“We have esteemed him to be an honest and peaceable citizen”

In May 1777 Boston had a series of town meetings concerned chiefly with its military defenses.

On 17 May that discussion went further to assembling a list of “Persons belonging to this Town, as have been endeavouring since the 19th. of April 1775, to counteract the united Struggles of this & the neighbouring States.”

The town meeting voted to have those twenty-nine men “apprehended & confined”—while recognizing that would require an order from the Massachusetts Council.

Boston’s official list of suspected Loyalists included the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, Dr. James Lloyd and four other physicians, William Jackson of the Brazen Head, and others. Three of those men were already in jail: Hopestill Capen, Thomas Edwards, and Benjamin Davis, Sr.

On 22 May the town elected seven representatives to the Massachusetts General Court, with John Pitts and Ellis Gray getting the most votes—more than 500.

Some prominent people disagreed with the town’s list of Loyalists. Soon after the new legislative session started, the Council received a petition “praying the Court to give Orders for the Removal of Hopestill Capen, a Prisoner in Boston Goal.” That petition came from a group headed by Robert Pierpont, a Roxbury merchant and official with impeccable Patriot credentials.

Furthermore, it appears Patience Capen had collected ninety signatures on this statement, transcribed in American Archives:

We, the subscribers, inhabitants of Boston, do hereby certify, that Mr. Hopestill Capen is well known to us, and we have esteemed him to be an honest and peaceable citizen; some of us in particular, have experienced his kind and faithful services in securing and saving our interest and property when we were out of the town; and we all join with the petitioner that he may be released from gaol and restored to his family.

The phrase “when were were out of the town” referred to the siege of Boston. Capen had evidently looked after other shopkeepers’ goods or real estate.

Again, those signers included some men deeply involved in Boston’s Patriot movement and town government: William Dawes, Samuel Dashwood, Moses Grant, Timothy Newell, Edward Payne, John Scollay, Pool Spear, Henry Bass, and so on. Other signers were more moderate Whigs—Ezekiel Price, John Andrews, Thomas Fleet, Thomas Handysyd Peck, Duncan Ingraham. But none of those names would raise political or religious suspicions.

Ninety signatures on a petition was a very impressive number. Nonetheless, those men would have been a decided minority in a town meeting attended by up to 500 citizens worried about the town being attacked from without or undermined from within.

On 18 June, Council member Dr. Samuel Holton brought the businessmen’s petition to the House with a proposal to form a committee “to examine the Commission of the Court of Enquiry, and their Doings thereon at large, together with this Petition, and report what is best to be done thereon.” The House approved that step the next day.

And then, it appears, nothing happened for months.

COMING UP: The repetition of Patience Capen.

“Mr. Capen insults the State, by denying their jurisdiction”

At the end of 1776, Hopestill Capen was still locked away from his wife Patience.

And Capen lost patience in another way. On 30 December, he sent a letter from “Boston Prison” to Joseph Greenleaf, a justice of the peace.

As transcribed in American Archives, that letter says:

It is now one hundred and forty-seven days since you, with John Hill, Joseph Gardner, and Samuel Pemberton, Esqrs., accused and judged me unfit to go at large, for no other cause whatever than my plainly and simply pleading conscience in obeying the plain Scripture commands; and for that only, you, with the other three of my accusers, committed me to close prison in a felon’s room, there to be kept until delivered by a due course of law.

Can any one with truth say this is not unjust, and against the law of the God of Heaven, who speaketh in the Scriptures? Is there any law that forbids any man’s obeying the plain commands of the great Lawgiver, who is the Maker and Judge of all men? [Multiple citations from the Bible follow] . . .

But I shall be very glad of my just liberty; and I beg that you will not persecute me any longer for that I cannot in conscience do. Can you, on a cool reflection, take any pleasure in such tyranny, while you profess to be the supporters of liberty? What liberty is dear as the liberty of conscience? And I again beg of you to release me from such cruel oppression. . . .

P.S. Surely injustice continued will not atone for past wrongs; and I most heartily entreat you not to keep me away any longer from my just and lawful liberty.

Capen sent similar letters to Sheriff William Greenleaf (not a close relative of the justice) and jailer Joseph Otis (not a close relative of the Barnstable family).

Justice Greenleaf forwarded his copy to James Warren, speaker of the Massachusetts House (and not a close relative of the Roxbury family), with this request:

I must beg the protection of the Court from the insults of Mr. Capen, who stands committed for signing an association to join the enemies of his country whenever called upon, and other crimes. Mr. Capen insults the State, by denying their jurisdiction. He disowns me as a Magistrate, because appointed by the present Administration, while he owns the jurisdiction of the other members of the Court of Inquiry, because appointed by the King’s Governour, and (as he apprehends derive) their authority from thence.

The “association” Greenleaf referred to was a Loyalist militia formed during the siege of Boston. Capen hadn’t just signed up; he’d volunteered to be a sergeant. Greenleaf had “the Books, which contain the Names of the Associations.”

