Why Samuel Prescott and Lydia Mulliken Never Married

A couple of days ago, I quoted an 1824 Concord newspaper saying that on 18 Apr 1775 Dr. Samuel Prescott had been out on “a visit to the lady who afterwards became his wife.”

Folks who’ve read about Prescott no doubt perked up at that because it contradicts one of the few facts in the history books about him.

That fact first surfaced in a footnote in Lemuel Shattuck’s history of Concord:

Samuel was taken prisoner on board a privateer afterwards, and carried to Halifax, where he died in jail.

No other details or source notes came with this statement, alas.

Authors were therefore left with little to work with. Some dwelled on the sad story of Lydia Mulliken’s brother Nathaniel and Samuel Prescott’s brother Abel both dying on dysentery (camp fever) in the first year of the war, followed by Samuel dying a prisoner.

In November 1782, the Haverhill town records recorded that Joseph Burrill of that town and Lydia Mulliken of Lexington intended to marry. On 18 Mar 1783, the Lexington vital records say, that wedding took place. (This is listed only under Burrill’s name.)

Some have taken that timing to say Lydia held out hope that Samuel was still alive until near the end of the war and only then agreed to marry someone else. But of course we don’t know what she was thinking or when she and Joseph Burrill met.

Lydia died in 1789 after having two children who both died young. Joseph remarried to Susanna Mulliken, a cousin of his first wife. That couple had several more children and lived into the 1830s.

There are, however, a couple of other sources that might complicate or confirm the local lore of Dr. Samuel Prescott’s death in a Halifax jail.

TOMORROW: Marching west, sailing east?

“Frenchmen at the Siege of Boston,” 23 Mar.

On Thursday, 23 March, I’ll speak at the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site on the topic “Frenchmen at the Siege of Boston.”

This is the site’s annual Evacuation Day lecture, presented in partnership with the Friends of the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters. It honors the successful end of the siege of Boston, which Gen. George Washington oversaw from that Cambridge mansion.

Our description of this talk says:

Histories of the French government’s support for the American Revolution usually begin with Lafayette, the secret supply chain organized by Beaumarchais, and the formal alliance in 1778.

But French gentlemen were actually at the siege of Boston in 1775—observing the armies, meeting Gen. George Washington at his headquarters, and even briefly overseeing the provincial artillery force. Washington and his generals were also trying to win over the francophone subjects of Canada.

In this talk, author J. L. Bell will explore the first secret and tentative steps toward French-American friendship in Cambridge in 1775.

I’ll share some of my research about French noblemen and merchants who visited Massachusetts in 1775. I’ll also rely on Rick Detwiller’s excellent research about two more men who went beyond visiting to participate in the siege itself. As shown above, they left their mark on the landscape, or at least on Henry Pelham’s map of Boston: a fortified site labeled “French redoubt.”

I’ll speak in the Longfellow carriage house. Seating is limited, so please reserve seats through this link. This will also be our first attempt at livestreaming a talk through the site’s YouTube page.

2023 Revolutionary War Conference in the Mohawk Valley, 9–11 June

On the weekend of 9–11 June, the Fort Plain Museum will host its annual Revolutionary War Conference in the Mohawk Valley.

This year’s session is called “Conference 250,” with several presentations looking back at events in 1773 and others looking forward to the Sestercentennial.

The lineup of speakers includes:

• James Kirby Martin in conversation with Mark Edward Lender, professor and former student discussing the Revolutionary War and its 250th anniversary
• Friederike Baer, “Hessians: The German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War”
• John “Jack” Buchanan, “The Battle of Musgrove’s Mill, 1780”
• Benjamin L. Carp, “The Boston Tea Party at 250: Reflections on the Radicalism of the Revolutionary Movement”
• Vivian E. Davis, ”Over 250 Years Ago!: The Battle of Golden Hill, January 19, 1770”
• Holly A. Mayer, “Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union”
• Steven Park, “250 Years of Remembering: The Changing Landscape of Gaspee History”
• Nina Sankovitch, “The Abiding Quest of a Forgotten Hero: How Josiah Quincy Battled Overwhelming Odds to Bring Together the Northern and Southern Colonies in 1773”
• Eric H. Schnitzer, “Picturing History: The Images of the American War for Independence”
• Sergio Villavicencio, “St. Eustatius and the American Revolution”
• Kelly Yacobucci Farquhar, “Jellas Fonda, a Letter, and the Boston Tea Party: A Look Back 250 Years Later”
• Terry McMaster, “A Revolutionary Couple on the Old New York Frontier: Col. Samuel Clyde & Catharine Wasson of Cherry Valley”
• “New York State and the 250th: Where Things Stand” presented by Devin R. Lander, New York State Historian; Phil Giltner, Director of Special Projects, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation; and Lauren Roberts, Saratoga County Historian
• Norman J. Bollen, Fort Plain Museum board chairman, “The Fort Plain Museum & Historical Park’s Grand Enhancement Plan: Rebuilding the Blockhouse for the 250th”

Before the conference and under a separate registration, there will be a bus tour of “Forts and Fortified Homes of the Mohawk Valley” led by Bruce Venter, Wayne Lenig, and Norm Bollen. This is a new, in-depth tour of the historic forts, fortified homes, and other sites that formed the defensive perimeter around Fort Rensselaer (Fort Plain). Lunch will be included.

The conference will take place in the theater of Fulton-Montgomery Community College in Johnstown, New York. Based on past events, I expect an excellent selection of Revolutionary history books to be on sale.

For the full schedule as currently planned, additional information, and registration forms, visit this website.

“To transport these Men to Kennibeck”

When Dr. Benjamin Church wrote his intelligence report on 24 Sept 1775, the latest big event along the Continental lines was the departure of volunteers heading north.

Those men were under the command of Col. Benedict Arnold (shown here), respected for his part in taking Fort Ticonderoga and other Crown positions along Lake Champlain.

Church knew Arnold. In fact, the doctor had been the ranking member of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety who had signed Arnold’s orders for that mission to Ticonderoga on 3 May. In August he headed the committee to review the colonel’s expenses, an interaction that didn’t go so smoothly. (Ironic moments, since Church was already supplying the Crown with secrets and Arnold would do so later.)

In late August, Arnold met with Gen. George Washington and gained approval for a quick thrust through Maine to Québec, meeting up with Gen. Richard Montgomery’s force advancing from New York. The commander’s general orders for 5 September called for “such Volunteers as are active woodsmen, and well acquainted with batteaus,” to march under Arnold’s command. About a thousand men responded, and most of them left Cambridge on 13 September.

