“The next morning presented to the view of the enemy a regular fort”

Samuel Richards (1753–1841) came from Farmington, Connecticut. In May 1775 he marched north with his town’s company to the Boston siege lines.

According to the memoir he wrote for his family decades later, Richards went as a gentleman volunteer, not in the ranks, and in Roxbury, Gen. Joseph Spencer offered him a post as private secretary.

However, contemporaneous records show that the young man was a sergeant in Capt. Noadiah Hooker’s company from May to December 1775. Perhaps Richards preferred his family to consider him as always of genteel class. 

Those sources agree that when the Continental Army was enlisted for a second year, Samuel Richards signed on as an ensign—the lowest rank of officer.

Ens. Richards’s regiment served on the southern side of the siege. For a while they camped on Gen. William Heath’s family farm in Roxbury, then in barracks as close to the Neck as possible.

Richards and his company were part of the reinforcement that went onto the Dorchester peninsula on the morning of 5 Mar 1776 to prepare for an expected British counterattack. He left this account of what followed in his memoir, published in 1909:

the next morning at 8 oClock a relief was sent on—of which I was one—in passing the neck the tide having overflowed it I found my boots filled with mud and water, but we had no dry clothes with us, nor any time or opportunity for changing. . . .

I found a redoubt considerably advanced in a position well calculated for defence. Outside the parapet were casks filled with sand and so placed that a slight touch would set them rolling down the hill which was very steep on every side, and thus break the ranks of the enemy on their advance.

Those barrels had prompted a lot of discussion.

On the afternoon of the 6th we very plainly saw the enemy in motion in the town: dense columns of troops moving down the main street to the wharf and embarking on board the ships which moved down the harbor and formed in a kind of crescent at considerable distance from the hill.

most of the next day [still 6 March] was spent by those ships in beating up nearer to our post—the wind being a head:

we continued our work incessantly in compleating the redoubt, being urged to exertion by a full expectation of being attacked by the enemy’s troops we had seen embark on board the ships; we had no time to spare for reflecting on and counting the cost of the issue of the expected battle, we did not work litterally with arms in our hands, but they were lying by our sides, and it is presumed that every one ardently wished for the opportunity of shewing the enemy what freemen would do when contending for their just rights. No one needed stimulating to the performance of his duty as every one possessed the inclination.

As night approached an uncommonly severe South East rain storm came on with very high wind, and in that elevated situation, surrounded by the sea, it was felt in all its force, but the severity of the storm did not stop our work, which we pushed forward with the utmost alacrity. The next morning presented to the view of the enemy a regular fort, far advanced to completion—and to our view their ships below apparently in a very disorderly condition: the day passed without any thing worthy of particular notice.

In looking back, Ens. Richards skipped over the couple of days that passed before the next action.

At evening we broke ground on Nook, or Nuke point, a small hill very near the water oposite South Boston. The enemy could plainly hear the sound of our entrenching tools, on which they opened and continued an incessant cannonade with a general direction towards this point. I counted the number of discharges up to about 1500 during half an hour and then left off counting; this firing was continued through the night, and the morning shewed a novel sight; the ground all around where the work had been carrying on appeared as if it had been plowed irregularly, and a very great number of cannon balls were picked up: but strange as it may seem there was but a surgeons mate and two privates killed during the night.

Contemporaneous sources say a doctor and three Continental privates were killed.

TOMORROW: Marching into Boston.

(Richards’s portrait, as copied for another family member around 1890, appears above. It was auctioned in 2020.)

“This Convinced me that they were Actually fled”

Gen. John Sullivan of New Hampshire wrote this description of how experienced the end of the siege of Boston for John Adams:

We Saw the Ships under way about 8 in the morning and the River full of Boats with Armed Soldiers. This gave an Alarm as Some Suspected they were about to Land at Dochester but having a full view of them with a Glass from Plowed Hill I found they were going on board the Ships.

I then took my Horse and Rode Down to Charlestown Neck where I had a Clear view of Bunkers Hill. I Saw the Sentrys Standing as usual with their Firelocks Shouldered but finding they never moved I Soon Suspected what Regiment they belonged to and upon taking a Clear view with my Glass found they were only Effigies Set there by the flying Enemy. This Convinced me that they were Actually fled for if they meant to Decoy us they would have taken away Every appearance of Men.

By this time I was Joined by Colo. [Thomas] Mifflin who with my Brigade Major [Alexander Scammell] agreed to go up[;] Sending two persons Round the works to Examine whether there was any of them in the Rear of the works while we went up in the front. I at the Same time Sent for a Strong party to follow us on to the Hill to assist us in Running away (if necessary).

We found no persons there and bravely Took a fortress Defended by Lifeless Sentries. I then brought on the party to Secure what we had So bravely won and went Down to the other works where we found all Abandoned but the works not Injured in any part.

We hailed the ferry Boat which came over and Informed us that they had abandoned the Town. We then gave Information to the General who ordered me with the Troops under my Command to take possession of Charlestown and General [Israel] Putnam with 2000 men to take possession of the works in Boston

Samuel Hall’s New-England Chronicle for 21 March offered the public this account of the action at the other end of Boston on the Neck:

About the same time General [Artemas] Ward, attended by about 500 troops from Roxbury, under the command of Col. Ebenezer Learned, (who unbarr’d and opened the gates) entered the town on that quarter, Ensign [Samuel] Richards carrying the standard.

The command of the whole being then given to General Putnam, he proceeded to take possession of all the important posts, and thereby became possessed, in the name of the Thirteen United Colonies of North-America, of all the fortresses in that large and once populous and flourishing metropolis, which the flower of the British army, headed by an experienced General, and supported by a formidable fleet of men of war, had, but an hour before, evacuated in the most precipitate and cowardly manner.

That’s rubbing it in, don’t you think?

TOMORROW: Ens. Richards’s perspective.

“Very lucky for us that we got possession of Nook Hill”

On 16 Mar 1776, 250 years ago today, Abigail Adams wrote from Braintree to her husband John in Philadelphia:

There has been no firing since Last twesday [12 March], till about 12 o clock last Night, when I was waked out of my sleep with a smart Cannonade which continued till nine o clock this morning, and prevented any further repose for me

That cannon fire from the north was prompted by the Continental Army moving again onto Nook’s Hill on the end of the Dorchester peninsula nearest Boston.

As related back here, the Continentals had started to fortify that strategic ground on 9 March, but the British artillery forced them back with the loss of four men. A few quiet days followed before Gen. George Washington became impatient with the speed of the British departure and ordered another try.

