Searching for Mr. Molineux’s Cannon

Last month I wrote about William Molineux obtaining eight cannon for the Massachusetts resistance in the last weeks before he died on 22 Oct 1774.

When I did, Joel Bohy of Bruneau & Co. and Antiques Roadshow, a truly dedicated local and living historian, sent me a letter from the Massachusetts state archives showing what happened to those guns.

Dated 3 Feb 1775, this letter was addressed to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s committee of supply by four men from four different towns. It began:

We the Subscribers beg leave to Inform the Gentlemen of the Committe of Supply, that there was eight peices of Cannon Sent to Watertown last Fall & Committed to the care of ye Selectmen of Said town and Some time after they were informed they were under the Direction of the late Mr. Molinux,…

How Molineux and his Sons of Liberty got those guns past the army sentries on the Neck we still don’t know, but here’s confirmation they were in the hands of the Patriots by the fall of 1774.

Indeed, people had started talking about cannon in Watertown soon after the “Powder Alarm” on 2 September and the people of Charlestown removing the cannon from their shore battery five days later.

On 13 September, Customs Commissioner Henry Hulton wrote to a friend about the Patriots’ military preparations: “The people for their part are all arming, melting their lead into bullets, and draging Cannon into the Country.” From the timing that appears to refer to the Charlestown guns. In a postwar memoir Hulton wrote about how people had “secretly removed several Cannon from Boston, and dragged them into the Country beyond Watertown.” I suspect that when Hulton looked back he conglomerated several instances of cannon movement in the fall of 1774, but it’s notable that he remembered Watertown as a transport point.

Patriots expected the royal military to respond. On Sunday, 18 September, soldiers of the 38th Regiment of Foot turned out for inspection with knapsacks, suggesting they would be away from their barracks for midday dinner. Those men were actually ordered out to help built fortifications as Gen. Thomas Gage strengthened the town’s defenses. But the Boston merchant John Andrews described the local reaction in a letter:

[That] manoeuvre rais’d a suspicion in some people’s minds (who were more credulous than wise) that they were going to Watertown after the cannon: which, by being often told, came to be believ’d, and the committee here sent to inform their brethren of Charlestown, which broke up their morning service and induc’d them to proceed to Cambridge, and from thence to Watertown, alarming all as they went, to be prepar’d and ready to act upon the defensive, if attack’d.

Andrews’s phrasing suggests he’d been told there actually were cannon in Watertown, but even if he was just repeating “a suspicion in some people’s minds,” that was a good guess. Because by early October 1774, Molineux’s cannon were there, and the townspeople had to decide what to do with them.

TOMORROW: Mounting costs.

“Lodged in part pay for the said Cannon”

In September and October 1774, as I describe in The Road to Concord, Gen. Thomas Gage’s royal government and the Patriots in and around Boston engaged in an “arms race”: racing to grab every cannon and mortar they could.

The Crown took two small cannon from the Cambridge militia, the guns on Governor’s Island, and the stock of hardware merchant Joseph Scott.

In the same weeks, Patriots emptied the Charlestown battery, removed a “great gun” from along the Dorchester shore, and spirited four brass cannon out of the two gunhouses of the Boston militia train.

The Royal Navy spiked all the guns in the town’s North Battery, but locals said they would clear those. Someone tried to float a boat loaded with guns up the Charles River, but it got stuck on the dam that formed the Mill Pond and the navy seized it.

That was the period when the Boston Patriot firebrand William Molineux sent his son John to take four iron cannon out of a stable in West Boston owned by Duncan Ingraham, who a couple of years before had moved out to Concord with his new wife.

As I’ve been quoting, in 1791 Ingraham petitioned the Massachusetts General Court, of which he’d recently been a member, to compensate him for those cannon. He specified the amount this way:

Your Memorialist prays that he may be allowed for the aforesaid Cannon the aforesaid Sum of ninety six pounds, after deducting therefrom thirteen pounds six shillings & Eight pence which was lodged in part pay for the said Cannon at the Store of Duncan Ingraham Junr. as your memorialist has since been informed by said Mollineux

So William Molineux didn’t just take the guns; he left a down payment for them equal to a sixth of £80. (Where Molineux got his money and how much was actually his is a whole other question, linked to his sudden death on 22 October.) It’s not clear how Patriots slipped these weapons out of town, but they used various ways to smuggle military goods past the army guards on the Neck.

Ingraham wrote that he hadn’t known about Molineux’s payment at the time, and perhaps not until shortly before his petition. That hints at a rift between the merchant captain and his namesake son. In 1774 they were on different political sides: Duncan, Jr., spoke for the Cadets in their dispute with Gen. Gage over having John Hancock as their colonel while Duncan, Sr., was considered a Tory by his Concord neighbors. The older man’s new wife might also have been an issue. Whatever the reason, his son didn’t tell him about making a deal with Molineux, perhaps for years.

Even after deducting that first payment, Ingraham asked Massachusetts for more than £82. In March 1792, the General Court voted to grant him only £58.13s.4d. Do the math, and the legislature’s committee decided that Ingraham’s four cannon were worth only £72.

