle.  In his long naval service, he battled Caribbean pirates and commanded several ships before accepting command of the Pacific Squadron in 1844. 

As tensions with Mexico grew, Sloat was ordered to take Alta California in event of the outbreak of war.  He was sailing off of Mazatlán on the Mexican Pacific coast when he got fragmentary reports from shore that fighting had broken out along the Texas border.  Without waiting for official confirmation, he raced north to prevent a possible occupation of California by the British from Oregon.  Sloat eventually learned that fighting had already broken out in Northern California and that a Republic had been declared by a handful of settlers from the US. 

Famed explorer Captain John C. Frémont entered the rich agricultural Sacramento Valley at the head of a large 55 man “exploration” party early in 1846.  His appearance there was something of a mystery, as his official orders were to explore the source of the Arkansas River on the east side of the Rocky Mountains.  Many historians believe he was acting under secret orders from President Polk, although no evidence of such orders has been found.  Others think that the ambitious Frémont acted on his own accord.

At any rate, Frémont agitated among the U.S. settlers in the valley promising that if war broke out with Mexico that he and his men would, “be there to protect them.”  

A heavily romanticized view of Capt. John C. Fremont who mysteriously appeared in northern California at a critical moment and after the senseless slaughter of an innocent Klamath fishing village, rousted local Californio forces, claimed the brief Bear Flag Republic for the United States and anointed himself military governor.

Needless to say, Mexican authorities were unamused.  Commandante General José Antonio Castro, a native Californian who was himself often at odds with the distant Mexican government but who was a fierce opponent of foreign immigration, rallied his small force and forced Frémont to north into Oregon.  After a battle with Modoc warriors Frémont let a retaliatory attack on a wholly innocent Klamath fishing village massacring the residents.  He encountered Marine Corps Lieutenant Archibald H. Gillespie who was carrying secret oral orders for him from the President. 

He turned his force back south to California with his trusted scout Kit Carson and Lt.  Gillespie at his side.  When he arrived at Sutter’s Fort on June 25, Frémont found the settlers at Sonoma had declared the Bear Flag Republic on June 14.  He took command in the name of the United States and ended the nine-day existence of the Republic. 

Frémont went to work consolidating his force of men from the Army’s Topographical Engineers and experienced mountain men led by Carson with local volunteers, including some Mission Indians.  After defeating a small force under Castro at the Battle of Olompali, it seemed that Frémont was in control of California, a situation that did not thrill either Sloat or his successor Stockton. 

But Stockton had to use his force of sailors and Marines to garrison key points on the coast and to be kept in reserve as “shock” troops should serious fighting break out.  He needed to bring Frémont’s California Battalion under his orders and into U.S. service.  Frémont was brevetted Lt. Colonel in command of the unit dubbed the U.S. Mounted Rifles with Gillespie as Major and second in command.  Carson was appointed a Lieutenant. 

Former mountain man and guide, Kit Carson, left, seemed to be everywhere during the California campaigns of the Mexican Wars.  One of the few legendary figures of the old West whose real life lived up to the hype, Carson is pictured here with John C. Fremont, the Pathfinder, after their famous and epic exploration of the Mountain west.  Carson would rise in the Army to the rank of Brigadier General and command forces in New Mexico during the Civil War.  He was the only Army general officer known to be illiterate.

The volunteers supported a landing by Marines and Bluejackets at San Diego on July 28 followed by taking Los Angeles on August 13.  The conquest of California seemed complete.  But Major Gillespie, left in command at Los Angeles with 60 men, infuriated the local ranchers with a harsh order of martial law and general contemptuous treatment of local citizens.  Previously many were sympathetic to the possibility of American rule, having become fed up with inept and corrupt government from Mexico City. 

On September 23 about 200-300 Californios under Gen. José María Flores staged a revolt besieging Gillespie and his garrison without water on Ft. Hill. American volunteer John Brown broke through the Californio lines and made a 400-mile ride to contact Stockton in San Francisco Bay.  Before Stockton could act to relieve the siege, Gillespie was forced to surrender and was allowed to retreat from Los Angeles to the near-by port of San Pedro.  

