Tracking the Wheaton Brothers

Winthrop Sargent, Sr.’s list of civilian men captured on the Elizabeth on 2 Apr 1776 and brought into Gloucester included (in his unique spelling):

• Kalep Whitten – Bad Man…
• Calep Whitten ju
• Joseph [Whit]ten
• John Whitten

I discussed Caleb Wheaton of Machias, Maine, yesterday. E. Alfred Jones’s Loyalists of Massachusetts states that he and his wife Mary had sixteen children, but not all survived to adulthood. The genealogies I’ve found are contradictory and confusing.

According to one family researcher whose work is shared here, those other three Wheatons were all boys born on New York’s Long Island:

• Caleb, Jr., on 20 July 1753.
• Joseph on 30 Dec 1754.
• John on 9 Aug 1756.

Jones’s Loyalists says Caleb and John were both born in 1757 and thus probably twins. Other records put Joseph’s birth in 1755. But let’s agree they were all around twenty years old in 1776 when Massachusetts authorities took them into custody.

Not all three Wheaton sons were of legal age in 1776. But they were all prime age to be soldiers, which is probably what mattered for Sargent. Sisters and younger brothers didn’t make the list.

To jump ahead, Caleb, Jr., and John would have standard trajectories as young American Loyalists. By 1777 they made their way to British-occupied New York City and joined provincial regiments fighting for the king. Caleb became a lieutenant, John a captain. At the end of the war they settled in Canso and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, respectively.

The only odd blip in those brothers’ story was that when Caleb, Jr., married Sally Bryant in November 1792, the couple was in Boston’s Trinity Church (shown above). 

Joseph Wheaton followed a different course, one that took him to the U.S. Capitol.

TOMORROW: Defection.