William Jackson in and out of the Boston Jail

One month after he’d decided to sail out of Boston with his goods, the brazier William Jackson was locked up in the town jail, suspected of stealing from his fellow merchants.

Cdre. John Manley had captured him on the Elizabeth. Crowds in Newburyport, Salem, and Boston had jeered him. The Massachusetts Council had ordered him into prison.

Bostonians already had some reasons to dislike Jackson. The great fire of 1760 started in his shop. He defied the non-importation movement in 1770, and on top of that he hosted Capt. Thomas Preston before the Massacre.

Then in 1774 Jackson signed the complimentary Addresses to Govs. Thomas Hutchinson and Thomas Gage. He stayed in town when war broke out. He joined the Associators, the Loyalist militia formed in Boston during the siege, though he tried to explain that away:

General [William] How…isued a Proclamation for the Inhabitants to Associate themselves and bear Arm’s in defence of the Town, being what I did not thing [think] was my duty I did not sing [sign],

sometime After he Isued another recommending to the Inhabitants to Associate themselves for preserving the peace and good Order of the Town by preventing any Riotous doings by the Soldier’s or other’s which I thought Incumbent with every good Citizen to comply

The Patriot government naturally looked askance at any “associators” who fell into its hands.

At the same time, William Jackson had some local support. Unlike Crean Brush and the other merchants locked up alongside him, Jackson had grown up in Boston. His mother Mary and older brother James still lived there. His shop sign, the Brazen Head, was a long-time landmark for locals and visitors.

The jailers had been ordered not to let Jackson have pen and paper, but he could ask his family for help. He stated, “after my Committment my brother wrote Mr [Joshua] Wentworth for my Baggage.”

More surprisingly, other members of Boston’s business community spoke up for him. I already quoted Isaac Smith, Sr.’s comment that he hadn’t really done anything bad. A few years back, Chris Hurley told me that Jackson garnered letters of support from selectmen John Scollay and Samuel Austin, printer John Gill, and other Patriots. (Among those names is John Peters, who could be the future husband of Phillis Wheatley.)

Later William Jackson would tell the Loyalists Commission that he was let out of jail after 126 days, or in August 1776. Some of his fellow prisoners would be locked up for much longer.

TOMORROW: Back to Cape Ann.

“Without the Privelege of Pen, Ink, Paper or Candle”

In April 1776, Watertown was the seat of Massachusetts’s government.

Though people could now go into Boston, that town was still reeling from the siege. Plus, there was smallpox.

So the Massachusetts General Court stayed in Watertown—the assembly in the town’s meeting-house and the Council in an upper chamber of Edmund Fowle’s house (now headquarters of the Historical Society of Watertown, shown here).

Under the provincial charter, because the governor and lieutenant governor were absent (both driven away by the war), the Council exercised executive power.

That’s why, on 12 April, James Otis, Sr., as senior member of the Massachusetts Council, signed this order to imprison five genteel Loyalists captured aboard the brig Elizabeth:

To the Keeper of the Goal at Boston, in the County of Suffolk—Greeting—

You are hereby directed and commanded to take into your Custody Crean Brush, William Jackson, Peter Ramsey, Edward [K]eighley, and Richard Newton, lately taken in their flight from Boston in attempting to carry away from thence under the protection of the British fleet, large Quantities of Goods Wares & Merchandizes, the Rightful Property of the Inhabitants of that town, and having joined themselves with the Fleet & army employed against the united Colonies of America—

and you are commanded to confine the said Crean Brush William Jackson & Peter Ramsen [sic], each in an apartment by himself, without the Privelege of Pen, Ink, Paper or Candle, and not suffer them, or either of them to converse with any person whatever, unless in your hearing, and for the better Security of the said Crean Brush you are further ordered & commanded to put him into Handcufts immediately—

And them and each of them safely keep, ’till the further Order of the Major part of the Council, or they be otherwise discharged by due Course of Law—Hereof fail not at your Peril.

Two days later, Maj. John Grizzage Frazer, as assistant quartermaster for the Continental Army, wrote to Gen. George Washington to say that those men were now locked up. Brush was “in Irons.”

Frazer also passed on the news that on 12 April “8 british seamen” had made off with the cutter from H.M.S. Renown, one of the Royal Navy ships still hovering in the outer harbor, and got into Boston. Those defectors were much more welcome than the Loyalists who had tried to leave.