Brigadier General Stephen Kearny arrived in California at the head of a few hundred Dragoons after a punishing march from Santa Fe.  He eventually clashed with both Commodore Stockton and Fremont for leadership.

Meanwhile, an entirely separate American Force was heading to California overland from Santa Fe.  On September 25 about 300 Dragoons under the command of Brigadier General Stephen Kearny began an epic march across deserts and mountains to California.  On October 6 he encountered a small party led by Kit Carson which was sent from Los Angeles in early September with dispatches for President Polk proclaiming victory in California.  On the strength of this now outdated news, Kearny sent more than half of his troops back to Santa Fe along with Carson’s dispatches.  Carson agreed to turn around and guide Kearny the rest of the way to California by the best possible route.

By December 5 Carson brought Kearny’s exhausted men to within 25 miles of their destination in San Diego.  An intercepted Mexican courier alerted Kearny that Stockton and his forces were under siege in the city.  With his men mounted mostly on broken mules, Kearny decided to raid a camp of Californios under Andrés Pico at San Pasqual for much needed spare horses.  The camp was alerted that Kearny decided to attack.  But his 60 remaining exhausted men and their mules were no match for Pico’s skilled lancers who rode rings around the Americans and killed at least 22 of them.  Kearny was among the wounded.  

Lancers of the Californio Militia badly mauled Kearny's exhausted forces in a bloody battle but had to retreat as reinforcements from Stockton's sailors and Marines neared. It was the final major military action of the campaign and left Alta California securely in American hands.

The Dragoons set up a defensive perimeter and were besieged by Pico.  Carson and another man were dispatched to sneak through the lines into San Diego for help.  Miraculously, they arrived in the city with bloody bare feet.  Stockton dispatched 200 sailors and Marines with fresh horses for Kearny.  The arrival of reinforcements caused Pico’s men to scatter. 

The combined forces entered San Diego on December 12.  Kearny’s dispatches reported the Battle of San Pasqual a victory because the Californios “fled the field” when re-enforcements arrived.  Stockton reported it as a loss for the Army.  The Lancers considered it their victory. 

After a brief rest Stockton and Kearny’s combined force marched to Los Angeles where they were to join with 400 men under Frémont.  On January 8, 1847, with Stockton in command and Kearny his second, approximately 600 men from the San Diego column with artillery support dispersed 150 Californios under José Mariá Flores in the short but sharp Battle of Rio San Gabriel.  Remnants of Flores’s men were defeated again the next day at the battle of Battle of La Mesa, the last significant action of the California campaign.  

Commodore Robert Stockton won his bureaucratic and inter-service struggle with General Kearny for ultimate command and as Military Governor, but his choice of Fremont to succeed him fell afoul of the Pathfinder's Regular Army status as a mere Captain and therefore subordinate to Keary.

American forces re-entered Los Angeles and Major Gillespie personally raised the same American flag he had been forced to haul down months earlier. 

With fighting essentially over, the conquerors fell to bickering among themselves for command.  Both Stockton and Kearney held equivalent one-star rank but there was no ordinary precedent for an officer of one branch to serve under one of the other of the same rank.  Stockton on the scene longer and asserted military command as well as the post of military governor.    Kearny insisted his orders from Washington were more recent and included both military command and authority to establish a government.   

Frémont, acting for Stockton signed the Treaty of Cahuenga on January 13 which ended local fighting with the surrender of Californio artillery and return of prisoners on both sides, and which allowed the Californios to return unmolested to their homes without having to surrender Mexican citizenship until a final and comprehensive end to the broader war, which would finally be ended in 1848 by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the official cession of California to the U.S. 

Stockton appointed Frémont his successor as governor.  Frémont, a mere captain in the Regular Army, several times defied a direct order from his Army superior to surrender the Governorship.  Kearney appealed to Washington, which confirmed him as Governor.  He had Frémont arrested, put in chains, and court marshaled for mutiny and insubordination.  Frémont was convicted and sentenced to be dishonorably discharged from the service.

