Samuel Akley, Continental Matross

The fourth Akley brother to serve in the Continental Army was Samuel.

He was baptized at the New South Meeting-House on 13 May 1764 and thus still only ten years old when the Revolutionary War began.

When Samuel had just turned four, the Boston Overseers of the Poor had indentured him to wheelwright John Merrill of Topsham, in the district of Maine, until 1785. But he didn’t serve that full term.

In February 1827 Samuel Akley, then living in Halifax, Vermont, applied for a Revolutionary pension. The text of that application can be read as an attachment to a later filing with the state of Maine, digitized here.

It says Samuel Akley

for the term of three years…Enlisted in the Company of Capt. [Thomas] Jackson and the Regiment of Col. [John] Crane. the first of March 1780, or 1781. enlisted in Topsham in the State of Mass: in the Mass: line—Passed Muster at Boston Mass. Joined the Army at West Point N.Y.

In 1848 Akley testified that he’d joined the army in April 1781. In 1855 he dated his service at West Point from 17 July 1780. He also said then that he was eighteen years old when he passed muster, which would mean the summer of 1782.

Samuel Akley of Topsham isn’t listed in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War. However, there is a listing for a man by the same name who received a bounty from Thaddeus Lovering of Holliston to serve three years in the army in his place.

Because no families named Akley (however spelled) appear in Holliston’s published vital records from that time, and because Lovering paid the bounty in Boston, I wonder if that farmer crossed paths with Akley while he “Passed Muster at Boston.” The receipt is dated 17 June 1782, which would match the latest indicator for when Akley enlisted.

In any event, Akley became a matross in Crane’s Continental artillery regiment, the equivalent of a private on a gun crew. He served “till the Army was disbanded, and was discharged at West Point.”

Samuel Akley made his way back to Topsham, Maine. On 18 Nov 1791 he married Elizabeth (Betsey) Moody there; she appears to have been around age twenty. According to a descendant, they had at least six children together. Three of those children, ages seventeen to twelve, were still living with their parents in 1827.

In 1831, the Akleys moved to Rumford, Maine. Betsey died in 1842. Six years later, Samuel applied to the government for an increased pension as an artillerist. Seven years after that, at the age of ninety-three, he put in the paperwork for a land grant from Maine.

Samuel Akley finally died on 17 July 1861, as shown on his gravestone above. By then he and his family believed he was just short of his hundredth birthday; in fact, he was ninety-seven. He had served in the last months of the Revolutionary War and lived to see the first months of the U.S. Civil War. On his gravestone is this memento mori:

Stop traveler as you pass by
As you are now so once was I.
As I am now so you must be.
Prepare for death and follow me

TOMORROW: Wrapping up the Akely family.