“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.

Two Vast and Trunkless Legs of Stone

Earlier this summer the National Park Service issued a series of reports about the triumphal arch proposed for Memorial Circle in Washington, D.C.

Those reports can be downloaded from this webpage.

One document, for instance, is a summary of the 100,936 public comments on this project (P.D.F. download; much smaller addendum).

The summary aggregates the points citizens have made, not counting how many people expressed particular ideas. Those points are overwhelmingly negative. (Some groups have filed suit to block the project.)

Appendix D (P.D.F. download) is a table of historic sites that could be adversely affected, directly or indirectly, by the arch. Those affected sites are:
1. Memorial Avenue Corridor Cultural Landscape
2. Arlington Memorial Bridge and Associated Features
3. Lady Bird Johnson Park Cultural Landscape
4. Arlington National Cemetery Historic District
5. Arlington House Historic District
6. Arlington House (Robert E. Lee Memorial)
7. Arlington House Cultural Landscape
8. Lyndon B. Johnson Memorial Grove
9. Mount Vernon Memorial Highway Historic District
10. Lincoln Memorial Cultural Landscape
11. Lincoln Memorial
12. National Mall Site and National Mall Historic District
13. The Mall Cultural Landscape
14. Washington Monument
15. Washington Monument and Grounds Historic District
16. Washington Monument and Grounds Cultural Landscape
17. Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway Historic District
18. East and West Potomac Park Historic District
19. L'Enfant Plan of the City of Washington, District of Columbia
20. Arlington Ridge Park
21. Pentagon
22. Fort Myer National Historic Landmark District
23. George Mason Memorial
24. Thomas Jefferson Memorial Cultural Landscape

On 28 August, the N.P.S. press office issued a new document titled “Triumphal Arch Assessment of Effect (Revised)”.

In this report, the adverse effects table is Appendix L, part of the main file. It adds to the sites expected to suffer adverse effects:
25. World War II Memorial
26. Thomas Jefferson Memorial
27. United States Capitol
28. Georgetown Historic District
29. Old Naval Observatory
30. Observatory Hill Historic District
31. Alban Towers Apartment Building
32. American Institute of Pharmacy Building
33. Halcyon House
34. Francis Scott Key Bridge
35. National Cathedral
36. National War College
37. Vigilant Firehouse
38. Bridge #5020
39. Mount Vernon Memorial Highway North Cultural Landscape Inventory
40. Old Warehouse Area and Ground Maintenance Complex
41. Frederick Douglass National Historic Site

Nonetheless, that latest report states:

Placing the Triumphal Arch within the George Washington Memorial Parkway is consistent with the park’s purpose as a scenic roadway honoring the nation’s first president and protecting the cultural and natural resources that frame the Potomac River corridor. The Arch’s role in celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States aligns with the Parkway’s long-standing function as a landscape dedicated to reflection on national ideals, unity, and sacrifice.

News media have reported this report as the N.P.S. “approving” of the construction, which technically it is, but only because the political appointees atop the Department of the Interior have insisted on rubber-stamping the President’s grandiose ideas.

Back in October 2025, when Donald Trump started waving around models of the arch, Time reported:

At the end of a press conference in the Oval Office Wednesday before the dinner, Trump was asked about the arch, of which a model sat on his desk. “Who is it for?” asked CBS reporter Ed O’Keefe. “Me. It’s going to be beautiful” replied President Trump.

Nothing about the Sestercentennial, “national ideals, unity, and sacrifice,” or “honoring the nation’s first president,” much less protecting cultural and natural resources.

“Me.”

Long Island Has Fallen

On the morning of 30 Aug 1776, 250 years ago today, Gen. William Heath was stationed at Kingsbridge, New York, on the Hudson River just north of Manhattan Island.

Heath wrote urgently to his commander-in-chief:

A very Extraordinary Report has Just Spread here, that whether True or false we are as yet uncertain That Long-Island is Evacuated by Our Troops. . . .

I am in Anxiety Untill I hear from you

This letter is transcribed at Founders Online, and the Massachusetts Historical Society has digitized Heath’s copy.

Likewise, Abraham Yates, Jr., head of the New York committee of safety, wrote to the commander from the same place:

In our way to Fishkill agreable to an adjournment of the Convention, we are informed that the Army is removed from Long Island to the City of New York—

an anxiety to know the fact, as well as to be informed wether you think any measures necessary for us to take—Induces us to trouble your Excellency at this time for an answer hereto—

We have ordered last Night all the Militia of the Counties of Ulster, Dutchess, Orange and Westchester to be ready at a Minutes warning, with five days provisions.