This letter might help to explain why the Massachusetts General Court took no action on Patience Capen’s petition asking for her husband’s release. He was still in jail as the spring of 1777 arrived.

TOMORROW: Yet another approach.

“the long Confinement of her said Husband in close Goal”

Yesterday’s post recounted Hopestill Capen’s plea to be let out of jail, where he was locked up on suspicion of being inimical to the newly independent Massachusetts in August 1776.

That long, religiously based argument, printed as a broadside, didn’t work. So on 22 October his wife Patience took over the case.

It’s possible that, like Benjamin Davis, Hopestill refused to petition the Massachusetts legislature because that would mean recognizing that as a legitimate government authority.

It’s also possible that Patience Capen was willing to argue a position that her husband would not. Or she expected that as a woman she could garner more sympathy than he did.

The Massachusetts Archives displays a digital copy of Patience Capen’s petition to the Council in this online exhibit, albeit captioned with her husband’s name.

Patience Capen acknowledged that her husband handbill hadn’t gone over well:

That altho your Pet[itione]r’s said Husband signed certain Obnoxious Papers, in which he declares he acted from the Principles of his Religion and the Dictates of Conscience, by “Submitting to the Powers that be,” yet he never had in his Heart the least intention of taking up Arms against his country but on the contrary exerted himself and was actually the means of securing and saving the Property and Interest, to a very considerable Value of several of the Inhabitants of Boston, who removed out of Town, and left their Interest & Property exposed to the Ravage and Plunder of our Enemies.

That by means of the long Confinement of her said Husband in close Goal, she and her Children have suffered great Distress

She asked that the authorities release Hopestill so he could get busy “obtaining a support for them”—with the implied threat that the family might soon need public charity. That sort of plea was designed to catch officials’ attention.

On 24 October, Council member Caleb Cushing shared Patience Capen’s petition with the Massachusetts House. Which of course referred the matter to a committee.

American Archives included the transcription of a document datelined “In the House of Representatives, November 25, 1776.” It laid out a plan for Hopestill Capen to be released once he arranged for a bond of £100. However, there’s no sign of that proposal in the official records of the House. I suspect this was a draft that went nowhere.

Hopestill Capen remained in jail.

TOMORROW: Hearing from Hopestill again.

“I am to be confined in Prison for that I cannot in Confidence do”

A month ago, Boston 1775 followed Hopestill Capen (1731–1807) to the Boston jail, suspected of being disloyal to the new U.S. of A. And left him there.

Postings veered off onto the trail of Benjamin Davis, already in the jail after being captured while sailing from Haliax to New York.

Both Capen and Davis were Sandemanians. They grounded their attitude to the new independent state on their religion. They felt bound to remain loyal to King George III, they said, until events showed that this new republican government had God’s approval. 

When the Massachusetts Council ordered that Capen and dozens of other suspected men be detained, it named seven Suffolk County magistrates to question them: Joseph Palmer, Benjamin White, Joseph Greenleaf, Samuel Niles, Thomas Penniman, Theophilus Cushing, and Thomas Crafts.

Capen wrote an address to that “Court of Enquiry” dated 29 August. It doesn’t look like he had a chance to deliver it, at least as he had imagined, because he later wrote this preface:

The following was written with an expectation that I should have the Liberty to lay the same before the Court of Enquiry, before whom I was impeached as an Enemy to my country and cast into Prison, (in Boston 6th August 1776) but it has been said by some I was not rightly understood, and if opportunity be given to me to open my simple meaning to the Court, and I am restored to my just right of Liberty, cause of Complaint will end; and if not, this will serve to inform all whom it may concern, the Principles I acted upon, and if I am to be confined in Prison for that I cannot in Confidence do, it will be happy for me if I am indeed taught to suffer with Patience.

Several copies of that text survive because Capen had his address printed—an act that probably reinforced militant Patriots’ fear that he was a troublemaker.

On the copy of that handbill offered by Sotheby’s in 2013, Capen also wrote a note to Sheriff William Greenleaf:

You have never yet shewed me by what authority you have kept me thus in prison which you ought to have dun & now demand of you a coppey of my commitment and I likewise demand of you my just liberty as I look on you answerable for all the consequences of unjust imprisonment.

Again, perhaps not the most politic way of winning over the authorities.

Capen kept a copy of his handbill sold by Heritage Auctions in 2006 with Biblical citations for his argument and notes about exactly how long he was in jail. That copy appears above.

While Boston 1775 may have just left Capen in the Boston jail for a month, 250 years ago the Massachusetts authorities kept him locked up for much longer.

TOMORROW: Another sort of plea.

“She wrenched the bayonet from the piece”

George Harris was a captain in His Majesty’s 5th Regiment of Foot, sent to Boston in the summer of 1774.

Without barracks on the Boston peninsula, the 5th camped on Boston Common for the first few months.