Although the destination of that column was supposed to be secret, lots of people suspected. For example, on 13 September Jesse Lukens, a volunteer from Pennsylvania, wrote:

Col. Arnold having chosen one thousand effective men, consisting of two companies of riflemen, (about one hundred and forty,) the remainder musqueteers, set off for Quebec, as it is given out, and which I really believe to be their destination. I accompanied on foot as far as Lynn, nine miles.

Starting on 20 September, newspapers in New York and Philadelphia reported on Arnold’s departure for Québec, citing reports from Cambridge. New England newspapers were more cagy about his destination, but the secret was out.

Dr. Church mentioned the overall Canada campaign three times in his letter, starting with the second sentence and ending just before his request for money:

The fifteen hundred Men that you had news of going to Quebec are going to Halifax (I believe) to destroy that place, . . .

An Express from Ticondiroga, says that they had been Ambushed but foursed their way through with the loss of 13 Men and they on their advancing forward found on the ground ten Indians dead, that the Army was within one Mile and a half of St. Johns, on which they sent a party of Men to Cut of the Communication between Montreal and the Fort. . . .

The Vessells I mentioned that was fiting at Salem was to transport these Men to Kennibeck as I find since, I am not Certain they are gone to Halifax but it is thought and believed they are.

This letter shows that even the British commanders inside Boston had received word of “fifteen hundred Men…going to Quebec” and asked Church about it. But the doctor suspected they were headed to Nova Scotia. When he began this dispatch he was certain about that; by the end, he wasn’t so sure but still thought that was most likely.

In fact, the Continental generals had talked about an attack on Halifax. Immediately after hearing about the shortage of gunpowder on 3 August, Washington and his council of war discussed raiding Crown outposts with powder stores. Col. John Glover leased a schooner called the Hannah.

By mid-September, however, plans had changed. Washington had ordered the Hannah to try attacking British supply ships instead. He wrote to the merchant Nathaniel Tracy to arrange for several more ships to carry Arnold’s one thousand men from Newburyport up to the mouth of the Kennebeck River.

Church’s expectation of an attack on Halifax might have been accurate at one point, but not any longer.

COMING UP: More details from the Continental camp.

Hannah Waldo, Patent Heiress

Hannah Waldo was born in Boston on 21 Nov 1726 and baptized in the town’s First Meetinghouse. She was the daughter of Lucy and Samuel Waldo (shown here).

Samuel Waldo was a merchant who went into land speculation in a big way. In 1729, when Hannah was two years old, he acquired the controlling interest in a big land grant in Maine.

That royal grant had changed hands for many decades because simply having permission from London to claim land didn’t mean a person could actually exercise any control over it.

Waldo also bought a big land grant in Nova Scotia, but that claim was on shaky legal grounds. He spent a fair amount of the 1730s in London, arguing unsuccessfully for that patent and recruiting people to settle on his Maine (main?) claim.

One obstacle to British settlements on what became known as the Waldo Patent was danger from the French and the Native nations allied with them, or just uninterested in losing their territory. Starting in 1740, Waldo promoted a plan to attack the French fortification at Louisbourg to remove that threat.

When Britain finally went to war against France, Gov. William Shirley authorized that military expedition. William Pepperrell was the commander-in-chief, and Samuel Waldo, who had served under Pepperrell in the top ranks of Maine’s militia, was commissioned a brigadier general, second in command of the land forces.

As I discussed yesterday, that expedition was a big success. By the end of 1745, Massachusetts’s military captured the French outpost for the British Empire (though the British Empire decided to give it back in exchange for Madras). Pepperrell was made a baronet. Waldo was addressed as “general” for the rest of his life, and he could step up his efforts to recruit settlers for his land.

Among the people who came to the Waldo Patent in the next few years, before another war broke out, were Georg Frederich Seiter and Christine Salome Hartwick. They would marry and have children, including Christopher Seider. But that’s getting away from Hannah Waldo’s story.

The Waldo and Pepperell families were well acquainted. The general’s son Samuel, Jr., was in the same class at Harvard College as the baronet’s son, Andrew. Furthermore, in 1742 the baronet’s daughter, Elizabeth, had married Nathaniel Sparhawk, a son of Hannah and Samuel, Jr.’s step-grandmother through a second marriage.

In 1746, Hannah Waldo and Andrew Pepperrell became engaged. Andrew was seen as quite a catch. Writing ninety years later, Usher Parsons said: “his comely person and polished manners were a passport to the best circles; and his heirship to a fortune and a baronetcy placed him in the highest social position.”

Sir William and Gen. Waldo were both pleased with this engagement, which would bring together the district’s two leading families (with the Sparhawks tied in as a bonus). The actual wedding date was to be named later when Andrew finished building his house.

And that proved to be a problem.

TOMORROW: Waiting for a wedding.

How Andrew Pepperrell Became Heir to a Baronetcy

Andrew Pepperell was born on 4 Jan 1726 and grew up as the only son of the Maine-based merchant William Pepperrell (shown here) and his wife Mary.

When Andrew went to Harvard College in 1743, his parents moved to Boston to be closer to him. And also so William could participate in the Council.

Over in Cambridge, Andrew Pepperrell quickly got into trouble with David Phips, son of the lieutenant governor and later himself sheriff of Middlesex County. They were fined for “an extravagant drinking Frolick and afterward in making indecent Noises, in the College Yard and in Town, and that late at Night.”

Nevertheless, both Pepperrell and Phips ranked second in their respective classes, simply on the basis of their fathers’ social stature.

After graduating, Andrew Pepperrell became his father’s business partner while also working on his M.A. Meanwhile, as King George’s War began, William Pepperrell was among the gentlemen arguing for an expedition against the French fortress at Louisbourg.

That expedition set off in April 1745. Pepperrell was the commander-in-chief. Though some Royal Navy warships sailed in support, this was primarily a Massachusetts military enterprise. To many people’s surprise, it was a big success. After a six-week siege, Pepperrell and his men forced the French garrison to surrender.

In 1746, William Pepperrell received a singular honor from the Crown: he was made a baronet, or hereditary knight. Indeed, he was the only American ever made a baronet. That meant Andrew was the heir to a title, as well as a growing fortune.

Andrew Pepperrell was already investing his share of that fortune. Not always speculating wisely, his father thought, though he did make money in ship-building. One particular project was a large mansion house in Maine near his parents’ estate. The younger Pepperrell imported both labor and furnishings for this grand building.

As an impetus for that construction, it appears, in 1746 at the age of twenty Andrew Pepperrell engaged to marry a young woman named Hannah Waldo.

