Battling Myths and Misinformation about 1775

As we reach the cusp of the Sestercentennial year of 2025, I’m highlighting some articles I’ve written for the Journal of the American Revolution discussing myths and mistaken beliefs about the events of 1775.

Some of these articles were published in the past year, some more than a decade ago.

Here are the tl;dr versions with links to the full-length originals.

American Patriots didn’t call the laws that Parliament passed in 1774 to reform Boston (and Massachusetts as a whole) the “Intolerable Acts.” That term arose decades later in U.S. history textbooks. George III’s blanket term for those laws was “Coercive Acts.” Full article.

Tarring and feathering was a painful and humiliating public punishment, but it wasn’t fatal. Full article.

Dr. Joseph Warren didn’t obtain inside information about the British army march to Concord in April 1775 from Margaret Gage, Gen. Thomas Gage’s wife. Instead, he consulted with a man we’ve never heard of: a knife-maker named William Jasper. Full article.

Israel Bissell didn’t carry news of the fighting at Lexington south, and no single courier rode went all the way to Philadelphia. The first rider was named Isaac Bissell, and he carried the news to Hartford, Connecticut. Full article.

There’s solid evidence that Col. Israel Putnam (not Col. William Prescott) issued the order “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes” at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. That phrase didn’t come from the Prussian army but from the Royal Navy. Full article.

Maj. John Pitcairn wasn’t fatally shot as he topped the wall of the provincial redoubt at Bunker Hill. Of the many men credited with that fatal shot, the best evidence points to Salem Poor, but he probably shot a different British officer. Full article.

Gen. George Washington didn’t respond to news of a gunpowder shortage in August 1775 by creating a false rumor of an adequate supply and feeding it to the British inside Boston. That was a novelistic touch created by a biographer misreading his sources. Full article.

Finally, my article for Age of Revolutions on how the “Join Or Die” snake evolved into the “Don’t Tread on Me” snake remains one of that site’s most read. While this essay doesn’t refute a clearly mistaken belief, I argue that those were two different species of American snakes: the glass snake and the rattlesnake.

If more people avoid repeating those myths and errors in the coming year, then my work will have benefited the world. And we can all move on to repeating new myths and errors.

“Global 1776” Conference in Hong Kong, Mar. 2026

Both demonstrating and exploring the global reach of the American Revolution is this conference announcement from the University of Hong Kong.

“Global 1776: Imperial Worlds in Upheaval”

The American Revolution is often told as a national story. Yet it was also part of a series of world events which culminated in a global age of imperial crisis lasting from the 1760s through the 1820s. That crisis was simultaneously intellectual, cultural, political, social, and economic.

In some places, established empires lost power. In others, new empires took shape. In the Americas, Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, local forces demanded change. Was the American Revolution paradigmatic? Did the age of global imperial crisis have a center?

The University of Chicago, the University of Hong Kong, and the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society will hold a conference at the University of Hong Kong on 12-14 March 2026 on the theme “Global 1776.”

We invite contributions on any aspect of this age of imperial crisis. Scholars may propose papers or panels with a range of methodologies and themes. We are especially interested in work that focuses on peoples and places that have received less attention from scholars of the Revolutionary era, especially Asia, India, West Africa, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Ireland, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Work that crosses imperial and historiographic boundaries and uses comparisons or connections to put the American Revolution in broader dialogue is especially welcome.

The conference steering committee consists of:

• James R. Fichter, Associate Professor, Global and Area Studies, University of Hong Kong, author of Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776.
• Michelle Craig McDonald, Librarian and Director of the Library and Museum at the American Philosophical Society, author of the upcoming Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States. 
• Steven Pincus, Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of British History and the College, University of Chicago, author of The Heart of the Declaration. 
• Brendan McConville, Professor of History Boston University, Head of the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society, author of The King’s Three Faces. 
• Christine Walker, Associate Professor of History, University of Hong Kong, author of Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire.

Travel support and “opportunities for conference publications” are available for presenters. The deadline for submitting proposals is 20 Apr 2025. Proposals for papers should consist of a 250-word abstract and c.v. for each presenter. Proposals for panels should also include a file indicating the names of the panel, the authors of panel papers, and the discussant/moderator. Use the "SUBMIT" link at the conference website or send email to global76@hku.hk.

Understanding the Context of The New-England Primer

The Louisiana law requiring public schools to display a version of the Ten Commandments (now blocked from taking effect while a civil-rights lawsuit is settled) also requires the display of a “context statement” about those rules.

That context doesn’t discuss where the Ten Commandments appear in the Jewish Bible, or how the Sermon on the Mount depicts Jesus riffing on them, or how different faiths present different texts.

Instead, that mandated “context statement” is written to justify the posting of the Ten Commandments themselves in public schools. It begins:

The Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries. Around the year 1688, The New England Primer became the first published American textbook and was the equivalent of a first grade reader. The New England Primer was used in public schools throughout the United States for more than one hundred fifty years to teach Americans to read and contained more than forty questions about the Ten Commandments.

For a “context statement,” that’s missing historic context.

It’s true that most editions of The New-England Primer included questions and answers about the Ten Commandments. That’s because that little book reprinted the Westminster Catechism, a set of 107 questions and answers that children were supposed to memorize.

This text was created in 1646–1647, during the ascendancy of the Puritans in England. There had been many forms of Christian teaching for the masses before. The Church of England and Church (Kirk) of Scotland agreed to a synod in Westminster to produce an official catechism for those two faiths.

As a result, the Westminster Catechism held sway in what became Congregationalism, and thus in New England, even as the Anglican Church swung back toward episcopacy. The Presbyterian Church adopted that text for three centuries. Baptists revised that catechism to fit their understanding of salvation, and within decades individual authors published their own versions and expositions, some becoming quite popular.

That catechism did indeed devote “more than forty questions” to the Ten Commandments, or an average of more than four per Commandment. That’s because its authors didn’t think children could really understand the Ten Commandments just by reading, or even memorizing, those rules. That should raise questions about the value of posting simply those Commandments in school.

But even more salient to the Louisiana law is that The New-England Primer was not created for use in public schools. Under colonial New England’s educational systems, families were responsible for teaching children how to read English. They could do so in the home or in private neighhorhood schools, often called “dame schools.” That’s when young children studied The New-England Primer.

The public schools were established to provide boys aged seven or above with more advanced lessons: in Latin and Greek in the grammar schools, in handwriting and business math in the writing schools. A boy had to demonstrate he was already reading English well before being admitted into either of Boston’s Latin Schools, and after that his reading assignments consisted mostly of classical writers.

Thus, the true context of The New-England Primer actually casts doubt on what the Louisiana law is trying to mandate. That book contained the Ten Commandments not because they were universal but because it served the particular religious faiths that had adopted the Westminster Catechism. Those Commandments weren’t displayed on their own because the authors of that catechism thought children wouldn’t understand them correctly that way. And that textbook wasn’t created for American public schools but for home and private education.