Digging into the Three Cranes Tavern in Charlestown

I was intrigued by the Massachusetts Historical Council’s webpage for the archeological site of the Three Cranes Tavern in Charlestown.

As the page explains, Charlestown was settled in 1629, the year before Boston, and that site was originally the location of the Great House that served as a meetinghouse, storehouse, and protection. In 1635 a man named Robert Long bought part of the property and opened the Three Cranes Tavern, named after a well known public house in London.

The Three Cranes remained in the extended Long family and one of the town’s busiest taverns for the next 140 years. In that time, tax records and the archeological record show, the owners added a separate dwelling house, brewery, stone foundation, and wine cellar.

As of 1763, the tavern was the southern end of the stage coach route from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The horses were stabled there while passengers could continue over the ferry to Boston if they chose.

In 1766 proprietor Nathaniel Brown mortgaged the property to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. Without banks, I’m guessing, that was one of the province’s few chartered institutions that could lend out money.

Then came the war and destruction, as the webpage says:

The long history of the Three Cranes Tavern came to a fiery end on June 17, 1775. On the night of June 16, 1775, rebellious colonists occupied Breed‘s Hill. General [Thomas] Gage responded by sending British troops to remove the Americans from the hill. The famous Battle of Bunker Hill ensued. Rebel snipers in nearby Charlestown shot at British soldiers from windows, so General Gage [sic] turned his cannon on the town setting fires everywhere. By the end of the night most of downtown Charlestown, including the Three Cranes Tavern, had burnt to the ground.

Although the damage was great, most of the streets, chimneys, and foundations were visible among the rubble. The citizens of Charlestown cleaned up the debris, filled the site of the tavern over, and created an open market in its place. Market Square was renamed City Square in 1848 to celebrate Charlestown becoming a city.

It actually took quite a while to reuse the tavern site. Nathaniel Brown was a Loyalist and apparently gave up on the property, moving first to Pownalborough, Maine, and then to Nova Scotia. The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company went into abeyance from 1775 to 1786. Finally in 1794 the artillery company donated the land to the city.

For those who want to dig deeper, here’s a 2014 article about Boston city archeologist Joe Bagley’s work on the site and a 2016 reevaluation of the evidence by Craig S. Chartier.

“Two floating batteries came up Mystic River”

Back in June, we left the town of Malden worrying in mid-1775 about being attacked by British forces out of Charlestown, across the Mystic River.

The town had ended up with two cannon from Newburyport. Locals built earthworks near the landing of the Penny Ferry from Charlestown and strengthened the buildings there. (A comment on that June posting reminds us the ferry landing was near what’s now the Encore Casino in Everett.)

To guard that site, the Massachusetts army assigned a company of Malden men to their home town. Their leader was Capt. Naler Hatch (1731-1804), who had learned to command at sea. Locals remembered him as “a stout built man, rather rash in temper, and fiery in zeal.”

Deloraine Pendre Corey’s history of Malden says that on 23 July Christian Febiger, the Denmark-born adjutant of Col. Samuel Gerrish’s regiment in the Continental Amy, wrote of the situation at Malden:

Capt Hatch of Colo. [Thomas] Gardners Regiment is there with one Company & has to mount 20 men on Guard every Day without Officers, three Relieves is 20 men privates mounting every Day & then they have no Sentries on the River which by the Description and the Situation of the place wants at least 4 Centries every Night.

Gerrish moved Capt. Eleazer Lindsey and his company from Winnisimmet in Chelsea to strengthen that spot in Malden. Lindsey was a 59-year-old veteran of the last war from Lynn. His men had signed up from several Essex County towns.

On Sunday, 6 August, the British finally came. Lt. Benjamin Craft of Manchester, stationed at Winter Hill, wrote in his diary:

Just after [morning] meeting two floating batteries came up Mystic River and fired several shots on Malden side, and landed a number of regulars, which set fire to a house near Peny ferrys which burnt to ashes.

One Capt. Lyndsly who was stationed there, fled with his company, and got before the women and children in his flight.

We were all alarmed, and immediately manned our lines, and our people went down to Temple’s Point with one field piece, and fired several shot, at the regulars, which made them claw off as soon as possible. Gen. Gage, this is like the rest of your Sabbath day enterprises.

“Temple’s Point” was no doubt part of Robert Temple’s farm in what is now Somerville.

Katie Turner Getty described this fight in detail from the perspective of Lt. Col. Loammi Baldwin, then stationed in Chelsea, for the Journal of the American Revolution. Baldwin reported directly to Gen. George Washington:

I proceeded to Malding as quick as possable found that Capt. Lindsey was gone home, & his Company dispersd, all but a few with the Lieut. was down at the House that was Burnt[.] I went to him and enquired into the matter who Informd me that the Capt. was gone Home & near one half the Company was fled & where they were gone he could not tell, I ordred him to Rally his Company & Guard his Post which he Seem’d willing & ready to preform as far as Lay in his Power.

It appears that the lieutenant was Daniel Galeucia (also spelled Gallusia and Galushe, 1740-1825). In an odd twist, he was married to Capt. Lindsey’s daughter.