TOMORROW: Free William Jackson!

“They were much insulted by the people”

Yesterday we left William Jackson on the road from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Boston, having reached the town of Newburyport on 11 April 1776.

Jackson and dozens of fellow Loyalists had been captured aboard the brig Elizabeth while trying to sail to Halifax with the rest of the British evacuation fleet.

Most of the king’s army, and most of the Loyalists inside Boston, had managed to get away. Which meant popular anger about those people focused on the prominent few remaining—like Jackson.

In Newburyport, an angry crowd surrounded the tavern where the captives were eating, objecting to how they were riding in carriages. Carriages that Jackson, ship captain Peter Ramsey, and the others had hired.

Jackson later recounted:

we sent for the Committe of safety to Appease them, but all to no purpose, finding our selves in such a situation we comply’d, the Committe not thinking it safe they Appointed a Guard of five Men and Obliged us to pay the Expence the rest of the Journey,

as soon as we came out of the Inn we received Blow’s, mud, stones, Eggs, and every other abuse and proceeded to Boston being 40 miles on foot

In Salem, the lawyer William Pynchon (1723–1789) wrote in his diary:

Wm. Jackson, merchant, and others, with some regular soldiers, went thro’ Salem on foot for Boston, under guard; ’t is said they were much insulted by the people (it must be presumed to be the rabble) at Newburyport, in their way hither; that Jackson was stopped and obliged to leave his carriage, and walk on foot from Newbury to Salem, and thence to Boston

Pynchon then said: “in Newbury street he was stopped again and obliged, after his hat was knocked off, to fall on his knees and beg pardon of the mob and of the Country, and to say whatever was required of him.” At first I thought that might be a reference back to the streets of Newbury, but the placement suggests this story described when Jackson reached Newbury Street in Boston’s South End. Jackson himself didn’t specify such an incident.

Fellow gentlemen—merchants, professionals, landowners—sympathized with Jackson for coming under fire from crowds of poorer citizens. On 16 April, Isaac Smith, Sr., wrote to John Adams from Salem:

You have heard of Bill Jackson’s being taken. He received some Insult on the road which am sorry for and lamented by all, persons of any consequence. He is in Boston goal, but I dont learn he has behavd any way Ill att Boston dureing the seige.

Indeed, Jackson’s letter complained that after reaching Boston:

we was again carried to Wartertown 9 miles before the late Councill and being each seperately ask’d a few Question’s and not properly Examined was sent back to Boston and committed on a supposed Crime of being concern’d with Crean Brush denied the Use of pen Ink and paper and Candle light not suffer’d to speak to any one but in presence of the keeper whare we have been ever since 13th April

That accusation must have been especially galling to Jackson since one month before he’d been trying to stop Crean Brush from taking away Cyrus Baldwin’s goods.

TOMORROW: In the Boston jail.

William Jackson “shipt on board the Brig Elizabeth”

When I started to look at the Continental capture of the brig Elizabeth in early April 1776, I didn’t expect to find so much drama and mystery in the Wheaton family.

I thought they’d be a one-day diversion before I got back to the main storyline, following the other Loyalists on that ship—those sent to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Instead, the Wheatons’ story took me right through Patriots Day. But now I’m returning to the others—which also means resuming the Saga of the Brazen Head!

On 6 July 1776, the brazier William Jackson wrote to the Continental Congress, describing his experience of trying to evacuate Boston. His letter started with a bunch of special pleading about not intending to be political when he signed two documents that marked him as a Loyalist. Mind you, that was five years after he’d put himself among the “Enemies of their Country” for not signing the Boston Whigs’ non-importation agreeement.

Eventually Jackson got to his escape narrative:

General [William] How’s quiting this Town in so short a time as he did must of Consequence be attended with the utmost Confusion and gave no one time to settle his thoughts what to do with themselves or property, but the past unhappy situation we had been in this Town I finally concluded to take the Opportunity to go to Halifax their to have tarried or gone from thence to England untill the unhappy disputes whare settled leaving my Property behind,

but upon the proceedings of Mr. [Crean] Brush takeing away the property of the people of this Town as you will see by the copy of paper’s accompanying this which I have related to the Hon’ble Councill of this Province [Massachusetts], I then alter’d my mind and concluded to carry my Goods with me which I shipt on board the Brig Elizabeth being Twenty-Six packages

on the Passage was taken by three of the United Colony Vessell’s and brought in Portsmouth New Hampshire

The Congress had appointed the merchant Joshua Wentworth (1742–c. 1809) as its agent in that port. His job included using the admiralty court to “condemn” captured ships, then selling them and their cargo for the benefit of the government and the mariners who’d made those captures. Wentworth’s house—since expanded, moved, and restored—appears above.