The next day, Adams was able to report more details she’d heard about the operation:

It was very lucky for us that we got possession of Nook Hill. They had placed their cannon so as to fire upon the Top of the Hill where they had observed our people marking out the Ground, but it was only to elude them for they began lower upon the Hill and nearer the Town. It was a very foggy dark evening and they had possession of the Hill six hours before a gun was fired, and when they did fire they over shot our people so that they were coverd before morning and not one man lost

Meanwhile, the British inside Boston would have been happy to be outside Boston. They were staying in town despite every effort to leave. On 15 March, Capt. John Barker wrote in his diary:

The Wind being fair at 12 oclock in the day, the Troops were order’d under Arms in order to embark; but after waiting some time returned to their Quarters, the Wind having shifted.

And then on the 16th: “Still detained by the Wind.”

Abigail Adams saw the new position on Nook’s Hill as forcing the British out: “the enemy no sooner discoverd [that fortification] than Bunker Hill [in Charlestown] was abandoned and every Man decamp’d as soon as he could.” But as with the entire siege, Gen. William Howe was responding to weather conditions as much as or more than his enemy’s maneuvers.

“After Evacuation” in Cambridge, 19 Mar.

On Thursday, 19 March, I’ll speak at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site on the topic “After Evacuation: What Came Next for General Washington and the American Colonies.”

Back in January I spoke in that same space about Col. Henry Knox’s “Fine Train of Artillery” and the end of the siege of Boston. Here’s the video of that presentation. This talk will pick up when that left off.

Here’s our event description:

On March 17, 1776, the British military pulled out of Boston, giving General George Washington his first victory of the Revolutionary War. Already, however, he was positioning the Continental Army for the redcoats to return. Meanwhile, the political atmosphere had changed, sending the thirteen colonies in a new direction. This year’s annual Evacuation Day talk explores how much changed during the siege and what lay ahead as the Washingtons left Cambridge.

One detail I haven’t decided whether to include is the honorary doctorate that Harvard College conferred on Washington on 3 Apr 1775, as discussed back here. This was the first time the college gave an LL.D. degree.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper wrote in his diary about signing the handwritten diploma on 4 April. Then Cooper went to Cambridge to say farewell to the general and presumably help to deliver that document, only to find that Washington was already on his way south. No word about how the diploma eventually made its way to the man.

To reserve a seat at my talk on Thursday, or learn about how to look in online, go to this page.

Events on Dorchester Heights, 14 and 17 Mar.

The National Parks of Boston reopened the Dorchester Heights monument this year and will welcome visitors to two commemorations there of the end of the siege of Boston this week.

Saturday, 14 March, 11 A.M. to 2 P.M.
Artillery Encampment

See authentic cannons up close and learn about the British evacuation in 1776. This hands-on, family-friendly program offers a vivid look at the technology and teamwork that helped change the course of American history. Visitors will also have the opportunity to climb the newly restored Dorchester Heights Monument for sweeping views of the harbor and city skyline.

Cannon firing demonstrations will take place at 12 p.m. and 1 p.m.

This year the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day/Evacuation Day parade is on Sunday, 15 March, for those who celebrate.

Tuesday, 17 March, 11 A.M. to 3 P.M.
Evacuation Day 250

This event is both a formal rededication of the monument and a commemoration of the day when British troops embarked from Boston and Continental troops marched into the town. It’s also the culmination of the Knox Trail events and of the Boston campaign for this Sestercentennial year. As such, I expect there will be speeches from lots of officials of different sorts.

The ceremony is scheduled from 11 A.M. to 1:30 P.M., and seating will be first come, first served. The monument will remain open for visitors until 3 P.M.

A Council of War in Roxbury

Early on the morning of 13 Mar 1776, 250 years ago today, Gen. Artemas Ward received a note from Stephen Moylan, muster-master general of the Continental Army, who was acting as an aide to George Washington, commander-in-chief.

Moylan wrote:

His Excellency the General, wants to Consult with you, General [John] Thomas, & General [Joseph] Spencer upon many matters & as he does not think it prudent at this time, that you all Should be So far as Cambridge from your posts, I have it in Comand to inform you that he will Call at your house or General Thomas’s this day at ten ôClock, where he will expect to meet you & them

I imagine a bit of a scramble that morning as the generals on the southern wing of the Continental siege lines prepared to receive their boss.

(It’s notable that Moylan didn’t mention Joseph Frye, a colonel ranked as a brigadier under Ward. The commander didn’t much like Frye. He had served in the summer of 1775, gone home when he didn’t get a Continental commission, and come back in February 1776. On 7 March, Gen. Washington told Joseph Reed that Frye “has not, and I doubt will not, do much Service to the cause—at present he keeps his Room, & talks learnedly of Emeticks Catharticks &ca. For my own part I see nothing but a declining life that matters him.”)

When Gen. Washington came to Roxbury, he brought Gens. Israel Putnam, William Heath, John Sullivan, Nathanael Greene, and Horatio Gates—all the generals present at the siege. They held a council of war in Ward’s headquarters. (The picture above shows that house in the mid-1800s after a lot of modification.)

The record of that council shows that Washington asked for advice on three questions:

• Should he order part of the army to head to New York to guard that city in case the British military struck there next?
• If the British evacuated Boston, should he leave part of the army there to guard the town?
• If the British lingered in Boston, should he order the army to try fortifying Nook’s Hill, as they had on 9–10 March (with the loss of four men)?

The council of war concluded:

• The rifle battalion should march immediately to New York, to be augmented by militia troops from that and neighboring colonies.
• There would be no need to leave Continental troops in Boston since the Massachusetts militia could guard it.
• If the British troops were still in Boston on 14 March, the army would go back onto Nook’s Hill.

Once again, the siege was over, and yet not over.

“Without the leave of the Governor”

Earlier this month the Journal of the American Revolution ran an article by Ray Raphael about colonial Massachusetts’s constitution and how the royal government tried to curtail it.

Here’s a taste:

Of the four punitive acts passed in response to the Boston Tea Party, closing the port of Boston receives most attention in textbooks today—but at the time, with 95 percent of the colony’s population living outside Boston, it was “An Act for the Better Regulating the Government of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay”—known today as the Massachusetts Government Act—that sparked the people’s fury and led them to cast off British rule.