TOMORROW: The lucky lady.

“My desire is to restore to them the blessings of law and liberty”

On 31 Oct 1776, Parliament opened a new legislative session. King George III addressed the assembled House of Commons and House of Lords.

The king spoke on behalf of the current government’s leaders, particularly prime minister Lord North and the secretary of state for the colonies, Lord George Germain.

The king strongly agreed with those men, so the remarks also reflected his own ideas about the American War:

My Lords and Gentlemen,

Nothing could have afforded me so much satisfaction as to have been able to inform you, at the opening of this session, that the troubles, which have so long distracted my colonies in North America, were at an end; and that my unhappy people, recovered from their delusion, had delivered themselves from the oppression of their leaders, and returned to their duty: but so daring and desperate is the spirit of those leaders, whose object has always been dominion and power, that they have now openly renounced all allegiance to the crown, and all political connection with this country; they have rejected, with circumstances of indignity and insult, the means of conciliation held out to them under the authority of our commission; and have presumed to set up their rebellious confederacies for independent states.

If their treason be suffered to take root, much mischief must grow from it, to the safety of my loyal colonies, to the commerce of my kingdoms, and indeed to the present system of all Europe. One great advantage, however, will be derived from the object of the rebels being openly avowed, and clearly understood; we shall have unanimity at home, founded in the general conviction of the justice and necessity of our measures.

I am happy to inform you, that, by the blessing of Divine Providence on the good conduct and valour of my officers and forces by sea and land, and on the zeal and bravery of the auxiliary troops in my service, Canada is recovered; and although, from unavoidable delays, the operations at New York could not begin before the month of August, the success in that province has been so important as to give the strongest hopes of the most decisive good consequences: but, notwithstanding this fair prospect, we must, at all events, prepare for another campaign.

In fact, three days before Gen. Sir William Howe had won a solid victory at the Battle of White Plains, part of the Crown’s recovery of New York City and Long Island into the British Empire. But of course that news hadn’t reached London yet.

After directing a request to continue funding the war through taxes to the Commons, as the British constitution required, the king concluded:

In this arduous contest I can have no other object but to promote the true interest of all my subjects. No people ever enjoyed more happiness, or lived under a milder government, than those now revolted provinces: the improvements in every art, of which they boast, declare it; their numbers, their wealth, their strength by sea and land, which they think sufficient to enable them to make head against the whole power of the mother-country, are irrefragable proofs of it. My desire is to restore to them the blessings of law and liberty, equally enjoyed by every British subject, which they have fatally and desperately exchanged for all the calamities of war, and the arbitrary tyranny of their chiefs.

Not everyone in the chamber agreed with that perspective.

TOMORROW: The Rockinghamites strike back.

Josiah Quincy’s Fellow Travelers

Once his ship was safely clear of Salem harbor, Josiah Quincy, Jr., must have come up to enjoy the sea air. One of the benefits of his voyage to Britain was supposed to be relief from his tuberculosis.

I suspect his presence startled his fellow passengers aboard the Boston Packet. In his diary of the trip, Quincy listed those men this way:

With us went passengers Messrs. W. Hyslop and son; Dr. Paine and Rufus Chandler, Esq., of Worcester; Mr. Higginson, of Salem, and Mr. Sylvester Oliver, son of the late Lieutenant-Governor. Some of us might say, “Nos dulcia linquimus arva,” [We abandon our sweet fields] while others were obliged to mourn, “Nos patriam fugimus.” [We fly from our country]

Those Latin tags appear together in Virgil’s first Eclogue. Quincy evidently thought one applied to some of the men and one to the rest.

Who were those fellow travelers?

William Hyslop (1714–1796) was a merchant of Scottish descent, close to the Rev. Charles Chauncy and involved in missionizing charities. By 1774 he was “liveing out of town,” as Jane Mecom wrote, in a Brookline house he bought from Dr. Zabdiel Boylston. (Mecom had asked Hyslop to carry a letter to her brother in London, Benjamin Franklin, but he’d forgotten.) Hyslop’s son traveling with him was probably William Hyslop (1753–1792).

Hyslop appears to have been stranded in Britain by the outbreak of war. In May 1778 he wrote to John Adams from London to say he had “not heard from his Wife, Family, and other Friends at B—— since the 21st of September last” and was “impatiently waiting for a favourable opportunity to return to his Family and Friends from whom he has been so long involuntarily absent.” He probably didn’t want to be counted among the “absentees”; if so, the state might assume he was a Loyalist and confiscate his property.

Hyslop eventually did return to his family and property. He funded a school building for Brookline in 1793, and the town still has a road named for him.

Dr. William Paine (1750–1833, shown above) and Rufus Chandler (1747–1823) were both Harvard-educated young professionals, Paine a physician-apothecary and Chandler a lawyer. Their families were also related. They had been building genteel lives in Worcester until they sided with the Crown in the town’s increasingly Whiggish politics.

In August 1774, “near 3000 people” visited Paine’s father, Timothy Paine, to express their displeasure at him accepting a seat on the mandamus Council. The next month, over 4,500 Worcester County Patriots turned out to close the courts where Chandler worked. The two men decided they were better off visiting London.

Paine and Chandler returned to Massachusetts in the spring of 1775, landing in Salem in May only to find that there was a war under way and they were on the wrong side of the lines. They quickly moved into Boston and took stock of their situations.

Paine sailed back to Britain, where he bought and wheedled a medical degree and an appointment as apothecary for Gen. Sir William Howe’s army in 1776. During the early 1780s he held some offices in Nova Scotia. But in 1787, Paine came back to Massachusetts and rebuilt his upper-class life.

Chandler stayed in Boston through the siege, evacuated to Halifax with his wife, and then spent most of the war years in New York City. He tried to establish a lucrative legal practice in Halifax and Annapolis Royal, but eventually gave up and moved to London for his final decades.

Stephen Higginson (1743–1828) had become a merchant in Salem after spending a decade as a young ship’s captain. During this trip to London, the House of Commons invited him to testify about how the fishermen of Massachusetts would respond to a proposed new law. Higginson’s answers didn’t endear him to all his Essex County neighbors, and Salem’s committee of safety had to ask the Massachusetts Provincial Congress to vouch for him in June 1775.

Higginson repaired his reputation well enough, particularly by financing privateers, that toward the end of the war he became one of Massachusetts’s delegates to the Continental Congress. During the Shays Rebellion, he helped to lead the militia that Gov. James Bowdoin sent to quell the unrest, and he was a strong Federalist in the early republic.

