From the Archives

A relic of the siege of Boston in 1775–76, this piece of house framing with a hole and round patch comes from a house built in 1767 by Edward Tuckerman (1740–1818), a prosperous baker and a member of the Sons of Liberty, and his wife, Elizabeth Harris (1747–1805). During the siege of Boston, the Tuckerman mansion was struck by a cannonball fired by an American gun. (Ironically, Tuckerman was a captain in the Boston Artillery Company.)

Signed at Mount Vernon, this certificate records the membership of Lieutenant Robert Rogers of Rhode Island in the Society of the Cincinnati, founded in May of 1783. Membership was confined to French ministers, admirals, and commanders of their army and navy, and to American Continental Army officers who had served three or more years in the Revolution. Rogers’s certificate is signed by two of the organization’s officers: George Washington, its first president, and Henry Knox, its first secretary.

Images of George Washington pervaded the early republic. This Washington portrait from the American Ancestors collection is part of a series begun in 1824 by Rembrandt Peale (1778–1860). Peale would eventually paint nearly eighty such likenesses, varying in detail, generally known as the “porthole portraits.” As a teenager in the mid-1790s, Peale had met Washington and thus could rightfully claim to have seen the great man in the flesh.