By this time the British were back over in Charlestown, parading on shore in triumph. Inside Boston, though, selectman Timothy Newell noted in his diary “several Soldiers brought over here wounded.”

COMING UP: More fighting and a court-martial or two.

Bringing Back a Source on the Bunker Hill Battle

Samuel Swett was one of the early historians of the Battle of Bunker Hill. He published a long essay titled “Historical and Topographical Sketch of Bunker Hill Battle” as an appendix to an 1818 reprint of David Humphreys’s biography of Gen. Israel Putnam.

The battle’s 50th anniversary came in 1825, bringing more interest from the public and more accounts from veterans. Some of those old men came to Charlestown for a public ceremony. Swett used interviews with them and his earlier research to publish Notes to the Sketch of Bunker Hill Battle at the end of 1825, quoting the sources he had used for the earlier essay and more.

Unfortunately for us, Swett didn’t tailor his publications and particularly his quotations around providing a comprehensive picture of the battle. Rather, in his own words, he wrote “for the defence of Gen. Putnam, did he need any.” In 1818 Gen. Henry Dearborn had published an article in The Port Folio basically saying that Putnam had been useless during the battle. This set off years of historiographical (and political) debate. Swett published a lot of evidence favoring Putnam, but he left out other testimony that later historians would have liked to see.

This spring I stumbled across two affidavits that Swett sent to the Boston Daily Advertiser for publication at the end of 1825. He had quoted parts of both in his Notes, and those quotations have been cited by many historians since. But as far as I can tell, scholars haven’t used the other parts of these documents, which offer more details about the battle. So I’m going to quote them in full. (As usual, I’ve added paragraph breaks for easier online reading.)

The first affidavit appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser on 20 Dec 1825, and in a few other newspapers after that. This was how Swett introduced the source:

Col. JOS[eph]. WHITMORE, of Newburyport, a native of Charlestown, brought up there as an apprentice by Richard Devens, Esq., well known in both those places as a witness of the highest respectability, Aug. 6, 1818, stated before a magistrate, Hon. Eben. Moseley, “that he was a Lieutenant in a company from Newburyport, commanded by Capt. Benj. Perkins, and which was raised and marched to Cambridge soon after Lexington battle.”

Capt. Perkins’s company was evidently assigned to Abraham Watson’s house in Cambridge. Lt. Whitmore’s account:

While their company were at their quarters at ’Squire Watson’s, about a mile from the Colleges, an alarm was given on the 17th, [June] 1775. The company immediately formed, marched to Cambridge, and received orders from Gen. [Artemas] Ward to march to Charlestown. Col. Whitmore thinks the company arrived upon Breed’s Hill between 2 and 3 o’clock.

Soon after the company reached the hill, the British reinforcement landed, formed into columns, and marched up the hill. Col. Whitmore with a part of his company went down to the left of the redoubt, near some trees which were standing, and there received an attack. The British were twice repulsed, but the third time they made the attack with great fury, and drove the Americans from their works.

On the retreat, Col. Whitmore was wounded in his thigh. The Colonel states, that at the very moment he was wounded, Gen. [Joseph] Warren fell, and was within six feet of him.

As it respects Gen. Putnam, Col. Whitmore states, that he knew Gen. Putnam perfectly well, that he was well acquainted with him in the old French war—that he saw General Putnam on Breed’s Hill, when he went on with his company, and also on the retreat, soon after he was wounded, on the side of the hill.

He says, that well knowing Gen. Putnam, and the General knowing him, he said to him, “General, sha’nt we rally again?”

Gen. Putnam said, “yes, as soon as we can—are you wounded?”

Col. Whitmore answered that he was, but thought he should get over it.

Swett quoted Whitmore’s words starting at “with a part of his company…” and ending with “…are you wounded?”

A petition to the Massachusetts government printed in John J. Currier’s 1906 History of Newburyport shows that to “get over it” Whitmore had to go home and receive medical care until 8 August. In March 1776 he asked the General Court to reimburse him for that cost since he hadn’t taken a bed in an army hospital.

TOMORROW: Another voice from Newburyport.

“The grand source of most of the Evils we groan under”

The same 14 Dec 1747 issue of the Boston Post-Boy that leaked Gov. William Shirley’s letters about riots the previous month also reported on how the Town House in Boston had burned down.

As good descendants of Puritans, the people of Massachusetts couldn’t help but worry that fire might be a sign of divine displeasure at how some of them had been behaving.

On 28 December, a day before issuing a new message to mollify the Boston town meeting, Gov. Shirley issued a proclamation for a public fast in one month. He noted:

the continued and growing Calamities of the War; and the many Difficulties and Embarrassments which attend our Publick Affairs, and in the signal Frown of Divine Providence in the Destruction of the Court-House by Fire, and therein of a great Part of the publick Records of the Province, and other useful and valuable Writings.

On the designated fast day, 28 Jan 1748, ministers in every Massachusetts town preached on how the people should improve themselves.