Finally, Brinley Sylvester Oliver (1755–1828) was indeed a son of Massachusetts’s late lieutenant governor, Andrew Oliver. His mother died in March 1773, his father a year later, just before he graduated from Harvard College. Oliver started attending Anglican services, a sign of his alienation from the Massachusetts society of his ancestors.

Syvlester Oliver was also a nephew of former governor Thomas Hutchinson, who greeted him warmly in London and loaned him £150. Eventually he gained the rank of purser in the Royal Navy and a Loyalist pension. He saw naval action against the French, including at the Battle of Trafalgar. Oliver died in London, a fairly wealthy man.

TOMORROW: Arriving in London.

“Mr. and Mrs. Curtis loaned their specie to the Colony”

Continuing my analysis of what an 1869 family history said about Obadiah Curtis (1724–1811), I reach the statement:

When the expedition against Canada was fitted out under Arnold, Mr. and Mrs. Curtis loaned their specie to the Colony, and took their pay in Continental paper.

That sentence appears to be the ultimate basis for this statement on the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum website:

He was also a personal aid to General Arnold and assisted him on his expedition to Canada.

Readers might reasonably interpret those words to mean Obadiah Curtis was an aide de camp to Benedict Arnold and accompanied him across Maine to Québec. And that would be mistaken.

Arnold was a colonel, not a general, during his 1775 expedition to Canada. He therefore didn’t have the budget for aides. The muster rolls listing all the men on that mission, published by Stephen Darley in Voices from a Wilderness Expedition, don’t include Obadiah Curtis.

That’s because Curtis spent the siege in Rhode Island, not in the Continental Army. The Curtis family claimed that their ancestors aided Arnold with money, not that Obadiah was a military aid(e) or was “on his expedition to Canada.”

But is it true that, “When the expedition against Canada was fitted out under Arnold,” Obadiah and Martha Curtis loaned specie to the colony of Massachusetts? Arnold’s expedition was funded by Gen. George Washington as commander-in-chief from Continental funds. Though specie was always in short supply in the British colonies, there was no special collection for the Canada mission, and a couple living in Providence would be an odd source to tap.

We do know that Obadiah Curtis loaned money to the state of Massachusetts sometime between 1777 and 1779. He is listed (along with hundreds of other people) in an 1899 publication of the Massachusetts D.A.R. titled Honor Roll of Massachusetts Patriots Heretofore Unknown. That loan was supposed to pay 6% interest, though of course inflation of paper currency and the need for cash caused problems for the lenders.

I’m guessing that the Curtises’ decision to risk some of their savings on risky war bonds was remembered within the family, and Arnold’s celebrated mission got attached later.

It’s notable that the family tradition credited both Obadiah and Martha Curtis with this financial action, though officially the loan came from him. Both Curtises died in 1811, her a few months earlier, so that recollection was not the result of descendants hearing stories from the widow. Martha came from a wealthy Framingham family and ran a store in the South End, so she was probably involved in, if not the manager of, the family finances.

TOMORROW: Obadiah Curtis in Rhode Island.

“Their belief that the peace was not the king’s to keep”

Lisa Ford’s The King's Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire was published last year by Harvard University Press. It looks at changes in how the British government sought to keep the peace in its empire by changing its fundamental rules.

Ford built the book around five case studies, starting in the province of Massachusetts and then moving on to Canada, Jamaica, Bengal, and New South Wales.

In a review for H-Net (P.D.F. download), Dana Rabin writes:

Boston’s Liberty Riot in 1768 illustrates the disorders faced by agents of empire in the run up to the American Revolution. Riot and threats of violence from white colonists revealed the weakness of the Crown and the powerlessness of the king’s agents to enforce the peace. Residents of Massachusetts justified their intimidation and threats of violence with their belief that the peace was not the king’s to keep but rather that of white, Protestant men in the name of the people. Ford calls this “the end of empire.”

The book proceeds to reconstruct what Ford considers the ramifications of the American Revolution to the legal history of empire, attributing to Parliament and British colonial officials a new resolve to buttress the king’s power and prerogative against similar future threats. In the period after the American Revolution, the Crown accrued great powers by Acts of Parliament that increased the power of governors and decreased the power of legislative bodies or eliminated them entirely. Judges appointed by the Crown and supervised from London enhanced Crown control over colonial legal systems. The Crown’s expanded power was often framed as a duty to protect.

The focus of chapter 2 is Quebec where white Protestant men again resisted the military rule installed upon British victory in the city in 1759. British Protestant merchants resented any limits to their participation in the fur trade and objected to any concession of rights to French Catholics. Ford argues that in response to their ungovernability and Catholic vulnerability, the Quebec Act of 1774 created a Crown colony in Quebec, granting the governor expanded powers to rule without a legislative body. Even after the creation of the elected assemblies of Upper and Lower Canada in 1791, legislation was subject to the approval of an appointed upper house and gubernatorial veto.

Starting in the 1760s, Massachusetts Whigs feared that Parliament wanted to take more control over the colony. British leaders felt that Massachusetts was trying to operate outside of legal bounds. With each new law, the Whigs felt their warnings were vindicated. With each new resolution or riot protesting a new law, London administrators felt their wish for stronger authority was vindicated. The result was a spiral of resentment and suspicion that no one could resolve.

Old Subjects vs. New Subjects in Canada

From Mark R. Anderson’s article on Borealia, I learned that the population of Canada in 1775 was divided between “new subjects” and “old subjects.”

Confusingly, the “new subjects” were the French inhabitants who had lived in the province the longest, starting before the British won it in the Seven Years’ War. They were newly subject to the rule of George III.

The “old subjects” were the new Canadians, people of British descent who had come to the province from other parts of the British Empire in hopes of enjoying commercial and political privileges.

The Quebec Act of 1774 granted the “new subjects” more political and especially religious authority than the “old subjects” had hoped the francophones would have, simply on the basis of being more numerous and experienced in the province.

That law prompted protests in New England, such as the Suffolk Resolves, but also protests in Montréal, as Anderson describes:

On the morning of May 1, 1775, the very day that the historic Quebec Act entered effect, Montrealers discovered this shocking vandalism to King George III’s marble bust, prominently displayed near Notre Dame church on the central Place d’Armes. . . .

There is evidence that the king’s bust represented more than just British rule over Canada, serving as a symbol of elite French Canadians’ embrace of the new imperial regime, too. . . . Thus, the May 1, 1775 bust defacement would presumably have been taken as an affront to the Canadien leadership class—those who benefitted most tangibly from the Quebec Act, including access to high provincial office in the appointive legislative council.