Upon my landing your agent Mr Wentworth Inform’d me he must Examine my Baggage as also what Money and Paper’s I had, from the former he has detain'd about £35- LMy [lawful money] and from the latter five setts of Bills of Exchange amounting to £100- stirlg payeable to my self Only,

after he Examined my Baggage had his leave to carry it with me but haveing no Acquaintance in the Town accepted his Offer of his store, and haveing tarried one day upon Parole the next morning the Master [Peter Ramsey] and two other passenger’s and my self haveing provided Carriadge’s at our own Expence and being attended by a Man sent with us by Mr. Wentworth we set of for head Quarter’s,

but upon our reaching Newbury Port about 20 miles whare we stopt to refresh our selves the popular Assembled and swore we should not ride and threatened to destroy the Carriadge

This was the anti-Loyalist sentiment I wrote about yesterday.

TOMORROW: Escape from Newburyport.

“Such Cost and Charge as hath arisen by their being brought before the General Court”

On 13 Apr 1776, the Massachusetts General Court decided that “Caleb Wheaton and others [well, other men], who were taken aboard the brig,” should be brought to its meeting-place in Watertown ”for Examination.”

Four days later, as quoted yesterday, the Marblehead committee of correspondence wrote to say they now thought two of Wheaton’s sons—Joseph and Caleb, Jr.—had stolen a local man’s boat about six weeks before. That apparently focused the legislators’ attention on the family.

On 19 April the Council and the House named members to a joint committee to question the Wheatons.

Four days later, those members determined that Caleb Wheaton, Sr., had been “an Associator”—a member of the Loyalist militia—inside besieged Boston. Furthermore, he had been “in other Instances unfriendly to American Liberty,” perhaps a reference to his work as a Customs officer in Maine, or his statements supporting Parliament back in early 1775.

But the two legislative houses disagreed about what to do with the Wheatons. The published record of the Massachusetts House, readable here, says simply that the Council approved the first recommendation from the committee and the assembly didn’t concur.

Peter Force’s American Archives, evidently based on more complete manuscript records from the Council, revealed more details. The committee recommended

that the said Caleb Wheaton give bond to the Treasurer of this Colony for the sum of three hundred Pounds, with sufficient surety for his future good behaviour, or be confined in some Jail within this Colony until he shall find such surety; or if the said Wheaton shall think proper, and shall procure his passage for himself and family to Nova-Scotia, he may have liberty to remove there on his own expense, provided he will give his promise in writing, not to bear arms against the United Colonies.

And that the said Caleb Wheaton, Jun., and Joseph Wheaton, upon their giving their written paroles not to bear arms against the United Colonies, nor any way to aid or assist the enemies of said Colonies, and they paying the expense of being brought before this Court, may be discharged.

After the lower house said that wasn’t good enough, two more legislators were added to the joint committee, and they went back to rethink their recommendation.

The next day the Council approved a revised proposal:

• All three Wheatons would be responsible for a £500 bond.
• They not only had to promise not to fight the colonies, but also “not correspond with any of the Enemies of America.”
• They had to “pay such Cost and Charge as hath arisen by their being brought before the General Court.” 
• If any of those conditions weren’t met, they would be “committed to close confinement.”

There was no more mention of letting the Wheaton family resume their trip to Nova Scotia.

On 25 April the House considered those strictures and agreed. (Its journal says “close Imprisonment” instead of “close confinement,” if that matters.)

The committee report on that measure, signed off by Caleb Cushing of Salisbury for the Council, Perez Morton as Council secretary, and James Warren as speaker of the house, went up for auction last year.

Caleb Wheaton came back on 4 May with a petition to the House

setting forth that he has been apprehended as inimical to his Country, that he is released by giving Bonds, and is now in low Circumstance; and praying therefore that he may be enabled to recover his Household Furniture, Provisions, &c. on board the Brig Elizabeth, at Portsmouth; whereby he may support himself and Family.

