Thomas Seward and “the calms of domestic felicity”

At last we reach the thing that prompted me to look into the life of Continental Army artillery officer Thomas Seward: his gravestone in the Copp’s Hill Burying-Ground.

This stone is well preserved and has been written up and photographed many times. The photo here is by Ken Horn and appeared on Find a Grave.

The stone’s ornaments include an urn, a rising sun, and a cannon and pyramid of cannon balls to reflect Seward’s military service. The text reads:

Reader!!!
Beneath this Stone is deposited,
the Remains of,
MAJOR THOMAS SEWARD,
who gallantly fought
in our late revolutionary War,
and through
its various scenes, behaved
with Patriotic fortitude
& died in the calms
of domestic felicity, as becomes
a Universal-Christian,
Novr. 27th 1800 Ætat 60

“The lonely turf where silence lays her head,
The mound where pity sighs for hon’d dead,
Such is the grief where sorrow now doth sigh,
To learn to live is but to learn to die.”

I haven’t found a source for that verse, so it may have been composed expressly for the Seward grave.

Some webpages describing this stone question why it doesn’t mention the major’s wife. Nineteenth-century books about the cemetery reported that the stone has further lines, now buried in the ground:

Also
SARAH SEWARD his Wife
Obiit March 14th 1800
Ætat 63

When I set out to research Thomas Seward, I hoped to find some dramatic story, the way probing the named attackers of Owen Richards led me on a round-the-world voyage and into colonial Boston’s system for managing poor children.

But recounting drama depends on finding personal details about a life’s inflection points, and the records of Seward’s life are stubbornly low-key. Very few personal papers survive. He rarely showed up in newspapers. Other people didn’t write much about him.

Over sixty years Thomas Seward maintained a business, married, and had children. He lived through the political turmoil of Boston in the 1760s and 1770s and then spent eight years fighting for American independence. During his final years he had a mild religious conversion, formed a political affiliation, and took on a new government job. At age sixty he lost his wife, and he died eight months later. His life must have contained drama. But it went with him to the grave.