Gen. George Washington wrote back to Yates:

Circumstanced as this Army was in respect to Situation Strength &c., it was the unanimous advice of a Council of General Officers to give up Long-Island, and not by divideing our Force be unable to resist the Enemy in any one point of Attack, this reason added to some others, particularly the fear of haveing our Communication cut of from the Main (of which there seemed to be no Small probability) and the extreame fatigue our Troops were laid under in guarding such extensive Lines, without proper Shelter from the weather, induced the above Resolution.

It is the most intricate thing in the World Sir to know in what manner to conduct ones self with Respect to the Militia, if you do not begin many days before they are wanted to raise them, you cannot have them in time, if you do they get tired and return, besides being under very little Order or Government whilst in Service—

However if the Enemy have a design of serveing of Us at this place as we apprehended they meant to do on Long-Island—it might not be improper to have a body in readiness to prevent or retard a Landing of them on the East of Harlem River, if need be—

In haste & not a little fatigued, I remain with great Respect & Esteem Sir Yr Most Obedt Hume sert…

Washington let the adjutant general, Joseph Reed, reply to Heath:

The Report of the Evacuation of Long Island last night is true—it was a Measure founded in the fullest Necessity after the Surprize of our Troops last Tuesday [the Battle of Brooklyn], by which the Flower of our Army & some of our best Officers were lost.

add to this that the constant Rains upon Troops without Cover has so spoil’d the Ammunition & enfeebled the Men that had the Enemy attempted to force our Lines they must have done it with great Ease. The Ships have also been trying to get up the whole Week, which if they could effect our Communication would have been cut off and the whole Army must have surrendered at Discretion.

Under these Circumstances the remaining General Officers were unanimously of Opinion that it was absolutely necessary to retreat which was done so as to bring off all our Ammunition & Artillery except the heavy Pieces & most of our Provisions—

Our Situation is in all Respects critical Ld. Stirling & Gen. [John] Sullivan are both Prisoners—the latter was permitted to come out this Morning on his Parole with a Message from Ld. Howe. This is the Substance of what has passed in this important Week.

“15,000 people over 4,000 days”

Robert Parkinson is the author of The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution, its distillation as Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence, and Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier.

John Fea at the Way of Improvement Leads Home site interviewed Parkinson on the publication of his 2026 book, Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence, looking at the grievances of the Declaration of Independence and the British officials blamed for them.

But the parts of the conversation that interested me most looked back and ahead:

JF: When and why did you decide to become an American historian?

RP: At a very impressionable age, I lived halfway between Lexington Green and Plymouth Rock. Each weekend I tried to convince my parents to take me to one or the other. Early American history seeped into my bones from these public history sites in the years after the Bicentennial. (Hopefully, a similar process is happening among little boys and girls in these days after the 250th, too…)

JF: What is your next project?

RP: I am embracing that original thrill. Boston in the years before the Revolution was my first love. I’ve decided to return to that place in those years. Boston in the middle years of the 18th century was a very small place. And in just a few years a few among them recognized they had a political emergency on their hands and took steps to organize and craft an effective resistance campaign. How 15,000 people over 4,000 days faced (and refaced) a decision to either embrace resistance – or not – is a fascinating story. No one yet has tried to encompass the whole story of Boston’s Revolution. If you can explain Boston, you can learn a lot about the causes of the Revolution. By featuring the rivalry between the families fighting for control of the city’s politics – the Adams/Otis and the Hutchinson/Olivers – I propose to do just that in Boston’s Revolution, 1754-1774.

Four thousand days is just less than eleven years, not twenty, but the preceding nine will probably serve to establish the situation most Boston politicians viewed as better and wanted to get back to.

In 1755 William Shirley was not only governor of Massachusetts but commander-in-chief of the British forces on the continent. I think that let Bostonians think they still lived at the center of British North America, despite Philadelphia and New York growing larger and richer. That status changed during the war.

In the late 1750s the royal governor was Thomas Pownall, a Whig willing to cooperate with the local legislature. Pownall departed for his own career reasons in 1760. Lots of Massachusetts politicians viewed his brief administration as the way the province ought to be run.

“I decided that I’d make clothing until something better came along”

After I started reading intently about the Revolution in New England, one of the first living historians I remember chatting with was Henry Cooke.

He was presenting the life of a tailor by, you know, tailoring clothes. He mentioned researching the career of a Boston tailor and militia officer named Thomas Marshall.

“Ah, the man with the shovel,” I said. Referring to Marshall’s role in the merchants’ confrontation with John Mein.

That’s when we knew we’d get along.

