“There is one Soldier a Coming, knock him down”

Here’s another piece of testimony about the spillover brawls on 3 March.

John Rodgers was a private in His Majesty’s 29th Regiment of Foot. In July 1770 he testified to a magistrate in New Jersey about the fight, signing his deposition with a mark.

According to Rodgers:

on the Third of March Last as he was walking From the Grenadier Barracks, to General [John] Pomeroys, Barracks opposite to the Rope Walks, There was four or five Men standing together one of whom said, there is one Soldier a Coming, knock him down, upon which Joseph Shed, an Inhabitant and two more Men Came out of a House Opposite the Rope walk’s with Faulchins in their Hands & Knock’d this Deponent Down, Fractur’d his Scull, & Broke his Arm, without any the least provocation and one of the Same Men cryed out, Damn him Kill him,

this Deponent knowing he should get no Redress, made no further Complaint,

“Faulchins” appears to mean “falchions,” which were either curved swords, like scimitars, or billhooks, the non-lethal weapon that Boston watchmen sometimes carried. Either way, Rodgers blamed locals for an unprovoked violence.

The assailant Rodgers identified was Joseph Shed (1738–1812), a carpenter whose name doesn’t otherwise come up in the record of the Boston Massacre. However, in the earliest published list of men involved in the Boston Tea Party from 1835, the second name is Joseph Shed. After the war he was a prosperous grocer in Boston said (by his family) to be close to Gov. John Hancock. Pvt. Rodgers’s deposition appears to be the first document to tie Shed to the resistance against the Crown.

Was Rodgers involved in the confrontation described by Archibald McNeal (as I quoted yesterday)? McNeal was quite clear that three grenadiers came to his father’s ropewalk looking for a fight, though the actual violence might have been short-lived. In that case, Rodgers’s description was misleading.

But perhaps Rodgers was unlucky enough to walk through the same neighborhood after that fight, without companions or bludgeons, and thus became prey to Shed and his friends seeking revenge.

Or perhaps the confrontation Rodgers described took place earlier in the day, and the three grenadiers went to the ropewalk neighborhood looking for revenge on Shed and company but couldn’t find them, so they threatened young McNeal.

According to Rodgers, he made it back to his barracks with a fractured skull and a broken arm, yet didn’t lodge any complaint. Surely injuries that extensive would have mattered to his officers? Did he exaggerate his pains for Crown officials months later and hundreds of miles away, when there might pressure to do so and little fear of contradiction?

I don’t think we can answer those questions definitely, but these two accounts of the fight on 3 Mar 1770 show how the stupid argument that started between two men, ropemaker William Green and Pvt. Patrick Walker, kept sucking in more people.

TOMORROW: Naming names.