Since the Common was where Bostonians let their cows graze, that produced some conflict, as shown in Capt. Harris’s letter on 7 August:

Our duty is so strict, that I have not yet had an opportunity of exploring the interior of the country, so that all I can say is, that it has a most beautiful and luxuriant appearance. The entrance to the harbour, and the view of the town of Boston from it, is the most charming thing I ever saw: far superior to the harbour of Dublin (which some consider equal to the Bay of Naples), and having the advantage of being wooded by nature as picturesquely, as if art had superintended her operations.

Our camp is pitched in an exceedingly pleasant situation on the gentle descent of a large common, hitherto the property of the Bostonians, and used for the purpose of grazing their cows, which now, poor creatures, from custom, often attempt to force their way into their old pastures, where the richest herbage I ever saw abounds. But from these they are now driven by stones flung at them by the different sentries.

An unfortunate one, the other day, when endeavouring to effect an entrance, ran on a range of firelocks, with the bayonets on, with such force, that she wrenched the bayonet from the piece, and went off with it sticking in her body. Finding herself wounded, she made towards home, and passed close by our mess-tent, from which some of us ran out, and drew the bayonet from her with great difficulty, then ordered a serjeant to attend her home, by letting her walk slowly the way she chose. We have since had the pleasure of hearing she is likely to recover.

I looked in the newspapers to see if this incident provoked any complaints from the locals. Remarkably, there were none.

Forsaken and Lost Founders at the Athenaeum

This month the Boston Athenaeum will host two presentations about Founders less known to the public than the big six. To forget one Founder may be a misfortune, but to lose memory of two would be sheer carelessness.

16 September, 6 to 7 P.M.
The Forsaken Founder
Scott S. Greenberger

When George Washington and the Continental Army faced starvation, he turned to Gouverneur Morris to help devise a plan to provision the troops. When the fledgling nation needed a financial system to sustain the Revolution, Morris again was called upon to help design its first national bank and currency.

When the compromises between North and South, large states and small, had to be stitched into a single governing document, the task of shaping the Constitution’s final language fell largely to him. At the Constitutional Convention, Morris spoke more often than any delegate save James Madison—and more forcefully against slavery. When Alexander Hamilton died in a tragic duel, his widow insisted that Hamilton’s closest friend, Gouverneur Morris, deliver the eulogy.

Morris continued to serve the republic after its founding as envoy to France during the Revolution and Reign of Terror, and as an early visionary who grasped that New York, not Philadelphia, could become the nation’s economic capital if a canal opened the interior to the sea.

In this deeply researched biography, The Forsaken Founder, Scott Greenberger restores this indispensable figure to history and asks why one of the most prescient and principled founders faded from memory. Was it his uncompromising opposition to slavery? His unapologetic aristocratic style? His belief that liberty required structure as well as passion?

Scott S. Greenberger is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis and author of The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur. Currently the executive editor of Stateline, he has been a newspaper reporter at the Austin American-Statesman and the Boston Globe. Greenberger has a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University and a master’s degree in international relations from George Washington University.

Tickets are required for this event. Athenaeum members can attend with up to three guests at no cost. Visitor tickets are $20.

28 September, 6 to 7 P.M.
The Lost Founder
Jesse Wegman

As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He wrote the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the more famous James Madison, played perhaps the essential role in its ultimate creation.

Wilson believed that the people are the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency, and fought unsuccessfully for a direct vote for the President and the Senate. Appointed as a justice to the first Supreme Court, he was later brought down by reckless land speculation and died of malaria in the back room of a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors.

Instead of being remembered as one of the nation’s great political thinkers, Wilson was virtually written out of history. But in The Lost Founder, Wegman brings to life the most prescient of the earliest patriots and makes a convincing argument that scandal should not diminish the life and impact of a brilliant, complicated man whose vision for his country could not be more relevant today.

Jesse Wegman is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, where he works with the Kohlberg Center on the U.S. Supreme Court and the Future of the Constitution Advisory Committee. From 2013 through 2025, Wegman was a member of the New York Times editorial board. His work was part of a package that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2018. Wegman is the author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College.

Tickets are required for this event. Athenaeum members can attend with up to three guests at no cost. Visitor tickets are $20.

“The British Empire Strikes Back” in New Jersey, 6–8 Nov.

The next Pursuit of History Weekend session is called “The British Empire Strikes Back,” and it will cover the New York and New Jersey campaigns from August 1776 to January 1777.

Here’s how we’re describing the developments of 250 years ago:

Even as the United States declared their independence, the British military returned to New York. Starting in August 1776, Gen. William Howe pushed Gen. George Washington off Long Island, off Manhattan Island, and down into New Jersey. The Continental Army struggled through battles at Brooklyn, Harlem Heights, White Plains, and Fort Washington.

By late December, the Congress was evacuating Philadelphia, Washington was estranged from top aides, and Continental soldiers’ enlistments were about to run out. Only by counterattacking Gen. Cornwallis and his Hessian vanguard at Trenton and Princeton did Washington reenergize the American cause.