Polk upheld the verdict but bowing to pressure from Frémont’s powerful father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and considering his service, vacated the sentence and allowed Frémont to honorably resign his commission.  

President James Knox Polk may or may not have given secret orders to Fremont and others before the War with Mexico officially broke out.  He also spent a lot of time sorting through the squabbles, charges, and counter charges involving Sloat, Stockton, Kearny, and Fremont.  About the only major figure to emerge with their reputation unsullied was Carson, who rose rapidly in the Army after the war

Frémont returned to California where he was subsequently elected Governor and Senator.  He was the first Republican Party candidate for President in 1856 and commanded Union forces in Missouri and in western Virginia during the Civil War displaying remarkably bad generalship in both assignments.  He ended up sitting out most of the war in disgrace. 

Kearney saw further service in the Mexican War and was appointed Military Governor of Vera Cruz and then Mexico City.  While in Mexico he contracted Yellow Fever.  He died of the illness at his home in St. Louis 1848. 

His rival Stockton resigned from the Navy in 1850 and was elected to the Senate as a Democrat from New Jersey the next year.  He was the sponsor of the bill that finally ended flogging in the Navy. In 1861 he was a delegate to an unsuccessful Peace Conference trying to head off the Civil War.  He was appointed commander of the New Jersey Militia during the war but saw no action.  He died in 1865. 

Frémont, Stockton, and Kearny—even Kit Carson—were all lauded as heroes for their part in the annexation of California.  Place names in several states honor each of them as did Army posts and Navy ships. 

And what of Commodore Sloat?  Ill health ended his career as a sea-going officer.  He was assigned shore duty, including the planning of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard at Vallejo, California.  He retired from the service in 1866 and died in New York the next year.  Largely forgotten, you can find a stone monument in his memory, if you know where to look at the Presidio of Monterrey and streets in residential areas of Monterrey and Los Angeles are named in his honor.

 

Geezer Whining--What Ever Became of the Picnic?

The American family picnic 1950s.  Was it ever really like this?  Pretty close.

I don’t want to be one of those old fuddy-duddies who bitch and moan that everything was better in the good ol’ days.  Trust me.  It wasn’t.  Take polio, segregation, child labor, and push lawn mowers for example.  And as much as I once loved banging away on my trusty Smith-Corona, the computer I am working on is way better and I can get the fruits of my writing labor in front of you eyeballs in a trice.  Nifty.

But what the hell happened to picnics?  I don’t mean just eating outside which humans have been doing since they came down from trees, or wherever they hung out before the magic pixie dust made them something a little different than the other apes.  We have no end of cook outs and barbeques on private decks and patios.  We munch Red Hots at ballparks.  We grab fast food on the fly and have lunch at the little tables outside, in sprawling urban plazas adorned with monumental modern sculpture.   There are church events, concerts, carnivals, and family reunions.  We eat outside all the time, weather permitting, and sometimes even when it is discouraging.

Coronavirus pandemic street dining in Chicago.

It takes more than chowing down outside for a picnic. A picnic was an event and an adventure, the highlight of a week. 

When I was a boy in Cheyenne it meant loading up my Mom’s ’51 Chevy or my Dad’s official State of Wyoming station wagon—not for unofficial use—and heading out on a Sunday Drive—another lost tradition. 

Out from the city we would go, often down gravel roads, in search of, I don’t know, nature of some kind or something.  Maybe out Happy Jack Road, or Vedauwoo Canyon, along some creek out on the Wyoming Herford Ranch, by the Tree Growing Out of the Rock along Highway 30 to Laramie, down to Colorado, or just any enticing spot with shade and a pull-off along the road.

Of all of our picnic destinations around Cheyenne, the rocks at Vedauwoo Canyon offered the highest adventure opportunities for boys--and the most dangerous.

