The True Story of Isaac Bissell

We don’t have the original letter that Joseph Palmer dashed off on the morning of 19 Apr 1775, alerting the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s political allies in Connecticut that the British army had killed people at Lexington and asking speedy passage for the man carrying it. Instead, we have copies of that letter, hastily written at stops along the post riders’ route.

It’s only natural that errors crept into Palmer’s text. By the time the note reached New York, it referred to “Israel Bessel” and “T. Palmer.” Later copies, such as the one transcribed in Charles Burr Todd’s A General History of the Burr family in America (1872), appeared to render the rider’s name as “Trail Bissell.”

So we need to go back to the earliest copies that survive. The one from Brooklyn, Connecticut, now owned by the National Heritage Museum, gives the name Israel Bissell. But according to this article, a copy signed by Connecticut official Silas Deane and owned by the William L. Clements Library in Michigan names the rider as “Mr. Isaac Bissell.” And a copy transcribed from the Springfield archives also names “Mr. Isaac Bissell.”

The name “Isaac Bissel” appears in the records of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, authorizing payment for “a Post-Rider’s Account.”

That brings me to the research that Lion G. Miles has shared through iberkshires.com, the Berkshire Eagle, and Connecticut History.

According to Miles and his citations, all the papers in the Massachusetts Archives about the post rider who carried Palmer’s message are signed by “Isaac Bissell,” who identified himself as from Suffield, Connecticut, near the Massachusetts border. In July 1775, the Provincial Congress approved his bill for six days of expenses while riding “to Hartford,” but then that body dissolved for elections and no one got around to paying the man.

In March 1776 Bissell wrote to Palmer: “Sir you may Remember when Lexinton Fite was you gave me an Express to Cary to Hartford in Connecticut which I did. . . .I think I Earn my money.” Finally on 23 April the Massachusetts House voted to pay Isaac Bissell the £2.1s. he’d asked for.

So I now believe that Isaac Bissell rode to the Connecticut capital of Hartford, probably by way of Worcester and Springfield. An accurate copy of the letter he carried was sent on to Deane, who lived one town below Hartford in Wethersfield. Meanwhile, another rider or set of riders, names unknown to us, was carrying another copy of Palmer’s letter south from Worcester to Brooklyn, Norwich, and New London, and then along the coast to New York. That copy rendered the original courier’s name as “Israel Bissell,” and Isaac wasn’t around to correct that error or further deviations.

According to lineages published by the D.A.R. and S.A.R., after returning home to Suffield, Isaac Bissell (1749-1822) enlisted in a Connecticut regiment and marched back to Boston to participate in the siege. He was a sergeant in Col. Erastus Woolcott’s regiment until March 1776, and later mustered as part of the New Haven Alarm of July 1779. After the war he worked as a blacksmith in Suffield. His grave in the Suffield cemetery (shown in the thumbnail above; click for a full set on Flickr from caboose_rodeo) has been identified as that of a Revolutionary veteran for decades.

What about the Israel Bissell buried in Hinman Hinsdale, Massachusetts? His grave has gotten special attention from the D.A.R., and he’s been lauded in poetry, song, and art as the forgotten equal to Paul Revere. But all that celebration is just because of a spelling error.