How Massachusetts Militia Companies Trained for War

At Historical Nerdery, Alexander Cain shared some findings on the question of how often Massachusetts militiamen drilled in the charged months leading up to the outbreak of war.

Provincial law already required most men aged sixteen to sixty to drill with militia units four times a year. But with royal troops in Boston, Patriots saw a need to increase their preparedness—to demonstrate their determination to resist in order to make the government back down in the best case, to fight those redcoats in the worst.

Cain wrote:

Following the October 1774 orders of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, provincial towns scrambled to put themselves onto a wartime footing. As part of the effort, many militia and minute companies passed resolutions or entered into covenants clearly outlining the expectations of military service. . . .

Amesbury resolved that its minute men would engage in “exercising four hours in a fortnight.” Two weeks later, the town modified its order and instructed its minute men to “[exercise] four hours in a week.” The residents of Boxford voted on March 14, 1775, “that the minute-men shall train one-half day in a week, for four weeks after this week is ended.”

Note that towns didn’t follow uniform standards on how much their minute companies would train. Because the Provincial Congress was a creation of the towns, without strict constitutional authority, it could recommend that men devote more time to military training, but it didn’t have the authority to require that. 

Each town could choose whether to form a minute company, what training schedule its militia companies would follow, and how men would be paid for their time—or if they were to be paid at all. As I wrote back here, Westborough’s town meeting debated at least twice whether to pay the minute men more than other militiamen and decided not to. Furthermore, as volunteers the men themselves had a lot of say in how much time they put in.

In Haverhill, Cain has noted, the meeting first decided its minute men should “be duly disciplined in Squads three half days in a Week, three hours in each half day.” (Did the reference to “squads” mean only parts of the whole company?) That schedule was replaced a week later with one requiring a full day of training once a week.

Cain also shared the transcription of a document from Haverhill prepared by Sgt. Mitchel Whittier, listing the men who belonged to the minute company and how often each had come to drills in March and April 1775.

The number of days men attended ranged from six down to one—or, if a horizontal line didn’t mean “ditto,” none. Only one of four sergeants and one of three corporals (“Coprel”) came on six days. Neither Capt. James Sawyer nor his two lieutenants showed up for all six drills. (Or perhaps there were more than six drills, and nobody showed up for all of them.)

The fact that so few men attended every drill strongly suggests that the community didn’t expect perfect attendance. As neighbors, they understood that illness, family responsibilities, bad weather, the farming workload, or other factors might keep a man from every training day. Nonetheless, the prevailing goal in rural Massachusetts in the early months of 1775 was to get more prepared for war.

Lydia Barnard: “a woman of strong mind and massive physique”

Yesterday I continued this year’s exploration of the stories of the Battle of Lexington and Concord with the story of Lydia Barnard (born Lydia Warren and died Lydia Spofford), as first set down in an 1880 history of Boxford, Massachusetts.

Another version of this tale appeared in Jeremiah and Aphia Tenney Spofford’s 1888 genealogy of the family. This book calls Lydia Spofford “a woman of strong mind and massive physique,” and quotes what it says is her own account of 19 Apr 1775, “transcribed by her grandson, Benjamin S. Barnes, of Boxford”:

The day of the battle of Lexington, I was living in Watertown. The able-bodied men had all gone to the battle, leaving only women, children, and a few old men, at home, anxiously awaiting the result. Toward night several women came running to my house, crying, “Mrs. Barnard, the Regulars are coming!”

I looked up the street, and saw a redcoat riding toward us on a horse. He came up and inquired if that was the road to Boston. I stepped to his side, took the horse by the head with one hand, and the soldier by the collar with the other, saying, “You villain; you’ve been killing our folks, and deserve death yourself” (my husband and five brothers had gone to the fight). I pulled him to the ground, while he begged piteously for his life.

I then gave him up to some old men, who took him to the tavern and kept him till the proper authorities had him exchanged for one of our men. It was asserted that he was wounded, and was trying to find his way to Boston, having stolen the horse from the roadside, where it had been tied by its owner, Col. Stedman, of Cambridge, who had ridden him to Lexington that morning, whither he had gone to fight for his country. He was made glad, a few days after, by the recovery of his valuable horse.

I don’t know of any colonel named Stedman in Cambridge, but Capt. Ebenezer Stedman (1709-1785) was a selectman and important Patriot activist in that town. Local historian Lucius Paige wrote: “He kept a tavern many years on the southerly side of Mount Auburn Street, about midway between Brighton and Dunster streets.” We know from contemporaneous notes that Stedman sent express riders up to Woburn between midnight and dawn on 19 Apr 1775, so he got word of the British march early. Still, he was in his late sixties that day, and might have left the actual riding and fighting to younger men.

This version of the tale offers an explanation of how a Watertown woman could have grabbed a redcoat when the main British column never passed through that town: this particular soldier was separated from the rest, and lost. He also seems to have been wounded, and not carrying a gun—easy prey for “a woman of strong mind and massive physique.”

TOMORROW: Apparently, yet more details of Lydia Spofford’s tale.

Lydia Barnard: “a woman of strong mind and body”

Sidney Perley’s History of Boxford (1880) includes this ungraceful sentence in a footnote:

When the British drove the General Court from Boston in 1775, Mr. [Aaron] Wood and some of the representatives boarded with Mrs. Lydia Barnard,—daughter of Phineas and Grace (Hastings) Warren of Waltham, Mass., and widow of David Barnard—(who was born Jan. 18, 1745), in Watertown, where, it will be remembered, many of the members of the General Court took refuge.

Already we’ve veered off the historical track. The royal authorities didn’t “drive the General Court from Boston in 1775.” Gov. Thomas Gage had used his constitutional power to dissolve the legislature in mid-1774 while it was meeting in Salem. The towns elected a shadow legislature called the Massachusetts Provincial Congress late that year, and Aaron Wood was the first representative from Boxford, though he didn’t attend all the later sessions.

In mid-1775, after the war had begun, Massachusetts towns decided they could resume electing a General Court. The legislature then met in Watertown, and Wood was once against a Boxford representative. And, since his wife died on 15 June 1775, he was also available.

Perley’s footnote continues:

Mr. Wood fell in love with his buxom hostess, married [on 8 May 1776 in Cambridge], and brought her to Boxford. After the death of Mr. Wood, who died childless, she married Benjamin Spofford of Boxford, Nov. 14, 1792. She was a woman of strong mind and body, weighing over two hundred pounds, and died Sept. 6, 1839, aged ninety-five years [actually ninety-four].

When the British retreated after the battle of Lexington, they passed by her house. One of the privates stole a horse, and was making his retreat in better style. He said something to Mrs. Barnard that was not acceptable to her patriotic mind, and she pulled him from his horse, and took him prisoner; and, it is said, this was the first prisoner taken during the Revolution.

But the British column didn’t withdraw from Concord through Watertown, so they couldn’t have “passed by” the Barnard house.

TOMORROW: Lydia Spofford’s own story?