The assembly gave Wheaton “Leave to withdraw his Petition.” In other words, it said no.

The Massachusetts legislature, especially the lower house, was in no mood to do any favors to Loyalists. In fact, the Wheatons even had to pay the costs of being transported to the General Court. And it appears Caleb, Sr., later told the British government that he was locked up for three months. The Wheatons’ case reflects a popular mood in the spring of 1776 that affected other Loyalists as well.

TOMORROW: William Jackson returns to Boston.

The Case of the Stolen Fishing Boat

Ashley Bowen was a sailrigger in Marblehead who kept a diary for many years, published in print and online by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

On 29 February 1776, Bowen recorded a waterfront crime:

This night some seamen took Eleazer Ingalls’s boat and went to the Nautilus.

H.M.S. Nautilus was a Royal Navy sloop, rated for sixteen guns, under the command of Cdr. John Collins. It patrolled outside Marblehead harbor, hunting for the Continental schooners and trading ships. Or, as Bowen wrote on 1 March:

The Nautilus layeth a mile below our Fort. Much ice about her. Ingalls’s boat astern.

The next day the warship sailed out of sight “and carried Ingalls’s boat with her.”

A month later, Bowen started to record details about the Loyalists captured on the Elizabeth:

5 [April:] … Admiral John Manley arrived at Beverly [other sources say Gloucester] with 13 of the King’s troops on board, prisoners whom he had taken out of a brig he took bound from Boston for Halifax and carried in to Portsmouth, laden mostly with English dry goods, one [William] Jackson merchant. . . .

9 [April:] … I find Captain Samuel Tucker hath brought the inhabitants that was taken by Manley from Cape Ann and landed them here, and they are housed at Mr. William Rogers’s house at Nick Cove. . . .

10 [April:] Sam Tucker went out and returned to Beverly as his cruise is up. Passed a ship for Boston. The 3 men are taken up that stole Eleazer Ingalls’s boat and carried her to the ship.

The authorities had cracked the case of the missing boat! On 17 April Joseph Orne reported to the Massachusetts Council on behalf of the Marblehead committee of safety:

The Committe of Correspondence upon a ReExamination of the Prisoners, (taken by Capn Manly on board the Brig Sally [sic] bound to Hallifax) have made a Discovery of Joseph Wheaton & his Brother Caleb Wheatons Stealing & Carrg away a Fishing Boat in the night of the 28th Feby last, from Eleazer Ingalls of this Town, & then made their Escape to one of the Men of Warr Station’d here—

An Acct of the Boats amount with stores &c, Will be forwarded by the Owner who also Attends to Wait your Honours Determination respecting what Steps He shall pursue in the Recovery of his Intrest Again—

We are with the Greatest Respect
In behalf of the Committee
Joshua Orne Chairm.

P S Phineas Jones one of the Prisoners & who was also concerned in the above Theft Eloped the 10th Inst—notwithstandg he was under the Care of the Guards

Before reading these sources, I pictured Caleb Wheaton, Sr., going into Boston just before the war began or shortly afterward, and his wife and family joining him there (perhaps reluctantly for some) in the spring or summer of 1775.

The way Orne wrote about this theft suggests a different scenario: Phineas Jones, Joseph Wheaton, and Caleb Wheaton, Jr., stole Ingalls’s boat in order to get to H.M.S. Nautilus and thus into Boston. If so, those Wheaton brothers were inside the besieged town for only a couple of weeks before it was time to leave.

TOMORROW: A summons to Watertown.

“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.

“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.

“I said to him—Dennis let us go and take that Schooner”

Where were Caleb Wheaton, Sr.’s sons when the Revolutionary War began in April 1775?

Wheaton made his home on a substantial riverside plot in Machias, Maine, but he also owned real estate in Dedham. It’s conceivable an older son was farming that land.

The newspaper articles I quoted here suggest Wheaton himself was traveling in his home town of Rehoboth and nearly Providence, Rhode Island, in February.

But I haven’t found any statement from Caleb Wheaton about why or when he left Machias, when he went into Boston, or how many family members were with him.

