“Westminster Massacre” Sestercentennial Commemorations, 13–15 Mar.

This month, the town of Westminster, Vermont, is celebrating the Sestercentennial of the “Westminster Massacre,” a clash that began over land titles and ended in the death of two men.

In the 1760s both New York and New Hampshire claimed the land between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River. Gov. Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire granted lots of real estate in six-mile-square town lots between 1749 and 1764. Meanwhile, the New York government issued larger, irregular land patents to wealthy landlords. Each set of claimants complained about the other.

In July 1764 the British government declared all that territory belonged to New York. By this time, a fair number of farmers from New England, particularly Connecticut, had moved into the region. The New York patentees demanded those settlers buy that land, pay rent, or leave. In 1770 the top court in New York confirmed that the New Hampshire land titles were invalid.

For the next few years, there were lots of disputes between settlers with New Hampshire titles and “Yorkers,” rent collectors or farmers arriving from New York with solid legal claims. The Green Mountain Boys formed as an unofficial militia to intimidate Yorkers. Settlers held conventions modeled after those in the rebellious colonies, but they focused their ire on New York, not the imperial government.

On 14 Mar 1775 a court session was scheduled to take place in the town of Westminster. Judge Thomas Chandler held a commission from New York, and his docket included evictions of men with old titles from New Hampshire as well as a murder. Probably inspired by the shutdown of courts in Massachusetts in late 1774, about a hundred local men surrounded the courthouse on the evening of 13 March.

Sheriff William Patterson declared that assembly a riot and ordered the men to disperse. When they refused, the sheriff went to Brattleboro, where New York law had more support, and recruited a posse of 60 to 70 men.

By the time Patterson and his force returned, the protesters were holding the Westminster courthouse and jail. Once again, the sheriff ordered them to leave. Night fell, and the courthouse was still occupied. Patterson told his Yorker posse to open fire on the courthouse. Some men inside fired back, wounding a magistrate.

Sheriff Patterson and his men stormed the building, shooting and clubbing those inside when they resisted. During that melee, twenty-two-year-old William French was shot five times; he died before dawn. Another man, Daniel Houghton, was beaten and died from his injuries nine days later. Seven rioters were arrested and locked into the jail.

On 14 March, a crowd of “upwards of 500” men came into Westminster from nearby towns. They freed the seven prisoners and locked up Patterson and his Yorkers. This mob then proceeded to Brattleboro, breaking into other Yorkers’ homes to arrest more men and bring them to the Westminster jail.

Benjamin Bellows, a militia captain from Walpole, New Hampshire, arrived with his company to restore order, but for local authorities, not New York. The Yorker leaders accused of killing French were taken to Northampton, Massachusetts.

Ultimately, the outbreak of the Revolutionary War overshadowed all these events. Between the overlapping jurisdictions, the end of royal rule, and more immediately pressing matters, no one was ever tried for the actions in Westminster.

Some local historians cast the “Westminster Massacre” as the first fatal battle of the Revolutionary War. I view it, like the 1766–1771 Regulator movement in North Carolina, as a parallel conflict, but not one that involved the core dispute of the Revolution between the royal government and colonists resisting new taxes. The lines weren’t tightly drawn: while Patterson became a Loyalist, Chandler and Bellows supported American independence.

The Westminster Historical Society has created an exhibit on the conflict 250 years ago in the Town Hall museum, and it will host three commemorative gatherings.

Thursday, 13 March, 3:30 P.M.
Walk from the Azariah Wright house site (corner of Sand Hill Road and Route 5) to the town cemetery. Wright’s house was one of the gathering-places for the men who closed the court. This walk is about fifteen minutes. The event is all outdoors with no bathroom.

Friday, 14 March, about 4:00 P.M.
Gathering at the D.A.R. Courthouse Marker on Shattuck Road, celebrating how the crowd took back the courthouse. Ray Boas of the Walpole Historical Society will deliver remarks about Col. Bellows and his militia company preventing further bloodshed.

Saturday, 15 March, 6 P.M.
The museum will open to share the exhibit, remarks by public officials, refreshments, and bathrooms. At 7:00 there will be a twilight vigil at William French’s grave site on the anniversary of his burial. This is the event designed for visitors from outside the region. There will be parking behind the Post Office on the other side of the road.

For more about Westminster history, see Jessie Haas’s books Revolutionary Westminster and Westminster, Vermont, 1735–2000: Township Number One.

“Alarmed in Lexington” and More

The Lexington Historical Society is now the Lexington History Museums.