Our main meeting space for this weekend will be the Old Barracks Museum in Trenton, New Jersey, built to house troops in the French and Indian War. On 6–8 November, we’ll visit sites of fighting in that city; Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania; and Princeton, New Jersey. 

Here are some of the experts I’m eager to hear from:

• Ricardo Herrera, Ph.D., joins the Pursuit of History Weekends as a program director and faculty member. He is Senior Historian at the George Washington Leadership Institute at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, having previously served as Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army War College and as an Armor and Cavalry officer. For the U.S. Army Center of Military History Rick wrote The New York Campaign 1776 (2026).
• Friederike Baer, Ph.D. (friederikebaer.com), is the author of Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War (2022), honored with the American Revolution Round Table of Philadelphia’s Annual Book Award and the Society of the Cincinnati Prize. She is a Professor of History at Penn State University Abington College.
• Benjamin L. Carp, Ph.D. (benjamincarp.com), wrote The Great New York Fire of 1776 (2023) and Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (2007), and other award-winning studies of the American Revolution. He holds the Daniel M. Lyons Chair in American History at Brooklyn College within the City University of New York.
• William L. “Larry” Kidder, M.A. (wlkidderhistorian.com), has written several books about the Revolutionary War, including Ten Crucial Days: Washington’s Vision for Victory Unfolds, Crossroads of the Revolution: Trenton 1774–1783, and Revolutionary Princeton 1774–1783. He is a veteran of both the U.S. Navy and forty years of teaching high school.
• Phillip Papas, Ph.D., explored the life of the Continental Army’s most confounding commander in Renegade Revolutionary: The Life of General Charles Lee (2014). Also author of That Ever Loyal Island: Staten Island and the American Revolution (2007), Papas is Senior Professor of History in the Economics, Government, and History Department at Union County College.

We’re still finalizing the schedule with the venues, but I expect to give some brief presentations as well.

Pursuit of History Weekends are limited to about forty people to facilitate discussion with speakers and among attendees. As of this holiday weekend, only ten slots are left.

For more information and to register, please visit this webpage.

“Ever afterwards, he was known as Dr. Bush”

David Bushnell’s pioneering submarine didn’t do much damage to the Royal Navy in 1776, but the next year he came back with another invention.

As Christian McBurney relates in this article, in August 1777 Bushnell oversaw an attack on H.M.S. Cerberus with explosive mines. They didn’t hit the warship, but they did destroy a schooner and kill three British sailors.

In August 1779 Bushnell became an officer in a new Continental corps of “Sappers and Miners.” Two years later, Capt. Bushnell led his specialized unit in the siege of Yorktown.

In 1787 Bushnell moved from Connecticut to France. There’s not much evidence of what he did there. Some people speculate that he crossed paths with Robert Fulton, who would design his own submarine as well as a steamboat. However, it looks to me like Fulton didn’t go to France until 1797, and by then Bushnell was back in the U.S. of A.

Not in Connecticut, however. Instead, Bushnell settled in Georgia “in 1795 or 96,” according to the Rev. George White’s Historical Collections of Georgia (1854). At first he was “a teacher in the County of Columbia.”

He was eminently distinguished for his classical and scientific learning. His chief enjoyments were found in the instruction of his classes, and an occasional visit to a few men of congenial spirit. . . .

His old fellow soldier, the Hon. Abraham Baldwin, received him into his family, under whose auspices he had no difficulty in placing himself at the head of one of the most respectable schools in Georgia. In this vocation he spent several years, and under his guidance and tuition many of our most useful citizens received valuable instructions in learning and morals.

Bushnell and Baldwin (1754–1807, shown above) had met at Yale in the early 1770s. Baldwin was barely a “fellow soldier,” though; he had been a chaplain for Connecticut troops but spent most of the war preparing for the Congregationalist pulpit. Then in 1783 he suddenly changed direction, became a lawyer, and moved to Georgia.

Within a few years Baldwin was representing the state in the Confederation Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the first federal House of Representatives. He also served as president of the nascent University of Georgia while it was organized.

As for the “family” that Baldwin welcomed Bushnell into, both men were lifelong bachelors. It looks like Bushnell shared Baldwin’s house for several years before the younger man died suddenly in 1807 while serving in the U.S. Senate.

The Historical Collections of Georgia profile of Bushnell continued:

Late in life, he settled in Warrenton as a practitioner of physic. Then, and ever afterwards, he was known as Dr. Bush. For reasons which have never been disclosed, he had some time before he settled in Georgia, dropped the last syllable of his name; and until the publication of his last will and testament, no person in this country, except his old friend Baldwin, was apprised of the fact that his family name was Bushnell.

The name of “David Bush, Phicion [physician]” does appear on Georgia tax records for 1805, owning “Stock in trade & House adjoining Warrenton.” Three years later, he bought more real estate. In 1810 David Bush was one of the commissioners to incorporate the town of Warrenton, named for Dr. Joseph Warren.

