“His majesty’s troops peaceably marching to and from Concord”

I profiled Maj. Robert Donkin (1727–1821) back in 2021, which was 212 years after someone drew this profile of him as a retired general.

In 1777, Donkin was an officer in the 44th Regiment of Foot, stationed in New York City. He decided that was the right time to publish a collection of short essays and anecdotes on military topics.

Donkin described Military Collections and Remarks as the wisdom of “a late general officer of distinguished abilities, in the science of war”—probably his mentor, Gen. William Rufane. But the major wrote at least some of that material himself since it referred to events after Rufane’s death in 1773.

Donkin cast the project as a charity project. In his preface he wrote of “the bloody massacre committed on his majesty’s troops peaceably marching to and from Concord the 19th April, 1775,” and promised that proceeds from his book would

relieve and support the innocent children and widows of the valiant soldiers inhumanly and wantonly butchered that day, as well as for those that gloriously fell in their country’s cause at Bunker-hill the 17th June following.

The book contains a subscribers’ list eighteen pages long, all military officers or administrators, about 500 of them. At the end of that list is an accounting. Donkin and his agents had collected £422.7.3.

Here are the costs for the 296-page book, printed in New York by Hugh Gaine:

To Paper for 1000 Copies, £37.19.4 1/2
To Printing Expences, 57.13.1 1/2
To folding, sewing, and covering 1000 Copies, 21.1.10 1/2
To Advertisements, 4.19.3 1/2
Expences in England, Scotland and Ireland. 5.5.0
Incidental Charges 5.0.0
[total] Sterling, £131.18.8

The major therefore declared he had “Distributed in Charity, Sterling, £290.8.7.”

But if Donkin and Gaines thought that they were done when they printed those pages, they were fooling themselves.

TOMORROW: Cut it out.