In Cambridge, the Rev. Nathaniel Appleton (1693-1784, shown above) spoke on The Cry of Oppression where Judgment is Looked for, and the Sore Calamities Such a People May Expect from a Righteous God. In Charlestown, the Rev. Thomas Prentice preached The Vanity of Zeal for Fasts without True Judgment, Mercy and Compassions. In Medford, the Rev. Ebenezer Turell published a Brief and Plain Exhortation to His People on the Late Fast, a condensed version of his sermon.

All three of those clergymen pointed to the same problem. Was it rioting? Spending too much on luxury goods? New Light enthusiasm? Old Light recalcitrance? No, it was that burdensome sin—allowing the value of paper money to depreciate!

“For one and all agree,” Appleton declared from his pulpit, “that the Sinking of the Value of these Bills below what is expressed in the Face of them, is the Cause of the present Complaints and Cries that are heard in the Land.”

“We find GOD complaining most grievously, of his people Israel, Amos viii.5. for their not dealing with just Measures and Weights according to the fixed Standard,” Prentice preached; “…and such like Instability, either in the Measure of Commodities, or in the Weight and Value of Money, is a most dreadful Injustice.”

Turell explained that “the grand source of most of the Evils we groan under at this Day” was “our Medium of Exchange, unstable as Water, and variable as the Wind. . . . We trade and traffick, buy and sell by this Measure, and so we daily oppress one another.”

This was a long-standing challenge to the Massachusetts economy. Without enough specie (gold and silver coinage) to keep commerce going, the province issued notes on paper. Those notes never traded at quite their nominal value, and as time went on the bills came to be worth less and less.

That was a problem for people who had fixed incomes—particularly ministers who had negotiated set salaries with their congregations when they assumed their pulpits.

In his speech to the Massachusetts General Court on 3 February, Gov. Shirley devoted a whole paragraph to both “the extraordinary Emissions of Paper Money, whereby the Value thereof for all Occasions of Life is sunk so low and is still sinking,” and “the Difficulties, which many of the Ministers of the Gospel within this Province are brought under, thro’ the great Depreciation of the Bills of Credit.”

Thus, the question of rebuilding the Town House in Boston or building a new legislative meeting hall somewhere else was also a question of adding to the public debt just when that was becoming a real problem for influential people in the colony.

TOMORROW: Back to the Massachusetts house’s discussion.

Lt. Jacob Rogers and the “Confusion” in Charlestown

One of the more unusual accounts of the start of the Revolutionary War came from Jacob Rogers, former commander of the Royal Navy ship Halifax.

In 1774 Lt. Rogers left the navy (more on that eventually), married Anne Barber, and settled in her home town of Charlestown.

Most of that town was on a peninsula between the Charles and Mystic Rivers, as shown here. The common spilled onto the westerly side of the neck connecting that peninsula to the rest of Massachusetts.

In October 1775, Rogers related his experiences on 19 April in a petition to the Massachusetts legislature. He wrote:

We were alarmed with various reports concerning the king’s troops, which put everybody in confusion

About ten in the morning I met Doctor [Joseph] Warren riding hastily out of town and asked him if the news was true of the men’s being killed at Lexington; he assured me it was. I replied I was very glad our people had not fired first, as it would have given the king’s troops a handle to execute their project of desolation. He rode on.

In the afternoon Mr. James Russell [a town official and appointee to the mandamus Council] received a letter from General [Thomas] Gage, importing that he was informed the people of Charlestown had gone out armed to oppose his majesty's troops, and that if one single man more went out armed, we might expect the most disagreeable consequences.

A line-of-battle ship lying before the town; a report that Cambridge bridge was taken up [at the site of the Anderson Memorial Bridge]; no other retreat but through Charlestown: numbers of men, women, and children, in this confusion, getting out of town.

Among the rest, I got my chaise, took my wife and children; and as I live near the school-house, in a back street, drove into the main street, put my children in a cart with others then driving out of town, who were fired at several times on the common, and followed after. Just abreast of Captain [John] Fenton’s, on the neck of land, Mr. David Waitt, leather-dresser, of Charlestown, came riding in full speed from Cambridge, took hold of my reins, and assisted me to turn up on Bunker’s Hill, as he said the troops were then entering the common.

I had just reached the summit of the hill, dismounted from the chaise, and tied it fast in my father-in-law [William Barber]’s pasture, when we saw the troops within about forty rods of us, on the hill. One [Daniel?] Hayley, a tailor, now of Cambridge, with his wife, and a gun on his shoulder, going towards them, drew a whole volley of shot on himself and us, that I expected my wife, or one of her sisters, who were with us, to drop every moment.

It being now a little dark, we proceeded with many others to the Pest House, till we arrived at Mr. [Samuel] Townsend’s, pump-maker, in the training-field; on hearing women’s voices, we went in, and found him, Captain [Nathan] Adams, tavern-keeper, Mr. Samuel Carey, now clerk to Colonel [Thomas] Mifflin, quartermaster-general, and some others, and a house full of women and children, in the greatest terror, afraid to go to their own habitations.