False Witness about What James Madison Wrote

Earlier this year, the Louisiana legislature passed a law requiring all public schools in the state to display a particular edited version of the Ten Commandments in a particular size starting on 1 Jan 2025.

A federal judge has blocked that law from taking effect on the grounds that it clearly violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment bar on governments establishing religion.

In attempting to justify itself, the law cites some historical facts about earlier invocations of religion in American civic life, though not the Ten Commandments. The law’s only citation specifically mentioning those supposedly foundational rules is:

History records that James Madison, the fourth President of the United States of America, stated that “(w)e have staked the whole future of our new nation . . . upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments”.

That is, however, a lie. The editors of the James Madison Papers have said that those words don’t appear in his writings, and that idea is antithetical to what Madison did write about the basis of the Constitution and the place of religion in government.

Three books published in 1989 attributed those words to Madison:

• George Grant, Trial and Error: The American Civil Liberties Union and Its Impact on Your Family.
• Mark A. Belilies and Stephen McDowell, America’s Providential History.
• David Barton, The Myth of Separation.

All three were written by fundamentalist Christian ministers publishing through fundamentalist Christian presses (in Barton’s case, through his own organization).

As his source for the Madison quotation, and for other claims, Grant pointed to Harold K. Lane’s Liberty! Cry Liberty! (Boston: Lamb & Lamb Tractarian Society, 1939). Beliles and McDowell offered no citation. Barton cited Beliles and McDowell.

In his 1992 reissue of The Myth of Separation, Barton changed his citation to match Grant’s Liberty! Cry Liberty! and added a 1958 issue of Progressive Calvinism, itself citing that year’s calendar from the Spiritual Mobilization organization.

Authors defending Barton and themselves against the charge of lying about the quotation point to Liberty! Cry Liberty! as evidence that people have attributed those words to Madison since 1939. Except that citation also appears to be a lie.

Chris Rodda has detailed her unsuccessful quest to find a copy of Liberty! Cry Liberty! anywhere. It’s not in the Library of Congress or Harvard University, the nation’s two largest repositories. The book has no entry in WorldCat. Nor is there other evidence of the publisher or author existing. Grant has never supplied a copy or explained where he saw one.

Rodda has made a convincing case that the real source of this “quotation” are speeches that law school dean Clarence Manion delivered in the early 1950s in support of the Bricker Amendment. Manion interspersed accurate quotations from Madison with his own exegeses, which of course reflected his own ideas of politics and religion and which many Madison experts disagree with. Later in that decade, it appears, people assembling non-scholarly religious publicatons assigned Manion’s words to Madison himself.

After that, a series of authors saw a “quotation” from a famous Framer that confirmed their existing belief and repeated it without checking for an original source, all the way to the Louisiana law. So is this a simple chain of error, the authors to be blamed for no more than carelessness?

I don’t think the idea of simple mistakes is tenable. For one thing, someone came up with that suspicious citation of Liberty! Cry Liberty!, and many other people have repeated it without anyone apparently confirming the publication even existed.

Secondly, scholars pointed out the falsehood of the Madison quotation decades ago. The Madison Papers editors addressed it in 1993. Robert S. Alley published about it in the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal in 1995. The Washington Post published a letter about it in 1999. Chris Rodda wrote out her investigation in 2016.

Even Barton and his organization now acknowledge that the Madison quotation is “unconfirmed” after more than twenty years of zealous searching. (I’ve discussed other obvious errors from Barton here and here. And we mustn’t forget how Barton’s effort at publishing through a religious press with higher standards was recalled in 2012.)

In sum, the Louisiana legislature used a false claim to justify promulgating a particular religious text to schoolchildren. That claim had been publicly shown to be false before the parents of some of those children were even born. The lack of evidence for that claim can easily be found through a simple web search, including at the website of the author most responsible for spreading the falsehood. That doesn’t add up to simple carelessness. That’s educational negligence.

TOMORROW: What The New England Primer says about the Ten Commandments.

Christopher Machell and the Additional Companies

Earlier this month I wrote about Capt. Christopher Machell of His Majesty’s 15th Regiment of Foot.

Some sources have said that British officer was wounded at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and I knew his regiment wasn’t even in North America at that time. Apparently more reliable sources said he was wounded in the “Battle of New York,” but when that was remained a mystery.

Also a mystery: Why if Machell lost an arm in 1776 did he remain on the regiment’s rolls through the end of the war?

I was pleased but not surprised to receive answers from Don Hagist, author most recently of Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution and editor of the Journal of the American Revolution.

Here’s Don Hagist as this month’s guest blogger, plugging the holes in that short series about Capt. Machell:

During the American Revolution British regiment on service in America maintained a cadre of officers and non-commissioned officers in the British Isles for recruiting. Called “Additional Companies”, these were not companies in a structural sense, but financial vehicles to allow for the expenses of the recruiters, and for the recruits.

Every so often, when enough recruits had been raised and trained, they were sent to America under care of one of the Additional Company officers, and an officer in America returned to Britain to join the recruiting service.

As the war progressed, it was quite common for wounded officers to return to Britain to recover, and joining the Additional Companies was a way to keep them at full pay and working while they convalesced.

Captain Christopher Machell commanded the 15th Regiment’s light infantry company, and was wounded at the battle of Harlem Heights on “New York Island” on 16 September 1776. Because he was no longer fit for that company’s active service, he was transferred into a battalion company, then the following June joined the Additional Companies in Great Britain, where he remained for the rest of the war.

Thanks, Don!

Grand Union Flag Raising Commemoration in Somerville, 1 Jan.

On Wednesday, 1 Jan 2025, the city of Somerville will observe its annual Grand Union Flag Raising, 249 years after Gen. George Washington had a new flag flown in the fortifications atop Prospect Hill.

The program will begin at 11:30 A.M. with a procession from the City Hall to Prospect Hill. The public is invited to participate in this walk along with city officials and guests.

From noon to 1:00 P.M. there will be a ceremony on the hill in the shadow of the present monument. It will feature:

• A reenactment of George III’s message to the rebellious colonies delivered by gentlemen from His Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot. This will presumably be part of the king’s speech to Parliament in the fall of 1775, which arrived in Massachusetts around the same time as the flag-raising.
• Remarks from people interpreting Martha Washington, wife of the Continental commander-in-chief, and the poet Phillis Wheatley, who several weeks before had sent Washington a complimentary poem.
• Members of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company.
• A portrayal of Gen. Washington leading the ceremony to raise the new flag, usually interpreted to be the new Continental Navy flag: thirteen red and white stripes for the thirteen colonies at the Continental Congress with the Union Jack in the canton.

Attendees should be prepared for cold weather; this event takes place on a hill during the New England winter. Hot drinks will be available. Participants will also have a choice between small Grand Union flags to wave or blank flags to decorate.

