Finding Mary Fowle of Londonderry

Yesterday I cited Jane Merrill’s Sex and the Scientist: The Indecent Life of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753–1814), the latest and frankest biography of the scientist, statesman, soldier, and seducer.

That book quotes testimony from Mary Fowle of Londonderry, New Hampshire, about how Thompson had an affair with Mary (Dill) Thomas, first wife of the Boston printer Isaiah Thomas.

Merrill distinguishes that woman from the Mary Fowle whom Isaiah Thomas married in 1779, whom she identifies as both the printer’s cousin and the widow of his old master, Zechariah Fowle.

Isaiah Thomas’s second wife named Mary was indeed a cousin, having been born Mary Thomas on 9 June 1750, according to genealogy published in “The Portraits of Isaiah Thomas” by Charles Lemuel Nichols.

However, that cousin Mary didn’t marry Zechariah Fowle. Her mother, Rebecca (Bass) Thomas, did. The older printer died in Portsmouth in 1776. Rebecca (Bass Thomas) Fowle, twice widowed, died in Worcester in 1803 and was buried in her son-in-law’s family tomb.

So who was Mary Thomas’s first husband? Boston vital records show that the Rev. John Lathrop married Isaac Fowle and Mary Thomas on 11 May 1769. The Thomas and Fowle family genealogies say they had two daughters, who both died young:

• Rebecca T[homas?]. (4 Feb 1770–6 Dec 1773 in New York)
• Dorothea Whitmarsh (5 Nov 1771–10 Sept 1772)

Isaac Fowle reportedly died in 1777 while serving in the Continental Army.

That same year, Isaiah Thomas leased his financially stressed press and newspaper to his come-of-age apprentice, Anthony Haswell, and moved with his children to “a small farm in Londonderry, New Hampshire,” according to the biography published with the second edition of his History of Printing in North-America. He also initiated a divorce from his first wife.

A couple of years later, Isaiah came back and took over the print shop again. Worcester’s vital records state that on 26 May 1779 Isaiah Thomas married “Mary Fowle of Londonderry” in Boston. Since 1777 he had been a divorcé with three children, his cousin Mary had been a childless widow, and there was a war on. Mary might well have been keeping house for Isaiah in New Hampshire even before they married.

Thus, the Mary Fowle of Londonderry who provided testimony for Isaiah Thomas in his divorce case in 1777 was:

• his cousin
• a stepdaughter of his former master
• his future wife

Isaiah and Mary (Thomas Fowle) Thomas had no children. She died at Worcester in 1818, and he remarried again the next year. The picture above is the pastel portrait of Mary in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society.

“Receiving confirmation various ways of the surrender”

The army around Philadelphia wasn’t alone in waiting anxiously for news from northern New York in October 1777. The publisher of the Massachusetts Spy was gleaning every bit of information that came through Worcester for his readers.

That publisher wasn’t Isaiah Thomas, who had co-founded the Spy in Boston in 1770 and moved it out to Worcester just before the outbreak of war.

In the middle of 1776 Thomas stepped away from day-to-day operations in order to tend to family business—namely, divorcing his wife, finding care for their children, and helping his mother at her home in Cambridge.

Thomas leased the Massachusetts Spy to other printers as a (barely) going concern. Starting in mid-1777 the publisher was Anthony Haswell, a former Thomas apprentice who turned twenty-one that year.

On 23 October Haswell’s Massachusetts Spy printed extracts from a Continental officer’s letter dated eleven days before, reporting that Gen. John Burgoyne’s army had attacked and been pushed back:

Friday [10 October] the whole army marched with three days provision, and we found the road strewed with baggage of all kinds; horses killed in the waggons, and all their sick and wounded, with Burgoyne’s chief surgeon…

Then came another letter from the same officer, dated 14 October:

We have now entirely surrounded the enemy, and it is common to have forty or fifty deserters and prisoners come in per day. The Canadians we are informed have mutinied, and decline having anything further to do in the matter, and that the General had promised they should go home in a few days.