Under the 1691 Charter, “freeholders” could call a town meeting whenever they saw fit—but no longer: “Whereas a great abuse has been made of the power of calling such meetings, and the inhabitants have, contrary to the design of their institution, been misled to treat upon matters of the most general concern, and to pass many dangerous and unwarrantable resolves,” the 1774 act declared, “no meeting shall be called by the Selectmen, or at the request of any number of freeholders of any township, district, or precinct, without the leave of the Governor, or, in his absence, of the Lieutenant Governor, in writing, expressing the special business of the said meeting.”

Likewise, on the provincial level, power was wrested from the people. No longer would the incoming “general court or assembly” choose the Governor’s Council:

Whereas the said method of electing such counsellors or assistants. . . hath been so far from contributing to the attainment of the good ends and purposes thereby intended, and to the promoting of the internal welfare, peace, and good government of the said province, or to the maintenance of the just subordination to, and conformity with, the laws of Great Britain, . . . the said method of annually electing the counsellors or assistants . . . should no longer be suffered to continue . . .

Be it therefore enacted . . . that the council, or court of assistants, shall be composed of such of the inhabitants or proprietors of lands within the same as shall be thereunto nominated and appointed by his Majesty.

All other officers would also be appointed by the governor, who could remove them at will…

The voters of Massachusetts didn’t like to see Gov. Thomas Gage implement the new law. Soon they were protesting against it—and shutting down the colonial government to do so.

The next courts were scheduled for Springfield, shiretown of Hampshire County, two weeks later, on August 30—but some 1,500 citizens made sure they did not sit. One eyewitness, Joseph Clarke of Northampton, gave a vivid account: “The people of each town being drawn into separate companies marched with staves & musick . . . The trumpets sounding, drums beating, fifes playing and Colours flying, struck the passions of the soul into a proper tone, and inspired martial courage into each.”

The judges and justices of the peace offered no resistance to “the body of the county,” as Clarke called the men who marched with their town’s militia companies. When a committee asked them “whether they meant to hold their commissions and exercise their authority according to the new act of parliament for altering the constitution of the province,” they all said they would not.

One corrective for the article: The Boston Port Bill went into effect on 1 June 1774. The Massachusetts Government Act may have been drafted to start at the same time, but the final language said it took effect on 1 August. And then the text didn’t arrive in Salem until a few days after that.

In other words, it took only about two weeks from the start of the law for people in western Massachusetts to organize major protests and shut down a branch of the royal government. That’s how much people wanted to maintain their constitution.

Events about Washington in Boston and Cambridge

Here are two events accessible online in the next two days that explore the start and peak of George Washington’s national career.

Wednesday, 11 March, 6 to 7 P.M.
The Siege of Boston: An Ending and Beginning
online via the Boston Public Library

National Park Service rangers will explore the siege of Boston—its origins, impacts, and conclusion—and how the departure of the British military from Boston would influence the pivotal year of 1776 and the rest of the Revolutionary War. Register here.

Thursday, 12 March, 6 to 7:30 P.M.
Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy
Cambridge Public Library in-person and online

Retrace President Washington’s post-inaugural journeys and explore how he sought to unite a fragile new nation, featuring:

• Peter Drummey, Chief Historian of the Massachusetts Historical Society (ret.) 
• Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, along with many other New York Times bestselling books

The public is welcome to attend this event in the library auditorium or register to watch online through this page.

“He must not fire upon the Town of Boston tonight”

On 10 Mar 1776, 250 years ago today, Gen. George Washington’s military secretary, Robert Hanson Harrison (shown here), sent this order to Gen. Artemas Ward in Roxbury:

By his Excellency’s command I am to inform you that It is his desire that you give peremptory Orders to the Artillery Officer commandg at Lams Dam, that he must not fire upon the Town of Boston tonight unless the Enemy first begin a Cannonade, and that you Inform the Officer at Dorchester heights that he is not to fire from thence on the Town—

If they begin, and we have any Cannon on Nuke Hill, his Excellency wou’d have the fire to be returned from thence among the Shipping and every damage done them that possibly can.

Notwithstanding the accounts received of the Enemy’s being about to evacuate the Town with all seeming hurry & expedition, his Excellency is apprehensive that Genl [William] Howe has some design of having a brush before his departure and is only waiting in hopes of findg us of our Guard, he therefore desires that you will be very vigilant and have every necessary precaution taken to prevent a Surprize and to give them a proper reception in case they attempt anything

This conditional order summed up the Continental commanders’ dilemma. On the one hand, they didn’t want to waste gunpowder and cause unnecessary damage to the town if the British army was leaving. On the other hand, they still didn’t fully trust the British commander to leave.

Around seven o’clock that evening, Gen. Horatio Gates sent another message to Ward with a similar mix of optimism and paranoid preparation:

The Motions of The Enemys Fleet, Strongly intimate their intention of Abandoning The Town of Boston tomorrow,

His Excellency Generel Washington is therefore Anxious to take every Possible Advantage of their precipate Retreat; & desires you would Order all the Troops at Roxbury, & Dorchester Heights, to be paraded at their Several Alarm Posts, half an hour before day tomorrow morning; it is not possible for His Excellency to give any Particular directions as to the manner of Distressing the Enemy, or assisting Our Friends in The Town, as there is no foreseeing the Circumstances that will accompany the departure of [the] Ministerial Army: a very exact Observation will be taken from hence of all The Enemys Motions at Sun rise.

the General desires the like attention may be paid on Your side, & wishes you to Communicate every half hour all extraordinary Occurrences; you may be assured of receiving the like minute Accounts from hence

Meanwhile, inside Boston Gen. Howe’s orders were all about preparing to sail, though he did add that “Upon Ringing the Church Bells at Night the Troops are to get under Arms.” Because he wasn’t entirely sure there would be no Continental attack, either.

Capt. John Barker summed up the situation inside the town this way: “Nothing but hurry and confusion.”

“The Firings Continued all Night”

With hindsight, we can see that 250 years ago the siege of Boston was basically over, with the British military preparing to leave.

At the time, however, Gen. George Washington couldn’t be completely sure that Gen. William Howe was pulling out. He had good indications from the letter I discussed yesterday and from some people who slipped out of Boston around the same time. But he still had to consider the possibility that Howe was deceiving him, or might change his mind.

On the night of 9 Mar 1776, the Continental troops moved to fortify another high point of the Dorchester peninsula: Nook’s Hill, also known as Foster’s Hill. It was on the tip closest to Boston, from which cannon could threaten the town.