At least one other local did know Dr. Bush’s real name, however. In 1814 George Hargraves, a notary in Warren County, wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson enclosing a “description and drawing of a Torpedo” that might be useful to the U.S. in the current war. He said the inventor was “a man of science” mentioned in David Ramsay’s history of the Revolution, hinting: “you will readily conjecture who the Inventor is.” Bushnell must therefore have entrusted Hargraves with his secret, just as he trusted the man to be an executor of his will.

Dr. Bush probably died in early 1826. Hargraves started advertising for his debtors to come pay what they owed the estate on 15 March of that year.

On 9 August an item appeared in the Middlesex Gazette of Middletown, Connecticut, reminding readers about Bushnell and his “destructive machine.” It reported:

About 30 years since, Mr. Bushnell left his native town, and from that period no information was received respecting him, until very recently, when a gentleman arrived in Saybrook from Georgia, with the intelligence that Mr. Bushnell had lately died in that State, leaving about 9,000 dollars in cash; accumulated principally by the practice of Medicine; which Mr. B. had given to him, he being a particular friend, provided that if he should, upon inquiry, discover that Mr. B’s connexions in Saybrook, were from their character, worthy of the property, such connexions were to receive the whole amount.

The gentleman with whom it was entrusted, ascertained, on reaching Saybrook, that Mr. Bushnell’s nearest relatives were four nephews, and those all men of worth and integrity, and faithfully divided the property among them.

Those were the sons of David Bushnell’s brother Ezra. In addition to the money, this article said, he bequeathed them an “unfinished a piece of mechanism, upon which he had bestowed much pains”—but what it was, the newspaper didn’t, or couldn’t, say.

The Middlesex Gazette stated: “Mr. Bushnell…bore a very high reputation as a mechanical genius, and was esteemed an exemplary member of society, although possessing many eccentricities of character.” Again, the paper didn’t say what those eccentricities were.

“Came under the bottom of the ship”

After his brother Ezra Bushnell fell ill, the inventor David Bushnell asked Gen. Samuel Holden Parsons to send three men who might be able to operate his submarine against the Royal Navy in New York harbor.

Parsons already had a list of volunteers ready to sail a fireship toward the fleet, another risky venture. One of them was his brother-in-law, Sgt. Ezra Lee (1749–1821, shown here).

Bushnell brought the machine back to Saybrook, Connecticut, for the three men to practice. Eventually Lee got the assignment. His mission: Screw a timed explosive charge (Bushnell’s other invention, called the “magazine”) to the hull of H.M.S. Asia.

Lee went into action on 6 Sept 1776, 250 years ago today. Decades later, in 1815, he wrote an account of his mission for David Humphreys:

We set off from the City—the Whale boats towed me as nigh the ships, as they dared to go, and then cast me off—I soon found that it was too early in the tide, as it carried me down by the ships—I however hove about, and rowed for 5 glasses, by the ships’ bells, before the tide slacked so that I could get along side of the man of war, which lay above the transports—

The Moon was about 2 hours high, and the daylight about one—when I rowed under the stern of the ship, could see the men on deck, & hear them talk—I then shut down all the doors, sunk down, and came under the bottom of the ship, up with the screw against the bottom but found that it would not enter—

I pulled along to try another place, but deviated a little one side, and immediately rode with great velocity, and come above the surface 2 or 3 feet between the ship and the daylight—then sunk again like a porpoise I hove partly about to try again, but on further thought I gave out, knowing that as soon as it was light the ships boats would be rowing in all directions, and I thought the best generalship, was to retreat, as fast as I could as I had 4 miles to go, before passing Governor’s Island.—

So I jogg’d on as fast as I could, and my compass being then of no use to me, I was obliged to rise up every few minutes to see that I sailed in the right direction, and for this purpose keeping the machine on the surface of the water, and the doors open—

I was much afraid of getting aground on the island as the Tide of the flood set on the north point While on my passage up to the City, my course owing to the above circumstances, was very crooked & zig zag, and the enemy’s attention was drawn towards me, from Governors Island—

When I was abreast of the fort on the island 3 or 400 men got upon the parapet to observe me,—at leangth a number came down to the shore, shoved off a 12 oar’d barge, with 5 or 6 sitters, and pulled for me—I eyed them, and when they had got within 50 or 60 yards of me, I let loose the magazine, in hopes, that if they should take me, they would likewise pick up the magazine, and then we should all be blown up together, but as kind Providence would have it, they took fright, and returned to the island, to my infinite joy.—

I then weathered the Island, and our people seeing me, came off with a whaleboat, and towed me in—

The Magazine after getting a little past the Island, went off with a tremendous explosion, throwing up large bodies of water to an immense height.

On seeing that explosion, Humphreys wrote, Gen. Israel Putnam shouted, “God’s curse ’em, that’ll do it for ’em.” But the bomb merely startled the enemy, not doing any physical damage.