Then a letter from Saratoga dated 14 October:

Last night General [Horatio] Gates received a card from General Burgoyne, requesting to know when it would be agreeable to him to have a field officer of his army wait on him with proposals of great consequence to both armies. . . . General Gates sent the articles on which he would agree . . .

P.S. I believe that General Gates rather than not get Burgoyne and his army, will soften his terms a little.

In the next paragraph the publisher lamented receiving “many different” reports raising doubt about what had really happened next. But then a seemingly reliable witness arrived:

A Gentleman who passed through town yesterday informed, that General Burgoyne was arrived at Albany, on his way to Boston, where it is said he is to take ship for England, according to the capitulation said to be entered into between him and Gen. Gates.

In consequence of receiving confirmation various ways of the surrender of Gen. Burgoyne, a number of the sons of liberty in this town, met on the common and expressed their joy by thirteen discharges of cannon, and drinking several toasts. The whole was conducted with a decency suitable to the occasion, and truly characteristic of the supporters of the glorious cause in which we are engaged.

On the same day that Haswell was printing these bare tidbits, in Boston John Gill was printing the entire Articles of Convention, or terms of surrender, for readers of his Continental Journal. That document must have been couriered to Boston by a route that bypassed Worcester.

Anthony Haswell and Isaiah Thomas

During the preparation of “Mapping Revolutionary Boston” website/app, as I recall, someone asked if there was enough information to profile a printer’s apprentice—like Johnny Tremain, but real. So I worked up an article on the youth of Anthony Haswell (1756-1816).

The text under young Anthony’s yellow pin describes how he was born in England, brought to Boston by his father, and basically abandoned when he was a teen. He worked through the town’s Overseers of the Poor to get himself apprenticed to a printer instead of a potter.

Those paragraphs don’t cover Haswell’s later life: possible military service during the Revolutionary War; a return to printing; starting the first newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts, with Elisha Babcock in 1782; and then settling in Bennington, Vermont, as postmaster and publisher of the Vermont Gazette a year later.

I was surprised to find no biographical information about Haswell in Isaiah Thomas’s History of Printing in America, first published in 1810. Thomas claimed to write about everyone in the profession through the Revolution. To be sure, he highlighted firsts, and the Vermont Gazette was that state’s second newspaper, but Haswell was a very prominent printer in that state up through the time Thomas wrote his book.

Furthermore, Thomas must have watched Haswell’s career because he was the printer who’d signed up young Anthony as an apprentice back in 1771. During the war, when Thomas was beset by creditors, Haswell even became the nominal publisher of Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy for a while. That episode prompted the only mention of Haswell in Thomas’s History, and it’s hardly flattering:

The printer of the Massachusetts Spy, or Boston Journal, was obliged to leave Boston, as has been mentioned, on account of the commencement of hostilities between the colonies and the parent country. He settled in this place [Worcester], and on the 3d of May, 1775, recommenced the publication of that paper, which he continued until the British troops evacuated Boston; when he leased it for one year to William Stearns and Daniel Bigelow. . . .

After the first lease expired, the paper was leased for another year, to Anthony Haswell, printer. Owing to unskilful workmen, bad ink, wretched paper, and worn down types, the Spy appeared in a miserable dishabille during the two years for which it had been leased, and for some time after. At the end of that term, the proprietor returned to Worcester, and resumed its publication…

Why did Thomas have so little, and nothing good, to say about his former apprentice? I suspect politics was involved. Thomas was a Federalist. Haswell became a Jeffersonian, and not just any Jeffersonian—he was one of the printers jailed under the Sedition Act in 1799 and made into a martyr for press freedom. Here’s a page about Haswell at the Bennington Museum, and another from the Posterity Project.

So Anthony Haswell might not have been discussed in Thomas’s History of Printing because he was too prominent a printer.