“The honor of this enterprise belongs to Joseph Wheaton”

Yesterday I shared part of a letter Joseph Wheaton wrote in 1818 about how men from Machias, Maine, captured H.M.S. Margaretta early in the Revolutionary War.

In 1824, Charles W. Goldsborough quoted that letter in The United States Naval Chronicle. Many other chroniclers drew on it to describe the fight, sometimes said (by people not from Fairhaven) to be the first naval battle of the war.

In The Pictorial Field-book of the Revolution (1852), Benson J. Lossing said in a footnote:

The honor of this enterprise belongs to Joseph Wheaton, a native of New York, then residing at Machias. He was an energetic young man of twenty years. He proposed the expedition, but modestly named [Jeremiah] O’Brien for commander. He was active in the whole affair, and in person seized the colors of the Margaretta.

However, in a 1975 article for Maine History titled “The Historiography of The Margaretta Affair, Or, How Not To Let the Facts Interfere With a Good Story,” Edwin A. Churchill grouped Wheaton’s description of events with other unsupported or untenable tales. Churchill referred to “the self-centered bragging of Joseph Wheaton” and said his memory was “notoriously bad.”

Churchill’s main targets were two big errors that he said “traditionalist” authors kept making in their accounts of the Margaretta affair. It wasn’t sparked by conflict over a Liberty Pole, he insisted, and Benjamin Foster’s ship didn’t run aground before the fight. Wheaton wrote nothing about a pole, but he left Foster out of his account entirely. 

I won’t continue to quote Wheaton’s account, which you can read in full here, thanks to Maine Memory. Nor will I try to pick apart its details, much as I like doing that. Other people, closer to Machias geographically and emotionally, can handle that task.

Instead, I’ll consider how Joseph Wheaton’s account of the Margaretta capture fits, or doesn’t fit, with his status in March 1776: in the family of a royal appointee evacuating Boston with the British military.

It’s possible that Joseph Wheaton did take part in the attack on the Royal Navy sloop in 1775, despite (or because of) how that would have angered his father, a local Customs officer and Loyalist. He wouldn’t have been the only Revolutionary veteran to muddle details of events forty years before and put himself and his friends at the center of an event. He definitely did join the Continental Army a couple of years later.  

On the other hand, coming from a Loyalist family gave Joseph Wheaton a strong incentive to play up his Patriot credentials. In 1776 Massachusetts authorities even confined him as a suspected Loyalist. Telling the story of helping to capture the Margaretta let Wheaton claim that he’d fought for what became the U.S. from (nearly) the start of the war.

And Wheaton told that story a lot.

TOMORROW: Over the decades.