In contrast, Caleb’s son Joseph Wheaton left a definite and detailed account of how he saw the war begin. In a letter to Gideon O’Brien, written on 23 Apr 1818 and held and published by the Maine Historical Society, Joseph Wheaton stated:

Before the Battle of Concord 19. Apr 1775—the Margarette Schooner Capt Moore—saild from Boston and came to Machias to escort convoy two sloops owned by Ichobod Jones with lumber for Boston & for the use of the British Governmt

while those vessels were loading. their came to Machias a vessel, & brought the news of the Battle of Concord—and communicated it to the people, on a Saturday Evening—

the next Morning Sunday it was proposed to take the officers when at public worship, and thereby obtain the vessel in retaliation for Concord & Lexington,

in attempting this, the officers Capt Moore & others escaped and got on board the Schoon—and fell down to Scotts Wharf—Where they were fired upon by a party who had come there headed by Mr [Benjamin] Foster from the East river—but as it fell dark very soon the Margarette fell down the river near where my family then lived

on Monday morning the people being yet together at Scotts—the Schooner in view. Your Brother Dennis and Myself were Standing on the Wharf by ourselves—when I said to him—Dennis let us go and take that Schooner—

how will you do it Said Dennis—

I said, we can take Job Hains’s Sloop, get the people on board her, the Sloop will out Sail the Margarette, we can board her and take her—

with all my heart said Dennis—

we then called to our aid two youths and renewed the proposition to which they agreed—we four immediately steped into a boat and went on board the Job Hains’s sloop and demand him to take the sloop to Scotts Wharf which with some little opposition was effected—

so soon as we steped on shore and gained the Bank before Scotts house, we four took off our Hatts and gave three cheers—when your Brother Jeremiah steped forward, yourself & Brother John & called upon the people to undertake the interprise to which all consented

We know from other sources that Lt. James Moore brought H.M.S. Margaretta to Machias in early June 1775, well after news that a war had started. That should be our first tip-off not to take the story that Joseph Wheaton told more than forty years later at face value.

TOMORROW: Maine memories. 

“Sacrificed his home and domestic ties for the cause of liberty”

The story of Joseph Wheaton’s defection from his Loyalist family to the Continental Army was passed down in both branches of the divided family, but the details got fuzzy and/or exaggerated.

E. Alfred Jones published the Canadian Wheatons’ version in his Loyalists of Massachusetts:

Joseph, also a loyalist, was taken prisoner and confined in Concord gaol, where he was successfully induced to join the Americans and was given a commission as ensign.

I haven’t yet found any connection between Wheaton and Concord, but members of the family were indeed detained in 1776.

A U.S. Congressional report in 1879 accepted this version from Joseph Wheaton’s descendants:

that Lieutenant Joseph Wheaton served in the Rhode Island Line from the commencement to the close of the revolutionary war; that his father and ten brothers all held commissions as officers in the British service, and that he alone sacrificed his home and domestic ties for the cause of liberty; that he was disinherited by his father, Colonel Caleb Wheaton, who commanded a regiment of British pioneers, who to the day of his death never forgave his son for what he considered a disloyalty to the King of Great Britain in joining the “Yankee rebels”…

Joseph Wheaton’s father Caleb was a lieutenant in a provincial company of guards and pioneers, never a colonel. The family boasted that five sons served in branches of the British military, not ten.

Most significant, Joseph Wheaton wasn’t in the Continental Army “from the commencement“ of the war. As I’ve been discussing, in April 1776 he, his father, and the family were captured by Continental schooners trying to sail from Boston to Halifax with the British invasion fleet.

But Wheaton did eventually join the Continental forces. Documents show that in September 1777 the New Hampshire committee of safety began to disburse money to him, and as of January 1778 he had “orders…to Enlist men for Rhod Island,” where the British were holding Newport. In April 1778 he was commissioned as a lieutenant in Capt. Samuel Dearborn’s state company for that campaign.

Francis B. Heitman’s Historical Register of Officers of the Continental Army stated that Joseph Wheaton became an ensign in the Second Rhode Island Regiment on 1 Mar 1779, rising to lieutenant by the end of the war.

According to a letter he wrote in June 1783, Lt. Wheaton went into New York City at the end of the war to seek out his Loyalist relatives. He found that “his parents were gone to England and Nova Scotia”; indeed, Caleb Wheaton, Sr., was in London pursuing a Loyalist claim in the middle of that decade. In 1820 Joseph described this situation as: “[I] found myself disinherited by my father for shedding my blood in the cause of liberty and my country.”