Nook’s Hill wasn’t as high as the heights that Gen. John Thomas had first fortified. It was closer to the British artillery on the Neck and inside Boston. It was vulnerable.

Capt. John Barker of the Tenth Regiment described the action that day:

The Rebels having been deserned carrying Materials for making a Battery to Foster’s hill at Dorchester, the nearest of any to Boston; and at 8 o’clock in the evening it being reported they were at work there, our Batteries at the Blockhouse, the New Work at the Neck, and [John Rowe’s] Wharf began to play upon them, and kept it up all night so as to prevent their Working: they likewise fired at the Town from their different Batteries at Roxbury.

Sgt. Henry Bedinger of the Virginia riflemen described the experience from the American side:

About 2 hours after Dark the Enemy Began to fire on a part of our men who were throwing up a Breastwork on the Nearest point to Boston on Dorchester. They fired from a Small Vessel from Boston Neck, from the wharf, from Fort Hill, &c. Supposed they Fired 1000 Shott as it Lasted the whole Night. Our people Fired in Boston from Roxberry. The Firings Continued all Night. We had 1 Surgeon & Three men Kill'd.

The surgeon was Dr. Enoch Dole, buried in his native town of Littleton, as shown above and discussed here.

Ezekiel Price heard the cannonade out in Milton. In his diary for 10 March, he added that “some travellers from below [i.e., downriver]” had told him “Four men, some say five, were killed by the enemy’s cannon, and by one ball; they were sitting round a fire on the hill.”

Even during that exchange of fire, however, the British military really was preparing to leave. Barker also wrote: “All the Brass Artillery on board except a few small field pieces. Orders for all the sick Men and Wo[men to] be embarked before night.”

TOMORROW: Pressure.

“He would take no notice of it”

On 8 Mar 1776, 250 years ago today, three Loyalists walked out of Boston under a flag of truce.

Peter Johonnot and the brothers Thomas and Jonathan Amory handed a letter to the Continental Army officer commanding at the bottom of the Neck, Col. Ebenezer Learned (1728–1801) of Oxford.

That letter was signed by four Boston selectmen, and I quoted it in full here, a mere eighteen years ago.

The gist of the message was that “Genl [William] Howe…has no intention of destroying the Town Unless the Troops under his command are molested during their Embarkation.” The British army was ready to leave.

However, that gist was coated in verbiage and layers of intermediaries: the three gentlemen who brought the message, the four selectmen, Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, Gen. James Robertson. It wasn’t a letter from Gen. Howe himself or anyone he’d designated as his representative.

The next day, Col. Learned wrote back from Roxbury to the three Loyalists:

Agreeably to a promise made to you at the Lines Yesterday I waited upon his Excellency Genl [George] Washington and presented to him the Paper (handed to me by you) from the Select Men of Boston.

The Answer I receiv’d from him was to this effect “That as it was an unauthenticated Paper; without an address and not obligatory upon General Howe he would take no notice of it”

As Washington noted, Gen. Howe had put no promise in writing. He had also avoided acknowledging any legitimacy to Washington’s claim to be a fellow general.

Nonetheless, the reply Learned sent back assured the Loyalists, and the British officials behind them, that Gen. Washington had read the message.

Indeed, even as the Continental commander-in-chief was officially taking no notice of the letter, his staff was making several copies of it, and he was conveying its contents to Gov. Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut and the Continental Congress.

When I spoke in Acton last month, someone asked if Washington and Howe had made an agreement about letting the British depart. This exchange of letters that wasn’t officially an exchange was why I had to answer, “Yes and no.”

“A more interesting and bloody scene is apprehended”

The Rev. William Gordon’s account of the end of the siege of Boston continues, picking up (in the present historical tense) just after Gen. William Howe has spotted the Continental Army positions on the hills of the Dorchester peninsula:

The admiral [Molyneux Shuldam] informs him, that if the Americans possess those heights he cannot keep one of his majesty’s ships in the harbour. A council of war determines to attempt dislodging them.

General [George] Washington has settled his plan of defence and offence. Boston is so surrounded on every land side by neighbouring hills, that nothing can take place on the wharves or next to the water, but it may be noted by the help of glasses. Proper signals having been agreed on, by means of the hills, which are in view one of another, intelligence can be conveyed instantly from Dorchester heights to Roxbury, and from Roxbury to Cambridge and so the reverse. This mode of communicating information is the speediest and safest.

General Washington’s plan is, in case any number of the enemy leave Boston to attack the heights and are defeated, to communicate such defeat by the proper signal, when 4000 provincials are to cross over from Cambridge side, and attempt the town in the confusion that the regulars will be under. The boats are prepared, and the men paraded ready to embark. General [John] Sullivan commands the first division, and general [Nathanael] Green the second. Gen. [William] Heath objected to the command when offered, and remains in perfect safety with the troops left in Cambridge. The whole force which the commander in chief now has, including all the militia, is not much short of 20,000.

All is hurry and bustle in Boston. General Howe orders the ladders in town to be cut to ten feet lengths, that they may be fit for scaling. A large body of troops are to embark on board the transports, and to proceed down the harbour, with a view of landing in the hollow between the furtherest of the two fortified hills and the castle.

The men are observed by one, at whose door they are drawn up before embarking, to look in general, pale and dejected; and are heard to say, “It will be another Bunker’s Hill affair, or worse”—they have adopted the prevailing mistake of Bunker’s for Breed’s Hill. Some show great resolution and boast of what they will do with the rebels. When these troops, amounting to about 2,000, and designed to be under the command of lord Percy, are upon the wharves, and passing in the boats to the transports, the Americans expect they are intended for an immediate attack, clap their hands for joy, and wish them to come on.

General Washington happens at that instant to be on one of the heights; thinks with his men; and says to those who are at hand, “Remember it is the fifth of March, and avenge the death of your brethren.” It is instantly asked by such as are not near enough to hear, “What says the general?” His words are given in answer. They fly from man to man through all the troops upon the spot, and add fuel to the martial fire already kindled, and burning with uncommon intenseness.

The surrounding hills and elevations about Boston, affording a secure view of the ground on which the contending parties are expected to engage, are alive with the numerous spectators that throng them. A more interesting and bloody scene is apprehended to be just upon commencing, than what presented at Charlestown. They wait, as do the troops, officers and privates, the morning through; and till far into the afternoon, when they are convinced of the tide’s being so far ebbed, that no attack can be made by general Howe on the Tuesday, which indeed is not his intention, for he is preparing to do it on the Wednesday.

