Men and Times of the Revolution; or, Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, Including His Journals of Travels in Europe and America, from the Year 1777 to 1842, and His Correspondences with Public Men, and Reminiscences and Incidents of the American Revolution

557 pp. Based on journals begun by Elkanah Watson at age 20 (1778). Watson, Elkanah (22 January 1758–05 December 1842), merchant and promoter, was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the son of Elkanah Watson, Sr., a cooper and civic leader, and Patience Marston. He attended Plymouth's common school until 1773, when he began an apprenticeship with merchant John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island. Active in the Providence cadet company, Watson hoped to end his apprenticeship and take up active military service, but he stayed in Brown's service until he became twenty-one and began his own mercantile career. Watson's apprenticeship gave him a grand adventure that lasted almost eight months starting in the fall of 1775. Assigned to carry $50,000 in negotiable securities from brothers John and Nicholas Brown to their agents in South Carolina and Georgia, Watson rode through ten states and kept a journal of his observations and ideas. His journal reported the appalling condition of slaves, the progressive Quakers and “ignorant” Germans of Pennsylvania, and the practices and promises of agriculture. He continued to travel, write about his observations, and comment on farming, with which he had a little boyhood experience in his father's cornfield, through most of his remaining years. Subsequent travels included five years in Europe beginning in 1779, when his apprenticeship ended; he carried to France congressional bills of exchange from several merchants, including the Browns. After visiting Paris, where he met Benjamin Franklin, Watson settled in Nantes, France, where he formed a partnership with Jonathan Williams, a nephew of Franklin's, and later with François Cossoul. Cossoul had money to invest, access to credit, and was willing to work in the office while Watson hosted Tom Paine (who struck him as untidy and egotistical) and traveled around the country seeking new business. The Watson and Cossoul partnership profited while the Revolution interrupted British-American trade. They anticipated that they would need other business opportunities when peace between America and Britain would reduce the alternative trade between America and France. Watson traveled almost a thousand miles in England, impressed by the country's agriculture and canals. An admirer of Edmund Burke, he stood near the foot of the throne when Britain's monarch announced his recognition of American independence, and John Singleton Copley painted Watson's portrait. Then he returned to Nantes, where his partnership, now losing money, was dissolved. In 1784 he returned to America with experience, his journals, and his portrait. Soon after returning to New England Watson stopped at a farm close to Norton, Massachusetts, and weeks later married Rachel Smith, the farm family's daughter. At first Watson traveled on by himself, keeping his marriage “concealed for a time,” in search of financial recovery from his European venture. At Mount Vernon, Virginia, he visited George Washington, who heightened his enthusiasm for canals, and then he joined Cossoul in New York, where they devised a new partnership that they hoped would earn enough to pay their creditors. Cossoul then moved to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 1786 Watson tried to run a store in Nixonton, North Carolina, a village near the coast. A clerk did most of the work while Watson visited the state's western hills, made a business trip to Maryland, and then bought a 640-acre farm in North Carolina, near the confluence of the Chowan and Meherrin rivers. The Scots merchants who had developed the farm just before the Revolution had cultivated fifty acres and left the rest wooded. Watson spent a winter in his farmhouse with “3 Negroes and a wench in the negro house.” In the spring he learned of his partner's death; he sold the farm and then took a small ship of his own back to New England, where he rejoined his wife on his father's farm in the summer of 1788. Watson then explored western Massachusetts and visited the “Old Dutch City of Albany,” New York, where he and his wife settled in 1789. They had five children. In 1790 Watson published A Tour in Holland, the first of his books, and then attributed his unpopularity in Albany to the unflattering opinions he expressed in it. Basing his views on his European experiences, Watson wrote that Holland had admirable canals but, he said, the Dutch did not seem to be a progressive people. The ones who lived in Albany, he told a correspondent in 1804, were “the most illiberal portion of the human race” and desperately in need of a progressive New Englander who could teach them to drain their roofs in ways that did not soak passersby, pave their streets, organize a town library, and erect a bathhouse. Watson regularly contributed articles to Albany newspapers on a wide variety of reform issues. He crusaded for the establishment of a New York state prison system, helped to found Albany's first and second banks, and advocated construction of turnpikes. He also wrote newspaper articles about his explorations, in 1788 and 1791, of what he believed could be the route of a canal system to link Albany with the Great Lakes. He helped lead the movement that persuaded New York's legislature to incorporate the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company and the Northern Inland Lock Navigation Company in 1792. Although the corporations never did build a canal, nor did the Niagara Canal Company that Watson helped to found in 1798, they were part of Watson's well-publicized claim and long-standing competition with De Witt Clinton for the glory of being the real founder of the Erie Canal. After departing from his usual political inactivity by helping to lead Governor Morgan Lewis's campaign for reelection in 1807, losing both the election and a $500 bet, Watson decided to leave Albany. He bought a farm in Massachusetts, just south of Pittsfield in the hills of Berkshire County. Professing the fashionable enthusiasm for “rural felicity,” Watson was also convinced that agriculture offered some opportunities. In 1791 he had organized the Maple Sugar Society to promote a local product that could compete with West Indian sugar; he had also joined the Agricultural Society of New York and shared with Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, the society's principal leader, a great enthusiasm for Merino sheep. Watson obtained a pair of the sheep from Livingston's flock in 1807 and employed Shakers to weave wool into “superfine broad cloth.” He sent samples of the cloth along with essays about sheep and woolen mills to area newspapers. Berkshire County, he hoped, would become America's Yorkshire, an English county known for its sheep and fabrics. Watson's enterprise took yet another direction in 1810 when he attended one of Chancellor Livingston's festive sheep shearings. There he saw guests compete to buy Merino sheep at prices reaching $1,000 apiece. A month later Watson and twenty-six allies announced the Berkshire Cattle Show, an exhibition of cattle, hogs, and Merino sheep that began an annual series conducted by the Berkshire Agricultural Society, founded in 1811 with Watson as its first president. The Berkshire fairs offered parades, dances, oratory, and awards for agricultural and domestic achievements. Widely imitated, they contributed to the spread of county and state fairs in nineteenth-century America. Although hardly the sole founder of American fairs, Watson was an early and effective promoter. In 1816 Watson arranged to sell his farm; in 1817 he returned to Albany. The prices for Merino sheep had fallen. He may have broken even on his venture, but it was not promising enough to hold his interest. Although an urban-dweller again, he continued to promote agricultural improvements. He wrote a petition to Congress calling for a National Board of Agriculture, and he urged New York legislators to create a state board of agriculture, which it did in 1819. Watson also wrote a history of the Berkshire Agricultural Society that described his achievements and offered guidance to people who wanted to follow in his footsteps. Often the principal orator at new fairs and an honorary member of new agricultural societies, he basked securely in his reputation as an agriculture expert. Increasingly, Watson's interests focused on northern New York, especially the Champlain Valley and the town of Port Kent, which he saw as the future commercial heart of the region. Moving to Port Kent in 1825, he participated in efforts to connect the area by railroad with Boston and to organize an agricultural society for Clinton and Essex counties. He died probably in Port Kent. Watson's grave, on a hill overlooking Port Kent, bears a monument that recalls his leadership of the Berkshire Agricultural Society, which he considered the most important of his many and varied endeavors.--American National Biography