“An account of the progress of our machine”

On 31 Aug 1775, the Rev. Benjamin Boardman, serving as a chaplain to Connecticut troops at the siege of Boston, wrote in his diary:

I collected this day in cash for the encouragt. of Mr. Bushnels Machine the sum of £13.4.4. in cash out of our regt.

Boardman was a graduate of Yale, and David Bushnell (1740–1826) had just graduated from that college.

On 24 September, Dr. Benjamin Church wrote to his British army contact:

The distroying the Ships in the manner I wrote you before they began to dispair of tho’ the former of the Machine is full of faith that he can do it, Works on hardly and so let him, I say.

This intel might have referred to the same machine, or to different technology designed to damage Royal Navy ships.

Bushnell’s invention was still in the works, but getting closer to completion, when the doctor and inventor Benjamin Gale (1715–1790) wrote from Killingworth to Silas Deane at the Continental Congress on 9 November:

In your last you requested I would give you an account of the progress of our machine, and whether anything may be expected of it. I now sit down to give you a succinct but imperfect account of its structure, which is so complicated that it is impossible to give a perfect idea of it. . . .

I conclude by the time this reaches you the machine will be in camp. Lately he has conducted matters and his designs with the greatest secrecy, both for the personal safety of the navigator as to produce the greatest astonishment to those against whom it is designed,—

if this projection succeeds, of which I make no doubt, as I well know the man and have seen the machine while in embryo, and every addition made to it fills me with fresh astonishment and surprize. And you may call me a visionary, an enthusiast, or what you please,—I do insist upon it, that I believe the inspiration of the Almighty has given him understanding for this very purpose and design.

But two weeks later, on 22 November, Gale had to report a delay:

I have to ask pardon for the wrong information I gave you. At the time of my last writing, I supposed the Machine was gone, but since find one proving the navigation of it in Connecticut River. The forcing pump made by Mr. [Isaac] Doolittle, not being made according to order given, did not answer; which has delayed him. The trials I mentioned to have been made since Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin’s being here, was the explosion, which prov’d beyond expectation.

The most famous American scientist of the day had stopped in Saybrook on his way back from Cambridge to Philadelphia in order to inspect this invention.

Gale sent another update and plea to Deane on 7 December:

…everything answers well, but still, he fails on one account. He proposes going in the night, on account of safety. He always depends on fox-wood, which gives light in the dark, to fix on the points of the needle of his compass, and in his barometer, by which he may know what course to steer and the depth he is under water, both which are absolute necessity for personal safety of the navigator; but he now finds that the frost wholly destroys that quality in that wood, of which he was before ignorant, and for that reason and that alone he is obliged to desist. He was detained near two months for want of money, and before he could obtain it the season was so far advanced he was, in the manner I have now related, frustrated. . . .

The person, the inventor of this machine, now makes all his affairs a secret even to his best friends, and I have liberty to communicate this much from him only with a view to know if Dr. Franklin knows of any kind of phosphorus that will answer his purpose; otherwise the execution must be omitted until next spring, after the frosts are past.

As of 1 February, Gale was still seeking some phosphorescent material for Bushnell. He wrote, “I have lately seen the man, and conversed freely with him. He is no enthusiast; a perfect philosopher, and by no means doubtful of succeeding.” But the siege of Boston would end before warm weather.

TOMORROW: A new campaign.

(Several replicas of the Bushnell’s machine have been built over the years based on the verbal descriptions. The one shown above was in Westbrook, Connecticut, as of last year.)

“Environmental Histories of New England” in Boston, 18 Sept.

On Friday, 18 September, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host the New England Quarterly Symposium on Environmental Histories of New England, 1600-2026.

Papers relevant to our period include:

• “Preserving the Catch: Curing Practices, Environmental Agency, and the Eighteenth-Century New England Commercial Cod Fishery” by Morgan S. Hardy, University of Tennessee
• “Beyond ‘Hot Girl Summer’: Rural Life and Gendered Experiences of Seasonal Variability in Eighteenth-Century Northern New England” by Emma C. Moesswilde, Elon University
• “Many Are These Awfully Sudden Deaths: Mapping the Environmental History of Boston’s 1721 Epidemic” by Christopher Parsons, Northeastern University, and Molly Nebiolo, Butler University
• “Environmental history with/for Indigenous communities: Examples from Acadia” by Catherine Schmitt, Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park
• “‘A Fishay Noyse’: Taunton’s Herring Crisis and New England Energy Futures” by Zachary Bennett, Norwich University

The keynote address at the end of the day will be “Tom Paine’s Sunshine Soldiers” by Joyce Chaplin, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University.

Registration, which includes food, costs $20. The event is free for graduate students, teachers, and adjunct faculty.

On the afternoon before the symposium, the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, a co-sponsor of the event, will host an open house in its facilities at the Boston Public Library central building.

For the full program and registration information, start at this page.

“Those who have something to lose who are now ye. Zealous Patriots of the Day”

Since this is the anniversary of the 1774 “Powder Alarm” in Cambridge, I’m quoting from a letter that discusses that event and the surrounding political environment.

Stephen Mix Mitchell (1743–1835, shown here) was a lawyer in Wethersfield, Connecticut, having spent the 1760s as a student and then tutor at Yale College.

On 19 Sept 1774, Mitchell wrote to the merchant Peter Verstille in Boston. He first discussed his recent trip to the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock’s school, the challenges of collecting debts that season, and land that Gov. Francis Bernard might have been granted in Vermont.

