Grandmothers’ Tales and Grenadier Gibson

The story from Sarah H. Swan that I shared yesterday, about a British grenadier killed in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, has all the hallmarks of what I call “grandmothers’ tales.”

It was literally a story Swan heard from her grandmother, who in 1775 was Mary Stedman, wife of a Boston doctor. The anecdote comes in a meaningful shape, with a little lesson in fate and family patriotism that a good republican woman might want to pass on to her grandchildren.

I don’t think anyone involved in the story was still around when Mary Stedman first told it to the children of her second marriage, who passed it down. Mary’s first husband, Dr. John Stedman, was dead of yellow fever. Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., to whom Stedman had reportedly passed intelligence, had been lost at sea. Dr. Joseph Warren, who dispatched the riders to Lexington, died at Bunker Hill. Of course the unfortunate Pvt. Gibson was dead, and his wife had probably left Boston in 1776. So no one could contradict this claim.

As I poked into the background of the tale, I was struck by how little information remains about Dr. John Stedman. He and his twin brother Ebenezer were the sons of a well established Cambridge farmer, tavern-keeper, militia officer, and town official. They both graduated from Harvard College in 1765, having lived at home instead of in the dorms. The college granted them the usual M.A. degree three years later.

Ebenezer became the Cambridge schoolmaster and his father’s heir while John went into Boston and trained to be a doctor. In 1769, according to a family historian, he wrote in an almanac: “I am a young man just entering into the world with nothing to recommend me but my education and a few friends whom I obtained while I was assistant to a noted Physician in Boston who has recommended me to the world.”

In 1773, Dr. Stedman married Mary Quincy, daughter of merchant Henry Quincy. They moved into a house on Marlborough Street. But I can’t find mentions of Dr. Stedman as prominent in either political or medical circles. He unfortunately died too early for Dr. Ephraim Eliot’s rundown of the town’s medical men, published in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Proceedings.

Was the “noted Physician in Boston” who served as John Stedman’s mentor Dr. Benjamin Church? In addition to this anecdote, I found another tenuous connection: In October 1776, when Dr. Church was locked up on suspicion of treason, Dr. Stedman bandaged Benjamin Church, Sr.’s head. (That bill was still unpaid after Stedman died in 1780 and the elder Church died a year later.)

If Dr. John Stedman was known to be a protégé of the duplicitous Dr. Church, then perhaps his widow and her descendants felt a need to burnish the family’s Patriot credentials. What better way than to say the Stedmans provided crucial intelligence that helped John Hancock and Samuel Adams evade capture in Lexington? (Even if it’s questionable whether Dr. Church would have passed on that information, and the redcoats weren’t searching for Hancock and Adams anyway.)

As for the unfortunate grenadier private, the name Gibson is common enough to seem plausible. Indeed, there’s a Gibson back in the Stedman family tree.

So Sarah H. Swan’s family lore might belong in the category of myth, a “grandmother’s tale” developed for entertainment or moral guidance that a later generation grew up believing whole-heartedly and inserted into the national history during the Colonial Revival. Some of those late-blooming tales flourished, like the story of Betsy Ross and the first flag. Others have long been dismissed.

But this tale comes with one more wrinkle. Don N. Hagist, author most recently of These Distinguished Corps: British Grenadier and Light Infantry Battalions in the American Revolution, amasses images from British army muster rolls in this period to track individual soldiers as much as possible. I asked him if those documents had information relevant to this story.

Don answered:

In the regiments for which we have complete muster rolls, there was no soldier named Gibson in the grenadier or light infantry companies. I haven’t looked at all at the regiments in Percy’s relief column, so there’s that possibility.

There are no known rolls for the Marines, and that battalion suffered the most casualties on April 19. And there are no rolls for the 5th Regiment for 1775, so we don’t know which men of that regiment died on or soon after April 19.

BUT: on the 5th’s rolls for the second half of 1774, prepared on 16 January 1775, there is a grenadier named John Gibson. And he’s not on the next set of rolls covering the first half of 1776. That’s true for a lot of men in the 5th, and I suspect most of the missing are Bunker Hill casualties, but it’s entirely possible that John Gibson was among the April 19 casualties.

The Marriage of John Fleeming and Alice Church

The 17 Aug 1770 issue of the New Hampshire Gazette of Portsmouth included this announcement:

Last Week was Married in this Town, by the Rev. Dr. HAVEN, Mr. JOHN FLEMING, of Boston, Printer, to Miss. ALICE CHURCH, Daughter of Mr BENJAMIN CHURCH, of the same Place, Merchant,----an agreeable young Lady, adorn’d with the Qualifications requisite to render that honorable State happy.