If the weather cooperates, the tower on Prospect Hill will be open to the public following the ceremony. The Somerville Museum will be on hand with souvenirs representing the city’s historic assets.

“This is a great day with the Roman Catholics”

On Saturday, 25 Dec 1779, John Quincy Adams was in the coastal town of La Coruña.

He and his younger brother Charles were accompanying their father on his second diplomatic mission to Europe. Aiming for France, their ship had run into trouble, and the captain had chosen to dock in allied Spain instead.

That provided the occasion for John Quincy to experience another culture. Which his diary shows him doing with characteristic primness:

This is a great day with the Roman Catholics. “Fete de Nouailles” Christmas. However I find they dont mind it much. They dress up and go to mass but after that’s over all is. So if they call this religion I wonder what is not it; after Mass, almost all the Shops in town are open’d.

But stop. I must not say any thing against their religion while I am in their country but must change the subject.

This forenoon Madame Lagoanere [wife of the American consul] sent us some sweetmeats: for my part I was much obliged to her for them, but I shall diminish them but little.

John Quincy’s idea of a proper religious holiday involved closing the shops. That was how people observed fast days in New England, after all. And the gift of sweets seems to have puzzled him. I suspect Charles wasn’t so bothered.

Tales of the Cochran Family

The 8 Sept 1845 Exeter News-Letter followed up the tale of James Cochran’s captivity and return with remarks about his son—though it got that man’s name wrong.

The 8 November Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics reprinted the first paragraph of that account, correctly naming the man as John Cochran:

He led a sea-faring life in his younger days, and sailed out of Portsmouth a number of years, as a ship-master, with brilliant success. A short period before the war of the Revolution broke out, he was appointed to the command of the fort in Portsmouth harbor. The day after the battle of Lexington, he and his family were made prisoners of war by a company of volunteers under the command of John Sullivan, afterwards the distinguished Major General Sullivan of the Revolution, President of New-Hampshire, &c. Captain Cochran and his family were generously liberated on parole of honor.

That paragraph, flattering to both Cochran and Sullivan, now came with the endorsement of one of John and Sarah Cochran’s daughters, who had moved back to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

It was, however, wrong. The move on Fort William and Mary led by John Sullivan (shown above) happened four months before the Battle of Lexington and Concord, not the day after. And to read John Cochran’s own accounts from December 1774, it was much less friendly than this retelling describes.

The Portsmouth Journal didn’t name the Cochran daughter or state her age, so we don’t know if she was old enough to recall these events herself or had heard about them from her parents and older siblings.

She provided some new anecdotes:

Not far from this time Gov. J[ohn]. Wentworth took refuge in the Fort, and Captain Cochran attended him to Boston. In his absence the only occupants of the fort were Mrs. Cochran, a man and a maid servants [sic], and four children.

At this time all vessels passing out of the harbor, had to show their pass at the Fort. An English man-of-war one day came down the river, bound out. Mrs. C. directed the man to hail the ship. No respect was paid to him. Mrs. C. then directed him to discharge one of the cannon. The terrified man said, “Ma’am I have but one eye, and can’t see the touch-hole.” Taking the match, the heroic lady applied it herself; the Frigate immediately hove too [sic], and showing that all was right, was permitted to proceed.

For this discharge of duty to his Majesty’s Government, she received a handsome reward.

Again, the timing of this event seems off. Sarah Cochran appears to have been on the family farm rather than at the fort when Gov. Wentworth departed in August 1775. The New Hampshire Patriots would hardly have let her take charge of the guns, and there was little gunpowder left anyway. If something like this story happened, it was probably earlier, under royal rule.

The daughter’s account continued:

It was thought by some of the enemies of Gov. Wentworth that he was still secreted at the fort, after he had left for Boston. A party one day entered the house in the Fort, (the same house recently occupied by Capt. Dimmick), and asked permission of Mrs. Cochran to search the rooms for the Governor.

After looking up stairs in vain, they asked for a light to examine the cellar. “O yes,” said a little daughter of Mrs. C. “I will light you.” She held the candle until they were in a part of the cellar from which she well knew they could not retreat without striking their heads against low beams, when the roguish girl blew the light out.

As she anticipated, they began to bruise themselves, and they swore pretty roundly.—The miss from the stairs in an elevated tone cried out, “Have you got him?” This arch inquiry only served to divide their curses between the impediments to their progress and the “little Tory.”

Was this “little daughter” the same one telling the story or an older sister of the narrator? Was this an anecdote from the militia raids on the fort in December 1774 or truly a search for the departed governor months later?

The Portsmouth Journal then returned to the text from the Exeter News-Letter, adding only one parenthetical correction:

Captain John Cochran, (who was a cousin, and not the father, as has been stated, of Lord Admiral Cochran) immediately joined the British in Boston; and, as it was believed, being influenced by the double motive of gratitude towards a government that had generously noticed and promoted him to offices of honor, trust, and emolument, and for the sake of retaining a valuable stipend from the Crown, remained with the British army during the war. It is due to his honor to state, however, that he was never known to take an active part in the conflict.

At the close of the war, he returned to St. Johns’, New-Brunswick, lived in the style of a gentleman the remainder of his days, and died at the age of 55.

John Cochran’s sister and then his daughter, both living in America, apparently didn’t want people to think he was too fervent in his loyalty to the Crown. Therefore, they insisted he was “never known to have taken an active part in the conflict.”

That’s a direct contradiction to what Sarah Cochran told the Loyalists Commission back in 1787. She described her husband as working for both the British army and the Royal Navy, including in the invasion of Rhode Island, and Abijah Willard backed her up.

The stories offered to American readers in 1845 didn’t say anything about Patriots taking the Cochrans’ property, or the years of separation on opposite sides of the war, or the journey of Sarah Cochran and her chldren to New York.

The tale of Sarah Cochran forcing a British warship to “hove to” and show a pass may also have been shaped to appeal to American readers. Though she reportedly “received a handsome reward” from the Crown for that action, that anecdote depicted a woman in America bossing around a frigate.

Sarah Cochran had told the Loyalists Commission about her husband’s debilitating strokes. Again, a fellow refugee in New Brunswick confirmed that. But John Cochran’s sister, followed by his daughter, didn’t mention his health at all, instead emphasizing how he had “lived in the style of a gentleman.”

Much of the Portsmouth Journal’s article went into Lorenzo Sabine’s compendium of stories on American Loyalists. It was thus an early source on the Patriot raids on Fort William and Mary, but not a very reliable one.

“Died leaving a memory respected”

In the fall of 1845, as I described yesterday, New Hampshire newspapers published a pair of articles printing Cochran family lore, particularly the story of young James Cochran’s brief and bloody captivity by Natives.

Neither article named its source, but both contained clues.