On 12 May 1789, the weeks-old U.S. House of Representatives elected Joseph Wheaton to be its first sergeant at arms, empowered to carry a ceremonial mace and enforce protocol. He held that position until 1807, meaning he moved with the federal government from New York to Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. The picture above shows the unfinished U.S. Capitol in 1800.

During the War of 1812 the old lieutenant returned to the U.S. Army, serving as a captain and then major in the quartermaster department from 1813 to early 1815.

According to the Congressional report quoted above, early in the Revolutionary War Joseph Wheaton had “received a severe saber wound on the head, which troubled his mind through life, and terminated in his dying in the insane asylum, in Baltimore, in the year 1828.”

As we’ll see, there’s reason to doubt that account of his Revolutionary activity.

TOMORROW: Back to Machias.

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.

Caleb Wheaton “industriously vindicating the Measures of the Ministry”

In yesterday’s discussion of how the Massachusetts legislature dealt with Loyalists captured on the Elizabeth in April 1776, I left out Caleb Wheaton and his sons: Caleb, Jr.; Joseph; and John.

That’s because their story is complex and detailed enough to deserve a few postings on their own. And even then there will be holes and mysteries.

Vital records of Rehoboth show Caleb Wheaton born there in 1713. There were lots of Wheatons in that region, however, including across the nearby border in Rhode Island. Unfortunately for us, that means there were other men with the same name moving in and out of the eighteenth-century record.

Documents in Caleb Wheaton’s filing to the Loyalist Commission in 1784 show that he served in the Massachusetts army raised by Gov. William Shirley to hold Annapolis Royal in 1744. Later he was “Commandant of St. George’s Fort in the Eastern Part of the Province of Massachusetts,” now Thomaston, Maine.

Customs Commissioner Charles Paxton certified that his agency made Wheaton “a preventive Officer at Machias in which he conducted himself faithfully and diligently to the Acceptance of the Board.” That couldn’t have been a full-time position, given the size of trade in the region.

By 1774, Wheaton owned 200 acres in Machias, Maine, where he lived, and 173 more acres in Dedham. Capt. Solomon Smith wrote that he “was Situated in the most advantagest place for traid in the harbour of Machias.” Wheaton’s family consisted of a wife and nine children, some grown.

That year, Caleb Wheaton testified, he was “obliged to fly from his Estate and Property…on Account of his Attachment to the British Government.”

The 13 Feb 1775 Newport Mercury ran these two articles:

Rehoboth, February 3, 1775.

A Number of the Inhabitants of this Town assembled on Monday last [28 January], to enquire into the Conduct of Mr. Caleb Wheaton, who lately came here from the Eastward, and who had rendered himself obnoxious, by openly espousing & vindicating the Plan of Despotism now carrying on against the Colonies. A Committee was appointed to wait on him, and after making an Acknowledgment of his Villany, asking Forgiveness, and promising Amendment, he was ordered to depart the Town in twelve Hours. . . .

PROVIDENCE, Feb. 4.

Mr. Caleb Wheaton, who some Time since was obliged to quit this Town for industriously vindicating the Measures of the Ministry, returned here from Rehoboth the Beginning of this Week, which Place he had likewise been obliged to leave; and Yesterday a Number of the Inhabitants paid him a second Visit, to remind him of their former Request, when he thought proper to make a precipitate Flight.—So many all the Enemies to America become destitute of a Resting-Place for the Soles of their Feet.

The reference to “the Eastward” makes me think these items referred to Caleb Wheaton, Sr., from Maine.

Like other New England Loyalists, Wheaton found protection in army-occupied Boston. Gen. Thomas Gage certified that “he was employ’d as an Officer of Guides in the Kings Service.” According to E. Alfred Jones’s Loyalists of Massachusetts, “By orders of General Sir William Howe he pulled down the Old North Meeting House,” which happened on 16 Jan 1776.

TOMORROW: The Wheaton brothers.

“What I am to dow whith the Prisoners for I have Thirtey hear now upon Expences”

A lot of the correspondence that followed the Continental capture of the Elizabeth in April 1776 involved money.

First, there was the cost of housing the prisoners taken on that brig.

Eleven men were sent to Gloucester, including four British soldiers and Caleb Wheaton, the Customs officer from Maine. Their families came along.