On May 2, the day after Montrealers discovered the vandalism, a crowd gathered on the Place d’Armes, awaiting a reward announcement. Two men began quarreling. Newly appointed legislative councillor Chevalier François-Marie Picoté de Belestre and merchant David Salisbury Franks raised voices, exchanged insults, and then resorted to blows. Another scuffle promptly ensued when upcountry fur trader Ezekiel Solomons struck affluent shopkeeper Charles Laferte Lepailleur for making an offensive statement.

Read the rest of “The Quebec Act, Two Fights, and Relative Subjecthood” here.

Learning More about Hammond Green and Mary Rogers

This afternoon at the Dedham Historical Society is the third of the panel discussions I’m participating in with Christian Di Spigna and Katie Turner Getty (shown speaking here) in commemoration of the Boston Massacre.

This will be Katie’s fourth event, and Christian is going on to do a fifth. Jonathan Lane of Revolution 250 has moderated all sessions, and Bob Allison spoke in Charlestown last night.

Katie Turner Getty’s presentation was about the two women who gave detailed, preserved testimony about the Massacre, Jane (Crothers) Whitehouse and Elizabeth Avery.

From Avery’s testimony we know two more women watched the confrontation from an upper floor of the Customs house with her: Ann Green and Mary Rogers.

Ann, also called Nancy, was the sister of Hammond Green, one of the men tried for allegedly shooting a gun out of that room into the crowd below. Hammond was baptized in Christ (Old North) Church in January 1749, Ann in September 1756—and thus was still only thirteen on the night of the Massacre.

Not until I heard Katie’s talk did I learn that Mary Rogers, also called Molly, went on to marry Hammond Green. In fact, they married in Christ Church on 29 Nov 1770, just a couple of weeks before Hammond went on trial for murder. As Katie pointed out, this might have made the jury skeptical about anything Mary might say to clear her husband. The defense attorneys called Elizabeth Avery to testify instead, and Ann Green to corroborate the exoneration of her brother.

The record from 1770 makes clear that Hammond Green’s father worked for the Customs Commissioners, but it isn’t clear to me that the young man himself did. Legal records identified Hammond as a “boat-builder.” As of the evacuation of March 1776, however, Hammond Green was a Customs house “Tidesman.”

Notably, Mary Green didn’t leave with her husband that month. He evacuated as a party of one. In July 1777 the Massachusetts General Court passed a special law:

Upon the Petition of Mary Green, Wife of Hammond Green, late of Boston, praying Leave to go to her Husband now resident at Halifax—

Resolved that the Prayer of the Petition be granted & that the sd. Mary Green with her Child have Leave to go by such Opportunity & under such restrictions as the honorable Council judge proper—& that she have Leave to take with her, her Bed & other necessaries

I presume Mary (Rogers) Green and her child arrived in Halifax soon afterward.

Mary Green probably died in the following years because Hammond remarried to Elizabeth Mott in 1785. This second wife was still in her teens, having been born to a retired British artillerist and his wife in Halifax in 1768. Hammond and Elizabeth Green had a few children together before she died in 1802. He continued working as a tidesman until at least 1807, according to a local almanac.

On 26 July 1808, the New-England Palladium reported that Hammond Green had died in Halifax, aged sixty. (He was in fact fifty-nine.)

One other personal detail about Hammond Green: In accusing him of murder, Charles Bourgate referred to him as “a young man one Green, he with one eye,” pointing him out in court. So Green didn’t simply become a Customs inspector; he became a one-eyed Customs inspector.

“The infamous Capt. Beeman”

The Rev. Jeremy Belknap’s account of how Gen. Thomas Gage’s plan for the march to Concord leaked out to the Patriots, quoted yesterday, mentions four men by name.

Three of those people were well known Patriot leaders: Dr. Joseph Warren, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock.

The fourth was a Loyalist scout for the British troops identified as “the infamous Capt. Beeman.” Is there any more evidence about such a figure, especially evidence not publicized by October 1775? If so, that would suggest that Belknap truly heard some inside information.

And indeed we can identify “Capt. Beeman.” That must be Thomas Beaman (1729–1780), a Loyalist refugee from Petersham, Massachusetts.

Beaman was born in Lancaster. He joined Gov. William Shirley’s 1755 expedition against Acadia as a sergeant under Capt. Abijah Willard, and before the end of that war he was a captain under Col. Willard at the capture of Montréal. From then on people called him “Captain Beaman” even in peacetime.

In the 1760s Beaman was married and settled in Petersham. The first and so far only minister of that town was the Rev. Aaron Whitney (1714–1779). Unlike most of his Congregationalist colleagues in New England, Whitney strongly supported the royal government in the political disputes of the 1760s and 1770s.

So did Beaman. There was an argument and lawsuit over a schoolhouse around 1770 that I’ll save for later. Instead, let’s skip ahead to late 1774 after royal authority outside Boston broke down. According to Petersham town records, Beaman was among fourteen local men who banded together and agreed:

That we will not acknowledge or submit to the pretended Authority of any Congresses, Committees of Correspondence or other unconstitutional Assemblies of Men, but will at the Risque of our Lives, and if need be, oppose the forceable Exercise of all such Authority.

A 2 January Petersham town meeting summoned those men by name to explain themselves or repent. Only two showed up, defiantly maintaining their position. The meeting then determined:

Therefore as it appears that those persons still remain the incorrigable enemies of America and have a disposition to fling their influences into the scale against us in order to enslave their brethren and posterity forever, and after all the friendly expostulations and entreaties which we have been able to make use of, we are with great reluctance constrained to pronounce those, some of which have heretofore been our agreeable neighbors, traitorous paricides to the cause of freedom in general and the United Provinces of North America in particular…

The meeting urged townspeople not to have any commercial dealings with those men, even planning to print up 300 handbills at town expense. The Boston newspapers reported on that resolution.

Customs Commissioner Henry Hulton left this version of what happened next, starting in February 1775:

A number of Inhabitants in the town of Petersham, who had entered into an association for their mutual defence, finding the spirit of persecution very strong against them, assembled together in an house, resolving to defend themselves to the utmost.

The house was soon surrounded by many hundreds of the people, and they were obliged after some days to capitulate and submit. The people, after disarming them, ordered them to remain each at his own house, not to depart from thence, or any two of them to be seen together upon pain of death.

Petersham’s local historian says that siege concluded on 2 March.

Beaman then probably moved his family into Boston, as many other prominent Loyalists did. [ADDENDUM: Further research cited in the comments below shows that Beaman’s wife and children remained in Petersham until early 1779, when the Massachusetts legislature permitted them to travel through Newport to join him in New York City.] But according to the account his heirs later gave the Loyalists Commission, paraphrased in E. Alfred Jones’s The Loyalists of Massachusetts, “he, at the request of General Gage, frequently traveled the country to discover the real designs of the leaders of the rebellion.”