As the Sestercentennial of the start of the Revolutionary War approaches, the organization’s Buckman Tavern museum is open to visitors every day of the week but Wednesday, 10am–4pm.

Another of the museums, the Hancock-Clarke House, is about to host this special program.

Saturday, 8 March, 7 to 9 P.M.
Alarmed in Lexington
Hancock-Clarke House, 36 Hancock Street

Step back in time to experience the anxious hours before the start of the American Revolution. It’s past midnight on April 19th, 1775, and Paul Revere has just left the home of Lexington’s minister, Jonas Clarke, with news of an impending British attack. This leaves the home’s occupants to take in the news and prepare for what is to come.

In a series of three short plays by Debbie Wiess, see how John Hancock and Samuel Adams, leaders of the Revolution; Dorothy Quincy and Lydia Hancock, John’s family; and Jonas and Lucy Clarke, town leaders, process the impending crisis as they prepare for war in the very rooms in which these conversations took place 250 years ago.

Admission is $25, or $20 for museum members. This program has received funding from Kirkland and Shaw Plumbing and Heating and by a grant from the Lexington Council for the Arts, a local agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which in turn receives funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

[I hope those funds were received last year since the current administration has stopped many payments for work already done and contracts already awarded. The White House has also ordered future N.E.A. grants to conform to criteria not established by Congress; arts organizations just filed a lawsuit about the unconstitutionality of that order. Events like “Alarmed in Lexington” show how White House edicts can affect local endeavors that don’t have direct federal involvement.]

Next month, the Lexington History Museums will also reopen its Munroe Tavern for the season, and debut its new Depot museum covering all of Lexington history.

Starr and Starr vers. Starr and Phillips, executors of Philip Mortimer

In the Connecticut Superior Court’s December 1795 court term, George and Ann Starr sued Elihu Starr and George Phillips as executors of Philip Mortimer’s estate, seeking to overturn the validity of the man’s will.

George and Ann’s young son, Philip Mortimer Starr, was in fact the main beneficiary of that will. But to inherit his great-uncle’s property, he’d have to change his surname to Mortimer on coming of age.

Before then, the will required the estate to grant land and £1,000 to the city of Middletown, Connecticut, to expand a cemetery and build and stock a granary. Maybe the Starrs opposed those plans.

The Starrs’ arguments that the will of Ann’s uncle was invalid were:

• Philip Mortimer was “not of sound disposing mind and memory” when he set up the will and codicils.
• The codicils weren’t completely signed and witnessed.
• Elihu Starr was too entangled in the situation as an heir, a witness, and an executor, not to mention the man who wrote out one of those codicils for Mortimer.
• The other witnesses to the will, Timothy Starr and Joseph Sage, were also heirs inasmuch as they were citizens of Middletown and therefore stood to benefit from that granary.

The court decided that Philip Mortimer was mentally capable of composing the will and codicils. Implicitly, the judges therefore agreed that Mortimer wanted to give the town a granary, to leave most of his money to his great-nephew with the name-change stipulation, and to free his enslaved workers.

However, the majority of the court found that the technical violations of the law invalidated the will. Apparently someone should have told Philip Mortimer that he needed out-of-town witnesses, that he shouldn’t have made even small bequests to his witnesses and executors. Though I have a sense that telling Philip Mortimer what to do wasn’t easy.

Judge Jesse Root (1736–1822, shown above), a veteran of both the Continental Army and the Continental Congress, dissented from the court’s ruling. In fact, Root’s dissent took up most of the official report on the case. But his argument that the court should respect Philip Mortimer’s clear desires and overlook legalities didn’t carry the day.

In January 1796 the court negated the Mortimer will, ruling that he had died intestate. It appointed the husband of his nearest relative to administer the estate. The 12 February Middlesex Gazette carried this notice:

THE Subscriber, being appointed Administrator on the Estate of PHILIP MORTIMER, Esq. late of Middletown, deceased, hereby gives public Notice to the several Creditors, That the hon. Court of Probate for the District of Middletown has limited Twelve Months from the 30th Day of January, 1796, as the Time for exhibiting their respective Claims against said Estate. Those who neglect to exhibit the same to the Subscriber within that Time will be legally debarred of their Demands. All Persons indebted to the Estate are requested to make Payment, to
GEORGE STARR, Administrator.
Middletown, Feb. 5, 1796.

COMING UP: The fallout.

Valuing the Philip Mortimer Estate’s Human Property

After Philip Mortimer’s death, his executors began to work through his substantial estate in Middletown, Connecticut.

As quoted yesterday, executors Elihu Starr and George Phillips advertised for creditors and debtors to come settle their accounts with George Starr, acting as their attorney. And also for people to bring back any borrowed books.