The first, published in the Exeter News-Letter, described a daughter of James Cochran this way:

well remembered by many of the surviving inhabitants of Derry and Londonderry. She is particularly recollected as a “maiden lady,” highly celebrated as a beauty and a wit, when at an age she was not averse to own, and even delicate and shrewd when far advanced in the “sear and yellow leaf.” Her tongue was a two edged sword, and woe to him who recklessly called forth its exercise. She was for many years a distinguished Mistress of the rod and ferule and died leaving a memory respected, and was gathered to her fathers—for, husband, ”she ne’er had ony.”

I take that as a hint that the writer “G.” had personally known this woman as a schoolteacher (“Mistress of the rod and ferule”). He may well have heard the family stories from her but didn’t write them down until after her death and thus had no way of assaying this ”tradition.”

In contrast, the editors of the Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics dropped that character sketch entirely from their version. Perhaps it didn’t sit right with their new source: a living granddaughter of James Cochran through his son John, and thus a niece of the teacher.

That granddaughter said she had known her grandfather in his old age:

Capt. James Cochran removed to St. Johns, New-Brunswick, where he closed his life in 1795, at 84 years of age. This lady was with him several years, watched over him in his declining years, and attended his dying bed. She says, he never used to speak of the Indian adventure with exultation. The anniversary of that day he ever observed with a melancholy, grateful feeling—regarding it as a merciful providence, than as an achievement of personal heroism.

Thus, she might have heard James Cochran’s story of captivity and escape from the man himself, decades later.

However, instead of getting that granddaughter to tell the story as she had heard it, the Portsmouth Journal mostly reprinted the earlier article, now with her endorsement. The second version includes a little more detail about James getting out of his bonds and his canoe sinking, but that’s it. Otherwise, the second account is a word-for-word replication of the first.

We’re thus presented with a story that appears to be one remove from James Cochran (James —> granddaughter), but was actually in some respects multiple steps away (James —> daughter —> “G.” —> granddaughter?).

The Portsmouth Journal also ran an expanded version of the Exeter News-Letter’s anecdote about James Cochran’s son at Fort William and Mary. It offered important corrections like:

• That man was John Cochran, not a second James.
• He “was a cousin and not the father, as has been stated, of Lord Admiral Cochran.”

(That had to be a distant cousinage at best.)

Nonetheless, the second telling once again adopted some sentences word for word from the first. John Cochran’s daughter told her own story in part through the voice of “G.,” whom she had apparently never met.

TOMORROW: Those anecdotes from the fort.

(The picture above, courtesy of Find a Grave, shows a stone in East Derry, New Hampshire, carved “In Memory of James Cochran…,” who died in 1795 “in ye. 85th. year.” Given the granddaughter’s description of his death in St. John, this would be a cenotaph, not a gravestone.)

“What is all history but facts or falsehood”?

On 8 Sept 1845, the Exeter (New Hampshire) News-Letter and Rockingham Advertiser published an item signed “G.” and dated one week earlier.

Titled “Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction,” it told the story of how at age fourteen “Captain James Cochran” was captured by a Native couple, killed and scalped them, and returned to his family’s settlement on the Penobscot frontier.

The first two paragraphs and the last of this article were all about whether people should believe this story. “I have it only by tradition,” the writer said at the start before concluding, “But what is all history but facts or falsehood, having, at a time, a legendary existence?”

That article also made two claims about James Cochran’s descendants:

• His “second son, James,” was a ship captain, put in “command of the fort in Portsmouth harbor,” and “made prisoners of war by a company of volunteers under the command of John Sullivan” on “The day after the battle of Lexington.” 
• One of that man’s sons was “now high in office and renown in the British Navy, adorning the title of—Lord Admiral Cochran.”

The first item was obviously a garbled version of the story of John Cochran, commander of Fort William and Mary, as I’ve explored it this past week.

The second might be a wishful reference to Adm. Thomas Cochrane or Adm. Thomas John Cochrane, neither of whom had any discernible family connection to the New Hampshire Loyalist John Cochran.

Two months later, on 8 Nov 1845, the Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics published a new version of the tale:

ADVENTURE OF CAPT. JAMES COCHRAN.
“Truth Stranger Than Fiction.”

This newspaper assured its readers:

The statements published we have submitted to a daughter of Capt. John Cochran, who is a resident of Portsmouth, and we are enabled from these traditions, and from conversation with that lady, to present a more full account of the historical incidents of the family, which may be relied upon as accurate.

Unfortunately, this newspaper didn’t name that woman or say how she had come to live in Portsmouth seventy years after her father had been driven away. I haven’t found other mentions of her.

TOMORROW: The daughter’s story.

(The picture above shows Adm. Sir Alexander Inglis Cochrane, father of Adm. Thomas John Cochrane and uncle of Adm. Thomas Cochrane as well as brother-in-law of Maj. John Pitcairn. Born in 1758, this man served in the navy during the American War for Independence. That we can rely on.)

“An Act to Authorise Sarah Cochran…”

As I wrote back here, John Cochran died in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1790.

Though he’d been in ill health for years, he didn’t leave a will, and the probate court appointed his widow Sarah to administer his estate.

Back in 1779 the New Hampshire legislature had passed a law empowering the state to confiscate John Cochran’s property and sell it to defray the costs of the ongoing war.

However, the 1783 Treaty of Paris urged states to repeal such laws and allow Loyalists to return. Some Americans objected to that provision. It took until 1786 for any state to follow that path, but New Hampshire was the first.

Thus, when John Cochran died, his estate included some property he’d left behind in New Hampshire, apparently unsold. Sarah petitioned to be able to sell that land.

On 20 June 1793, the state assembly, still meeting in Portsmouth, passed a law authorizing her to do so:

Whereas Sarah Cochran of Saint-Johns in the Province of New Brunswick in British America, hath petitioned the general Court, representing that she is Administratrix of the estate of her late husband John Cochran of said Saint Johns decd., that she hath taken out letters of Licence from the Judge of probate of wills & within the aforesaid Province To sell and convey all the Estate of said decd., more especially a certain tract of land, situate in said Londonderry Wherefore she prayed that she might be enabled to make and execute, by herself or her Agent, duly appointed a good and valid deed of the land aforesaid in said Londonderry — The prayer of which petition appearing reasonable.

Therefore be it enacted by the Senate and house of Representatives in General Court convened, that the said Sarah Cochran, be and she hereby is authorised and impowered to sell, and make and execute by herself or her Agent duly appointed a good and valid deed of the lands aforesaid, situate in said Londonderry, she the said Sarah or her Agent giving bonds with sufficient surety to the Judge of probate for the County of Rockingham, to account to the said Judge for the money arising on such sale, or to the creditors of said deceased or his heirs when they shall arive to full age or otherwise to such person or persons, to whom of right it may belong.

