{"id":1131,"date":"2020-08-06T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-06T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/?p=1131"},"modified":"2020-08-06T13:01:56","modified_gmt":"2020-08-06T17:01:56","slug":"elephant-on-the-green-part-1-contributed-by-bob-goodhouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/?p=1131","title":{"rendered":"Elephant on the Green Part 1, Contributed by Bob Goodhouse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
The Witness <\/em>July 30, 1806<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

In 1806 we had an Elephant on the Green.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was exhibited for one day behind the current @the Corner<\/em>, at what was then Grove Catlin\u2019s Tavern, and was the only elephant in America.  She was later named \u201cOld Bet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her visit to Litchfield coincided with a Jeffersonian \u201cFestival\u201d on 6 August 1806, and the visit was encouraged by town Federalists hoping to distract people from the detailed program planned by the Festival organizers.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The elephant arrived in Boston from India in 1804 along with a Bengali handler and was purchased by Edward Savage.  It appears this was the same Edward Savage who was the well-known portrait painter, famous for his painting of George Washington with his family.  Savage\u2019s brother had the job of exhibiting the elephant (presumably with the Bengali) up and down the East Coast in those years.  Her visit to Litchfield got her caught-up in local politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time, Litchfield was a stronghold of Federalism and had become synonymous with support for the established Congregationalist Church, limited suffrage, and similar principles.  The election of Thomas Jefferson caused animosity between our Federalist majority and our minority Democratic-Republican (Jeffersonian supporter) Litchfield residents; Judge Tapping Reeve, a Federalist, had predicted \u201cblood will run in the streets\u201d with Jefferson\u2019s election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pro-Jefferson Democratic-Republicans decided to hold what they called a \u201cFestival\u201d- a popular and common means of celebrating their political message- in town on August 6th<\/sup>, to be attended by hundreds of in and out of state supporters, and several state militia companies.  The \u201cPresident of the Day\u201d was Retired Gen. Timothy Skinner, former head of the Connecticut Militia\u2019s 6th<\/sup> Brigade, and \u201cVice Presidents\u201d included Maj.  Moses Seymour, our Town Clerk, and David Welch, the Milton merchant.  A key reason for holding the Festival in Litchfield was the town\u2019s imprisonment of a Democratic-Republican journalist, Selleck Osborne, which had gained national attention. And support for Osborne was one of the reasons the Federalists wanted to distract public support of the Festival by a greater focus on an Elephant on the Green than on the Festival\u2019s goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his Litchfield paper \u201cThe Witness\u201d Osborne regularly printed anti-Federalist editorials and articles; he also gave prominent Litchfield Federalists nicknames in print: Col Benjamin Tallmadge was \u201cBilly Bobtail\u201d and Judge James Gould (Reeve\u2019s partner at the Law School) was \u201cJimmy Dross\u201d.  Osborne added to town Federalist ire by insulting Tallmadge\u2019s son at the Tallmadge store, from which he was chased-out with a horsewhip. Another prominent town Federalist, Julius Deming, (called \u201cCrowbar Justice\u201d by Osborne), finally launched a libel suit against Osborne, which led to his imprisonment in our jail, then on East Hill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Come back tomorrow for Part 2! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1131"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1150,"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions\/1150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}