In August 1795 the executors submitted Mortimer’s will and codicil to the probate court. The man’s estate was appraised at almost £5,000.

That legal paperwork included another list of the people Mortimer had enslaved, most of whom his will freed according to one schedule or another:

• Briston, aged 60, called Bristol in the will
• Jack
• Dublin, not mentioned in the will
• Prince, “sick with the yaws”
• Peter, “on board man of war and likely dead”
• Sophy, labeled a “girl” like the following two but old enough to have three sons; the Barbour collection says she was born in 1752 
• Silvy, born 1773 
• Peg, born 1777 as Margaret—though other documents estimate her to have been about 20 years old in 1794
• Lester, born 1787, first of three sons of Jack and Sophy
• Dick, born 1789 as Richard 
• John, born 1790
• Rachel, a “girl child,” born 1793, perhaps the daughter of Hagar, mentioned in the will, or Amarillas, born 1770

As property, all these people were assigned a monetary value. But those low values reflected how Connecticut was turning away from slavery. Mortimer was the state’s biggest single slaveholder in 1790, but his human property comprised less than .1% of his estate.

Jack was valued at £10, Sophy and the three boys at £5 each. The women Silvy and Peg were each valued at £1. The other four men and the little girl were assigned a market value of zero. That makes sense for Peter, who was out of reach in at least one way, but those prices suggest the appraisers thought any purchaser would have a hard time compelling most of the other people to work, or getting more value out of them than the cost of maintaining them.

In contrast, back in 1740 the inventory of Daniel Jones of Colchester valued a “young man” and a “negro wench” at £150 each, “an old negro man” at £40, and a boy at £25. Two years later, Samuel Allyn of Windsor priced his “servants, Cyrus and William,” at £100 apiece.

Almost all of the people listed in Philip Mortimer’s inventory appear to have still been living on his estate or nearby, continuing their work in his ropewalk or fields or house. Indeed, Jack and Sophy had another baby, Charles, in 1795; the local vital records assigned him to the Mortimer household even though the patriarch was dead.

The one exception among those workers was Peter. Mortimer mentioned him in the 1792 will and 1794 codicil, meaning he was still in Middletown then. Had he left for the sea after the old man’s death? If so, he was exercising the freedom Mortimer promised, but the appraisers didn’t think that had turned out well for him.

The probate court accepted Philip Mortimer’s will. It even accepted his codicils, one unsigned and the other unwitnessed. Though he was in his tomb, the man’s wishes still carried some authority in Middlesex County, Connecticut.

But there was one wrinkle: George Starr asked the court to relieve him of his job as executor.

TOMORROW: That freed Starr to contest the will.

The Last Last Will of Philip Mortimer

After Philip Mortimer completed his six-page handwritten will, he signed it in front of three witnesses, all neighbors in Middletown, Connecticut: Timothy Starr, Joseph Sage, and Elihu Starr.

Elihu Starr was also one of the three men Mortimer designated as his coexecutors, along with George Phillips and George Starr, the husband of his niece. At least two of those men would need to agree on any action regarding the estate.

As noted yesterday, the will also granted Elihu Starr the labor of Peg, an enslaved young woman, until she turned twenty-six.

In October 1793 Mortimer wrote a codicil to that will, micromanaging his estate a bit more. At the top of his list of people to be freed were the couple Jack and Sophy. He added two provisions for their benefit:

• Sophy should receive “my chest which I had made at the beginning of the late War, also my wash kettle who contains about four or five gallons, also one small kettle which contains about eight gallons, also so much of the furniture as either two of my coexecutors shall see fitt to give her.”
• Jack and Sophy could “use and enjoy the Interest I have in a Fishing Place in Chatham…during their Natural Lives,” with their three sons inheriting that right.

Then in March 1794 Mortimer, now in his mid-eighties, started to copy the entire will. Unable to complete the task himself, he called in Elihu Starr. Mortimer made only one revision: to grant the two ropemakers Prince and Peter their freedom on his death rather than three years later.

Mortimer signed the papers that Elihu Starr had written for him. Starr didn’t add his own signature, however, nor did anyone else.

The old man died just a few days later on 15 Mar 1794. One week later the Middlesex Gazette reported:

Died, on Saturday last, Capt. PHILIP MORTIMER, of this City, aged 84.—His Funeral was attended, on Tuesday last, with all the honors becoming his most worthy and respectable Character.

