Henry Howell Williams as a Quartermaster?

In his 1858 History of East Boston, William H. Sumner wrote, “I think [Henry Howell Williams] was a quartermaster-sergeant in the army” during the siege.

To research that book, Sumner relied on Williams family sources. He wrote favorably of Williams and included the portrait of the man shown here. So that impression probably came from descendants.

In fact, the Continental Congress didn’t establish the rank of quartermaster sergeant until July 1776.

As for the possibility that Williams helped in supplying the Continental Army around Boston less formally, I’ve found no contemporaneous documentation for that. Unless, of course, we count how the Massachusetts government commandeered his livestock for the public benefit.

Adm. Samuel Graves did claim that the destroyed property on Noddle’s Island belonged to “a notorious Rebel then in Arms.” But there’s no evidence for Williams joining the Massachusetts or Continental army. We shouldn’t rely on Graves’s self-justifying account for what was happening on the other side of the siege lines.

Sumner linked Williams’s alleged work for the army to how he obtained some property from the Continental authorities after the siege:

In partial compensation for this destruction of private property was the gift of the barracks at Cambridge, after the army quitted it, by General [George] Washington, to Mr. Williams. . . . The barracks were removed to the Island, and part of them used for a house, which Mr. Williams erected over the old cellar, to be used as tenements for his workmen, and for barns and sheds for the sheep and cattle, at the westerly slope of Camp hill.

Again, I’d like to see contemporaneous evidence for such a gift. Gen. Washington was careful to work with the Continental Congress and local governments in managing public assets, so such a grant should have left a paper trail. The documents I’ve found suggest another story.

[The search function for Founders Online has slowed down considerably in the past month. On 19 May the U.S. government issued an acknowledgment of “periodic degraded performance owing to extreme spikes in traffic caused by excessive website crawling, associated with content scooping from AI platforms and other indexers.” This slowdown coincided with the D.O.G.E. takeover of federal government computer networks. Given that new agency’s faith in A.I. programs, that could be related to the “scooping.”]

TOMORROW: The barracks on Noddle’s Island.