“From his own incoherent stories”

On 4 Dec 1775, Col. Jonathan Ward of Southborough convened a court-martial in the Continental Army camp at Roxbury.

Col. Ward presided over a board of officers that included four captains and seven lieutenants.

Pvt. John Short of Rochester was one defendant in that proceeding. He had marched under Col. Theophilus Cotton and Capt. Earl Clapp (represented above by his shoe buckles) during the Lexington Alarm and then enlisted under them for the rest of the year.

Short was charged with “desertion and theft.” He pled not guilty. The record of the court-martial published in American Archives states:

On hearing the evidence brought to support the charge, the Court are unanimously of opinion the prisoner is guilty. It likewise appears very clear to the Court, from sundry papers that were found with him, and from his own incoherent stories, that he is guilty of a breach of the 27th and 29th, and also the 3d article of the Rules and Regulations of the Massachusetts Army.

[Those articles forbade corresponding with the enemy, leaving one’s post to plunder, and provoking mutiny, respectively.]

According to said rules, the Court adjudge the following sums of money to be paid out of his wages and effects, viz:

To Captain Earl Clapp, the sum of 1£.16s., for expense of advertising and apprehending him; also, 36s., that said Clapp paid, at said Short’s desire, for a former theft.

To William Cowing [also listed as Cowen], a soldier in Captain Clapp’s company, 36s.10d., that he carried away with him when he deserted.

To Daniel Crawford [also Croxford], in said company, 4£.16s., for the damage done him by stealing his clothes.

Likewise adjudge him to be whipped thirty-nine stripes on the naked back, and suffer two years imprisonment in Newgate Prison, in Symsbury [Connecticut], and as much longer as the present contest between Great Britain and the American Colonies shall subsist.

The court then turned to Pvt. John Smith, a soldier in Capt. Peter Harwood’s company of Col. Ebenezer Learned’s regiment. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors includes many pages of John Smith entries, of course, but this information matches a man from Brookfield who had enlisted on 12 June.

Smith was charged with “attempting to desert to the enemy.” He pled guilty. The court sentenced him to “pay the sum of eight shillings to Brigadier-General [John] Thomas, to defray the expense of bringing him back to camp, and suffer six months imprisonment in Newgate Prison, in Symsbury.”

Finally the officers considered “Owen Resick, a transient person,” for “aiding, advising, and assisting John Smith to desert to the enemy.” He denied the charge. (Based on other sources, I now think this man’s surname should have been transcribed as Ruick.)

After “hearing and examining the evidence,” the panel found Ruick guilty and sentenced him to “one year’s imprisonment in Newgate Prison, in Symsbury, and as much longer as the present disputes between Great Britain and the Colonies shall subsist.”

Gen. Artemas Ward affirmed those sentences. They don’t appear in Gen. George Washington’s general orders, issued out of Cambridge.

TOMORROW: A glimpse of John Short.

“Permitted to Die of the Small-Pox”

Last weekend the Boston Globe’s Ideas section ran an article by historian Andrew M. Wehrman headlined “A Pox on You.” It starts like this:

On a blustery January night in 1774, scarcely a month after the famous Tea Party in Boston, an even more shocking protest unfolded on Massachusetts’ North Shore. In the dead of night, a crew of 20 men blackened their faces and armed themselves with torches and buckets of tar. The object of their anger was not a chest of tea, a tax collector, or British soldiers. What these men, mostly sailors from Marblehead, burned down was the town’s brand new hospital.

On the surface, such an attack might seem inhuman, or at best ignorant. But the act was the calculated result of long-simmering anger over the cost and politics of smallpox inoculations in one of the largest and most prosperous towns in the Colonies. Their anger would be familiar to anyone today who has faced ballooning insurance premiums, or who was moved to stand up and shout at this summer’s town hall debates on health care.

Wehrman’s study of the destruction of the Marblehead smallpox hospital appeared this year in the New England Quarterly. In this opinion essay, and in a follow-up discussion on N.P.R.’s Talk of the Nation, he touches on larger questions of public health and public resources, which have concerned governments in America from the start.

Later in the week I stumbled across a pertinent item from the Columbian Centinel for 14 Nov 1804. It was a column that combined simple death notices, longer obituaries, and some bills of mortality—early public health information. Among those last items was:

In New-York, from the 26th Oct. to the 3d Nov. 42 deaths;—of whom 14 were men, 10 women, 13 boys, and 6 girls;—by taking laudanum, (suicide) 1 person; TEN of SMALL-POX!—Shame!