The Beaman family’s claim also stated that “he was a volunteer (as a guide to Lord Percy) with the military detachment to Concord.” Percy got only as far as Lexington, however. According to Belknap’s informant, Beaman was actually a scout for the first British column under Lt. Col. Francis Smith; those soldiers “landed on Phips’s Farm, where they were met by the infamous Capt. Beeman, and conducted to Concord.”

Furthermore, the New-England Chronicle newspaper of 12 Sept 1776 referred to “Capt Beeman, of Petersham (who piloted the ministerial butchers to Lexington).” And Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 history of Concord, published before many Loyalist sources became available, stated: “It is also intimated that tories were active in guiding the regulars. Captain Beeman of Petersham was one.” Those sources suggest that locals recognized Beaman among the redcoats, as Belknap’s information implies.

Back in Boston, Gen. Gage rewarded Thomas Beaman in May by appointing him wagon-master to the army. Later in 1775 Beaman became a first lieutenant in the Loyal American Association, a militia company led by his old commander Abijah Willard, which never saw combat.

Beaman kept the position of wagon-master under Gen. William Howe. He traveled with the king's army, working in and around British-occupied New York until he died in November 1780. By then the state of Massachusetts had banished him and confiscated his property. Beaman's widow and children settled in Digby, Nova Scotia.

We thus have our first indication that Belknap’s October 1775 account of the march to Concord came from someone who had at least some reliable, little-known information.

Tracking Down Diaries of the Québec Expedition

Earlier this week I mentioned Stephen Darley’s 2011 book Voices from a Wilderness Expedition, a bibliography of all known diaries and first-person accounts of Col. Benedict Arnold’s trek to Québec in 1775 and a listing of all the men on that march.

That book also included the transcripts of five diaries not previously published or noted in the last edition of Kenneth Roberts’s March to Quebec.

This year Darley published a new collection, Voices Waiting to Be Heard, with transcriptions of nineteen accounts of the expedition, some discovered in the last decade. The earliest actually appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet in March 1779.

In 2013, Darley and Stephen Burk published an article in Early American Review, which can be read here. It tackled the question of who wrote a diary of the expedition published in The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal in 1900 without a name, still anonymous at the time of Darley’s first book.

Burk and Darley wrote:

From the pages of his journal it is apparent that the anonymous author was a Massachusetts soldier and that he had been in a Captain Smith’s company prior to transferring to Captain Hubbard’s company for the March to Quebec. He also mentions having a brother on the March although it is not evident whether both men were in the same company. The journal states that the author’s brother died “with fever and flux” on Dec. 28, 1775 near Quebec. Also, journal entries make clear that the author was not among the many that were taken prisoner during the Dec. 31 assault on the walled city of Quebec.

Using the listing of men in Darley’s book, the researchers found three named Pierce (or Peirce) in Capt. Jonas Hubbard’s company. David Pierce died during the march. John and William Pierce avoided both death and capture. But did either of them keep a diary?

In fact, they both did. Ens. John Pierce’s journal was published in Roberts’s compilation. One entry reads: “David Peirce…was taken again all on a sudden and died in a few days he had no senses after he was taken the last time –Adiu to my Friend and Namesake.” That doesn’t sound like a brother, just a man with the same last name.

Furthermore, Ens. Pierce was from Worcester, but David and William Pierce enlisted together from Hadley. They both served in Capt. Eliakim Smith’s company starting with the Lexington Alarm.

Those details confirmed William Pierce as the anonymous diarist first published in 1900. Knowing his name, Burk and Darley could fill out more details of the brothers’ lives. William was born in 1752, David two years later. Their father, a Harvard graduate, represented Hadley in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

David Pierce died just before Gen. Richard Montgomery led his doomed attack on Québec. William Pierce was sick that day, thus unable to fight. He remained with the Continental Army during its withdrawal in 1776 and was back in Hadley that summer. Pierce never married, dying in Hadley in 1832. Burk and Darley even found his gravestone.

All told, there are now thirty-eight known first-person accounts of the Arnold expedition, making it one of the most individually documented campaigns of the war. All the more striking since we usually hear about it as an event that took place in the wilderness under conditions that don’t seem conducive for keeping a diary.

Back in Halifax Harbor

As described yesterday, on 8 July 1777, after a chase and running battle lasting almost forty hours, H.M.S. Rainbow captured the Hancock, the Continental Navy’s leading frigate.

The Hancock was on its maiden voyage, less than two months out of Boston. It was commanded by Capt. John Manley, the first naval hero of the U.S. of A. There were more than two hundred American sailors on board.

Also captured on that ship was the surgeon, Dr. Samuel Curtis of Marlborough. (Following his story is how I embarked on this voyage.)

The Rainbow’s victory did set some people free: the commander of the captured British privateer Fox and about forty of his crew, being held on the Hancock while a Hancock lieutenant and crew took over the Fox.

Cdr. Sir George Collier, master of the Rainbow, did the same with his new capture. He sent Lt. Thomas Haynes and a prize crew to take control of the American ship.

Once Collier realized there were almost as many American crewmen present as British, he decided both ships should head for Halifax to unload their prisoners before those men got any ideas about retaking their vessel.

“I had the great Satisfaction on my Arrival,” Collier then wrote from that port, “to find the Flora and the Fox both here; she had retaken the latter shortly after I passed her.” Capt. John Brisbane’s Flora had forced the surrender of the American prize crew on the Fox and brought it into the same harbor.

Thus, on 6 July Collier had spotted four vessels in American hands, and two days later two of those ships were under British control and a third destroyed. Only the U.S.S. Boston had escaped. The Royal Navy had suffered minimal casualties.

In addition, the American Tartar, the largest of the privateers to leave Boston at the same time as the Hancock, was captured by H.M.S. Bienfaisant on 28 August with about 130 more men.

Though the spring 1777 cruise had started out well for the Americans, with several captures, it ended in failure. The losses were especially hard on New England since so many of the men on those ships came from the region.

Commander Collier and “Part of the Rebel Fleet”

On the morning of 6 July 1777, H.M.S. Rainbow sailed out of Halifax harbor. It was a fifth-rate frigate equipped with 44 guns. Behind the Rainbow came H.M.S. Victor, a brig carrying 10 guns.

In command of that little Royal Navy fleet was Commander Sir George Collier (1738-1795, shown here).