On 30 August this notice appeared in the same newspaper:

TWELVE Months from the Date being allowed, by the hon. Court of Probate for the Creditors to the Estate of PHILIP MORTIMER, Esq. deceased, to being in their Claims; those who neglect to exhibit them within the Time will be debarred Recovery. All indebted to said Estate are requested to make immediate Payment, to GEORGE STARR, Attorney to the Executors.

ELIHU STARR, GEORGE PHILLIPS, Executors.
Middletown, August 25, 1794.

ANY Person who may have borrowed BOOKS of the Deceased, in his Life, are desired to return them to George Starr.

TOMORROW: Tied up in court.

“Verging fast towards its Last Period in this Stage of Existence”

In 1792, Philip Mortimer, having turned eighty, drew up his will.

In doing so, Mortimer appears to have aimed to preserve his good name in Middletown, Connecticut, in three ways:

• He bequeathed land and money to the city to build a granary and to stock it with two thousand pounds of grains. He also left land for a cemetery; Middletown still has a Mortimer cemetery.
• He promised freedom to all the people he held in bondage, under various conditions, in tune with Connecticut’s general turn against slavery (but not yet).
• He left his mansion, ropewalk, and other property to Philip Mortimer Starr on the condition that that boy—then nine years old—legally take the surname of Mortimer when he came of age.

Little Philip was Mortimer’s great-nephew, son of his niece Ann and her husband George Starr. Mortimer and his wife had had no children of their own, so he had brought that niece over from Ireland. The Starrs had named their children Martha Mortimer Starr and Philip Mortimer Starr after her benefactors.

In the will Mortimer wrote of having adopted both Ann and young Philip. In his study of Prince Mortimer, A Century in Captivity, Denis R. Caron made much of how Mortimer had never formally adopted those relatives. But such arrangements weren’t so formal in the eighteenth century as more recent law demands.

Caron also interpreted Philip Mortimer’s will as expressing hostility toward George Starr since it didn’t leave his estate to Ann (and thus to her husband as well) but merely let them use it until their son was old enough to inherit. But to me it looks like Philip Mortimer’s driving motivation was to give that boy the maximum incentive to carry on the Mortimer name. And there were plenty of precedents for that sort of bequest.

According to the legal analysis of the will, if young Philip didn’t take steps to become a Mortimer, then the estate would go to a son of his older sister (then only fifteen) as long as that youth would change his surname. And if the family still didn’t come up with a boy willing to carry on the name Mortimer, then everything would go to the Episcopal church.

As for the enslaved workers, Mortimer tailored his grants to each family unit:

• Bristol and Tamer: freedom for Bristol (no emancipation mentioned for Tamer, so she might already have been free) and the use of their “Garden Spot and House thereon as it is now fenced” for the rest of their lives, after which the land would revert to the estate.
• Hagar and her daughter: freedom plus £5 to “buy her Mourning” for his funeral.
• Jack and Sophy, and their three sons: freedom and use of “one and three-quarters Acres Land” during their lives, after which that land would be divided equally among their sons Lester, Dick, and John, all still under age fourteen. Those boys were to be “kept to School until they arrive at the age of Fourteen Years then put to Apprentice by my Executors, the two Eldest to be put to House Joiners until they arrive to the Age of Twenty-one Years and then give them their Freedom.”
• Amarillas and her children: freedom and “one Rood Land,” probably a quarter-acre.
• Silvy: freedom.
• Peg: freedom when she turned twenty-six; until then she was supposed to work for Elihu Starr, one of the executors.
• Peter and Prince, ropemakers: freedom in three years, but until then “both be kept at spinning” and “to live with and serve Capt. George Starr.”

Back in February 1790, George Starr had advertised in the local Middlesex Gazette asking people to settle their debts since he “purposes to carry on the Rope-Making Business one Year more.” But he decided to stay in the business. Receiving three years of free labor from two experienced ropemakers would be a windfall.

TOMORROW: Legalities.

Independence and Enslavement in Middletown

At the end of the Revolutionary War, lots of things changed in Middletown, Connecticut.

In 1784, Hugh White left that town to start surveying an area of upstate New York that would become Whitestown. Relatives and neighbors would follow. The central part of that area would take the name Whitesboro and for a long time have an unfortunate town seal.

Other Middletown residents also moved west to lands made available by the U.S. victory over Britain and its Native allies. Retired general Samuel Holden Parsons became a director of the Ohio Land Company. He traveled to western Pennsylvania in November 1789 and drowned while canoeing.

There were also legal changes at home. The area around the Connecticut River port, where the merchants and ship-builders lived, incorporated itself as a city in 1784. Instead of a town meeting with nearly every farmer eligible to vote, the city of Middletown had a mayor, four aldermen, and ten “common-council-men” chosen from the upper class.

