“Martial music on the Sabbath”

Back in December 2019 Lance Boos, working on a fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, shared and analyzed a 17 June 1769 letter from Boston’s wardens to Col. Alexander MacKay, senior army officer in town.

The letter concerned an incident the preceding Sunday, six days before. A military band was playing that morning around the time of church services (which of course extended over most of the day).

More specifically:

a Young Gentleman an Inhabitant of the Town, appeared at ye relieving of ye Main Guard who being desired by one of ye Wardens to retire showed a willingness to Comply, but Capt. [Ponsonby] Molesworth of ye 29th Regiment, who was Capt. of ye Guard that was to be relieved, & an other officer Came to him & Insisted upon his tarrying to hear the Musick, Saying he would protect him, & Immediately ordered the fifes to play (in derision, as we Suppose,) what by them is Commonly Called ye Yankee Tune.

The three town officials who signed this letter—Thomas Walley, John Joy, and Henry Hill—then asked Mackay to order the troops not to play music during guard changes on Sunday any longer. As wardens, they had civic responsibility to keep the peace on the Sabbath.

We can find more context for this incident in the “Journal of the Times” reports that Boston’s Whigs dispatched to newspapers in other colonies to complain about the army presence in their town. The historian Oliver Dickerson collected and published those articles with the title Boston Under Military Rule.

The Whigs complained about martial music on Sundays starting soon after the regiments landed, with the first complaint dated 6 Nov 1768:

This being Lord’s day, the minds of serious people at public worship were greatly disturbed with drums beating and fifes playing, unheard of before in this land—What an unhappy influence must this have upon the minds of children and others, in eradicating the sentiments of morality and religion, which a due regard to that day has a natural tendency to cultivate and keep alive.

Yes, think of the children! About a month later, as of 4 December, the army seemed to accommodate the local authorities’ wish for peace and quiet:

It is observed with pleasure that the guards are now relieved on Lord’s day morning one hour earlier than on other days, which allows the soldiery to attend public worship in season; that there is now much less martial music on the Sabbath then has been heard since the first arrival of the troops.

But within a couple of weeks, the problem came to be martial music when the meetinghouses let out, and once again children were at risk:

Last evening after church service, there was a considerable gathering of children and servants, near the Town House, drawn by the music of the fife, &c. which is again heard on the Sabbath, to the great concern of the sober and thoughtful inhabitants; some of the youth’s having behaved so as to displease the officer, orders were given the guard to clear the parade; they marched up with bayonets presented,—one of the lads was pursued by a soldier to some distance, who made a thrust with his bayonet, which passed thro’ his coat, and had he not thrown himself on the ground that instant, its thought he would be run thro’ the body: He has entered a complaint against said soldier, with one of the magistrates of the town.

This passage repeats a common Whig trope, blaming disorder on “children,” “servants” (i.e., enslaved people), and “youth’s,” as opposed to “the sober and thoughtful inhabitants” who truly represented the town.

On the one hand, the dispatch said, young people lacked the judgment to resist gathering for the music. Even when they expressed their opposition to the soldiers, they did so through misbehavior instead of, say, formal complaints to the army and newspaper essays.

The result proved the Whigs’ main message: the presence of soldiers in the crowded town led to violence, and the London government should have foreseen that. And of course, when describing military abuse, a child was always a useful victim.

TOMORROW: This conflict continues.

“Landed and quartered in town”

On 18 Nov 1768, 250 years ago today, the Boston Whigs’ “Journal of Occurrences” alerted their readers in other North American ports to this news:

The 64th Regiment of those troops Col. [John] Pomeroy, are landed and quartered in town, the 65th Regiment Col. [Alexander] Mackay, at Castle Island; they consist of 500 men each.—The battalion-men of the detachment of the 59th are to return to Halifax.

The Whigs also counted eleven Royal Navy ships, not counting the chartered transport ships, in the harbor.

With four regiments (the 14th, 29th, 64th, and 65th) in town, plus part of the 59th and a contingent of Royal Artillery, this was the largest number of soldiers stationed in Boston before late 1774.