After refreshing ourselves, it being then dark. Mr. Carey, myself, and one or two more, went into town, to see if we might, with safety, proceed to our own houses. On our way, met a Mr. Hutchinson, who informed us all was then pretty quiet; that when the soldiers came through the street, the officers desired the women and children to keep in doors for their safety; that they begged for drink, which the people were glad to bring them, for fear of their being ill-treated.

Mr. Carey and I proceeded to the tavern by the Town House, where the officers were; all was tumult and confusion; nothing but drink called for everywhere. I waited a few minutes, and proceeded to my own house, and finding things pretty quiet, went in search of my wife and sisters, and found them coming up the street with Captain Adams.

On our arrival at home, we found that her brother [Edward Barber], a youth of fourteen, was shot dead on the neck of land by the soldiers, as he was looking out of a window. I stayed a little while to console them, and went into the main street to see if all was quiet, and found an officer and guard under arms by Mr. David Wood’s, baker, who continued, it seems, all night; from thence, seeing everything quiet, came home and went to bed, and never gave assistance or refreshment of any kind whatever. Neither was any officer or soldier near my house that day or night.

The next morning, with difficulty, I obtained to send for my horse and chaise from off the hill, where it had been all night, and found my cushion stole, and many other things I had in the box. Went to wait on Gen. [Robert] Pigot, the commanding officer, for leave to go in search of my children; found Doctor [Isaac] Rand, Captain [Joseph] Cordis, and others, there for the same purpose, but could not obtain it till he had sent to Boston for orders, and could not find them till next night, having travelled in fear from house to house, till they got to Captain [Daniel] Waters’, in Malden.

Rogers wrote this account in an attempt to absolve himself of the accusation of having helped the British military in some way. Because he had been a Royal Navy officer himself until just one year before the war broke out, many people suspected him, even after his wife had lost her teen-aged brother to British gunfire.

For more of Rogers’s attempts to clear his name, see Katie Turner Getty’s article for the Journal of the American Revolution. But see also her quotation from Rogers’s petition to Parliament in 1783, when he portrayed himself as a Loyalist and claimed that he “gave every relief and assistance in his power…to his Majesties’ troops on their retreat to Charles Town in refreshing the Officers and Men [and] procuring surgeons to dress the wounded.” So Lt. Rogers might have been even more busy on the night of 19 Apr 1775 than his first account suggested.

“Not to trust the said boy out of his sight”

After young Charles Bourgate accused both his master, Edward Manwaring, and his master’s alibi witness, John Munro, of participating in the Boston Massacre, as I related here, Manwaring summoned “a third person who happened to be that Evening in company with them.”

That person was the traveling actor and singer Michael Angelo Warwell.

On 15 Mar 1770, Warwell gave a long and detailed recollection of the night of the Massacre to Justices Richard Dana and Edmund Quincy, the magistrates who had quizzed Charles. It stated:

On Monday the 5th of this present March, 1770, about three o’Clock, afternoon, I called upon Mr. Edward Manwaring, at his lodgings in back-street Boston, and immediately proceeded with him and mr. John Monroe, to the house of mr. Brown in Charlestown, to settle an affair between the said Brown and one doctor Brown in Boston, relative to a horse, which the last mentioned Brown had hired of the aforementioned Brown in Charlestown, where we staid ’till something after six in the evening, and returned to Mr. Manwaring’s lodgings about seven, and sat ourselves down to spend the evening with him, which we accordingly did.

(You just know I tried to find out more about that horse. I regret to say I’ve learned no additional information.)

About an hour and half after our arrival at the said Manwaring’s lodgings, we heard the cry of fire in the street, and thereupon ran to the windows to be informed where it was, when some person under made answer at the south-end; others in the street were also enquiring where it was, and they were answered that they would soon see, and other expressions to the same purpose, which made us conclude, that something more was than in the case than fire alone; on which we came to a resolution not to [go] from the said Manwaring’s apartment, soon after this determination we were confirmed more in our former opinion by a noise in the street, and some people saying four out of five were killed, which words tho’ we did not know the meaning of, fully satisfied us there was something more than fire.

On this occasion Mr. Manwaring’s boy, several times attempted to go into the street to join the multitude, and once had got as far as the gate next the street, when Mr. Monroe fetched him back, and shut the gate after him. After this Mr. Manwarring kept the said boy, in his the said Manwaring’s own room, being determined not to trust the said boy out of his sight.

Then we the said Edward Manwaring, John Monroe, myself and Mrs. [Elizabeth] Hudson the Landlady of the House, who was afraid to stay in her own apartment alone; I say we the aforesaid persons sat over a bottle or two of mull’d wine ’till half an hour after Ten, when the tumult seemed to be subsided, and Mr. Monroe proposed to go to his own lodgings, which Mr. Manwaring would have persuaded him from, apprehending there might be danger in so doing; but he persevered in the resolution of going, and went accordingly, but told us at parting, that if any tumult still remained he would immediately return, but if he did not return we might depend upon it all was quiet, and he did not return that night.