Then Mitchell turned to the political turmoil in New England, addressing Verstille as representative of Boston and Massachusetts (which he wasn’t, but that’s another story):

We in the Country are more engaged for your Liberties (as I am told) than you are yourselves, you cannot conceive the Ardor of our people when the late Alarm happend. They flew to their Arms as readily as if they had been told their Wives & Children were captivated & carried of by a foreign foe,

I am fully convinced that the Country will never swallow these Acts of Parliament untill four fifths of the people are slain, the general say is “Tis a Country for which our fathers fought, bled & died with Savages, a Country for which we are not beholden to Great Britain, whose Liberties we will not give up but with our Lives——[”]

The Unanimity is beyond all Expectation. I have had Opportunity to enquire particularly in four or five Towns round about us which contain each about 4000 [sic] Inhabitants & not a Man whom the warmest Sons of Liberty do even suspect would not sacrifice his Life rather than submit....if this matter should come to blows, God only knows what would be the Event of it,

the Day is come when the friends of government at home can not say tis a Rabble who oppose them for tis now the land holders the freemen of our Towns those who have something to lose who are now ye. Zealous Patriots of the Day, & they will send their Sons to defend their Liberties; those who in the late warr would give 50 & 60 Dollars to hire a man to go into ye warr to get their Sons excused, are now determind. to trust the Defence of their Liberties in the hands of none but of their own families…

they say they chuse to live on their wonted good Terms with Great Britain, they chuse peace they chuse dependance on their mother Country, but if they must have warr or submit to these Duties & Marks of Slavery they have no Hesitancy in chusing the former;

they look up their old Deeds of patents from the Govt. & Company of the Colony when they read your Bill for regulating the Government of the Massachusetts Day, & then argue with themselves thus, “tis by this Deed I tho’t I held my land, this Deed is founded on our own Charter & what prevents our Charter from being taken from us, as that of our Neighbours has been? Then what security have I that I can hold my land by?”

Upon this the old Gray heads draw their old rusty Swords & order them to be cleand. & say like the brave Earl of Warren in another Case, “by this my father held & won his Land & by this I & my Children will defend it”—

This is no fiction but the cool deliberate Determination of the people, people who are friends to order & good government, & they are determind. this Time not to trust solely to the Virtue of the Merchants respecting non Importation, they will suffer no Mercht. To bring Goods.

It took some effort to track down Mitchell’s allusion to the “brave Earl of Warren.” Tobias Smollett’s Complete History of England told the story of John de Warenne, 6th Earl of Surrey (1231–1304), this way:

the earl of Warenne, who being required by the judges to produce his charter, unsheathed an old rusty sword, as the instrument by which his ancestors had acquired their lands, and with which he resolved to preserve them to the last drop of his blood. This bold answer gave [King] Edward to understand, that his inquisition would be attended with very dangerous consequences…

In the mid-1780s Mitchell represented Connecticut in the Confederation Congress. He was later appointed to the U.S. Senate to serve out Roger Sherman’s term, but his main government service was as a judge on Connecticut’s supreme court.

Mitchell’s letter is now at the American Philosophical Society and has been scanned as part of its Revolutionary City website. I haven’t found it transcribed anywhere before.

The View from the Catawba River

On 1 Sept 1776, 250 years ago today, North Carolina brigadier general Griffith Rutherford wrote a letter to the body that had commissioned him, the North Carolina Council of Safety.

He had taken a force of men to the head of the Catawba River to confront Cherokees who had, to preserve their land and as allies of the British Empire, raided some western settlements earlier in the summer.

Rutherford summarized the situation:

If the Indians evacuate the Middle & Valley Towns and our provisions will hold out and it be possible to March to the overhill Towns perhaps I shall go to that place, or perhaps send a detachment to join the Virginians.

Those under my command consists of 1,971 privates of foot, about 80 light horse. . . .

I have ordered 130 under three Captains to Range and defend the forts on the frontiers of Tryon, 175 on the frontiers of Rowan, 100 on Surry.

I am in a very imperfect state of health, but will be as assidious as possible in executing the important trust reposed in me. . . .

P.S. I am this moment informed by the pack horse master General that there are about 1,400 pack horse one driver to each 4 horse and pack horse master over every 10 drivers. We have 40 days provision.

By his count, between soldiers and drivers, Rutherford commanded nearly 2,500 men. Though his letter mentioned Virginians, he was actually aiming to rendezvous with South Carolina’s similar force under Col. Andrew Williamson.

On 19 September, some of Williamson’s troops, guided by Catawba scouts, clashed with the Cherokee in the Battle of Coweecho River. In the same month Griffith’s force founded only deserted settlements, which they burned.

The NCpedia site says: “By late September the two armies made their way home after destroying thirty-six towns and laying waste to crops and storehouses, thus reducing the Indians to a state of near starvation as winter approached.”

This campaign was far from New York City, where the main Continental and Crown forces were engaged in much larger battles. The western fighting tends to be seen as regional sideshows, fought by regional troops. (Gen. John Sullivan’s campaign in New York in 1779 is an exception.)

Nonetheless, the war in the west was an integral part of the Patriots’ war against the British Empire, and the conquest of interior lands among the most far-reaching consequences of American independence.

On 25–26 September, the Catawba and Cherokee American Revolution Symposium will take place at the University of South Carolina at Lancaster.

This program will bring together scholars and researchers from various fields to discuss Catawba and Cherokee communities, conflict, diplomacy, movement, and archeology in the Revolution.

For more information, see this webpage.