The transports go down in the evening toward the castle, a floating battery is also towed down, but the wind is unfavorable, and before they reach their destination blows up fresh, and forces three of the vessels ashore on Governor’s Island. A storm succeeds at night, such as few remember ever to have heard; and toward morning it rains excessively hard.

[March 6.] The design of general Howe was hereby frustrated, and a deal of bloodshed providentially prevented. A council of war, was called in the morning, and agreed to evacuate the town as soon as possible. The time that had been gained by the Americans for strengthening their works, before any attempt could be now made upon them, took away all hope of success…

And with that return to the past tense, Gordon signaled that the height of suspense was past. The siege would not end with a second mighty battle.

TOMORROW: When is an exchange of messages not an exchange of messages?

“By ten o’clock at night the troops have raised two forts”

Yesterday I quoted Gen. William Howe’s report on how he discovered and responded to the Continental Army fortifications on the heights of the Dorchester peninsula.

From the American side, one of the chroniclers closest to the action was the Rev. William Gordon of Roxbury. In his 1788 history he offered a detailed account of the Continental operation, which I’ll quote at length.

Folks who dislike historians describing events in the present tense may need to grit their teeth for a while.

All things being ready on Monday [4 Mar 1776]; as soon as the evening admits, the expedition goes forward. The covering party of 800 men lead the way; then come the carts with the intrenching tools; after them the main working body of about 1200 under general [John] Thomas: a train of more than 300 carts, loaded with fascines; hay in bundles of 7 or 800 weight, &c. close the martial procession.

The bundles of hay are designed for Dorchester neck, which is very low, and exposed to be raked by the enemy; and are to be laid on the side next to them [i.e., towards Boston], to cover the Americans in passing and repassing. Every man knows his place and business. The covering party, when upon the ground, divides; half goes to the point nearest to Boston, the other to that next to the castle.

All possible silence is observed. But there is no occasion to order the whips to be taken from the waggoners, lest their impatience, and the difficulty of the roads should induce them to make use of them, and occasion an alarm. The whips used by the drivers of these ox carts, are not formed for making much noise, and can give no alarm at a distance. The men in driving their oxen commonly make most noise with their voices; and now a regard to their own safety dictates to them, to speak to their cattle, as they move on, in a whispering note.

There are no bad roads to require an exertion; for the frost having been of long continuance, they are so hard frozen as to be quite good. The wind lies so as to carry what noise cannot be avoided by driving the stakes and picking against the ground, (still frozen above eighteen inches deep in many places) into the harbour between the town and the castle, so that it cannot be heard and regarded by any who have no suspicion of what is carrying on especially as there is a continued cannonade on both sides.

Many of the carts make three trips some four; for a vast quantitiy [sic] of materials have been collected, especially chandeliers and facsines [sic]. By ten o’clock at night the troops have raised two forts, one upon each hill, sufficient to defend them from small arms and grape shot. The night is remarkably mild, a finer for working could not have been sellected out of the three hundred and sixty-five. They continue working with the utmost spirit, till relieved the Tuesday morning (March 5.) about three. It is so hazy below the height that the men cannot be seen, though it is a bright moon-light night, above on the hills.

It is some time after day break before the ministerialists in Boston can clearly discern the new erected forts. They loom to great advantage, and are thought to be much larger than is really the case. General Howe is astonished upon seeing what has been done; scratches his head and is heard to say, “I know not what I shall do; the rebels have done more in one night, than my whole army would have done in months.”

That last remark is the sort that New Englanders liked to tell themselves the British commanders had made, not questioning how anyone on their side of the lines could know. And who knows? It may even be true.

TOMORROW: Does the empire strike back?

“The enemy had thrown up three very extensive works”

Two hundred fifty years ago this morning Gen. William Howe looked across Boston harbor and saw that the Continental Army had erected fortifications on the heights of the Dorchester peninsula.

Those weren’t strong fortifications—they were primarily wooden, with fascines (bundles of sticks) lying between chandeliers (frames sticking up like the pickets of a fence). But Howe could see men at work strengthening those barriers with earth.

Sixteen days later, Howe described his response in a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth:

On the 2d instant [i.e., of this month], at night, the rebels began a cannonade upon the town from Roxbury and Phipps’s Farm [in Cambridge], and threw some shells from both places, without doing any personal damage, and but little to the buildings; the same was repeated on the evenings of the 3d and 4th, by which only six men were wounded; the fire being returned from our batteries, but at such a distance as to be very uncertain in the execution.

It was discovered on the 5th, in the morning, that the enemy had thrown up three very extensive works, with strong abatis round them, on the commanding hill on Dorchester Neck, which must have been the employment of at least twelve thousand men in a situation so critical.

I determined upon an immediate attack, with all the force I could transport. The ardor of the troops encouraged me in this hazardous enterprise; regiments were expeditiously embarked on board transports to fall down the harbor, and flat-boats were to receive other troops, making the whole two thousand four hundred men, to rendezvous at Castle William, from whence the descent was to be made, on the night of the 5th, but the wind unfortunately coming contrary and blowing very hard, the ships were not able to get to their destination, and this circumstance also making it impossible to employ the boats, the attempt became impracticable.

The weather continuing boisterous the next day and night, gave the enemy time to improve their works, to bring up their cannon, and to put themselves into such a state of defence that I could promise myself little success by attacking them under all the disadvantages I had to encounter; wherefore I judged it most advisable to prepare for the evacuation of the town, upon the assurance of one month’s provision from Admiral [Molyneux] Shuldham, who, in this emergency, as he has on every other occasion, offered all the assistance he could afford.

The Continentals had actually armed their new forts with cannon on that first night. They had even brought the makings of barracks so that hundreds of soldiers could man those positions all night. It was a very well planned operation, a great contrast to the brave but ultimately unsuccessful improvisation that marked the provincial move onto the Charlestown peninsula the previous June.

Howe wrote that report on board H.M.S. Chatham, floating off the Massachusetts coast. The siege of Boston was over.

Archive in the Sky

In addition to the Freedom Trucks discussed yesterday, the federal government and its corporate donors are sending the Freedom Plane around the country bearing documents of national importance from the Founding period.