That’s the last trace of John or Sarah Cochran that I’ve found. Of course, it’s likely that Canadian sources that I’m unfamiliar with have more to say.

John’s father James evidently moved to St. John, New Brunswick, to be with that part of the family. He died there in 1794, aged eighty-four.

TOMORROW: The child who came back.

“Liberty to remove with her sd. family to her husband”

Ideally I would have quoted today’s documents earlier in this series about Sarah and John Cochran, but I hadn’t find them yet.

As described back here, the Cochrans were separated in 1775, forced to communicate by letters between independent Londonderry, New Hampshire, and British-held Long Island, New York.

In early 1777 one of those letters was intercepted alongside a letter from John’s patron, royal governor John Wentworth. Gov. Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut sent copies to the New Hampshire government and to Gen. George Washington, and an extract was printed in the New-Hampshire Gazette in April.

About a year later, Sarah Cochran gave up trying to stay. She petitioned the New Hampshire government:

To the honble The Committee of Safety for said State now sitting at Exeter — The Petition of Sarah Cochran, of Portsmouth in the County and State aforesaid humbly sheweth that your Petitioner’s husband John Cochran lately of said Portsmouth has for several years past been absent from his family and is now at Long Island without the least prospect of being likely to return to this State —

and your Petitioner having a large family which she finds extremely difficult to support in the absence of her said husband and as he has frequently written to her to come with her family to him —

your Petitioner humbly prays your honors wd grant her liberty to remove with her sd. family to her husband for which favour your petitioner as in duty bound, will ever pray —

Portsmouth April 23d 1778.

Your Petitioner further begs that your honors would grant her liberty to carry her household furniture with her

Five days later, the committee granted Sarah Cochran and her children to go to New York “after having advertized her Departure three weeks Successively in the New Hampr. Gazette.” State leaders didn’t want her to run out on any creditors.

On 27 October, this notice appeared in that newspaper:

The Subscriber by Permission
Of the Committee of Safety for the State of New Hampshire, being about to depart the same, gives this Notice thereof, That all Persons who have Accounts open with her Husband John Cockrin, lately of Portsmouth, may within three Weeks from this Date, appear and settle the same.

Oct, 27, Sarah Cockrin.

That spelling of the family name meant it took me forever to find this ad.

Together these sources suggest that Sarah Cochran and her children traveled from New Hampshire to New York late in 1778. Thus, when the New Hampshire legislature confiscated John Cochran’s property in June 1779, it didn’t have to worry about resistance from his wife.

TOMORROW: Back to that property.

“No Civil Authority as yet Established”

John and Sarah Cochran and their family arrived in Saint John, New Brunswick, in July 1783, as I recounted yesterday.

Unlike Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the Loyalists from Boston found refuge in the spring of 1776, Saint John was a small port without a lot of resources.

In fact, it wasn‘t even Saint John until 1785, when the Crown united the settlements of Parrtown and Carleton on opposite sides of the harbor into Canada’s first incorporated city.

The influx of Loyalists made that possible but also brought troubles as those people had to figure out how and where to live.

By 14 December, John Cochran had recovered enough from his second stroke to write to his old patron, John Wentworth:

there is no Civil Authority as yet Established to prevent any One from doing what he thinks best in his Owne eyes. Upon the whole they appear at present to be in a State of Anarchy and will Continue so untill there is the Civil law put in force.

I pity the Officers of the discharged Regmts. They are more liable to be insulted than any others. Among the whole there is nothing but Murmering and discontent on Account they were promised land but as yet they have not been able to obtain any excepting a few who has Purchased and there does not appear any likelyhood of their Getting any Except it is the disbanded Regiments.

David Bell quoted that letter in Early Loyalist Saint John: The Origin of New Brunswick Politics, 1783-1786.

Ultimately, the Cochrans were among the families who received a land grant. They settled at what Sarah called “Mahogany.” I believe that was on or near Mahogany Island, now called Manawagonish Island. It appears in the picture above as “Meogenes Island.”

In 1787 Sarah went back to Saint John to testify to the Loyalists Commission on her husband’s behalf. Because of his strokes, she explained, “he could hardly be understood” by strangers and “His memory is gone.” A local apothecary, the Boston native Adino Paddock, Jr., confirmed that condition.

Abijah Willard endorsed John’s loyalty, as did letters from former governor Wentworth and Gen. Sir William Howe. It looks like the commission did grant John Cochran a pension in exchange for his losses and his service in the Revolution, but I don’t know the details.

John Cochran died in 1790, about sixty years old. According to Loyalist Trails, the household goods in his estate were valued at £134 and included a cribbage board and a “Baggammon” table. The family was doing their best to maintain a genteel life on the edge of the empire.

TOMORROW: Leaving New Hampshire.

“Perfectly Loyal, no one more so & very active”

As recounted yesterday, as of May 1777 John Cochran was on British-held Long Island in New York while his wife Sarah was still back home in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

(We know that because the Patriot authorities who intercepted a letter from John to Sarah were gracious enough to print it in the New-Hampshire Gazette that month for everyone to read.)

Documents published in the Parliamentary Papers show that John Cochran was continuing to collect ten shillings per day as captain of Fort William and Mary, plus “rations of provisions and fuel.”

In return, Cochran did various tasks for the king’s military. Sarah later told the Loyalists Commission:

He was occasionally employed in the Navy. Went on a Voyage as Pilot on Board the Lively. He Continued with the Army; always ready to give them his assistance by Land or Sea.

He was employed by Genl. [Richard] Prescot [shown above] on Rhode Island to attack an Enemies out Post, which he performed & took ye Picket. He was on a Cruise with Mr. [George] Leonard. Went with Dispatches from Rhode Island to New York, and was employed on various occasions.

Abijah Willard confirmed this service, telling the commission that Cochran “was very forward in giving Intelligence. Joined the Brit. very early.” The Loyalist colonel said he considered the man “perfectly Loyal, no one more so & very active.”

Cochran was also a lieutenant in a Loyalist militia company.

In June 1779, the state of New Hampshire moved to confiscate John Cochran’s property. If Sarah had been staying on the farm to forestall that move, it hadn’t worked. Maybe that’s what finally drove her away. By 1783, the whole Cochran family was in New York.

Sometime that year John suffered “a paralytic stroke.” Sarah described him as “not capable of doing any Business,” with “no more strength or understanding than a Child.”

When the order came to evacuate New York City, John’s militia company was assigned to the ship Bridgewater. Sarah got her husband and their four children aboard along with three dependents, including an eleven-year-old black boy named Adam who was indentured until he turned twenty-one, according to this article from Loyalist Trails.

That fleet left New York in June and arrived at Saint John, New Brunswick, on 5 July. John was still “not capable of doing any Business,” and then suffered another stroke about two months later.

TOMORROW: Life in a new province.

“Best to remove farther off in the country”

On 3 Feb 1787, Sarah Cochran appeared before the Loyalists Commission in Saint John, New Brunswick.

