Asa Copeland’s Revolution

Yesterday I introduced Asa Copeland as a “young lad” apprenticed to the Boston carpenter Amos Thayer.

He opened his master’s door to a redcoat the night before the Boston Massacre and heard that soldier offer a warning to Thayer to keep safe off the streets for the next couple of days.

I wondered what happened to Asa Copeland in subsequent years. One of my interests is how the children of Boston were shaped by the political turmoil of the ten years before the war.

Tracking this Asa Copeland isn’t certain because there were other youths of that name. One was born in Braintree in 1756, son of Seth and Lydia Copeland, neighbors of John and Abigail Adams; that lad would have been a good candidate to be Amos Thayer’s apprentice in 1770 since Thayer was also from Braintree. But that Asa Copeland remained in Braintree after the war, long enough to apply for a pension.

Instead, I think the Asa Copeland who became an apprentice carpenter in Boston was the man described by descendants in volume IV of Genealogical and Memorial History of the State of New Jersey, edited by Francis Bazley Lee and published in 1910. That entry is based on a blend of family tradition and research in genealogical sources available at the time.

The descendants were certain this Asa was the son of Jacob and Abigail Copeland, who hailed from Braintree but were living in Boston when they had him. But they didn’t know when he was born. The profile describes Asa as “at the age of seventeen” during the Tea Party of late 1773 and “about nineteen” at the start of 1777, which doesn’t add up. Descendants understood that Asa was “present at the ‘Boston Tea Party’” (which this book misdates). He may well have been present; hundreds of Bostonians were, watching but not participating.

That profile gets on more solid ground when it discusses Copeland’s military service. In January 1777, Copeland joined Maj. Ebenezer Stevens’s artillery battalion of the Continental Army. Like Copeland’s master, Stevens had been a carpenter in Boston before the war. The artillery needed skilled craftsmen. Soon Asa Copeland was a sergeant, and then a sergeant-major.

In April 1779, Copeland was appointed a conductor of military stores, caring for the army’s weapons. Thus, in 1781 Gen. Henry Knox sent him instructions “to procure 1500 muskets, 3 tons of lead, and all of the pistols at New Windsor” and to send some stores to Philadelphia.

In September 1782, as the army wound down, Gen. Knox listed Copeland among the personnel “proper to compose the department of field commissary” in a letter to Gen. George Washington. Copeland reportedly produced “a survey or inventory of ordnance at West Point, New York, dated April 20, 1783” for Knox.

After the war, Copeland settled in Philadelphia rather than returning to Massachusetts. On 27 Feb 1783 the Rev. William White married Copeland to Amelia Price. Eventually the couple had eight children, four girls and four boys. The veteran appears to have gone into business trading goods, using the skills and contacts he developed during the war.

In the 30 Aug 1793 Pennsylvania Gazette Copeland advertised “the schooner Milley” for charter to the West Indies. In October 1794 the U.S. of A. was undertaking to build frigates, including the Constitution. Revenue commissioner Tench Coxe wrote to Knox, then Secretary of War:

in pursuance of the Idea entertained by you and my self in a late conference, I have engaged Mr. Asa Copeland a trader in this town, To go to Georgia for the purpose of assisting Mr. J. T Morgan in expediting the hauling &c. of Timber & dispatching the Vessels.

The country needed strong live oak for the frigates. Coxe told his boss Alexander Hamilton, “Mr. Asa Copeland…is expected to be very useful. He has been accustomed to the Coasting trade and to the procuring of ship Timber.” (But Coxe also had to tell Knox that Copeland, not being a shipwright, couldn’t simply take over Morgan’s job.) According to a Navy Department report at the end of 1794, Copeland’s pay was “three and one-third dollars per day.”

Asa Copeland completed that job for the federal government and returned to Philadelphia, but unfortunately he died on 23 Sept 1797. His family understood the cause to be yellow fever, even though the city’s big epidemic had occurred four years before. The Copelands’ last child was born the following month and died within a year.

So far as I know, we have no personal or political statements from Asa Copeland that preserve his thoughts about the Massacre, the Tea Party, and other events from his teen years in Boston. But it’s clear he committed years to the Continental Army and the United States, and that service gave him the standing to build a new life as a businessman in America’s capital city.

Pvt. Malone at the Thayers

On the evening of Sunday, 4 Mar 1770, a private soldier in the 29th Regiment of Foot knocked on the door of Amos Thayer.

Thayer was twenty-four years old, 5'7", a native of Braintree. He was a carpenter, as stated in town records from 1775 when he joined an augmented town watch, or housewright, as stated in a 1769 deed from his father.

Thayer didn’t open the door. Instead, his apprentice Asa Copeland did. According to Asa, the soldier

asked for the young man that lived in the house. I asked him what young man he meant; he said, the young man a carpenter. I supposing he meant my master, told him he was up stairs. He then asked me to go and call him, and said he wanted to speak with him:

I then went up and told my master that Malone was below and wanted to speak with him. My master told me to tell him he was engaged and could not go down, and said if he had any thing to say he must say it to his sister Miss Mary Thayer.

Mary Thayer, two years older than her brother, confirmed what the “young lad” Asa described: her brother “refused to come down or have any thing to say to” this visitor. But she was “going down on other occasion,” so she “said she would hear what the soldier had to say.”

Malone told Mary Thayer, “your brother as you call him is a man I have a very great regard for, and came here to desire him to keep in the house and not be out, for there would be a great deal of disturbance and blood between that time and Tuesday night at 12 o’clock.”

By this time Asa was back downstairs, and he and a second woman named Mary Brailsford later said that they heard the same warning.

Malone went on to say that “he had a greater regard for Mr. Thayer than any one in Boston, and on that account came to desire him to keep in the house, which if he did there would be no danger.” He repeated that advice, went to the door, and then turned around again. “My name is Charles Malone,” the soldier declared; “your brother knows me well.” According to Asa, Malone added that he “had drank with” Amos Thayer.

The following evening, other soldiers of the 29th Regiment fired into a violent crowd on King Street—what we now call the Boston Massacre. Twelve days later, Asa Copeland, Mary Thayer, and Mary Brailsford all testified about that conversation before magistrates. (In addition, Mary Brailsford’s husband John described hearing another soldier of the 29th Regiment provide another warning on the 5th.)

For the Boston officials assembling the town’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, such encounters were evidence that the soldiers had been planning to attack townspeople. The shooting on King Street was not self-defense or a brawl that got out of hand, they argued, but a concerted attack.

However, such stories are also evidence of friendly relations between individual soldiers, like Charles Malone, and individual Bostonians, like Amos Thayer. Or at least good enough that Malone stuck his neck out a bit to warn the young carpenter about possible violence (more likely thinking of brawls than shooting).

Though there’s a lot of mystery in Malone and Thayer’s behavior. The soldier evidently knew where that “young man a carpenter” lived, but not his name. No one else in the Thayer family recognized Malone, so he couldn’t have been a regular coworker. And Thayer, for whatever reason, really didn’t want to speak to the private that night. We could come up with all sorts of scenarios, but the secrets remain buried.

TOMORROW: Whatever happened to Asa Copeland?