Those documents are listed on the plane’s own website. They are:

• William Stone’s 1823 engraving of the Declaration of Independence, which is both more common and more legible than the handwritten original. (This artifact is on loan from David M. Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group and collector of historical documents, while all the others are originals from the U.S. National Archives.)
• The Continental Congress’s Articles of Association from 1774, laying out the Continental Association boycott of goods from Britain.
• Oaths of allegiance signed by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr as Continental Army officers in 1778.
• The Treaty of Paris from 1783.
• A copy of the draft Constitution printed for delegates to the 1787 convention to debate and revise, this one with notes by David Brearley of New Jersey. 
• Chart of votes by states at that convention, including “The Constitution unanimously agreed to” (though Rhode Island didn’t send a delegation and New York’s was incomplete). 
• The Senate markup of the Bill of Rights in 1789, showing revisions of the language that came out of the House of Representatives. 

Legally the main omission is any form of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which actually formed the United States of America into a single country. But we always overlook that. 

The plane’s itinerary is Kansas, Georgia, southern California, eastern Texas, Colorado, southern Florida, Michigan, and Washington. This national tour includes no stop in the Northeast.

“Touch-screen displays, Revolutionary War artifacts, and A.I. slop”

Among the Trump administration’s Sestercentennial initiatives are modern gladiatorial games outside the White House on the President’s birthday. Less decadently imperial are the Freedom Trucks mentioned yesterday.

These trucks were clearly inspired by the Freedom Train that traveled the country in 1947–49, giving citizens a look at 127 documents from the National Archives and other artifacts.

The most detailed list of those documents that I found is a Huntington Library catalogue description of “Heritage of Freedom,” the booklet given out to explain those items to visitors. The selection didn’t include the handwritten Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, or Constitution, but it did have the Congress-approved Bill of Rights, George Washington’s copy of the printed Constitution, and various letters and pamphlets from the Founding era. The display went back as far as the Magna Carta and Christopher Columbus, and as recently as the surrender of Germany and Japan.

The 1940s Freedom Train previously inspired the American Freedom Train of the Bicentennial period, 1975–76. This one carried Washington’s copy of the Constitution again, the original Louisiana Purchase, and other documents, but also one of Judy Garland’s dresses from The Wizard of Oz, Martin Luther King Jr.’s pulpit, and a Moon rock. It was like a rolling Smithsonian.

What will be in the Freedom Trucks? The New York Times reported:

The truck exhibits were designed in collaboration with Hillsdale College, a conservative school in Michigan, and PragerU, a company that makes conservative educational materials. . . . The trucks prominently feature quotes from Mr. Trump and a video he filmed inside the Oval Office.

On 27 February, the New Yorker offered a story by Jessica Winter about PragerU’s projects:

Last year, PragerU unveiled the Founders Museum, a “partnership” with the White House and the U.S. Department of Education featuring A.I.-generated video testimonials from luminaries of the American Revolution. These include a digitized John Adams who ventriloquizes the words of the right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro, almost verbatim: “Facts do not care about our feelings.”

PragerU is also supplying the multimedia content for the Freedom Truck Mobile Museums, a travelling exhibition of touch-screen displays, Revolutionary War artifacts, and A.I. slop that will chug across the country on tractor-trailers throughout 2026, in celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It seems that the battle over who defines good and evil—or, at least, over who defines American history—will be waged, in part, from the helm of an eighteen-wheeler. . . .

Prager’s nonprofit is just one of dozens of conservative organizations, many of them Christian, that are named as “partners” in the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, which is overseen by Linda McMahon, the Education Secretary. The coalition has the secular task of developing programming for America’s birthday, such as PragerU’s Founders Museum and the Freedom Trucks, the latter of which received a fourteen-million-dollar grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. (In March, President Trump signed executive orders to dismantle both the I.M.L.S. and the D.O.E.; they remain alive, albeit in shrunken, ideologized versions of their former selves.)

Other America 250 partners include both of the major pro-Trump think tanks (the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation), a Christian liberal-arts school (Hillsdale College), the Supreme Court’s favorite conservative-Christian legal-advocacy group (the Alliance Defending Freedom), the Christian-right-aligned church of Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA), and something called Priests for Life.

Another notable detail from the New York Times: “Both institutions [Hillsdale and Prager U] said that they had not received any of the $10 million in taxpayer money and that they had funded their work with private donations.” That $10 million, you may remember from yesterday, was shifted by the White House from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to America250 and then to Freedom 250, ostensibly for these very trucks. What pocket is that money sitting in now?

TOMORROW: Up in the air.

The Sestercentennial as a Civil War?

Yesterday I quoted a couple of news stories about how the White House was using America250 to raise money, and how it set up another group called Freedom 250 to raise more money with fewer rules.

Boston 1775 readers may remember these reports from September of America250 fighting off a Trumpist staffer’s attempt to commandeer its communication channels. The White House lost its plant within that organization then. After that, it appears, the administration promoted a rival organization to suck attention and taxpayer funds away from America250.

Freedom 250 was originally named Task Force 250, an initiative ordered up within the Department of Defense in January 2025. (The administration has of course also tried to rename that government department, without congressional authorization.)

The Mother Jones article by Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore reported that the top of the National Park Service is now telling employees to replace all America250 references and logos with Freedom 250 insignias. There are competing sets of merchandise. (The internet working as it does, there’s also merch from Freedom250.net, a domain registered in September 2024 and operating out of Sandwich.)

The New York Times story by Kenneth P. Vogel, Lisa Friedman, and David A. Fahrenthold says: “About $10 million in taxpayer funds has already been redirected to Freedom 250 from America250 for a fleet of six mobile museums called ‘Freedom Trucks’ that rolled out last month.”

Where did that $10 million come from? The conduit is the Institute of Museum and Library Services. At first the Trump administration tried to shutter that agency entirely, but federal judges ruled that illegal—so the administration is exploiting that channel instead.

Kelly Jensen of BookRiot reported, “IMLS’s new leadership has decided that nearly all of the $14.1 million allocated to the National Leadership Grants for Libraries program is going to a single recipient, the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission for its America250 project, even though the America250 project has nothing to do with the Leadership Grant’s requirement that the grant recipient’s work ‘involve or directly impact libraries’.”

But that was back in September. Now, it appears, at least $10 million of that library money has been shifted over to Freedom 250 for trucks.

TOMORROW: About those trucks.

Sestercentennial for Sale

Here’s an excerpt from Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore’s article “Trump’s War on History,” in the March–April Mother Jones:

Uniformed troops were handing out free bottles of Phorm Energy—a beverage launched nationally the month before by Anheuser-Busch and Dana White, a vocal Trump supporter who runs the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Phorm, which bills itself as the “ultimate energy drink,” is an official sponsor of America250, a government-funded nonprofit organizing a series of celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday, culminating on July 4 this year.