She described how her husband John “went to Boston with Govr. [John] Wentworth” in late August 1775, as recounted here.

At the time, she and at least some of her children were living on the family farm in Londonderry. According to the Loyalist leader Abijah Willard, another commission witness, the Cochrans’ “Land was in a very good part of the Town, near the meeting house.“

(The picture here shows the First Parish Meetinghouse in Derry, New Hampshire, which might be the building Willard referred to. The oldest part of this church dates to 1769. It’s been significantly enlarged, and the impressive tower went up in 1822.)

Sarah Cochran testified that around October:

about 2 months after he went, she was ordered to quit the Premises, which she did & was moving her goods, on which a Mob rose & took every thing she had, calling them ye goods of a Tory. She got part back, but lost to amount of £150 lawful.

Unfortunately for us, Sarah didn’t recount where she went. Possibly she took refuge with her own family, or even with other members of the Cochran clan who were siding with the rebels.

We know Sarah didn’t follow her husband into Boston that fall, or to Halifax and then New York the following year. Instead, the next sign of her appears in the 29 May 1777 Independent Chronicle of Boston, publishing an “Extract of a letter from John Cochran, on Long-Island, to his wife in New-Hampshire, intercepted with others sent by the late Governor Winthrop to his sister”:

My Dear,

I would willingly advise, but know not how or what to advise you to at this distance. I shall leave it intirely to your judgment what you think best to be done in these unhappy days, for I am so puzzled about giving my advice what to do, that I am almost crasy.

However, I think upon the whole, it would be best to remove farther off in the country, as I am afraid you will suffer where you are, before it will be in my power to protect you, as there will be nothing but destruction of property without any reserve. In that case, I would have you send off the most valuable effects you have left to some place, if you know of any.

I shall either hope to find you at the Isle Shoals, or up at Londonderry—If you intend to tarry where you are, I pray for God’s sake that there be no CLERGYMAN in the house; if their is, your life is not worth a farthing as the whole race of that tribe will be spilt.

If you see any prospect of the affairs being given up without bloodshed, I had rather find you at Hampton than any where else…

I don’t know why Cochran was so anxious about his wife giving refuge to a minister. It’s possible that the family was Presbyterian and feared their ministers would be suspected of disloyalty by New England Congregationalists.

In June 1779 the New Hampshire legislature moved to confiscate the property of men away from the state and “residing with the enemys thereof.” Its new law listed individual names starting with former governor Wentworth, Surveyor General Samuel Holland, and one-time Stamp Act administrator George Meserve. The fourth name was John Cochran.

TOMORROW: Serving the Crown.

The Cochrans of New Hampshire

The Cochran family came to New England from northern Ireland. They settled in towns named to attract such migrants: Belfast in what would be Maine and Londonderry in New Hampshire.

At least that’s according to a family history recorded in Lorenzo Sabine’s American Loyalists, based on the account of a daughter of John and Sarah Cochran living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1845.

However, some details of that account don’t match what contemporaneous documents tell us about the confrontations over Fort William and Mary in 1774 and 1775. That daughter might have been too young to grasp the details and chronology.

It’s also not clear how the daughter (never named, alas) came to be in Portsmouth when her parents had moved with four of their children to New Brunswick, Canada, in 1783.

Multiple Cochran households settled in the region in the early 1700s. Leonard A. Morrison’s History of Windham in New Hampshire (1883) has an extensive genealogy for one family, but focuses on descendants that remained in the U.S. of A. The Cochrans I’m interested in may have been related, and they certainly used the same common given names, but I have no hope of sorting them all out.

The best I can say is that it looks like John’s father James was born in Ireland about 1710 and made the trip across the Atlantic. John was born in America in 1730. He went to sea for some years. The New-Hampshire Gazette reported a captain of his name in charge of the Berwick in 1762, the Onondaga in 1763, and the Londonderry in 1769 and 1770.

John Cochran then returned to the family farm in Londonderry. His wife Sarah and their children lived there—possibly as part of an extended clan. They ultimately held deeds for well over a hundred acres of land.

In 1770 John accepted the post of commander of Fort William and Mary from Gov. John Wentworth, which took him back to the sea—or at least to an island in Portsmouth harbor. On St. John’s Day in 1771 and 1774, Brother Cochran hosted a Freemasons’ dinner at the fort.

As I recounted here, John and Sarah were in the fort on the afternoon of 14 Dec 1774 when John Langdon led in a militia force that took away all but one barrel of gunpowder.

James Cochran joined his son at the fort, perhaps brought by news of that confrontation. He was still there the next night when John Sullivan, recently returned from the First Continental Congress, showed up with more militiamen to collect artillery pieces and ordnance.

According to Gov. Wentworth, the older Cochran laid into Sullivan:

The honest, brave old Man stop’d him short, call’d him and his numerous party perjur’d Traitors & Cowards, That his Son the Capt. Shou’d fight them two at a time thro their whole multitude, or that He would with his own hands put him to death in their presence, Which the Son readily assented to, but none among them wou’d take up the challenge, relying on and availing themselves of their numbers to do a mischief which they never wou’d have effected by Bravery.

Sullivan had been struggling all day to figure out how to handle this event, pushed by more radical militiamen while trying not to go too far in defying the king. He probably didn’t care to hear James Cochran’s opinion.

But the New Hampshire forces left the Cochrans alone. John continued to command the fort, soon protected and probably rearmed by the Royal Navy. Sarah and their children, and probably James, continued to farm in Londonderry, even as war began down in Massachusetts.

On 23 Aug 1775, as I said yesterday, Gov. Wentworth and John Cochran sailed away from Fort William and Mary for Boston. That left Sarah and the children behind. And the environment had changed.

TOMORROW: Cochrans on the move.

The Last of the Last Royal Governor of New Hampshire

As evening fell on 14 Dec 1774, New Hampshire militiamen finished their (first) raid on Fort William and Mary.

They loaded over a hundred barrels of gunpowder into a flat-bottomed boat. Just before embarking, they released John Cochran, commander of the fort, and his wife Sarah from confinement in their house.

But first they told Cochran to “go and take care of the Powder they had left.” As he reported that evening to Gov. John Wentworth (shown here), the raiders had left “one barrel.”

The royal governor lost most of his authority that day. He couldn’t even get men to row him out to the fort on his official barge.

Wentworth soon knew the identities of many of the raiders, but he didn’t foresee prosecuting them. “No jail would hold them long, and no jury would find them guilty,” he wrote. The most he could do was fire them from their appointed positions.

H.M.S. Canceaux and H.M.S. Scarborough arrived in Portsmouth harbor over the next week, preventing further attacks. The result was a stalemate, with the Patriots leaving Gov. Wentworth alone as long as they could proceed with their plans.

