Cuff Dole and Abel Dodge: comrades in arms?

Yesterday I quoted a 4 July 1776 warrant issued for the detention of Cuffee Dole, a black man from Rowley, Massachusetts. Today I’ll discuss the claims and implications surrounding that manuscript, which the Cohasco company has offered for sale. The press release promoting its sale says:

The document places him [Dole] inside George Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Called “the Barrack on Prospect Hill,” the house was later owned by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and immortalized in a poem.

Washington did make his headquarters in Cambridge, in a house later owned and written about by Longfellow, but that was miles away from where Dole and Dodge were housed. The “Barrack on Prospect Hill” was a barrack on Prospect Hill.

One of the auction sites describing this document says of the justice of the peace who issued it, “Aaron Wood would become a U.S. Senator.” He was a Massachusetts state senator in 1781, before the U.S. Senate was created.

Finally, the press release hypes the significance of this item by saying, “Dole is believed the first African-American to be mentioned in a document of the newly-independent United States.” In fact, Wood had no idea that the Continental Congress, hundreds of miles away, had declared independence; he issued the warrant invoking the authority of “the Province of Massachusetts-Bay.” The date is simple coincidence.

What’s more, the Congress’s actual vote for independence came on 2 July; the 4th was when it approved its public declaration, and the big date on top of that declaration became the anniversary we celebrate. I’d be surprised if people couldn’t find other African-Americans—particularly enslaved ones—mentioned on documents created 2-4 July 1776. It would give me more confidence if the material about this document was less hyperbolic and more accurate.

The warrant has already proven significant in what it tells us about Cuff Dole. As Christine Comiskey found when working on her recent short biography of Dole, we have solid documentation for his later life in that part of Rowley, Massachusetts, now called Georgetown. Above is a photograph of his gravestone; click on the thumbnail for a larger image from Jenn Marcelais’s Very Grave Matter website about New England cemeteries.

(Cuffee Dole is also recalled in Georgetown in the name of a restaurant, which is not inappropriate; like many other African-American men in the early republic, he made his living for a while in the catering business.)

The authoritative Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors in the War of the Revolution lists several references from the Massachusetts state archive showing how Dole served in the Continental Army 15 Aug-30 Nov 1777, and June-December 1780. But this document puts him in Cambridge barracks in March 1776, implying that he served in an earlier campaign as well.

Alas, the warrant offers just a hint at the relationship between Abel Dodge and Cuff Dole. Dodge apparently woke up in the barracks on 30 March, missing eight dollars. How did he decide Dole was responsible? Did Dole take the money because he believed he deserved it, and Dodge accuse him of stealing because he thought the law gave him an advantage over a black man? Did the two men fight? Dodge was 5'9" and thirty-three years old in 1776; Dole was four years younger, an inch taller, and according to tradition in the town of Bradford “of remarkable strength.”

I note that Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors also indicates that both Dole and Dodge served in “Benjamin Adams’s Co., Col. Johnson’s regt.; from 15 Aug to 30 Nov 1777.” So whatever difference arose between them in the spring of 1776, they probably worked it out by the summer of 1777.

Cuff Dole: wanted man

Boston 1775 reader Rob Velella (who maintains the Poe-a-Day Calendar) alerted me to an interesting press release from the historical documents dealer Cohasco of Yonkers, New York. It describes a manuscript related to Cuff or Cuffee Dole, a black soldier in the Continental Army during the siege of Boston. The item happens to be dated 4 July 1776, and the press release claims that it’s the earliest document about an African-American in the independent United States.

I’ll examine more details tomorrow. But first, more about the document itself. This auction website offers a tiny thumbnail image, and this auction website offers a transcription:

To the sheriff or marshal of the County of Essex or wither of his deputies or either of the Constables of the Town of Rowley in said County or to any or either of them—Greeting.

Whereas complaint has this Day been made unto me the subscriber by Abel Dodge of Rowley in said County Cooper against one Cuff Dole a Negro man of the said town of Rowley that the said Cuff did in the night beset after the Thirty First Day of March last by force of arms steel and take out of Pocket cash belonging to the said Abel as he was sleeping in his Barrack on Prospect Hill in Cambridge one Eight Dollar Bill of the Continental Emission which was the property of the said Abels.

Wherefore you and each of you are hereby required by virtue of the Authority reposed in me the subscriber by the Major [...] of the council of the Province of Massachusetts Bay immediately to apprehend the Body of the said Cuff Dole if he may be found in and present and bring him before me or some other of the justices of the said County of Essex so that he may be [...] and further dealt with according us to law and justice it doth [...] given under my hand and deed this fourth Day of July AD 1776 Aaron Wood Justice of the Peace.

Which makes it highly ironic that the press release is headlined: “1776 Black Document Discovered: A Story of Freedom for July 4th”. This warrant illustrates not the story of a black man’s freedom, but the threat of a black man’s imprisonment. The release’s statement that Dole was “concerned with an eight-dollar bill” is an obvious attempt to dodge that awkward fact.

A little more digging reveals that the document was discovered and published by Christine Comiskey, author of a booklet about Dole issued last year. On 24 Apr 2008, the Georgetown Record described reported:

The second surprise for Comiskey was finding a warrant for Cuffee’s arrest dated July 4, 1776. While fighting in the American Revolution, Dole was accused of stealing $8 from fellow soldier Abel Dodge as he slept in his barracks on Prospect Hill in Cambridge. Comiskey found no further record of the case, and believes the charges were probably dropped.

Comiskey’s book was published by the Georgetown Historical Society (the part of Rowley where Dole lived became Georgetown in 1838) and is available through its gift shop.

TOMORROW: What this document tells us—and what it doesn’t.