When asked, a soldier explained he had been ordered to hand out the samples—despite Defense Department rules that bar the military from endorsing “a particular company, product, service, or website.” The Pentagon didn’t answer questions about this apparent violation.

So it goes with the Trump administration’s approach to the country’s semiquincentennial. Congress is expected to allocate some $150 million for the festivities, but that’s not enough to fulfill Trump’s vision. So corporations with links to the president or his inner circle—UFC, Palantir, Oracle, Amazon, Coinbase—have signed on as sponsors, pouring in millions of dollars alongside companies like Chrysler, Coca-­Cola, and General Mills.

The promise of all that cash and spectacle helped America250 lure a flock of political operatives with Trump ties. Chris LaCivita, who helped steer Trump’s 2024 campaign, joined as a strategic adviser. Campaign Nucleus, founded in 2021 by former Trump campaign honcho Brad Parscale, helped organize America250 events. So did Event Strategies, which staged Trump campaign gatherings in 2020 and 2024, as well as the January 6, 2021, rally near the White House that preceded the attack on the US Capitol. America250 said in January that it’s no longer working with these contractors but hasn’t disclosed how much they were paid.

America250 and the White House insist they are planning nonpartisan festivities for all Americans, rather than creating a slush fund to throw the president militarized birthday parties and advance hard-right ideology. But in reality, American history is being subordinated to Trump’s cult of personality. The president’s face is suddenly ­everywhere—next to George Washington on America250-themed National Parks passes; alongside Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on giant banners hanging from federal buildings; on a $1 coin under consideration by the US Treasury.

Faced with sporadic pushback from a congressional commission overseeing America250 and from career officials at various agencies, Trump is now seeking to evade even these modest constraints. In December, he launched a new organization, Freedom 250, that could implement his most outlandish anniversary events without the inconvenience of legislative oversight or mandatory bipartisanship. For the president’s 80th birthday this year, Freedom 250 will help organize a UFC fight on the White House lawn.

More about Freedom 250 appeared in the 8 February New York Times article “For $1 Million, Donors to U.S.A. Birthday Group Offered Access to Trump” by Kenneth P. Vogel, Lisa Friedman, and David A. Fahrenthold:

President Trump’s allies are offering access to him and other perks to donors who give at least $1 million to a new group supporting flashy initiatives he is planning around the nation’s 250th birthday, according to documents and interviews. . . .

Freedom 250 has also emerged as another vehicle, akin to the White House ballroom project, through which people and companies with interests before the Trump administration can make tax-deductible donations to gain access to, and seek favor with, a president who has maintained a keen interest in fund-raising, and a willingness to use the levers of government power to reward financial supporters.

Several of Freedom 250’s planned events and monuments lack obvious connections to the Boston Tea Party, the signing of the Declaration of Independence or other seminal moments in the nation’s founding. Rather, they are tailored to Mr. Trump’s political agenda and his penchant for spectacle, personal branding and legacy. They include the construction of an arch overlooking Washington, an IndyCar race through the nation’s capital, a national prayer event and an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on the White House lawn to coincide with the president’s 80th birthday.

Meredith O’Rourke, the president’s top fund-raiser, is amassing private donations for Freedom 250. Her team is circulating a solicitation, obtained by The New York Times, offering “bespoke packages” for donors.

While there are inconsistencies in the solicitation language, the detailed breakdowns of packages for donors indicate that those who give $1 million or more will get invitations to a “private Freedom 250 thank you reception” hosted by Mr. Trump, with a “historic photo opportunity.” Those who give $2.5 million or more also are being offered speaking roles at an event in Washington on July 4.

TOMORROW: Team of rivals?

(The photo above shows the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., displaying a large portrait of a man convicted of multiple felonies intended to influence a Presidential election.)

“Acts of government could be resisted when they threatened the essential rights”

Jack Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies emeritus at Stanford University, with parallel appointments in political science and law.

He’s the author of respected books of Revolutionary-era history, including Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1997), James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic, and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America.

In other words, Rakove has worked largely in political history and how the Framers translated ideas into laws and policies for the new nation. When he uses the term radical, as in his 2020 book Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion, he’s talking about the ideas of the Founders in their eighteenth-century context, not about the importance of now noting how hierarchical those men’s lifestyles were.

That’s something to bear in mind while reading Rakove’s essay for the Washington Monthly earlier this month, “Playing the Grinch at America’s 250th Birthday Party.”

In that essay Rakove writes:

Last June, I attended a conference on The American Revolution and the Constitution held at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. It was the seventh of eight conferences that AEI has been holding on the 250th anniversary of independence. Given its conservative orientation, any conference sponsored by AEI would predictably take a celebratory turn, and so did this one. My own paper on “The Invention of American Constitutionalism” fits well within that framework. . . .

Yet at the conference dinner that followed, I became the grinch who wanted to rob the other happy campers of their semiquincentennial joy. Yuval Levin, our gracious host and convenor, started our post-dessert conversation by asking me, “What do you think the celebration of the 250th anniversary of independence will be like?”

“I think it is going to be a complete disaster,” I replied, and offered a few reasons to support that view. The most important one, directly relevant to our subject, was that the constitutional system is lurching toward collapse and outright failure.

That link leads to Rakove’s article from last June, “It’s Not Just a Constitutional Crisis in the Trump Era. It’s Constitutional Failure.” Having spent a career studying how the Constitution was supposed to work, he’s watching it not work that way at all.

Rakove discerns some hope in what his graduate-school colleague Pauline Maier described as “extra-legal resistance” in her excellent book From Resistance to Revolution:

In the colonies as in Britain, communities believed that certain acts of government could be resisted when they threatened the essential rights and interests of the king’s subjects. Various kinds of uprisings, riotous events, and militant protests did occur during the colonial era of our history. From the perspective of imperial officials representing the British crown, these protests were illegal acts to be repressed or punished. Ship captains in the Royal Navy believed they were acting legally when they forcefully impressed sailors for their warships. Merchant seamen, shipyard workers, or ordinary individuals innocently strolling the streets thought otherwise. When anti-impressment riots occurred, they enjoyed the community’s full support.

This tradition was well established before the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 disrupted imperial politics. Some of the earliest protests against the Stamp Act were indeed too violent. It was one thing to intimidate individuals who thought they had received lucrative appointments as stamp collectors into resigning their commissions. That was the easiest way to halt the enforcement of the Stamp Act. It was another matter entirely to ransack the residences of royal officials, notably including the Boston mansion of Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor and chief justice of Massachusetts. . . .