Records of the Rev. Samuel Haven’s meetinghouse specify that the couple were married on 8 August—250 years ago today.

Boston newspapers reprinted that news in the following week, with the 21 August Massachusetts Spy (cramped for space) leaving off the encomium to the bride but identifying her father as an “Auctioneer.”

Alice’s father, Benjamin Church, Sr., was indeed well known in Boston for his vendue-house. He wasn’t a native of the town but had been born in Bristol, Rhode Island, in 1704. His father died when he was two, and he grew up mostly in the household of his paternal grandfather, also named Benjamin Church, famous in New England for leading guerrilla war against Native nations in the late 1600s.

After graduating from Harvard College in 1727, the younger Benjamin Church went into business in Newport. He married Elizabeth Viall that October, and they had two children before she died in 1730. Church married again in 1732, to Hannah Dyer of Boston. He continued to develop his auction house in Newport.

Around 1740, Church moved his business and family to Boston. He owned various real estate, invested in the Land Bank, and established a new vendue-house in the South End. He specialized in selling cloth and other goods just off the ships. Church also served in public posts: as a minor town official and a deacon in the Rev. Mather Byles’s Hollis Street Meetinghouse. He penned Latin poems and a biography of his grandfather.

Benjamin and Hannah Church had eight children. Benjamin, Jr., was the first boy, born in 1734 and graduating from Harvard twenty years later. He became a physician and, by the late 1760s, one of the leaders among Boston’s Whigs, known for his genteel manners and satirical verse. In March 1770 Dr. Church performed an autopsy on the body of Crispus Attucks.

Alice Church was one of Benjamin and Hannah’s younger girls, baptized at the Hollis Street Meetinghouse in 1749. That meant she was around twenty-one years old when she married printer John Fleeming. He was older, but we don’t know by how much, only that he had been in business since arriving in Boston from Scotland in August 1764.

There are some mysterious aspects of this wedding. First, John Fleeming had been partner to John Mein in printing the Boston Chronicle. In that newspaper and subsequent political pamphlets, Mein sneered at Dr. Church the “Lean Apothecary.” Some have interpreted that to mean Dr. Joseph Warren, but Mein’s own handwritten “Key” to the pamphlet (now in the Sparks Manuscripts at Harvard) states he meant Church and further described him as:

One of the greatest miscreants that walks on the face of the Earth who has cheated & back bitten every Person with whom he ever had the least Connection—Father Mother & friend & more than once foxed his Wife &c &c &c

So right away we can ask how John Fleeming and Alice Church ever became friendly.

The next big question is why did they get married in New Hampshire. Massachusetts couples went over the border if they were eloping or needed to marry quickly because a baby was on the way. There’s no evidence to confirm either of those possibilities, but we know little about the Fleemings.

Church researcher E. J. Witek noted a possible third factor. John Fleeming had taken refuge on Castle Island at the end of June after shutting down the Chronicle, so he might not have felt safe going to a church in Boston. Still, I think he could have found a minister closer to home than Portsmouth.

John Fleeming was connected to the Sandemanian sect while Alice Church had been raised in the Congregationalist faith. They were married by a Congregationalist minister. But the Fleemings had a daughter named Alicia baptized at King’s Chapel, an Anglican church, on 17 July 1772 (and Dr. Benjamin Church was one of the baby’s sponsors). Again, questions but no answers.

The family link between John Fleeming and Dr. Benjamin Church became an issue of state in 1775 when Gen. George Washington and his staff realized that Church had tried to send a ciphered letter into Boston via his mistress, Mary (Brown) Wenwood. Deciphered, that letter turned out to be to Fleeming. In his defense, Church turned over a letter he had received from his brother-in-law. It said things like:

Ally joins me in begging you to come to Boston. . . . your sister is unhappy under the apprehension of your being taken and hanged for a rebel . . . If you cannot pass the lines, you may come in Capt. [James] Wallace, via Rhode Island, and if you do not come immediately, write me in this character, and direct your letter to Major [Edward] Cane on his Majesty’s service, and deliver it to Capt. Wallace, and it will come safe. . . . Your sister has been for running away; Kitty has been very sick, we wished you to see her; she is now picking up. I remain your sincere friend and brother…

That reads like a genuine familial friendship even though the men were on opposite sides of the war. And the link was forged 250 years ago today.

(While researching the Church genealogy, I realized that Dr. Church’s older half-sister Martha was stepmother to the teen-aged assistant teacher at the South Writing School in 1774, Andrew Cunningham. Both Dr. Church and young Cunningham, his step-half-nephew, are players in The Road to Concord, one helping to conceal the Boston militia train’s stolen cannon and the other helping Gen. Thomas Gage hunt for them.)