That afternoon, the Rainbow “discovered Three Sail,” Collier reported. He “could form no Judgement of their Force, or what they were,” so he “immediately gave Chace.” After all, he was the navy.

The Victor was lagging three or four miles behind, so Cdr. Collier sent a signal to its captain to make more sail and speed up. As the day ended, the Rainbow’s crew could see they were chasing “large Ships” which looked “bound to some of the Ports of New England”—enemy territory.

Collier wrote, “I followed them with all the Sail I could croud.” At dawn his crew made out three ships plus a sloop “about 5 or 6 Miles distant.” Meanwhile, the Victor had fallen so far behind it was no longer in sight.

At this point Cdr. Collier was convinced he’d spotted the “Part of the Rebel Fleet, which had sailed some Time before from Boston.” Despite being outnumbered, he continued the pursuit. 

The Rainbow had indeed found Capt. John Manley’s growing fleet, consisting of his Continental frigate Hancock, U.S.S. Boston under Capt. Hector MacNeill, a captured British privateer named Fox, and a recently seized sloop carrying coal.

The last vessel didn’t last long. Manley ordered it set on fire and cut loose. Then he gave orders for “setting Top Gallant Royals and every Sail that could be useful.”

Collier wrote:

A little after Six we discovered another Sail standing towards the Rebel Ships; she crossed us on the contrary Tack at about Four Miles Distance, and put about when she could fetch their Wakes; from her not making the private Signal to me, I concluded that she was another of the Rebel Frigates, and therefore paid no Regard as to an English Red Ensign she hoisted, and two Guns she fire to Leeward.

Ships didn’t have to display their true colors until they actually went into battle. Until then, captains could run up any nation’s flag to bluff another ship into thinking they were friendly or neutral or whatever seemed advantageous. Collier therefore suspected there were four enemy vessels ahead of him, but he kept chasing.

About 10:45 A.M., Collier was surprised to see this new ship and one of the original three exchange fire. He ordered his crew to raise the Union Jack. The match had turned out to be three American ships against two British.

The other Royal Navy frigate was H.M.S. Flora, a 32-gun fifth-rate that had started as the French warship Vestale. Its captain was John Brisbane (1735-1807).

One of the American ships split off from the other two. Brisbane on the Flora “exchanged a Broadside with each.” The Rainbow also fired on one that had fallen behind, seemingly “uncertain which to steer,” but “had not the good Fortune to bring down either a Mast or Sail.”

Cdr. Collier watched “the headmost Rebel Frigate put about,…just out of Gunshot to Windward.” He judged it “a very fine Ship of 34 Guns, with Rebel Colours flying.”

An officer on the Rainbow’s quarterdeck recognized that ship from when he had been a prisoner in Boston. It was the Hancock, and its master was Manley, “the Sea Officer in whom the Congress place great Confidence, and who is the Second in Rank in their Navy.”

Cdr. Collier realized he stood at a decision point. Of the enemy ships, he thought, “one of the three must unavoidably escape, if they thus steered different Courses.” The Flora had apparently picked its target, which turned out to be the prize ship Fox.

Collier decided to “put about and follow the Hancock, which appeared the largest Ship,” as well as the most important—and most dangerous.

TOMORROW: Commanders clash.

“The idea of a place called Nova Scotia”

One of the most thought-provoking historical articles I’ve read recently is Alexandra L. Montgomery’s essay for the Journal of the History of Ideas blog, “Imagining Nova Scotia: The Limits of an Eighteenth-Century Imperial Fantasy.”

Montgomery, a Nova Scotian herself, writes that the visions of people far from the province have often overlaid actual life there.

Particularly during the decades on either side of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the then-colony became a near obsession among British colonial administrators on both sides of the Atlantic. Generations of men poured over questionable maps, spinning out schemes meant to exploit the region’s rich fisheries, timber stores, and geographically advantageous location along the major ship routes between Europe, the British mainland colonies, and New France. And yet,…while proposals for the region were unending, facts were in short supply.

Indeed, even the idea of a place called Nova Scotia was, for much of the early modern period, unmoored from any objective reality.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Earl of Halifax wanted to mold Nova Scotia into a “model colony,” with lots of British government money and oversight and a new capital named, naturally, Halifax. The French and Indian War made British Canada safer to settle but harder to pay for.

While the new leadership of the province and Board of Trade supported Halifax’s broad vision, they balked at its cost and chose to outsource the next phase of Nova Scotia’s transformation to private individuals and land companies. It was in this post-war context that some of colonial America’s most notable names became involved in the colony to their north. The Board of Trade’s open call for respectable land investors to take up and settle Nova Scotian land attracted no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin, and another company from Philadelphia hired a fresh-faced and not-yet-“mad” Anthony Wayne to survey their potential Nova Scotian lands.

But that fuse fizzled instead of booming, and by the time the more populous British colonies to the south were coming together to resist Parliament’s new taxes, American Whigs saw Nova Scotia as what a colony shouldn’t be.

In his 1767/1768 Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, John Dickinson pitted the colonies that would eventually break away from the empire against the somewhat newer areas of British control, among which he included Nova Scotia. He rejected the attempts to settle Nova Scotia as damaging to the population levels of the older colonies, not to mention a colossal waste of money.

That attitude colored the American Revolutionaries’ thoughts on whether to treat Nova Scotia as a potential ally, Montgomery writes.

The last image her article left me with was Nova Scotia at the end of the war, firmly within the British Empire and now the Loyalists’ first place of refuge. “Shelburne, Nova Scotia,…transformed from a boom town of as many as 14,000 people in 1783 to a near ghost town with over 300 empty houses just a few years later.”

“I could almost wish that an inoculating Hospital was opened, in every Town”

In the Washington Post, Prof. Andrew Wehrman wrote about Massachusetts and Boston’s official response to the threat of smallpox in the summer of 1776:

Abigail Adams…learned of the Continental Army’s failed invasion of Canada. Smallpox had broken out among the soldiers, dooming the campaign. Returning soldiers threatened to bring the disease back with them. Exasperated, John wrote to Abigail: “The Small Pox! The Small Pox! What shall we do with it?” He answered his own question by remarking, “I could almost wish that an inoculating Hospital was opened, in every Town in New England.”

While John Adams and 55 other men in Philadelphia debated the final wording of the Declaration of Independence, on July 3, 1776, the people of Boston declared their independence from smallpox. Fearing further outbreaks, the Massachusetts legislature voted to once again shut down the entire city for a general inoculation.

The people of Boston cheered the news. Ezekiel Price, a local businessman and court official, declared on July 4: “Liberty given for to inoculate for the small-pox; many begin upon it this afternoon.”