In the past few weeks, Minneapolis has become our Boston, and its citizens have become modern Sons of Liberty. Far more important, they and their counterparts in other communities have unknowingly revived the strategy of resistance that American communities deployed between the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 and the crisis of independence. Blowing whistles, tailing ICE and Border Patrol vehicles, blaring airhorns outside the hotels where their agents are hopefully spending sleepless nights—these are modern versions of the extra-legal resistance that Maier described.

The protesters aren’t the only people behaving outside the law, however. The Trump administration continues to put unconstitutional pressure on Minneapolis, this past week announcing a freeze on paying for medical benefits for anyone in the state of Minnesota. It’s tried that tactic before through the Department of Agriculture, and been stopped by federal courts, repeatedly. That sort of tyrannical action naturally prompts protests.

“Possibly not the best man to colonize a new country”

I’ve been analyzing a letter from the Thomas Gage Papers at the Clements Library, written by Jonathan Hastings, Jr., on 11 June 1775.

Hastings addressed his correspondent as “Friend Jacob.” Their families were known to each other, and Jacob probably had connections to Harvard College.

Another clue to Hastings’s correspondent is his comment “Am happy you had so safe a Passage & found your Friends well.” Jacob was obviously traveling. Hastings then offered basic information about the siege, meaning he knew Jacob was far from Massachusetts. Crown forces probably intercepted the letter at sea, not on land.

I looked at the entries in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates for Harvard students in this period named Jacob who might have gone abroad. Almost all were settled down as ministers by 1775, usually inside Massachusetts.

One remaining candidate is Jacob Welsh (1755–1822) from the class of 1774. He was the son of John Welsh (1730–1812), a Boston jeweler and member of the club that used the silver punch bowl now called the “Sons of Liberty Bowl.” This Jacob had one brother, John, Jr., born in 1757.

Sibley’s says nothing about Jacob Welsh’s whereabouts between graduating in July 1774 and entering the Continental Army as an ensign at the start of 1776. (He served until late 1778, first at Fort Ticonderoga and then in the artillery.) Did Welsh leave Massachusetts in that stretch, missing the start of the Revolutionary War because he was in Europe, the Caribbean, or the west?

Jacob Welsh did prove more peripatetic than most of his peers. In addition, Sibley’s says, he “looked for the main chance wherever it might present itself.” After the war he settled in Lunenburg briefly, serving as the town’s legislative representative. But then he sailed to England, smuggling home a “carding and spinning machine” in hopes of securing a state patent for himself. In 1791 Welsh went to Philadelphia and applied to President George Washington to help build the new national capital. He invested in lots of land, as far afield as Louisiana.

In 1807, it appears, Welsh wrote to Gen. Henry Burbeck, a fellow veteran of the Continental artillery corps. According to Heritage Auctions, he submitted “suggestions for the defense of Boston,” including “substitutions for round cannonballs.”

By 1809 Welsh faced a legal judgment of almost a thousand dollars owed to a merchant in Salem. The authorities began to seize his local property. Welsh lit out for Geauga County, Ohio, to manage land that his father had bought a decade before. A county history published in 1878 stated:

Jacob Welsh was a native of Boston, of an old family, and reared in luxury, possibly not the best man to colonize a new country. At the time he came to Ohio, he was a middle-aged man; a gentleman of the old school, of medium height, fair complexion, dressed in small-clothes, with long hose and buckles at the knee, and shoe-buckles over the instep, liberally educated, of imposing appearance and stately address, quite fitted to the aristocratic drawing-rooms of Boston, but not appearing to especial advantage in the woods, trails, and cabins of the Western Reserve. While he was a good conversationalist, he had little energy, small business capacity, and a large disposition to spend money.

After another decade, enough people had settled around Welsh’s land to form a township. He promised his neighbors to “give glass and nails for a meeting-house, and fifty acres of land, to settle a minister.” In return, the township was named after him. In April 1820 Welshfield Township had its first election, and Jacob Welsh was chosen to be a trustee.

According to that county history, after Welsh died in 1822 locals found that he had “forgot” his promised bequests. Twelve years later, the community changed its name to Troy Township. That township’s website offers a more compact version of the story while Sibley’s says Welsh did make his promised donation. The county histories from 1878 and 1880 seem best documented, so I’ve relied on them.

Jacob Welsh’s gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find-a-Grave. The central, unincorporated part of Troy Township is still called Welshfield.

“It was not the Butler who fell in Battle”

I just finished quoting a letter that Jonathan Hastings, Jr., of Cambridge addressed to “Friend Jacob” on 11 June 1775. The letter probably never reached that friend because it’s in the files of Gen. Thomas Gage, the British commander besieged inside Boston at the time.

Hastings started by referring to “Your Brother’s Letter of 18th. May.” Later he wrote, “John intends to write to your Brother.” The writer had a younger brother named John, born in 1754 and graduating from Harvard College in 1772. Heitman’s Historical Register of Officers of the Continental Army says John Hastings “Served in the Army in 1775” but doesn’t specify a unit until 1777. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War likewise documents his service from 1777 on, rising to brevet major.

It looks like the Hastings brothers, Jacob, and Jacob’s unnamed brother were all part of the same crowd in Cambridge, probably connected with Harvard. Jonathan expected Jacob to know where “the Red House leading to Charlestown” was. Jacob and the Hastings family had financial dealings.

That link offers an explanation for Jonathan Hastings’s line “It was not the Butler who fell in Battle, but a Samuel Cooke from Danvers.” Harvard had a staff position called the butler. This man oversaw the buttery, which sold snacks and other little items to undergraduates. Unfortunately, the Harvard archives says, “there is no complete list of all of the Harvard Butlers.” It looks like the college reserved the job for master’s students to hold for two or three years before moving on.

Harvard’s class of 1772 included Samuel Cooke, Jr. (1752–1795), son of the minister in Cambridge’s Menotomy precinct. Some college documents say Cooke filled in as librarian while reading for his master’s degree. I suspect that he was the college butler in that period, thus known to his classmates and those who came after as well as to the administration.

After Samuel Cook of Danvers was widely reported as killed in the fighting at the Jason Russell House, Jonathan Hastings assured his friend Jacob that this wasn’t the fellow they knew from the buttery. The Menotomy Samuel Cooke, Jr.’s most significant action on 19 Apr 1775 was dragging his father away from the fighting.

TOMORROW: A man on the move and on the make.