Among those who were permitted to die of the small-pox, was Mr. Charles B. Rich, printer, of Brookfield, (Massa.); a young man of strict integrity and emulative worth, and bid fair to be a public, as he had been a private, ornament to society.

The Centinel employees might have felt special regret for Rich’s death because he was a fellow printer, perhaps even one they knew. But they also regretted it because people had started to see smallpox as a preventable disease.

For decades people had realized that an infection with a mild form of smallpox could grant lifelong immunity, lowering the rate of the disease’s transmission and mortality. And in 1798 Dr. Edward Jenner of Gloucestershire (shown above, courtesy of the New York City Department of Health) started to publicize his success at vaccination: injecting people with the rarely fatal cowpox or “kinepox” virus made them immune to smallpox as well.

The Centinel printers felt that having citizens die when people knew of better medical and public-health methods was a stain on American society. And a drain—a healthier public would benefit the nation. That thinking seems to be neglected in the U.S. of A.’s current debate over medical insurance, in which people have paid a great deal of attention to how much different plans might cost without noting how much money each is projected to save based on a healthier population and more efficient use of medical services. (And of course the policy-makers’ debate basically ignores how much more the nation could save by reducing private bureaucracies.)

The Trial of Bathsheba Spooner

At the Early American Crime blog, Anthony Vaver discussed one of the exciting scandals of Revolutionary Massachusetts: the trial of Bathsheba Spooner of Brookfield for arranging the murder of her husband. 

This 1778 crime gained an unavoidable political dimension because Spooner was the daughter of a leading Loyalist exile, Timothy Ruggles, and her alleged accomplices included two British prisoners of war—as well as a young Continental Army veteran. 

What’s more, as part of the 150th anniversary of the Massachusetts Superior Court, the trial of Bathsheba Spooner was reenacted at the Worcester Trial Court last week. Vaver provides lots of photographs, including some of men portraying prosecutor Robert Treat Paine and local newspaper publisher Isaiah Thomas. 

A Tea Party Rumor Reaches Brookfield

Today I braved the roads outside the American Antiquarian Society again—twice!—to look at documents and attend a lecture. And what have I learned? Well, if one asks a question from underneath the center of the dome above the reading room, the lecturer can barely hear it. However, questions asked more softly from seats further away, on the edge of the dome, are perfectly audible.

Oh, yeah, there was an interesting document, too. It came from Joseph Gilbert (1733-1776), a farmer in Brookfield, Massachusetts, who was active in town government and the local militia. When he died, he held the rank of colonel.

Daniel Waldo (1724-1808) was a Boston merchant until 1775. (This is a different Daniel Waldo from the one who told a story about George Washington.) After the war, he moved to Worcester, probably because his wife was a Salisbury, from one of that town’s leading business families. His portrait shown here, by Denmark-born artist Christian Gullager, is now in the Worcester Art Museum. In 1773, it appears Waldo might have been one of the principal purveyors of goods out to Gilbert and his neighbors, their contact with Boston’s merchant community.

On 22 Dec 1773, Gilbert wrote to Waldo—or “Waldow,” as he rendered it in his frequently phonetic spelling. Brookfield had heard big news about the Boston Tea Party, but some disturbing rumors had followed:

We have a Current Report that the Past friday teas is all throd into the Dock By a Number of Indians from Diffrint parts of the Countery and all Destroyed &C[.] if true We are very glad———

But of Late there is a Nother Report which Surprises us that Is the marchents of Boston has privately Convaied sd Tea a whay and are Determind to sell the same & have filled thee same Chists whith thare old mustea tea hay Chafe & such Like on purpos to mak a profitt to them selves & Decve the Cuntrey.

Can this Be so[?] I Cannot Belive it[.] if true I say no more In your favr nor Can any But Bid a Due to you and all your prosidings[.] pray send me a Line By the next post the Truth of the matter Dont faill & you oblige your frind & homil S[ervan]t

Joseph Gilbert

PS. This Last Report is Indousterisly spreding By your Enemyes throw the Cuntery that it stands you In hand to Clear up the matter for if true the Cuntery will not stand by you[;] if not true they Will Resque thear Lives & fortuens in your Care

And Gilbert wrote yet another postscript vertically beside the letter:

We Have a Town meating Worned to be on nex mondy at one O Clock that make it [word ripped away but obviously something like “important”] that Wee should know the Sartinte of this matter Befor that

Which confirms that it’s not just a modern tactic to spread completely false rumors when it looks like your political opponents are winning. Since the friends of the royal government were in the minority and controlled few newspapers or town meetings, we don’t see as many of their rumors as we see from the Whigs. But obviously they resorted to the tactic as well.