Abigail Adams took her four children to her uncle’s house to inoculate with the families of her two sisters. Guardhouses were built to warn anyone entering the city of the presence of smallpox and to prevent anyone from leaving the city during the general inoculation without a certificate from a doctor.

On July 18, 1776, Col. Thomas Crafts read the Declaration of Independence for the first time to the people of Boston from the balcony of the State House. Abigail Adams joined the “multitude into King Street to hear the proclamation.” The assembled crowd was composed of recently inoculated Bostonians and those with previous immunity who had stayed behind to take care of the rest. . . .

Boston’s “freedom summer” ended on Sept. 18, 1776, when the city ordered the guardhouses closed and the city to reopen for business. Although statistics were not immediately published, 20 years later, Thomas Pemberton, a businessman and member of the newly founded Massachusetts Historical Society, compiled the numbers. In the summer of 1776, Boston saw 29 deaths from 304 cases of natural smallpox. By contrast, only 28 deaths were reported with 4,988 Bostonians inoculated. Ninety percent of Boston’s nonimmune population was inoculated, saving hundreds of lives.

The implications for how our population should respond today are obvious. Some choose to reject them.

Visiting the American Republics

Two historians I follow on Twitter published reviews of Alan Taylor’s American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850 last week.

For The New Criterion, Daniel N. Gullotta of Stanford and the Age of Jackson podcast wrote:

Taylor’s history incorporates Canadian, Mexican, and Native American perspectives to recount the birth of the early Republic and the rise of American democracy. Taylor’s sources, which also include material from European diplomats and foreign travelers, offer unique insights on episodes routinely covered in similar books. International events loom particularly large in the mind of his antebellum American subjects, such as the establishment of Haiti as a free black republic in 1804, the various Latin American revolutions that erupted throughout the early nineteenth century, and the United Kingdom’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

While other works have shown how involved Americans were in regional events and national politics, Taylor demonstrates their keen awareness of foreign events and global changes, too. They were, for instance, angry that Canadians and Britons thought of the United States as a nation of irresponsible drunks, ill-tempered ruffians, and hypocritical slavers. . . .

Even the Americans who did want to expand the nation’s borders rarely did so out of a national sense of shared destiny, but rather out of regional self-interest. The absence of early American nationalism in this period might surprise readers, who will find more figures proudly willing to call themselves Virginians, Georgians, or New Yorkers than Americans. This regionalism and the issue of slavery made for a young nation full of anxiety and built on fragile alliances, ready to break out into civil war at almost any moment.

The Washington Post commissioned its review from Colin Woodard, author of American Nations and Union and journalist at the Portland Press Herald:

The takeaway is that this era of conquest and expansion was a time of anguish and acrimony for U.S. leaders — manifest uncertainty — and terrible tragedy for many of the continent’s inhabitants. In an effort to achieve security for its White citizens — to protect them from imperial rivals, native nations and enslaved-person uprisings — the United States aggressively expanded. The effort instead triggered the Civil War, as the balance of power between slave and free states became impossible to maintain. . . .

For Americans used to the comforting myth of an exceptional union boldly leading humanity in a better direction, this account may sting. Taylor doesn’t seek to salve such pain, but neither has he written a polemic. Diligently researched, engagingly written and refreshingly framed, “American Republics” is an unflinching historical work that shows how far we’ve come toward achieving the ideals in the Declaration — and the deep roots of the opposition to those ideals.

In addition, Taylor did a podcast interview with Lewis Lapham.

“Thereby prevent Inoculation amongst them”

On 25 May 1776, the New York provincial congress sent Gen. George Washington its report about Continental Army officers undergoing inoculation against smallpox.

The congress’s inquiry was instigated by information from Dr. Isaac Foster of the army, acting on orders from Gen. Israel Putnam, so Washington was probably already aware of the basics. But he deferred to the civil government on how to deal with the inoculator, Dr. Azor Betts.

Both the Patriot government and the commander-in-chief had issued orders against such inoculation. They didn’t fear the treatment absolutely. Rather, they worried that unregulated inoculations could end up spreading the disease or weakening the army just as the British military might reappear.

Washington responded to the New York government’s concerns by inserting that report into his general orders for the next day, followed by his own public messages:

The General presents his Compliments to the Honorable The Provincial Congress, and General Committee, is much obliged to them, for their care, in endeavouring to prevent the spreading of the Small-pox (by Inoculation or any other way) in this City, or in the Continental Army, which might prove fatal to the army, if allowed of, at this critical time, when there is reason to expect they may soon be called to action; and orders that the Officers take the strictest care, to examine into the state of their respective Corps, and thereby prevent Inoculation amongst them; which, if any Soldier should presume upon, he must expect the severest punishment.

Any Officer in the Continental Army, who shall suffer himself to be inoculated, will be cashiered and turned out of the army, and have his name published in the News papers throughout the Continent, as an Enemy and Traitor to his country.

Upon the first appearance of any eruption, the Officer discovering of it in any Soldiers, is to give information to the regimental Surgeon, and the Surgeon make report of the same, to the Director General of the hospital.

That certainly sounds tough. But so far as I can tell, it was mostly for show.

As I described back here, none of the officers found to have gotten inoculated appear to have been punished. Nor are there more penalties noted in the general orders. No names were “published in the News papers throughout the Continent.”

What’s more, in the very same period that Gen. Washington was issuing these orders, his wife Martha was being inoculated for smallpox in Philadelphia. Early the next month he wrote to his brother:

Mrs Washington is now under Innoculation in this City; & will, I expect, have the Small pox favourably—this is the 13th day, and she has very few Pustules—she would have wrote to my Sister but thought it prudent not to do so, notwithstanding there could be but little danger in conveying the Infection in this Manner.

Again, it wasn’t the inoculation process that Washington feared. It was the possible side effects, medical and social. The general didn’t want to risk adverse public opinion—hence the very loud and stern reply to the provincial congress.

But Washington couldn’t smother the epidemic. On 2 June, Gen. John Thomas died of smallpox near Chambly in Canada. Despite being a doctor, he had never contracted the disease or been inoculated against it. Many other men in the northern Continental Army were also ill or dying, destroying the Americans’ only chance to take Canada before Britain sent reinforcements.

This small controversy over inoculation in New York in May 1776 showed how men in the Continental Army were pushing back against the official non-inoculation policy. They understood that isolation and hoping for the best wasn’t going to work. In early 1777 Gen. Washington finally came around to a new strategy for protecting his army from smallpox; that story will be part of Andrew Wehrman’s upcoming book The Contagion of Liberty.