Several points of interest this month. Gallison starts with the annual election ceremony for the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts—then as now a social occasion as much as a military one. Posts of his on this occasion in other years indicate that some Gilbert & Sullivan pageantry was already making its way into the occasion.
More relevant to Gallison’s own life, he expanded his work for the church into teaching Sunday school. In addition, he resumed an interest in privateering that eventually found its way into an essay for the July, 1820 issue of The North American Review, and a petition to Congress he drafted, submitted after his death in 1821. William Ellery Channing and Daniel Webster were among the signers of the latter piece.
There are more notes on his churchgoing, an increasingly significant portion of his journal in later life– if we may say that about anyone who dies at 32!
A lighter note can be found in his description of a Handel & Haydn Society concert, interrupted by a fire in a nearby bakery. The aria in question was from Handel’s L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato.
H&H was founded in 1815, dedicated (as may be deduced by its name) to supporting ancient and modern music. The preeminence of those two composers in Boston’s musical life can be seen in the ceremonies commemorating peace with Britain in that year. A multi-hour outdoor pageant featured, along with the speeches and brass bands, some of the most famous numbers from Handel’s Messiah and Haydn’s Creation. Greatest hits from the greatest hits, as it were.
[1] Nicholas Parrillo, “The De-Privatization of American Warfare: How the U.S. Government Used, Regulated, and Ultimately Abandoned Privateering in the Nineteenth Century,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol 19, Issue 1, 52.