Cooke and I were part of the team that reenacted the Boston Massacre for several years leading up to its Sestercentennial. His face should also be familiar to anyone who attended the reenacted tea meetings at Old South Meeting-House in that period, and many other events.

Earlier this summer, the Tufts Now website shared Marc Chalufour and Alonso Nichols’s profile of Cooke as a university alumnus.

The interview reminds me how unruffled Cooke is, for a man who can make his own ruffles:

How did you get started doing historical reenactments?

When I was in high school, my guidance counselor said if I was going to go to college, I needed to have extracurricular activities. This is 1974, and he said there was this minuteman group starting in Randolph, Mass., and maybe I should join them. I have been doing living history in various forms ever since.

When did you start making your own costumes?

That happened very early. When I first got involved, the only clothing patterns that were available to us were from something called Sketchbook 76. But they were little more than sketches of pattern pieces and a drawing of what the finished object should look like.

When I was a college student, I started making historical clothing for myself. A lot of the guys in the unit would say, “Hey, I need an extra shirt, can you make me one?”

When I finished my master’s program, I was putting out résumés. I had done internships in archives, in museum collections, and assumed I would end up doing something like that, but I was competing with people with Ph.D.s for entry-level jobs. I decided that I’d make clothing until something better came along. That was 1984 and I’m still waiting.

At the same time, Henry Cooke takes his work quite seriously, learning from it and teaching others.

What have you learned from studying original 18th-century garments?

The clothing is a mold of the body that lived within it. I’ve studied Ben Franklin’s clothing, John Adams’s clothing, John Hancock’s clothing. You get an understanding and an appreciation of the humanity and the physicality of these people.

Franklin, I always thought, was this pudgy little guy. But he had a very muscular upper body because he was pulling on a printer’s beam throughout his career, and he loved to swim. He had the body of a swimmer.

For more, here’s a Journal of the American Revolution interview with Henry Cooke from a decade ago.

“Arnold’s Defeat or Ultimate Victory?” Conference at Fort Ti, 9–10 Oct.

On 9–10 Oct 2026, Fort Tionderoga will host a Special 250th Conference on “Arnold’s Defeat or Ultimate Victory?: Perspectives on the 1776 Campaign,” covering the Battle of Valcour Island and surrounding events.

The venue explains:

The failure of the British to seize Ticonderoga in the fall of 1776 was a critical, vital victory for the Americans in the early years of the Revolutionary War—acknowledged even at the time. But who gets the credit for the year’s victory? Benedict Arnold and his lake fleet? Horatio Gates and the defenses of Ticonderoga and Mount Independence? Sharing new perspectives and new research from a variety of disciplines, our panelists will detail, and debate, the critical actions of the campaign to better understand the impact of October 1776.

The event starts with optional programs on Friday:

• 11 A.M.: Tour of Liberty Hill and the Outer Defenses of Fort Ticonderoga with Stuart Lilie, Vice President of Public History.
• 1:15 P.M.: Crewing a Bateau—Join the fort’s Maritime Trades staff, take an oar, and head out on Lake Champlain in a bateau.
• 3 P.M.: Ticonderoga’s Treasures: The 1776 Campaign on Lake Champlain with Dr. Matthew Keagle, Curator.

These programs have limited space and additional fees ranging from $35 to $50.

Here are the conference presentations scheduled for the Saturday conference:

• “Carleton’s Race to Ticonderoga: His Opponents and Why He Lost” by Don Hagist, editor of the Journal of the American Revolution.
• “Crafting Independence: The Work Behind the Battle of Valcour Island” by Kenneth Cohen, Chair of the Division of Military & Society at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
• “‘To prevent Shipping coming past’: Ticonderoga’s Amphibious Fortifications” by Stuart Lilie, Vice President of Public History at Fort Ticonderoga.
• “The day must shortly come when these facts will be known to the World” by Eric Schnitzer, ranger and military historian at Saratoga National Historical Park.
• “‘An Active Part in Our Favour’: The Stockbridge Mohican Indians” by Mark R. Anderson, author of Down the Warpath to the Cedars.
• “The Archaeology of ‘Destruction Bay’ and the Events of October 13, 1776” by Christopher Sabick, executive director of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum.

The sessions will end with a panel discussion collecting all the speakers and moderator Dr. Matthew Keagle, Curator of Fort Ticonderoga.

The fort also organized a Sunday cruise on Lake Champlain, following the maritime action, but that’s already sold out.

The presentations will be livestreamed so people can register to listen online. For more information, including cost, meals, and schedule, visit the conference webpage.

And while you’re there, also check out Fort Ti’s annual conference on the American Revolution, scheduled 26–27 September.

