“Thus did I engage in the arduous Struggle in the commencement of that revolution”

In the summer and fall of 1783, Lt. Joseph Wheaton was feuding with another Continental Army officer. Among the issues was the accusation that he sold rum to the soldiers at a personal profit. There were court-martial proceedings.

Lt. Wheaton wrote what Henry Knox Papers cataloguers call a “Long letter describing his service in the army and denouncing the accusations made in ‘envy’ against him.” That letters said that he’d “been in the army close to eight years,” or since 1775.

In fact, in early 1776 Wheaton appears to have been inside British-held Boston. The earliest evidence he was helping the American side was in late 1777, and his first Continental commission came in early 1779. But suggesting he had been fighting the war from the start sounded more impressive.

Wheaton also appears in the correspondence of the first five Presidents, usually asking for better jobs on the basis of his past services. For example, as John Adams left office, Wheaton sent him this letter:

Having been honord by you with a request to State Some circumstances which took place in the eastern part of the State of Massachusetts in the early part of our revolution, I have taken the liberty now to inclose that Statement to you, and permit me to add, that thus did I engage in the arduous Struggle in the commencement of that revolution with a zeal commensurate With the object, and continued in the armies of my country until tranquility was restored and the object of our contention obtained, Since which I need not add how my feble efforts have been imployed—Notwithstanding I have much reason to fear, that tho’ I am grown grey in Service, I shall be heard of Soon (if any Should deign to enquire after me) in retirement, and in poverty, unable to Support a wife and two young Children my feelings have lately been much agitated by the political disquietude and changes of this Country, on which I make no comment…

After the War of 1812, Wheaton spent years lobbying the U.S. Congress to reimburse him for expenses he allegedly incurred as a quartermaster. Once again he demanded respect for “Having served nine campaigns in the revolution under experienced officers,—commencing on the 11th day of May. 1775, in the capture of the Margaretta…” (Which actually took place in June 1775, and had nothing to do with his financial accounts forty years later.)

Wheaton even passed that mission on to his progeny. Decades after he died in a Baltimore asylum, his heirs were still petitioning Congress for compensation. Wheaton’s Revolutionary War pension file doesn’t have the usual reminiscences from the petitioner and his witnesses in the early 1800s. Instead, it’s all about what congressional committees were deciding about him after the Civil War.

As I said yesterday, it’s possible Joseph Wheaton did take part in attacking H.M.S. Margaretta in June 1775, just as he claimed—over and over. And it’s possible that those claims were exaggerated or completely made up as a way to improve his social standing in the new republic.

All we can be sure of is that the first contemporaneous evidence of Wheaton’s activity during the Revolutionary War shows him seizing a civilian boat on behalf of the Royal Navy.

TOMORROW: Marblehead harbor in 1776.