The first set of aldermen included two former generals—Comfort Sage and the ill-fated Parsons—plus Col. Matthew Talcott and, for old times’ sake, former militia captain Philip Mortimer.

Among the first common-council-men was the husband of Mortimer’s favored niece, George Starr, as well as Col. Return Jonathan Meigs.

Also in 1784, the state of Connecticut passed a Gradual Emancipation Act—so gradual that it didn’t actually emancipate anybody for another twenty-five years. Children born into slavery after 1 Mar 1784 would become free on their twenty-fifth birthdays.

The 1790 U.S. Census counted 2,648 people enslaved in Connecticut, alongside 2,771 free blacks. The person who owned the most other people in the state—eleven by official count—was Philip Mortimer.

Back in Boston, as we know from newspaper advertisements, Mortimer employed at least one Irish teenager at ropemaking in 1738, and he imported young indentured servants from Ireland in 1740 and 1741. Maybe he enslaved Africans then, too, but he was doing so in a big way (by New England standards) in 1790.

That number grew to seventeen by July 1792. Mortimer then listed the people working for him for free as:

• Bristol, married to Tamer
• Hagar and her daughter
• Jack, Sophy, and Sophy’s sons Lester, Dick, and John, all under age fourteen
• Amarillas and her children
• Silvy
• Peg, still under the age of twenty-six
• Peter and Prince

That first census also found that Mortimer was the only white person on his estate, the biggest in Middletown. Most of the people he claimed as property must have been his household and farm help. But Peter and Prince worked at his ropewalk as spinners.

TOMORROW: Freedom, but not yet.

“He will do every Thing any Man can do towards a full Supply”

Philip Mortimer was not from an old New England family and he was Anglican, two traits that might have made him more likely to support the Crown in the pre-war political conflict.

Instead, Mortimer served on the Middletown, Connecticut, committee of correspondence. On 6 Mar 1775, the Connecticut Courant announced that he and George Philips would oversee the public sale of molasses and coffee brought in from Jamaica “agreeable to the 10th Article of said Association.”

That part of the Continental Congress’s boycott agreement said that goods landed between 1 Dec 1774 and 1 Feb 1775 could “be sold under the direction of the committee” covering that region, with “the profit, if any, to be applied towards relieving and employing such poor inhabitants of the town of Boston, as are immediate sufferers by the Boston port-bill.”

Mortimer was also a selectman for the first two years of the war and a justice of the peace.

In 1781, French troops on their way to Yorktown camped on Mortimer’s land in Middletown, according to an article by Allen Forbes for the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The young merchant who married Mortimer’s niece Ann Catharine Carnall, George Starr, was even more active in supporting the American cause. In 1778 Starr, who had the militia rank of captain, became a deputy commissary of hides for the Continental Army. On 26 October Gen. Samuel Holden Parsons wrote to the commander-in-chief from Middletown:

I find Capt. George Starr of this Town is appointed by the Board of War to take Charge of the Leather belonging to the Continent, purchase Shoes, Cartouch Bozes & other Military Accoutrements, by the inclosd Order you will find the Board have impowerd him to contract for those Articles in Exchange for raw Hides; I am fully Satisfied he will do all that any Man can do in that Department;

he informs me he Shall be able to send on about Twelve Hundred pair of Shoes within four Weeks about Seven Hundred of which are now On Hand & will be forwarded as soon as he can procure Buckles for about 300 or 400 Cartouch Bozes which are made and with the Shoes will compleat A Load for One Waggon; he Says he will take every Measure in his Power to procure a large Quantity of Shoes & thinks tis probable he Shall be able to furnish about 1000 or 1500 Pair a Month if the Leather can now be had in exchange for Hides as he is a Man very assiduous in his Business I have no Doubt he will do every Thing any Man can do towards a full Supply—

As to Caps he Says tis impossible to make an Estimate of the Quantity of Leather on Hand suitable for that Business which is not fit for Shoes or to be Usd for Accoutrements or in the Quarter Master’s Department as ’tis not in whole Sides, but part of most of the Leather in working is found unsuitable for other Business which will well Answer for this.

Starr did that job for three years. Even after stepping down he sent George Washington two pairs of boots for his personal use in 1783, though the general was unsatisfied.

TOMORROW: The new postwar order.

(The photo above shows Samuel Holden Parsons’s house in Middletown, now gone, from Damien Cregeau’s article “Top Ten Demolished Houses of Revolutionary War-Era Connecticut” for the Journal of the American Revolution.)