Identifying a Revolutionary Unknown Soldier at Camden

Last month the Independent newspaper reported on the identification of remains from the Revolutionary War using a relatively new method.

The story started on the battlefield at Camden, where on 16 Aug 1780 Gen. Cornwallis’s redcoats decisively defeated a Continental force under Gen. Horatio Gates.

The article says:

Archaeologists surveying the area in 2020 came across human bones protruding from the ground. Eventually, 14 sets of remains were identified — 12 of them Continental soldiers. The others were determined to be connected to the British side and were reburied at the battlefield.

The Richland County Coroner’s Office had worked with Texas-based FHD Forensics on modern-day cases and asked for their help.

The head of that organization is Allison Peacock. She and her associates use the immense databases of genetic code that have built up in recent decades to find unknown biological relatives for a range of reasons.

One of the American corpses was labeled “Camden 9B” as the second body retrieved from the ninth excavated burial.

The 12 Continentals were later reinterred [in 2023] with full military honors. Camden 9B’s headstone read: “UNKNOWN. REV WAR. BATTLE OF CAMDEN. AUG 16 1780.”

Meanwhile, samples from two of the soldiers were sent to Astrea Forensics in California for DNA extraction and sequencing. . . .

From a petrous portion of the temporal bone, a delicate structure behind the ear at the base of the skull, they successfully extracted DNA that generated [Camden 9B]’s entire genome. Peacock’s team then uploaded the data to FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch to trace three types of DNA matches: autosomal, X chromosome and Y chromosome.

“We got 20,000 matches to work with,” she said. “So, it was a lot to kind of comb through.”

Another clue was that when Camden 9B died, “the growth plates around his knees had not yet fully closed,” meaning he was still young.

The genetic markers found a match on the maternal line with Russ Hudson, a “retired federal agent in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.” He offered to join the search in archival sources.

Ultimately, the team found records of a Continental Army private from Anne Arundel County, Maryland, named John Pumphrey. He was in the right age range and had a family connection to Hudson.

Pumphrey’s exact birthdate is unknown, but those growth plates suggest he was between thirteen and fifteen years old when he enlisted in the 7th Maryland Regiment on 6 Jan 1777. He could sign his name only with an X.

As Historic Camden relates, Pumphrey’s regiment served at Brandywine, Germantown, Valley Forge, and Monmouth. He reenlisted on 28 Feb 1779, as shown in the paperwork above. The regiment spent the brutally cold winter of 1780 at Morristown.

In April 1780, the Maryland Line was sent south. The last part of their travels was a brutal trek from Cox’s Mill, North Carolina, to Camden, South Carolina—a difficult route with little food available along the way. Then came the battle for one of the British army’s main inland garrisons.

The skeleton doesn’t preserve clues to how Pvt. Pumphrey died. However, his brigade was part of an especially brutal fight with the 71st Highlanders, and the bodies were found in that part of the field.

Research continues on another of the bodies from the Camden field that had surviving D.N.A.,  now known only as 11A.

New Website Sharing a Lifelong Interest

A new online resource of information about the start of the Revolutionary War launched last month: J. Bohy Historical Consulting.

This is the website of Joel Bohy, expert on military artifacts and battlefield relics, local speaker and televised antiques expert, participant in both living history and archeological studies.

Because Joel Bohy grew up in Concord and still lives in Massachusetts, he has a particular interest in the opening months of the Revolutionary War. Which is, of course, the most interesting part.

I especially appreciate the Publications section of the site, with P.D.F. files of many articles (and links to a few behind publishers’ paywalls). These range from grunt-level recountings of the Battle of Lexington and Concord for general readers to technical analyses of bullet strikes and metal detecting on battlefields.

I particularly recommend “Warlike Preparations of Every Sort: Stores in Concord, Massachusetts, on the Eve of the Revolution,” published in Man at Arms for the Gun and Sword Collector in October 2025.

There’s also a Media Appearances section of recorded lectures, podcast episodes, and news stories. With, no doubt, more to come.

Notices of The Road to Concord, Old and New

Back in 2017, the Writer’s Bone website featured a very complimentary review of The Road to Concord by site co-founder Daniel Ford.

I thought I’d boasted about that, but I must have been more modest than usual. So I’m going to resurrect it now:

Daniel: J.L. Bell is a Massachusetts writer who runs the terrific history blog, “Boston 1775.” His book, The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War, features everything that makes Bell’s site great: accessible writing style, innovative historical storytelling, and a fresh perspective on events that occurred nearly two-and-a-half centuries ago.