Elizabeth Hudson’s wife John was “a custom-house clerk,” according to a Whig writing in the 8 Apr 1771 Boston Evening-Post. He was “out of town that evening,” she testified. She might have been nervous about an angry crowd mobbing her house because of its ties to the Customs service.

After this, myself, Mr. Manwaring and Mrs. Hudson (and the boy still in company) remained together ’till about twelve the same night, when she left us to go to her own bed. After this, myself, Mr. Manwaring and his boy sat up together about three hours longer; it being then too late for my returning to my own lodgings, Mr. Manwaring proposed my sleeping with him, which I accordingly did in the same bed, and, the boy was ordered to go to his bed, which he accordingly did, it being in the same room. These particulars I could not suppress, in justice to Mr. Manwaring and Mr. Monroe.

Warwell’s testimony prompted Justice Dana to dismiss the accusation against Manwaring and Munro, and to order Bourgate to be taken back to the Boston jail. Despite supporting the Whigs politically, Dana refused to have anything more to do with that charge.

On 16 March, 250 years ago today, Manwaring wrote a triumphant letter to the printers of the Boston Gazette, which had first reported the accusation against him:

Messieurs EDES & GILL,

Gentlemen,

As the villainy of my servant (who is a Boy under age without principle, sense or education, and indeed unacquainted with our language) has subjected myself and one of my friends to a suspicion that we were concerned in the unhappy transaction of Monday the fifth instant. I thought it necessary to publish the following affidavit as an additional (till further) proof of my innocence, and the extreme injury done my sentiments and reputation.

I am, Gentlemen,
Your humble Servant,
EDWARD MANWARING.

In their 19 March issue, Edes and Gill apologized for just not having enough space to print Warwell’s deposition. They finally got around to publishing it on 26 March. Later this month, we’ll see what effect it had.

David Lamson, a Middle-Aged Man of Menotomy

David Lamson was among the men from Cambridge who served in the French and Indian War, according to provincial muster rolls examined by local historian Lucius R. Paige.

Lamson himself had some Native ancestry and probably some African since he was later described as “mulatto” and “half Indian.” He may have been only in his teens when he enlisted.

The man next appears recognizably in government records in March 1767, when he “came from Medford to live at Peter Tufts, jr.’s.” in Charlestown. The town warned Lamson out the next year, disclaiming responsibility if he became ill or needed public assistance, but then taxed him in 1770.

Another Charlestown document puts Lamson in Reading in 1769 before returning, listed as an Indian and described as a “young man” still. His mobility indicates he had no land of his own and moved around the county seeking work.

Within the next few years, Lamson returned to Cambridge, in the western village known as Menotomy. There he had a positive reputation as “a man of undoubted bravery and determination,” respect gained at least in part from his military service.

As a man of color, Lamson was exempt from militia training, despite being only a few years removed from the “young man” label. However, he was on the area’s “alarm list” along with older men and others who didn’t have to train but were still expected to turn out with their guns in an emergency.

And on 19 Apr 1775, Menotomy faced an emergency. Hours before dawn, a column of British soldiers moved through the village on its way to Concord. Around noon, another column of about the same size marched through: Col. Percy’s reinforcements. In between those two sets of redcoats, the local militia company mustered and headed west to confront the king’s troops—from a strategic distance, of course.

That left the “alarm list” or “exempts” in the town. Sometime in the afternoon, word came of a couple of British army supply wagons rolling west. These wagons had been held up, possibly at the bridge across the Charles River. Hastening to meet Lt. Col. Francis Smith’s troops on their way back from Concord, Col. Percy had left those wagons to travel under the protection of several soldiers.

According to nineteenth-century chronicler Samuel Abbot Smith, the Menotomy exempts “met at once in [Benjamin] Cooper’s tavern…to form some plan of capturing” the wagons. “They chose for their leader David Lamson, a mulatto.” Putting a man of color in a leadership role was unusual for this society, but Lamson’s neighbors respected his military experience, his bravery, and most likely his relative youth.

George Quintal, Jr., located a May 1775 document listing “David Lampson” among the men present at that confrontation. Richard Frothingham’s 1849 History of the Siege of Boston stated that Lamson, “a half Indian, distinguished himself in the affair.” Those sources help to confirm Smith’s local lore, published in the 1860s.

Lamson’s group ambushed one British wagon near what would become the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Medford Street. A company from Chelsea, led by the Rev. Phillips Payson, attacked another wagon. The militiamen killed two of the redcoats in the escort, wounded others, and downed some of the horses. Some of the regulars fled, dropping their weapons and reportedly seeking protection from “an old woman” they found “digging dandelions,” possibly Ruth Batherick.

Menotomy later became the town of Arlington, and it memorializes this short skirmish with a monument crediting the “Old Men of Menotomy.” But their leader was a middle-aged man, exempt from militia training not because of his age but because of his skin color.

I’ll say more about David Lamson and about other Continental soldiers of Native American descent at tomorrow’s Evacuation Day lecture at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters in Cambridge.

