Soldiers “scourged in the Common”

On 14 Oct 1768, 250 years ago today, the Boston Whigs renewed their ongoing complaint about the royal army taking over the seats of local government, and they highlighted another grievance:

The troops still keep possession of Faneuil Hall, the Court House, Representatives Chambers, &c, guards placed at the passage way into the town, near the Neck. Patrolling companies near the ferry ways, and parties sent into the country to prevent desertions:

In the forenoon one Rogers, a New-England man, sentenced to receive 1000 stripes, and a number of other soldiers, were scourged in the Common by the black drummers, in a manner, which however necessary, was shocking to humanity; some gentlemen who had held commissions in the army, observing, that only 40 of the 170 lashes received by Rogers, at this time, was equal in punishment to 500, they had seen given in other regiments.

As I discussed [gulp] eleven years ago, those “black drummers” came from the 29th Regiment. In 1759 its colonel received a batch of black teen-aged boys as a gift from his brother, an admiral. Being sent off to the army was probably a lucky break for those young men, given that they were already enslaved. It got them out of the death traps of Caribbean plantations, and they earned freedom and even a measure of status from their military service.

In eighteenth-century European armies, drummers were a crucial part of a regiment’s training and maneuvers, and military musicians could earn extra money through their unusual skills. The British army assigned another responsibility to each regiment’s musicians: they carried out corporal punishment on enlisted men.

Of course, in North America’s slave society, most people saw a black man whipping a white man as a dangerous inversion of proper order. The Boston Whigs had already complained, “to behold Britons scourg’d by Negro drummers, was a new and very disagreeable spectacle.” Writing for an audience in New York and points south, where slavery was a bigger institution and the enslaved population larger, the Whigs knew that this report would be provocative.

Another element of their complaint was the number of lashes that Rogers had to suffer. As strict as Puritans were, they adhered to Deuteronomy 25:3’s prohibition against giving a man more than forty strokes. In the king’s army and navy, however, a thousand lashes was not unusual (though they weren’t all applied on one day). And the Boston Whigs claimed this particular whipping was harsh even for the army.

Naturally, I was curious to know more about Rogers, the unfortunate soldier. Alas, the 29th Regiment was lousy at filing its muster rolls in this period. That paperwork was supposed to be done monthly. Instead, the commander’s company supplied one roll to cover all the time from 16 July 1765 to 24 Apr 1769, or “1379 Days.” Other companies were similarly lax. That makes it much harder to track individual men.

However, in the spring of 1769 the Boston Chronicle and several other New England newspapers ran an advertisement dated 23 May over the signature of brigade major Capt. Charles Fordyce. It announced that Gen. Alexander Mackay would pardon deserters who returned to the army by the end of June. However, the same ad promised three guineas to anyone who apprehended eighteen specified men “whose crimes are of such a nature, as to oblige him to exclude them from any promise of PARDON.”

One of the deserters beyond pardoning was Daniel Rogers of the 29th Regiment. He therefore looks like the best candidate for being the “New-England man” whipped on Boston Common seven months before. Perhaps he’d been convicted of theft or some other crime, or had already tried to desert. Either way, the whipping doesn’t appear to have kept him from leaving by May. As a New Englander, he had a better chance of finding sympathetic help and blending back into civilian society.