When we found a spot, out would come a blanket or two to spread on the ground, which, being Wyoming, was often a little stony, strewn with pine needles and cones, covered in clumps of prairie grass and burrs.  Once smoothed out to my mother’s satisfaction we would unload the wicker hamper, a gallon thermos jug filled with iced tea, tin plates, aluminum tumblers that originally came with cottage cheese in them from the milk man, red checkered napkins, and Woolworth’s stainless steel flat ware.

The menu?  Glad you asked.  Most likely cold fried chicken.  We always had chicken on Sunday, and it was surely a Sunday afternoon, roasted if we were home.  But sometimes, for a more impromptu picnic, just cheese sandwiches with yellow mustard and Miracle Whip cut in half and wrapped in waxed paper.  Sometimes there was a bag of potato chips—rare treat not often on Mom’s shopping lists—or her favorite shoestring potatoes out of a can.  There might also be in covered dishes a potato salad and Van Camp’s Pork & Beans.  On a real good day there would be a plate of deviled eggs.  For dessert, watermelon by the slice or if it had been a cool enough week to use the oven, a homemade cherry pie.

Generally, there was nothing that needed cooking or heating, but when we knew there would be a park grill pit, maybe wieners to roast on a sick and marshmallows to toast if we lingered to dusk. 

Not much planned for amusement.  The picnic was the main fun.  Maybe we would bring a rubber ball to toss around between my twin brother Tim, me, and Dad after eating.  If there was a running creek nearby, we could roll up our jeans and go wading.  We might have even brought our rods and a coffee can of worms for a little fishing.  But Dad, a great fly fisherman, was bored by our drowning the worms under a bobber but dared not pull out his gear for fear of snagging one of our ears on a back cast.  Besides, for him fly fishing was a holy and solitary rite not compatible with noisy children.

Sometimes my brother and I snapped photos with our Kodak Brownies and got back little glossy prints in a week or so from the drug store.  Wish I could find some of those pix now. 

Quite often we would go hiking and exploring, which often quickly became an extension of our back yard cowboy and Indian games.  If we were at Vedauwoo, we would try to scamper up the steep sides of the box canyon.  When I was twelve, I broke my ankle there, but my Mom thought I was just being whiney about a simple turn.  It was not until it swelled to the size of a grapefruit and turned an angry, ugly color, that she believed me and reluctantly took me to the doctor the next day.

Few picnics ended with anything near that drama, although there could be bickering and yelling in the car on the way home if we were all tired and cranky.  But the next week we were rarin’ to go again.

American folk art circa 1800, probably Pennsylvania, shows the gentry on a picnic with a liveried servant--free or slave?

Millions of American families did more or less the same thing going back to when buggies and farm wagons were used instead of Chevys and substituting farm pastures, beaches, lakes, and city parks for destination.  Graveyards were a surprisingly frequent choice.  In the city the family might have to lug everything on trollies or busses to get to the park or walk for miles with everything packed in a Radio Flyer red wagon.  The menu and other particulars may have varied.  But the idea was the same.

Can you imagine rounding up children today for such an expedition?  “What are we going to do?” “Eat”  “That’s it?”  “Mostly.”  “There’s nothing to do!”  Oh, the wails, oh, the moans.  I know that after a few disastrous tries with our daughters when they were small, we gave up.

                                        Picnic romance--innocent privacy and sometimes something more.

Of course, picnics were not just for families.  They were a great cheap date.  An innocent enough sounding activity that otherwise closely watched young people often got time away from prying eyes.  It could be perfectly romantic; it could also become a sweaty rutting ground.  I suspect more than a few children were conceived on a picnic blanket.

But no need for that now. 

The French had more interesting picnics according to Édouard Manet in 1863.

Of course, picnics were not even uniquely American, we know, because a lot of French artists found them attractive subjects and displayed that the French often had a more adventuresome take on it than did prudish Americans.

And even the English, especially the gentry and toffs enjoyed a picnic outing if it was accompanied by servants and elegant accouterments.  But they always looked stiff in acres of crinoline and huge hats for the ladies with gentlemen buttoned up in sporting wool tweeds.

I’ll take our old American version, informality, dirt, dust, ants, mosquitos, sunburn and all.  If only I could find one….