In 2011 CCHS acquired an 1813 petition to the state legislature that sheds light on an intriguing yet little known episode in the County's history. The document reveals that Carlisle Constable James Hutton petitioned the General Assembly on January 28, 1813, in an effort to reverse the decision of two lawsuits against him that threatened to take away his property and leave him homeless. According to his petition, two militia officers, Captain James Blaine and Captain William Miller, were court-martialed "for disobedience of orders in wearing the black Cockade instead of the Blue and Red as ordered by his Excellency Thomas McKean then Governor of this State." Acting as Constable, Hutton served the warrant for the court-martial of the two officers, seized some of their property, and sold it to pay their fines. They in turn successfully sued Hutton for doing so. Since he could not afford to pay the sum required by the suits against him, his house and lot were to be put up for sale instead. More than one hundred men signed the petition in support of Hutton, many of whom were among Carlisle's most prominent citizens, including attorney James Hamilton and printers Archibald Loudon and George Kline.
Although fairly brief, Hutton's petition raises a number of questions. Why would the color of a cockade be so important as to warrant a court-martial? Why did these officers insist on wearing a black cockade? Did James Hutton actually lose his home, or was his petition successful? While complete answers prove elusive, an investigation of the story behind this short document reveals Carlisle's connection to the wider controversy over cockades in the early nineteenth century and suggests that James Hutton's predicament was likely the result of the militia's partisanship, as Blaine's and Miller's refusals to wear the red and blue cockade coincided with a larger backlash against Governor McKean's order.
At first glance it may seem odd that something so seemingly trivial as a cockade, a cloth rosette most often worn in a hat, would be taken so seriously. Yet cockades played an important role in the contentious politics of the early republic. During the 1790s, the first American political parties used the European custom of wearing a cockade to show loyalty to one's country as a way to identify themselves and signify support for either Britain or France in foreign affairs. Federalists adopted as their emblem the British black cockade, which had been worn by George Washington and officers of the Continental Army, while the tri-color embraced by the Democratic Republicans, with its red, white, and blue colors denoted sympathies for revolutionary France. In the words of historian Simon P. Newman, the cockade thus served as a type of political badge, "and to wear a black or a red, white, and blue cockade was to make a public statement of support for one or other political party." At the height of the tensions with France during the Quasi-War it was evidently not unheard of for soldiers seen donning the French colors to be court-martialed. Meanwhile, continuing debate over the black cockade's British origins near the decade's end led Washington to join Alexander Hamilton in recommending that the "American Cockade" be black with an eagle in the center to set it apart, which became a U.S. Army regulation in 1799.
Mr. President and Members of the Hamilton Library Association:—
I desire to say, in the first place, that I esteem it an honor to have been invited to prepare a paper for this occasion. Having listened to some of the papers here presented I fully understood that the preparation of a paper to be read here involved serious labor and that a random talk would not be acceptable.