Why hadn’t Sgt. Lee been able to attach that bomb to H.M.S. Asia as planned? Humphreys explained:

The reason why the screw would not enter, was that the ship’s bottom being coppered it would have been difficult under any circumstances to have peirced through it—but on attempting to bore with the auger, the force necessary to be used in pressing against the ships bottom, caused the machine to rebound off

In this series about David Bushnell and his submarine, I’ve cut down long letters that the U.S. Navy has collected on this website. Though the submarine was a top-secret operation in 1776, men like Humphreys and Thomas Jefferson made a concerted effort after the war to gather information about the machine and its operation.

Authors have written several books about the submarine. I’m linking to Arthur S. Lefkowitz’s The American Turtle Submarine because he gave me a nifty cap.

TOMORROW: Bushnell’s secrets.

“The first essays with the submarine Vessel”

On 2 Feb 1776, David Bushnell journeyed from his workshop in Saybrook, Connecticut, to Lebanon to meet with Gov. Jonathan Trumbull and his Council, telling those gentlemen about his “machine contrived to blow ships.”

After Bushnell left the room, the officials voted to keep the conversation secret and to send Matthew Griswold, the deputy governor, to Bushnell with £60 to encourage his work.

Back home, Bushnell resumed work on his machine—the first submarine to be deployed in warfare.

Years later, Bushnell described his invention to a curious Thomas Jefferson:

The external shape of the Submarine Vessel bore some resemblance to two upper tortoise shells of equal size, joined together: the place of entrance into the Vessel being represented by the opening, made by the swell of the shells, at the head of the animal. The inside was capable of containing the Operator, and air, sufficient to supply him, thirty minutes, without receiving fresh air.

At the bottom, opposite to the entrance, was fixed a quantity of lead for ballast. At one edge, which was directly before the operator, who sat upright, was an oar, for rowing forward or backward. At the other edge, was a rudder for steering. An aperture, at the bottom, with its valve, was designed to admit water for the purpose of descending; & two brass forcing pumps served to eject the water within, when necessary for ascending. At the top, there was likewise an oar, for ascending or descending, or continuing at any particular depth. A Watergage or Barometer, determined the depth of descent, a compass directed the course, & a ventilator within, supplied the Vessel with fresh air, when on the surface. . . .

The skilful operator could swim so low on the surface of the water, as to approach very near a Ship, in the Night, without fear of being discovered, and might if he chose, approach the stem or stern, above water, with very little danger. He could sink very quick, keep at any depth he pleased, and row a great distance, in any direction he desired, without coming to the surface; & when he rose to the surface, he would soon obtain a fresh supply of air, when, if necessary, he might descend again and pursue his course. . . .

In the first essays with the submarine Vessel, I took care to prove its strength to sustain the great pressures of the incumbent water when sunk deep, before I trusted any person to descend much below the surface: and I never suffered any person to go under water without having a strong piece of rigging made fast to it, until I found him well acquainted with the operations necessary for his safety. After that I made him descend and continue at particular depths, without rising or sinking, row by the compass, approach a Vessel, go under her, and fix the Woodscrew…into her Bottom, &c. until I thought him sufficiently expert to put my design into execution.

I found agreeably to my expectation, that it required many trials to make a person of common ingenuity, a skilful operator. The first I employed was very ingenious and made himself master of the business, but was taken sick in the campaign of 1776 at N.York, before he had an opportunity to make use of his skill, and never recovered his health sufficiently afterwards.

David Bushnell’s first operator was his own brother Ezra. They had inherited a farm together, and Ezra had bought out David’s interest to give him the capital to attend Yale College—an unusual course for a man in his late twenties.

Jefferson had Bushnell’s detailed description of his invention published by the American Philosophical Society in 1799. Those documents serve as the source for all attempts to depict and recreate the submarine, such as the 1916 illustration above.

TOMORROW: Into action.

“An account of the progress of our machine”

On 31 Aug 1775, the Rev. Benjamin Boardman, serving as a chaplain to Connecticut troops at the siege of Boston, wrote in his diary:

I collected this day in cash for the encouragt. of Mr. Bushnels Machine the sum of £13.4.4. in cash out of our regt.

Boardman was a graduate of Yale, and David Bushnell (1740–1826) had just graduated from that college.

On 24 September, Dr. Benjamin Church wrote to his British army contact:

The distroying the Ships in the manner I wrote you before they began to dispair of tho’ the former of the Machine is full of faith that he can do it, Works on hardly and so let him, I say.

This intel might have referred to the same machine, or to different technology designed to damage Royal Navy ships.

Bushnell’s invention was still in the works, but getting closer to completion, when the doctor and inventor Benjamin Gale (1715–1790) wrote from Killingworth to Silas Deane at the Continental Congress on 9 November:

In your last you requested I would give you an account of the progress of our machine, and whether anything may be expected of it. I now sit down to give you a succinct but imperfect account of its structure, which is so complicated that it is impossible to give a perfect idea of it. . . .