Winthrop Sargent, Sr. (1727–1793), the Continental Army’s agent at that port, wrote to Gen. George Washington on 7 April:

The Bayer [bearer] of this has under his Gard a Number of Prisoners & Toreys tachen by Comodor [John] Manley & Capt. [Daniel] Warters the Prise is sent to Portsmouth I mack Know doubt you have had Acount of before this Reaches your Excellence thar nams you have below

thare is two Women & Sum Children Left hear which is not Abel to Travel Should be glad your Excellence would Send me Answor to what I Roat you Last about Capt. Watt:s Goods and what I am to dow whith the Prisoners for I have Thirtey hear now upon Expences.

I Rem[ai]n You[r] Hume Sarv.
Winthrop Sargent, Agent

P.S. Sence I rote the above Capt. [Samuel] Tucker here Carres the Prisners to Marvelhead ware thay well be sent to head Quartr will not Carrey the women & Children for fear of the Small Pox so I am fors to porvide for them hear Should be glad of your Order in Regard to the afore

Capt. Tucker on the armed schooner Franklin carried twenty-two people, including the Wheatons, to Marblehead on 9 April. That town’s committee of correspondence sent Azor Orne to ask the Massachusetts Council what to do with them.

On 13 April, the legislature “Resolved that the Soldiers belonging to the British Army, with their Wives and Children, be sent to General [Artemas] Ward.” Apparently they would be treated like other prisoners of war.

The Marblehead committee would be responsible for maintaining all the civilian women and children, tracking the expenses so the town could “endeavour to have the same discharged out of the Monies arising on the Sales of the Cargo and effects found on Board the said Vessel.”

And that was where the big money was. John Rowe heard that the Elizabeth had “Twenty five Thousand pound Sterling On board—in English Goods & Other Merchandise.” The Boston Gazette reported, “she is estimated to be worth about 35,000l. sterling.”

Cdre. Manley had sent the brig into Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Continental agent Joshua Wentworth would go through the legal process of ”condemning” the ship and its contents and putting them up for auction. Manley, his captains, and his crews were no doubt anticipating a good payday.

TOMORROW: What to do with the Wheatons.

“Itt’s said she has a large quantity of the Stolen goods”

It didn’t take long for New England Patriots to realize that Cdre. John Manley’s capture of the Elizabeth on 2 April 1776 was a big deal.

On 6 April, Isaac Smith, Sr. (1719–1787, shown here courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery), wrote to his niece Abigail’s husband, John Adams, from Salem:

Commodore Manleys fleet has taken a brigantine bound to Halifax on board of which is Bill Jackson and all his Effects and itt’s said she has a large quantity of the Stolen goods—

and there is on board likewise One Greenbrush, receiver general of the stolen goods and has distinguisht himself in that way by demanding People’s propaty from them. Itts said he came from York and itts said those Carpenters and runagarders from that way has behaved worse than any Others.—

A sloop is on shore at the Cape, beleive nothing very Valuable on board but itt Appears they (the inhabitants) went away in a most dismal Cituation, not haveing even Water sufficient and crowded and some sick with the small pox.

That sloop was the Sally, commissioned by Jolley Allen and captained by no one who knew what he was doing, as described back here.

As a merchant in Boston before the siege, Isaac Smith knew William Jackson and his troubles well. But Smith wasn’t familiar with Crean Brush, who had arrived from New York after the siege began—hence his reference to the man as “One Greenbrush.”

John Rowe was all too familiar with Brush, having watched that royal appointee confiscate some of his property. On 8 April he wrote in his diary with surprising calm:

Capt. Manly is come to Town & brings the Accot. of his Taking Crian Brush Wm. Jackson & Twenty other passengers in A Brigg bound with The Fleet—

This Vessell tis Said has Twenty five Thousand pound Sterling On board—in English Goods & Other Merchandise—

among the Prisoners is A Sergiant & 12 Men of the Kings Troops

On 8 April Rowe added:

There is a Confirmation of Crean Brush & Wm. Jackson being taken & also My Negro Fellow Adam

Adam was one of the four enslaved people found aboard the Elizabeth. Remarkably, this is the only time in his published diary that Rowe mentioned the man. We therefore have no clue about how he came to be on the brig. Had Adam asked to evacuate the town, or had Rowe sent him away?

TOMORROW: Following the money.