Those activists had already called a province-wide meeting in July 1774 to send delegates to the First Continental Congress. They did that again in January 1775 for the Second Continental Congress. Another meeting in late April endorsed the New Hampshire militia companies already heading toward Boston.

Gov. Wentworth convened the official New Hampshire legislature on 4 May 1775, then prorogued it. He tried to make peace between Capt. Andrew Barkley on the Scarborough, who was seizing supplies and sailors from ships, and the Patriot militiamen, now fortifying Portsmouth harbor against attack from the water.

On 13 June, Wentworth offered shelter to John Fenton, a retired British army captain and a New Hampshire militia colonel. A crowd gathered outside his mansion, pointing a cannon at the front door. Fenton gave himself up. The governor and his wife fled out the back, carrying their infant son.

The Wentworths took refuge at Fort William and Mary, still commanded by John Cochran. The governor reported, “This fort although containing upward of sixty pieces of Cannon is without men or ammunition,” but it was protected by the Scarborough.

Wentworth continued to try to exercise gubernatorial authority, sending messages to the provincial assembly as if he were in his mansion nearby rather than on an island in the harbor. The legislature ignored him and his declarations that their session was adjourned.

Soon it became clear that there was no point in staying in New Hampshire. Capt. John Linzee and H.M.S. Falcon arrived to carry away the fort’s remaining cannon and keep them out of rebel hands. On 23 August the Wentworths boarded a warship to sail to besieged Boston.

With Gov. Wentworth went John Cochran, commander of Fort William and Mary.

Cochran’s wife Sarah and their children weren’t in the fort that summer, however. They were on the family farm in Londonderry.

TOMORROW: A Loyalist family’s troubles.

“Beset on all sides by upwards of four hundred men”

In 1770, New Hampshire governor John Wentworth appointed John Cochran (1730–1807) the official commander of Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth harbor. This was a more permanent responsibility than a militia rank, though less than the regular army.

According to an article in Loyalist Trails, Cochran was a sea captain who had settled on a farm in Londonderry, New Hampshire, with his wife Sarah and their children.

Both John and Sarah Cochran were on the fortified island on 14 Dec 1774, 250 years ago today. The evening before, Gov. Wentworth had sent a warning that local Patriots might try to take possession of the fort or its military supplies.

The Cochrans noticed an unusual number of visitors that day—men saying they’d just dropped by the island to chat, even though they’re never done that before. The couple became suspicious, and Sarah brought John his pistols.

More men arrived, kept outside by the fort’s guns. Future Continental Congress delegate John Langdon and sea captain Robert White convinced Cochran to let them in for a conversation.

Those two men told the commander they wanted to remove all the gunpowder from the fort. Cochran asked if they had authorization from the royal governor. Langdon reportedly replied that he “forgot to bring his Orders, but the Powder they were determined to have at all Events.”

In the evening Cochran wrote a quick report to Gov. Wentworth about what had happened next:

I received your Excellency’s favour of yesterday, and in obedience thereto kept a strict watch all night, and added two men to my usual number, being all I could get.

Nothing material occurred till this day one o’clock, when I was informed there was a number of people coming to take possession of the Fort, upon which, having only five effective men with me, I prepared to make the best defence I could, and pointed some Guns to those places where I expected they would enter.

About three o’clock the Fort was beset on all sides by upwards of four hundred men. I told them, on their peril, not to enter; They replied they would. I immediately ordered three four pounders to be fired on them, and then the small arms, and before we could be ready to fire again, we were stormed on all quarters, and they immediately secured both me and my men, and kept us prisoners about one hour and a half, during which time they broke open the Powder House, and took all the powder away, except one barrel, and having put it into boats and sent it off, they released me from my confinement.

To which can only add, that I did all in my power to defend the Fort, but all my efforts could not avail against so great a number.

Wentworth later interviewed witnesses, gathered depositions, and compiled a longer account. Those documents weren’t published until the 1970s. They contained more dramatic details, such as where the fort’s cannon shot had ended up: one four-pound ball “went thro a warehouse,” another “pass’d thro a Sloop,” and the third “lodg’d in an House in Kittery,” Maine.

As the attackers stormed in, Cochran found himself pushed back against a wall, his musket broken, jabbing at assailants with his bayonet. A Portsmouth sailor named Thomas Pickering jumped onto the captain’s shoulders and grabbed him by the neck. Finally the “Multitude” marched Cochran off to his house to retrieve the key to the powderhouse.

Instead, they found Sarah Cochran, who had herself “snatch’d a bayonet” and tried to rescue her husband. The crowd overpowered her and locked the couple (and perhaps their children) in the house while some went to break open the powder supply.

TOMORROW: What happened to the Cochrans?

Storming Fort William and Mary, 14–15 Dec.

Sometimes local boosters have claimed that the Boston Massacre was the first battle of the Revolutionary War.

Or maybe the “Battle of Golden Hill” a few weeks before that—a series of New York street fights in which, contrary to early reports, no one died.

Other folks point to the Battle of Alamance on 16 May 1771, the final confrontation between western North Carolina’s Regulators and the provincial authorities.

Or the Battle of Point Pleasant/Kanawha on 10 Oct 1774, the big fight of Dunmore’s War.

Or “Leslie’s Retreat” on 26 Feb 1775, when redcoats supposedly drew the “first blood of the Revolutionary War” as they poked locals with bayonets.

Or the Westminster Massacre on 13 Mar 1775, in what would become Vermont. Two men died in a confrontation over New York and New Hampshire property grants.

I don’t think any of those qualify as a Revolutionary War battle. Even a small battle must involve two opposing military forces, whether regular troops or militia, and not soldiers against civilians or civil authorities against rioters.

And to be part of the Revolutionary War, those forces must represent the Crown and colonial anti-tax activists. Theirs wasn’t the only conflict in North America at the time; some of these other confrontations were over different issues, with different alignments.

And ideally the outcome of a battle should be significant—control of territory or resources changing hands. (Of course, death and injury are also significant.)

By those criteria, I think the first battle of the Revolutionary War was the New Hampshire militia raid on Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth harbor on 14 Dec 1774, followed by a second incursion the next day. The captain of the small British army contingent inside the fort reported firing cannon. No one was wounded or killed, but that was good fortune.

This weekend the confrontation at Fort William and Mary will be commemorated and reenacted at the Strawbery Banke Museum and what is now Fort Constitution. Events for visitors begin each day at 9:00 A.M. See the full schedule here.

The New Hampshire Sons of the American Revolution shares Thomas F. Kehr’s comprehensive narrative of “The Raid on Fort William and Mary in 1774,” which draws on sources that came to light only in recent decades.

Here are some recorded interviews about the raids on Fort William and Mary:

• In Emerging Revolutionary War’s RevWar Revelry series, Rob Orrison talked with Dr. Cynthia Hatch.
• On the Revolution 250 podcast, Bob Allison interviewed Sarah Vedrani.

