“It was attributed to General Prescott”

After the British army and the New England provincials went to war in April 1775, people stopped worrying about political pamphlets like A Letter from a Veteran, to the Officers of the Army Encamped at Boston.

John Adams broke off his “Novanglus” essays. The New York printer Hugh Gaine struggled to remain politically balanced, literally printing on both sides of the conflict. Most prewar essays fell into obscurity.

Nearly half a century after A Letter from a Veteran appeared, William Tudor, Jr. (1770–1830, shown here), wrote about it in The Life of James Otis, of Massachusetts:

A few of the officers felt an esteem for the people, and were reluctant to engage in a civil war, which they knew would bring great misfortunes upon the country, and as they supposed, overwhelm it. There was to much folly and disgusting arrogance in many of the subalterns, and careless ignorance about the whole subject of dispute, that one of their superior officers published a small pamphlet, entitled, “A letter from a Veteran to the Officers of the army encamped at Botton.” It is remarkably well written, and while it justifies his own government, reproves the frivolity and rashness that treated the Americans with contempt. It was attributed to General Prescott.

Tudor didn’t state a source for this information, and the expression “It was attributed” suggests he wasn’t completely sure about it.

That book might have given the pamphlet more visibility. James Fenimore Cooper took a passage from A Letter from a Veteran (imperfectly cited) as a chapter epigraph in his 1825 novel Lionel Lincoln: or, The Leaguer of Boston. His protagonist was a British army officer with conflicting loyalties.

Tudor’s emphasis on how A Letter from a Veteran “reproves” British officers who showed contempt for Americans might also have given people a false sense of its overall argument. It expressed very little sympathy for New Englanders.

In 1860 a catalogue of the Massachusetts Historical Society library attributed A Letter from a Veteran to, of all people, Col. William Prescott, the commander of the provincial redoubt at Bunker Hill.

That made no sense. William Prescott was never a high officer in the regular British army or, so far as I see, any sort a general. He wasn’t a political writer, and he certainly wouldn’t have published a criticism of New England religious zealotry.

Nonetheless, the attribution to William Prescott was repeated in other American publications for the rest of the nineteenth century.

TOMORROW: General Prescott and General Prescott.