“To yncorage ye minit men so called”

In the fall of 1774, as I described yesterday, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress invited towns to form militia companies of “fifty privates, at the least, who shall equip and hold themselves in readiness, on the shortest notice.”

These special companies became known as “minute companies” or, alliteratively, “minute men.”

Not every town acted on the congress’s suggestion, however. For example, the smallish town of Lexington never formed a minute company. Technically, none of the militiamen on Lexington common during the first skirmish of the war were minute men.

Towns also differed in how they defined their minute men. Braintree, a larger town, fielded several companies of militia. Its town meeting decided to pay all members of the militia the same hourly rate for extra drills, but it asked ordinary companies to train for three hours every week and the minute company to train for four hours. Everyone was doing more military training that winter.

For Westborough we have two sources of information now handily digitized and on the internet. One is the handwritten record of the town meetings. The other is the diary of the town’s longtime minister, the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman.

As early as June 13, Westborough started to beef up its military defenses, approving the purchase of a cannon and the equipment to use it. In September, men from the town participated in closing Worcester County’s court and in the county convention that issued the first call for minute companies. But the meeting records don’t mention starting a minute company that summer or fall.

On 28 November, the Rev. Mr. Parkman wrote that there was a “Training of the Company of Minute Men, and Capt. [Seth] Morse’s Company.” Other entries identified the captain of the minute company as Edmund Brigham, who at the time was involved in a simmering dispute with the minister over a church matter. Evidently Brigham and his men had decided on their own to start doing more drills.

The Parkman diary mentions other groups, including “two artillery companys” active by August and “the (more Elderly) Alarm Men.” The alarm list was a standard part of the militia system, composed of men over age fifty and generally assigned lighter duties close to home.

Parkman also noted “a Number of Boys under their Capt. Moses Warrin.” Moses Warren (1760-1851) was only fourteen and not yet eligible to serve in the militia. His gang was probably just playing at being a military company, learning the drill to show off.

The first time the Westborough town records explicitly mention the minute company came on December 30. A town meeting on that date addressed the question:

To see if ye Town will grant any money to yncorage ye minit men so called to Train & Exercise themselves so that they may be fit & Quallified for Public Service if called there unto.

Everyone understood that “money to yncorage ye minit men” meant paying those men for their extra training. How Westborough defined its minute company thus came down to the issue that always roils town meetings—money.

The records show that proposal “past in the Negative”—i.e., the voters of Westborough chose not to pay the town’s minute men.

TOMORROW: Reconsidering.