The Road to Concord focuses on how four stolen cannons (that British general Thomas Gage was desperately, and perhaps foolishly, trying to recover) may have helped spark the American Revolution. The narrative features colonial hijinks, high political drama, and Revolutionary War heroes not often discussed alongside Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. The Road to Concord is refreshingly original and structured like a thriller. Learning about what led the British and the colonies to war has never been this much fun.

Since Ford is a fiction writer, I was especially pleased by hius remarks on the book’s narrative structure.

In addition, folks have been emailing me that an episode of History’s Greatest Mysteries released this month on the History Channel discusses The Road to Concord. I’m too confused by the state of television today to find the full episode, though.

The Return of Benjamin Davis

In late 1783, Benjamin Davis, Sr., and Benjamin Davis, Jr., sailed out of New York harbor, their second evacuation to Canada in the course of the American Revolution.

Father and son bought a land grant in Nova Scotia from Samuel Barnard and helped to establish the new town of Shelburne, continuing to work as merchants. Benjamin, Jr., went to London the next year, presumably to make contacts.

In the fall of 1786, Benjamin, Sr., was appointed a judge of the court of oyer and terminer in Nova Scotia. During the British Empire’s wars with Napoleonic France, Davis administered prize money from privateers; the signature above comes from one of those documents.

I’ve been frustrated in my efforts to learn more about the enslaved man captured and held with the Davises in 1776–77. Canadian records show Benjamin Davis continued to be a slave owner. In October 1789, he sold the Rev. John Agnew claim to “four negroes named Prince, and Bella his wife, and two children named Peter and William.”

At some point the Davises quietly moved back to Boston, where their family roots were, even though in 1778 Massachusetts had banished the older man by name and prepared to confiscate his property.

Boston newspapers reported that Benjamin Davis, Sr., died on 14 Sept 1805. Probate judge Thomas Dawes, Jr., appointed an administrator for his estate, which was found to consist entirely of household furniture worth just $101.

Benjamin, Jr., sold the Shelburne land in 1809. On 31 Dec 1836, the Boston Courier and Columbian Centinel reported the death three days before of “Benjamin Davis, Esq., aged 81.” The newspapers stated:

he was the last male descendant (of the name) in Boston of Capt. William Davis, an early settler, and well known character in the colony history.

I hadn’t planned to spend two weeks on Benjamin Davis, but the remarks from 1776 about him and gingerbread piqued my curiosity, and then there were more threads to pull.

Benjamin Davis, Baker?

The record of Benjamin Davis, Sr.’s appearance before the Loyalists Commission in Canada states of his time in New York:

He was then a Baker in Govert. Service.

That detail has gone into every profile of Davis written from that source. Articles have discussed Davis as an example of the baking profession.

That puzzles me because nothing in Davis’s past shows any connection to baking. (Gingerbread, yes. Running a bakery, no.)

In Boston, Davis was a general import merchant, usually dealing in dry goods. He also invested in distilling, whaling, and other enterprises. Whigs denigrated him as a “Huckster,” not a baker. The goods he lost at Boston included “Iron, Tea, Liquor, Stockings, Haberdashery…”

Later the same Loyalists Commission document quoted Davis as saying that when he was captured on his voyage to New York in 1776 “He was then going into Trade on advice of Sir W. How.” The term “Trade” meant general mercantile trading. The cargo Davis was bringing to the city? Wine, not flour or bread.

An advertisement in the 13 Dec 1777 Royal Gazette shows that Benjamin Davis had opened a store in New York “in Queen-Street, the corner of King-Street.” He offered Madeira wine, tea, candles, sugar, cloth, clothing, blankets, and “An assortment of childrens toys.”

On 23 May 1778 “Benjamin Davis, & Son,” advertised in the Royal Gazette from “their Store, No. 229, Queen-Street, the Corner of King-Street.“ They sold cloth, garments, notions, and wine.

In 1779 the father and son offered “A neat and elegant assortment of BOOKS.” In 1781 they had “Four hundred gallons choice fresh South Carolina ORANGE JUICE.” In 1782 they advertised “Garden SEEDS” shipped from London. Several of their newspaper ads offered the cloth and trimmings for military uniforms. But never bread.

That firm’s advertisements disappeared after August 1783 as the British military left New York. That’s why I’m confident these merchants were Benjamin Davis, Sr. and Jr., from Boston. (Because of course there were a bunch of men with that name in Revolutionary America.)

It’s conceivable that Benjamin Davis, Sr., provided some capital for a bakery that supplied the British military in New York, but there’s no sign he was involved in running that operation. And I wonder if the word “Baker” was correctly transcribed.

TOMORROW: Benjamin Davis, to the end.