I conclude by the time this reaches you the machine will be in camp. Lately he has conducted matters and his designs with the greatest secrecy, both for the personal safety of the navigator as to produce the greatest astonishment to those against whom it is designed,—

if this projection succeeds, of which I make no doubt, as I well know the man and have seen the machine while in embryo, and every addition made to it fills me with fresh astonishment and surprize. And you may call me a visionary, an enthusiast, or what you please,—I do insist upon it, that I believe the inspiration of the Almighty has given him understanding for this very purpose and design.

But two weeks later, on 22 November, Gale had to report a delay:

I have to ask pardon for the wrong information I gave you. At the time of my last writing, I supposed the Machine was gone, but since find one proving the navigation of it in Connecticut River. The forcing pump made by Mr. [Isaac] Doolittle, not being made according to order given, did not answer; which has delayed him. The trials I mentioned to have been made since Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin’s being here, was the explosion, which prov’d beyond expectation.

The most famous American scientist of the day had stopped in Saybrook on his way back from Cambridge to Philadelphia in order to inspect this invention.

Gale sent another update and plea to Deane on 7 December:

…everything answers well, but still, he fails on one account. He proposes going in the night, on account of safety. He always depends on fox-wood, which gives light in the dark, to fix on the points of the needle of his compass, and in his barometer, by which he may know what course to steer and the depth he is under water, both which are absolute necessity for personal safety of the navigator; but he now finds that the frost wholly destroys that quality in that wood, of which he was before ignorant, and for that reason and that alone he is obliged to desist. He was detained near two months for want of money, and before he could obtain it the season was so far advanced he was, in the manner I have now related, frustrated. . . .

The person, the inventor of this machine, now makes all his affairs a secret even to his best friends, and I have liberty to communicate this much from him only with a view to know if Dr. Franklin knows of any kind of phosphorus that will answer his purpose; otherwise the execution must be omitted until next spring, after the frosts are past.

As of 1 February, Gale was still seeking some phosphorescent material for Bushnell. He wrote, “I have lately seen the man, and conversed freely with him. He is no enthusiast; a perfect philosopher, and by no means doubtful of succeeding.” But the siege of Boston would end before warm weather.

TOMORROW: A new campaign.

(Several replicas of the Bushnell’s machine have been built over the years based on the verbal descriptions. The one shown above was in Westbrook, Connecticut, as of last year.)

“Environmental Histories of New England” in Boston, 18 Sept.

On Friday, 18 September, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host the New England Quarterly Symposium on Environmental Histories of New England, 1600-2026.

Papers relevant to our period include:

• “Preserving the Catch: Curing Practices, Environmental Agency, and the Eighteenth-Century New England Commercial Cod Fishery” by Morgan S. Hardy, University of Tennessee
• “Beyond ‘Hot Girl Summer’: Rural Life and Gendered Experiences of Seasonal Variability in Eighteenth-Century Northern New England” by Emma C. Moesswilde, Elon University
• “Many Are These Awfully Sudden Deaths: Mapping the Environmental History of Boston’s 1721 Epidemic” by Christopher Parsons, Northeastern University, and Molly Nebiolo, Butler University
• “Environmental history with/for Indigenous communities: Examples from Acadia” by Catherine Schmitt, Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park
• “‘A Fishay Noyse’: Taunton’s Herring Crisis and New England Energy Futures” by Zachary Bennett, Norwich University

The keynote address at the end of the day will be “Tom Paine’s Sunshine Soldiers” by Joyce Chaplin, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University.

Registration, which includes food, costs $20. The event is free for graduate students, teachers, and adjunct faculty.

On the afternoon before the symposium, the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, a co-sponsor of the event, will host an open house in its facilities at the Boston Public Library central building.

For the full program and registration information, start at this page.

“Those who have something to lose who are now ye. Zealous Patriots of the Day”

Since this is the anniversary of the 1774 “Powder Alarm” in Cambridge, I’m quoting from a letter that discusses that event and the surrounding political environment.

Stephen Mix Mitchell (1743–1835, shown here) was a lawyer in Wethersfield, Connecticut, having spent the 1760s as a student and then tutor at Yale College.

On 19 Sept 1774, Mitchell wrote to the merchant Peter Verstille in Boston. He first discussed his recent trip to the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock’s school, the challenges of collecting debts that season, and land that Gov. Francis Bernard might have been granted in Vermont.