The Move onto Ploughed Hill and “Poor Billy Simpson”

On the evening of 26 Aug 1775, two thousand Continental soldiers moved onto Ploughed Hill in west Charlestown, assigned to dig entrenchments. Along with them went some Pennsylvania riflemen as a picket guard.

Capt. James Chambers (1743-1805) of Pennsylvania wrote to his wife on 29 August:

I was ordered to draw fifty men out of each of the Cumberland companies, and to be ready to march at Sunset. Accordingly I did so, and marched without beat of drum to Prospect Hill, and thence proceeded with the riflemen stationed there, in all about four hundred, to Ploughed Hill, and then down the hill within three or four hundred yards of the enemy’s strongest works, to cover a party of about two thousand musket men who were at the same time to entrench on Ploughed Hill.

They labored hard all night, and at daybreak had the redoubt nearly completed. The English began a heavy cannonading, which continued all day. They killed one adjutant and one soldier with cannon, wounded three others with musket balls. William Simpson, of Paxton [Paxtang], was struck by a shot and his foot carried away, &c.

Pvt. Simpson was born about 1743, family historians guess. His older brother Michael was a lieutenant in the Paxtang company.

Maj. Robert Magaw (1738-1790) provided a more detailed account of the action:

On Saturday Night Last about 2000 of our Army with 100 of our Battalion took possession of Plough Hill—this hill lies a little to the left of a direct line from our Camp to Bunker’s Hill near Mistick river, about 3/4 of a mile from us, & very little more from Bunker’s Hill. The Possession of it has for a considerable time been deemed an object of much importance both the by the enemy and by us.

They discovered our Work only on Sunday Morning, & soon began a very heavy Cannonade from Bunkers Hill & Two Floating Batteries which continued the whole day, & altho’ their Artillery was conducted by some of the best Engineers in the British Service & shot amazingly true, all the loss sustained was two killed in the fort and two wounded nearer to the Enemy where 50 of our Rifle Men were placed all day among Orchards, Cornfields etc., sustaining and returning a heavy Fire with the Enemy’s Musketry, the Cannon Balls Shot at Ploughed Hill constantly hissing over their Heads.

Poor Billy Simpson was the only person who suffered of ours. He had his Foot and Ankle shot off by a Cannon Ball as he lay behind a large Apple Tree, watching an Opportunity to Fire at the Enemy’s Advanced Guards. There appears no Danger of his recovery.

However, by the time Magaw finished that 29 August letter he had to add: “Poor Simpson whom I heard this Morning was in a good way is Since Dead.”

Lt. Col. Edward Hand (1744-1802, shown above) was a doctor and veteran of the British army. On 29 August he reported that “Poor Simpson (beau) had one of his legs shattered by a cannon ball, The director general took it off, but the poor lad was buried this evening.”

In his memoirs, James Wilkinson wrote, “The young man was visited and consoled during his illness by Gen. [George] Washington in person, and by most of the officers of rank belonging to the army.” However, Wilkinson didn’t arrive in Massachusetts until “two or three weeks” after Simpson was wounded on 27 August, and he’s far from the most reliable figure in U.S. history.

Whether or not Wilkinson’s statement is true, Pvt. William Simpson’s death was significant. He was the first soldier who had come to the siege of Boston from outside New England to die in the Continental cause.

“Wholly worthless for history, and some of it discreditable”

As I wrote yesterday, in 1842 the Massachusetts Historical Society named a committee to consider taking in and/or publishing a collection of testimony collected in 1825 from veterans of the Bunker Hill battle. That testimony had been collected and preserved by William Sullivan, head of the committee overseeing the start of the Bunker Hill Monument.

One member of that M.H.S. committee was the Rev. George E. Ellis of Charlestown. He had heard about those accounts and tried to find them the previous year when he prepared an address on the battle. He couldn’t, so he must have been eager to read what finally surfaced.

More than three decades later, Ellis recalled:

I took the books to my house in Charlestown, and deliberately examined them.

Their contents were most extraordinary, many of the testimonies extravagant, boastful, inconsistent, and utterly untrue,—mixtures of old men’s broken memories and fond imaginings with the love of the marvellous.

Some of those who gave in affidavits about the battle could not have been in it, nor even in its neighborhood. They had got so used to telling the story for the wonderment of village listeners, as grandfathers’ tales, and as petted representatives of “the spirit of ’76,” that they did not distinguish between what they had seen and done and what they had read, heard, or dreamed.

The decision of the Committee was that much of the contents of the volumes was wholly worthless for history, and some of it discreditable, as misleading and false. The suggestion, as I remember, was made that the Committee report advising that the papers be burned. But this was not adopted.

Ellis’s memory doesn’t entirely fit with the M.H.S. minutes from 1842. The only recorded proposal from committee chairman George Ticknor was to simply return the volumes to the Sullivan family.

Ellis also recalled the committee had ultimately recommended “that there should be an entry made in the books, saying that they had been examined by a committee, who had passed judgment upon them, in substance as above, and that they be sealed up, and put away in our Cabinet.”

It’s unclear what actually happened to the volumes, however. The M.H.S. voted to return them, then voted to reconsider, then didn’t make a final determination at all (at least formally). The monument opened the next year.