Now of course the Battle of Lexington and Concord was a much bigger fight, and the Battle of Bunker Hill bigger still. Those confrontations produced many more casualties. But colonial militiamen and redcoat soldiers had already shot at each other in another part of New England. 

“You found the money and Sam Adams the brains”

For the first years of the Revolutionary War, Massachusetts continued to operate on the basis of its provincial charter.

The General Court was elected each year, starting in the summer of 1775, when it took over from the Provincial Congress. Its members chose a Council.

That Council exercised executive power, as the charter had specified for times when the royally-appointed governor and lieutenant governor were absent from the province. Which they were, for obvious reasons.

It took years, and two tries, before the towns of Massachusetts ratified a new constitution in 1780. That provided for a governor again—to be elected by the people rather than appointed.

On 19 October, the Rev. William Gordon of Roxbury wrote to John Adams, then on a diplomatic mission in Europe, about that choice:

Mr. [John] Hancock will be governour, unless Death should prevent it. I was employed by a Boston representative under the rose, to plead with Mr. [James] Bowdoin that pro bono publico [for the good of the public] he would condescend to serve as Lt. Govr.: I urged that plea, and encourage the expectation from his not declaring off, that, if the Genl. Ct. are pritty well agreed, he will not decline. He will be a good poize, and prevent undue influence and eccentric motions.

Some time back several persons dined together with the above mentioned, the conversation turned upon old matters, a country booby of a representative said, “ay I remember we used to say that you found the money and Sam Adams the brains.” A pause commenced for some minutes before the conversation was renewed. The poor mortal, upon being afterwards spoken to upon the impropriety of his remark, apologized by pleading, it was the truth and he thought there could be no hurt in speaking it.

This was during a rift between Hancock and Samuel Adams, with Gordon on Adams’s side and relishing anecdotes that made Hancock look foolish.

Hancock did indeed become governor less than a week later, but his lieutenant governor was Thomas Cushing. Bowdoin was the next elected governor, serving two difficult terms before losing to Hancock, who had decided he was healthy again. Eventually Samuel Adams became lieutenant governor under Hancock, and then succeeded him in 1793.

Christopher Machell and Crackenthorpe Hall

This post is about the life of British army officer and disabled artist Christopher Machell, mostly because I can’t resist the chance to type the phrase “Lancelot Machell of Crackenthorpe Hall.”

That was the name of the officer’s grandfather. The Machell family seat was that big manor house in Crackenthorpe (shown here), a village in the western English county of Westmorland (now Cumbria).

The Machells had owned that property since the late Middle Ages, rebuilding and remodeling it multiple times in the 1600s.

Lancelot Machell and his wife Deborah had fourteen children between 1708 and 1726, ten of them girls. Of the four boys, three died while still very young.

That left Richard Machell, born in 1713, as the heir to Crackenthorpe. He married Mary Gibson in 1732, and they soon started to have children. But Richard followed an unusual path for a landed gentleman: he joined the church and in 1739 became rector of St. Peter’s Church in Great Asby.

The elder Lancelot Machell and his wife Deborah both died in 1767. While retaining his ecclesiastical post, the Rev. Richard Machell moved into Crackenthorpe Hall with his family. The following year, he joined in an agreement to divide Crackenthorpe common among seventeen proprietors, coming away with 238 of its 526 acres.

The minister’s first son Hugh had died after a day. His oldest surviving son and heir was another Lancelot Machell, born in 1741. Among the younger children was Christopher, born in 1746. He needed a profession, and at age twenty-two he became an ensign in His Majesty’s 15th Regiment.

I discussed what I could find of Christopher’s military career yesterday. He was a lieutenant as of 1771, a captain in 1775, and deployed to America in 1776. Later sources say he was wounded in the “Battle of New York” and lost his left arm, but he remained on the regimental roll until 1789, when he retired with the rank of major.

Christopher Machell married Ann Scott in late 1783. According to Irish Watercolours and Drawings by Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, Maj. Machell was in Ireland in the mid-1780s, painting landscapes “in monochrome or grisaille” with “no interest in figures.” His pictures of the land around Dublin, County Antrim, and County Down are in the National Gallery of Ireland.

The Rev. Mr. Machell died in February 1786. Lancelot Machell became the owner of Crackenthorpe Hall and that big estate. But not for long. In August, he advertised the manor and its attendant properties for sale. An agent for the Earl of Lonsdale bought everything for £12,000.

Family tradition would say Lancelot “lost a bet to Lord Lonsdale of nearby Lowther Castle and put the estate up for sale to pay for it.” The first Earl of Lonsdale does have some crazy stories attached his name (keeping his late mistress’s body in her bed until the smell became so bad he had it put in a glass-topped coffin, fighting a duel with a guard captain because he didn’t like being told to stay away from a London riot), but gambling doesn’t loom large.

Maj. Christopher Machell reportedly objected to this sale and asked his brother to sell him Crackenthorpe Hall and a bit of land around it. (There was no way he could have matched the earl’s price for all the property.) But it was too late. Lancelot moved onto property he inherited from his mother and died in April 1788, leaving most of his remaining wealth to Christopher.

Maj. Machell settled his family in Beverley, in the county of Yorkshire. (In other words, he moved clear across England, but across the narrowest part of England.) As I wrote yesterday, Machell gained the rank of lieutenant colonel as an inspector of militia in 1807, so his descendants remembered him as “Colonel Machell.” An article in the 1886 Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society quoted one of his sons recalling him this way:

He was highly endowed with mental and personal qualities of no slight pretension, an admirable draughtsman, a good musician, a skilful botanist, and possessing a wonderful amount of varied and accurate information. In person he was above the ordinary standard being 6 foot 2 inches in height, and built in fair proportion, so that his strength and activity were very great, and even up to the time of his death he never was bowed down by decrepitude, nor did his sight fail him.

The Historical Account of the Herbarium of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society describes a painting of “the gallant colonel seated, and resting his arm upon a volume of his ‘Hortus Siccus’,” or plant list. A biography of his grandson, explorer Thomas Machell, by Jenny Balfour-Paul describes the colonel’s “armless sleeve pinned up” in this portrait. He died in 1827 at the age of eighty.

Christopher and Ann Machell had five sons who reached adulthood. Three joined the British army, and a fourth was a banker. The fifth tried the Royal Navy but then followed his grandfather’s path, became a minister, and produced the family’s only male heirs.

One of that man’s younger children, James Octavius Machell, proved to be a very successful racehorse breeder. So successful that he made enough money to buy back Crackenthorpe Hall from the latest Earl of Lonsdale in 1877. He added another wing to the manor, called the “Victorian Wing” but shaped along Georgian lines to blend with the rest.

If you’re Anglophilic enough to have enjoyed this trip through one line of British landed gentry, you may be interested to know that that wing of Crackenthope Hall is available for rentals and occasions.