The 64th and 65th were fresh from recruiting in Ireland, so they were at full strength. The Whigs’ estimate of “500 men each” is probably a little high and doesn’t necessarily apply to the two regiments that had arrived earlier from Nova Scotia.

Nonetheless, there were probably around 2,000 soldiers in Boston for a couple of weeks that fall. The 1765 census counted 2,941 white men above age sixteen (i.e., eligible for militia duty). Thus, in that stretch two out of every five white men in Boston belonged to the British army.

[The photograph above comes from Revolution250’s recent “Boston Occupied” reenactment, photographed by Chris Christo for this gallery at the Boston Herald.]

Soldiers “scourged in the Common”

On 14 Oct 1768, 250 years ago today, the Boston Whigs renewed their ongoing complaint about the royal army taking over the seats of local government, and they highlighted another grievance:

The troops still keep possession of Faneuil Hall, the Court House, Representatives Chambers, &c, guards placed at the passage way into the town, near the Neck. Patrolling companies near the ferry ways, and parties sent into the country to prevent desertions:

In the forenoon one Rogers, a New-England man, sentenced to receive 1000 stripes, and a number of other soldiers, were scourged in the Common by the black drummers, in a manner, which however necessary, was shocking to humanity; some gentlemen who had held commissions in the army, observing, that only 40 of the 170 lashes received by Rogers, at this time, was equal in punishment to 500, they had seen given in other regiments.

As I discussed [gulp] eleven years ago, those “black drummers” came from the 29th Regiment. In 1759 its colonel received a batch of black teen-aged boys as a gift from his brother, an admiral. Being sent off to the army was probably a lucky break for those young men, given that they were already enslaved. It got them out of the death traps of Caribbean plantations, and they earned freedom and even a measure of status from their military service.

In eighteenth-century European armies, drummers were a crucial part of a regiment’s training and maneuvers, and military musicians could earn extra money through their unusual skills. The British army assigned another responsibility to each regiment’s musicians: they carried out corporal punishment on enlisted men.

Of course, in North America’s slave society, most people saw a black man whipping a white man as a dangerous inversion of proper order. The Boston Whigs had already complained, “to behold Britons scourg’d by Negro drummers, was a new and very disagreeable spectacle.” Writing for an audience in New York and points south, where slavery was a bigger institution and the enslaved population larger, the Whigs knew that this report would be provocative.

Another element of their complaint was the number of lashes that Rogers had to suffer. As strict as Puritans were, they adhered to Deuteronomy 25:3’s prohibition against giving a man more than forty strokes. In the king’s army and navy, however, a thousand lashes was not unusual (though they weren’t all applied on one day). And the Boston Whigs claimed this particular whipping was harsh even for the army.

Naturally, I was curious to know more about Rogers, the unfortunate soldier. Alas, the 29th Regiment was lousy at filing its muster rolls in this period. That paperwork was supposed to be done monthly. Instead, the commander’s company supplied one roll to cover all the time from 16 July 1765 to 24 Apr 1769, or “1379 Days.” Other companies were similarly lax. That makes it much harder to track individual men.

However, in the spring of 1769 the Boston Chronicle and several other New England newspapers ran an advertisement dated 23 May over the signature of brigade major Capt. Charles Fordyce. It announced that Gen. Alexander Mackay would pardon deserters who returned to the army by the end of June. However, the same ad promised three guineas to anyone who apprehended eighteen specified men “whose crimes are of such a nature, as to oblige him to exclude them from any promise of PARDON.”

One of the deserters beyond pardoning was Daniel Rogers of the 29th Regiment. He therefore looks like the best candidate for being the “New-England man” whipped on Boston Common seven months before. Perhaps he’d been convicted of theft or some other crime, or had already tried to desert. Either way, the whipping doesn’t appear to have kept him from leaving by May. As a New Englander, he had a better chance of finding sympathetic help and blending back into civilian society.