Hello and welcome to Collections Speed Dating at Fort Ticonderoga
I am Matthew Keagle, curator, and I'm standing here in our Mars Education Center next
to one of our newest installations: an original Society of the Cincinnati
gold eagle medal on loan from the Robert Nittolo collection. Now this is a
particularly important piece and was worn by members of the Society of the
Cincinnati to indicate their membership. The society itself was created right at the
tail end of the Revolution with Henry Knox as one of its driving forces and it was
created to both perpetuate the acheivement of American independence
during the Revolutionary War, and provide a mutual aid and support Society for
former officers with the Continental Army that had achieved that independence.
The society would be open to certain officers and then perpetuated by passing it down to
their eldest sons. Now this fact and the fact that it was created amongst former military
officers made many Americans suspicious in the early American Republic, because
many feared that this would create an aristocracy of soldiers in exactly the
fashion that they did in Europe which they had fought against during the
Revolutionary War. It never came to that though and late in
1783, Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a French officer serving in the Continental Army,
he was best known to us today perhaps as the man who laid out the city plan for
Washington D.C., travelled to France to Commission the
first of these eagles. Now he went there with money for a number of these that officers had
already subscribed for, but he had a further 140 made basically on
speculation that he can sell back to members in the U.S. This is one of those
140 and despite having more of those created than those that
were subscribed to beforehand, there are fewer of them that appear to survive to
this day, making this quite a rare piece. What adds to the story of this though
is that we know the officer who owned it. Richard Douglass was a Connecticut
soldier who served almost the entirety of the Revolutionary War, marching to Boston
upon hearing the news of the battles of Lexington and Concord as a private
soldier in 1775, all the way to the end of the conflict in 1783, serving at the
battles of New York, the battle of Germantown, the harsh winter in Valley
Forge, the Monmouth campaign, and ultimately the siege of Yorktown and the
surrender of British forces in 1781. The long history of the Society of the
Cincinnati and Richard Douglass' own particular service make this a
particularly remarkable and interesting object
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