Then Mitchell turned to the political turmoil in New England, addressing Verstille as representative of Boston and Massachusetts (which he wasn’t, but that’s another story):

We in the Country are more engaged for your Liberties (as I am told) than you are yourselves, you cannot conceive the Ardor of our people when the late Alarm happend. They flew to their Arms as readily as if they had been told their Wives & Children were captivated & carried of by a foreign foe,

I am fully convinced that the Country will never swallow these Acts of Parliament untill four fifths of the people are slain, the general say is “Tis a Country for which our fathers fought, bled & died with Savages, a Country for which we are not beholden to Great Britain, whose Liberties we will not give up but with our Lives——[”]

The Unanimity is beyond all Expectation. I have had Opportunity to enquire particularly in four or five Towns round about us which contain each about 4000 [sic] Inhabitants & not a Man whom the warmest Sons of Liberty do even suspect would not sacrifice his Life rather than submit....if this matter should come to blows, God only knows what would be the Event of it,

the Day is come when the friends of government at home can not say tis a Rabble who oppose them for tis now the land holders the freemen of our Towns those who have something to lose who are now ye. Zealous Patriots of the Day, & they will send their Sons to defend their Liberties; those who in the late warr would give 50 & 60 Dollars to hire a man to go into ye warr to get their Sons excused, are now determind. to trust the Defence of their Liberties in the hands of none but of their own families…

they say they chuse to live on their wonted good Terms with Great Britain, they chuse peace they chuse dependance on their mother Country, but if they must have warr or submit to these Duties & Marks of Slavery they have no Hesitancy in chusing the former;

they look up their old Deeds of patents from the Govt. & Company of the Colony when they read your Bill for regulating the Government of the Massachusetts Day, & then argue with themselves thus, “tis by this Deed I tho’t I held my land, this Deed is founded on our own Charter & what prevents our Charter from being taken from us, as that of our Neighbours has been? Then what security have I that I can hold my land by?”

Upon this the old Gray heads draw their old rusty Swords & order them to be cleand. & say like the brave Earl of Warren in another Case, “by this my father held & won his Land & by this I & my Children will defend it”—

This is no fiction but the cool deliberate Determination of the people, people who are friends to order & good government, & they are determind. this Time not to trust solely to the Virtue of the Merchants respecting non Importation, they will suffer no Mercht. To bring Goods.

It took some effort to track down Mitchell’s allusion to the “brave Earl of Warren.” Tobias Smollett’s Complete History of England told the story of John de Warenne, 6th Earl of Surrey (1231–1304), this way:

the earl of Warenne, who being required by the judges to produce his charter, unsheathed an old rusty sword, as the instrument by which his ancestors had acquired their lands, and with which he resolved to preserve them to the last drop of his blood. This bold answer gave [King] Edward to understand, that his inquisition would be attended with very dangerous consequences…

In the mid-1780s Mitchell represented Connecticut in the Confederation Congress. He was later appointed to the U.S. Senate to serve out Roger Sherman’s term, but his main government service was as a judge on Connecticut’s supreme court.

Mitchell’s letter is now at the American Philosophical Society and has been scanned as part of its Revolutionary City website. I haven’t found it transcribed anywhere before.

The View from the Catawba River

On 1 Sept 1776, 250 years ago today, North Carolina brigadier general Griffith Rutherford wrote a letter to the body that had commissioned him, the North Carolina Council of Safety.

He had taken a force of men to the head of the Catawba River to confront Cherokees who had, to preserve their land and as allies of the British Empire, raided some western settlements earlier in the summer.

Rutherford summarized the situation:

If the Indians evacuate the Middle & Valley Towns and our provisions will hold out and it be possible to March to the overhill Towns perhaps I shall go to that place, or perhaps send a detachment to join the Virginians.

Those under my command consists of 1,971 privates of foot, about 80 light horse. . . .

I have ordered 130 under three Captains to Range and defend the forts on the frontiers of Tryon, 175 on the frontiers of Rowan, 100 on Surry.

I am in a very imperfect state of health, but will be as assidious as possible in executing the important trust reposed in me. . . .

P.S. I am this moment informed by the pack horse master General that there are about 1,400 pack horse one driver to each 4 horse and pack horse master over every 10 drivers. We have 40 days provision.

By his count, between soldiers and drivers, Rutherford commanded nearly 2,500 men. Though his letter mentioned Virginians, he was actually aiming to rendezvous with South Carolina’s similar force under Col. Andrew Williamson.

On 19 September, some of Williamson’s troops, guided by Catawba scouts, clashed with the Cherokee in the Battle of Coweecho River. In the same month Griffith’s force founded only deserted settlements, which they burned.

The NCpedia site says: “By late September the two armies made their way home after destroying thirty-six towns and laying waste to crops and storehouses, thus reducing the Indians to a state of near starvation as winter approached.”

This campaign was far from New York City, where the main Continental and Crown forces were engaged in much larger battles. The western fighting tends to be seen as regional sideshows, fought by regional troops. (Gen. John Sullivan’s campaign in New York in 1779 is an exception.)

Nonetheless, the war in the west was an integral part of the Patriots’ war against the British Empire, and the conquest of interior lands among the most far-reaching consequences of American independence.

On 25–26 September, the Catawba and Cherokee American Revolution Symposium will take place at the University of South Carolina at Lancaster.

This program will bring together scholars and researchers from various fields to discuss Catawba and Cherokee communities, conflict, diplomacy, movement, and archeology in the Revolution.

For more information, see this webpage.