“Do what you can to forward Mr. Swift to me”

Contemporaneous sources about Samuel Swift’s last months are thin.

Swift turned sixty years old on 9 June 1775. His first wife, the former Eliphal Tyley or Tilley (1713–1757), had borne three daughters in the 1740s.

One of those daughters, Sarah, had gone to live with her husband Amos Putnam in Sutton. The other two, Ann and Eliphal, were still unmarried in 1770, but I can’t trace them further.

In October 1757 Swift had married for a second time, to Ann Foster (1729–1788). That couple had six children between 1758 and 1773, and those children were with their parents in Boston when the war began.

The Swifts were still in the besieged town two months later, during the Battle of Bunker Hill. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband on 25 June 1775:

As to Boston, there are many persons yet there who would be glad to get out if they could. Mr. [Thomas] Boylstone and Mr. [John] Gill the printer with his family are held upon the black list tis said. Tis certain they watch them so narrowly that they cannot escape, nor your Brother Swift and family.

Around that time, however, Ann Swift managed to get a pass for herself and her children from a British army officer named Handfield—probably Capt. William Handfield of the 94th Regiment, who was attached to the quartermaster’s department in June.

By the end of that month, Ann Swift and her family were in Springfield. She wrote in her diary, as printed in The Memoirs of Gen. Joseph Gardner Swift:

Here I am in the woods, Boston being so surrounded by armies that we could not enjoy our home: no school for the children, and the town forsaken by the ministers—the pillars of the land.

In the following weeks she wrote to that army officer for another favor:

Capt. Handfield, S[i]r,

Your kindness in undertaking to get a pass for me emboldens me to ask the like favor for my dear husband whom I hear is in a very weak state of health. The anxiety of my mind is great about him. A word from you would have more weight than all the arguments that he could make use of.

Could I come to him, this favor I would not ask. O, S[i]r I trust in your goodness that you will do what you can to forward Mr. Swift to me and in doing so you will greatly oblige
Your distressed friend,
ANN SWIFT.

Should be glad if he would bring out two trunks which there is clothing in that I want very much for myself and children.

Evidently the royal authorities didn’t provide a second pass. Samuel Swift remained inside Boston. Margaret Draper’s Boston News-Letter reported that he died on 30 August.

On 4 September, Mercy Warren reported to John Adams in a bald postscript: “Swift of Boston is Really Dead.”

Ann Swift put in her diary this note about that 30 August date:

Departed this life, in the 61st year of his age, my dear husband, Samuel Swift. He died in Boston, or in other words, murdered there. He was not allowed to come to see me and live with his wife and children in the country. There he gave up the ghost—his heart was broken; the cruel treatment he met with in being a friend to his country was more than he could bear, with six fatherless children (in the woods) and all my substance in Boston.

Thus began the family tradition of blaming Gen. Thomas Gage for Swift’s death—not through violence but by not letting him leave Boston when ill to rejoin his family.

Swift’s body was placed in a tomb belonging to his first wife’s family in the burying-ground beside King’s Chapel, shown above.

TOMORROW: The family legend.