Editing the society’s records for publication in 1880, M.H.S. chroniclers reported: “Mr. Thomas C Amory, a relative of Mr. Richard Sullivan, is strongly of the impression that the papers, on their return to Mr. Sullivan, were destroyed by him.”

Yet in 1887 Justin Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America stated that the “three folio volumes” were still “preserved in the cabinet of the Mass. Hist. Society.” A few years later, however, members couldn’t find any such volumes.

Winsor also suggested that the original documents transcribed for Sullivan survived into the 1880s: “What purported to be some of the originals were offered for sale in New York in 1877, but were bid in.” Nate Raab confirmed to me that this meant they didn’t meet the reserve price. About what might be the same collection, Winsor added: “C. L. Woodward, of New York, advertised in May, 1883, nearly two hundred papers, which were called Col. [Samuel] Swett’s Collection of Affidavits.” No word on whether that sold.

So it’s possible that there’s still a sizable collection of testimony from Bunker Hill battle veterans out there in some private archive. It’s also possible that that testimony is just as worthless as Ellis believed. I’d still like to see it.

Thomas Kettell: Underage Prisoner after Bunker Hill

One of the last survivors of the Battle of Bunker Hill was Thomas Kettell, who died on 17 Sept 1850. He had lived seventy-five years after the battle, long enough to see the Bunker Hill Monument (for which he subscribed $5) not only started but completed.

The Boston Evening Transcript stated that Kettell was ninety years old when he died and

the last survivor of four brothers, all of whom bore arms in the revolutionary war. At the age of fourteen he was taken prisoner by the British, when they burnt Charlestown at the battle of Bunker Hill. He afterwards served in several campaigns in the Massachusetts forces.

Since Thomas was born on 23 Feb 1760, he was actually fifteen during the battle. He was definitely a prisoner of war for a short time. Newspapers from September 1775 list him among the provincials held by the British after the battle, but he’s the only one noted as “(a lad, dismissed),” or freed.

I haven’t found a record of Thomas Kettell’s later military service. There’s no entry for him in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War and no pension file, despite his long life.

Thomas was born and raised in Charlestown. There were a lot of Kettells in that town, including at least one more Thomas Kettell born five years before. This Thomas came from a family of bakers but went into silversmithing. He became an established Charlestown businessman, also serving as clerk of the Middlesex Canal corporation.

Thomas Bellows Wyman’s Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown (1879) called Kettell “a gentleman of the old school, rigid and unyielding in manners, and of the like firm integrity.” An obituary reprinted in the Baltimore Sun stated:

During a life of nearly a century he was esteemed by all who knew him, for the uprightness and integrity of his character, his kind manners, and his observance of all the duties of a citizen and sincere christian.

Given Kettell’s long life and his career in Charlestown, I presume that he had plenty of chances to tell his story of what happened on 17 June 1775. What did he see during the Battle of Bunker Hill? What part of the provincial forces was he attached to, or was he a civilian caught up in the action? What was his experience as a young prisoner of war?

Sadly, I haven’t found any account by or attributed to him. Aside from the 1775 newspapers and the 1850 obituaries, we’d never know that young Thomas Kettell had any connection to the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Thomas’s older brother John left a May-September 1775 diary that Richard Frothingham quoted several times in his History of the Siege of Boston (which renders Thomas’s first name as “Timothy” in the only mention of him). If that document ever turns up, perhaps it mentions Thomas’s release from captivity.

Pvt. Simon Fobes: “fully resolved to go as far as my officers did”

Simon Fobes was a nineteen-year-old provincial soldier when he fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill. More than forty years later he moved to Ohio, and in 1835 one of his sons wrote down his recollections of the Revolution. That memoir was published in Historical Collections of the Mahoning Valley in 1876.

Fobes’s ancestors had first settled in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, under the name Forbes, but lost the R to the nascent Boston accent before his own branch moved to Canterbury, Connecticut. He was born there in 1756. Not owning much property, Simon’s parents moved the family again to Amherst when he was about fourteen.

At his father’s urging, Simon Fobes became a minuteman. But he was visiting relations back in Canterbury when the fighting started in Lexington. He got the news in Union, raced home, “made some change of clothing, took my gun and accouterments, and started, in company with some others, for Cambridge.” Once there, Fobes enlisted for the rest of the year in the company of Capt. Eliakim Smith of Hadley, Lt. Col. Jonathan Ward’s regiment.

Around midday on 17 June 1775, Fobes’s regiment was ordered onto the Charlestown peninsula. He told his son:

Soon after the firing, on that memorable day, had begun, about one-half of our regiment marched, as a re-enforcement, from Cambridge to Charlestown Neck, where the British were continually firing. There we lay awhile, waiting for orders. When the orders came we marched on behind the buildings, as well as we could, across the Neck, which was partially flooded, it being high water.

When we started from the fort, in Cambridge, marching in double files, I was near the center of the detachment, fully resolved to go as far as my officers did. In crossing the Neck I soon perceived that fully one-half of our soldiers were missing, and I was now near the front of the detachment.

As we ascended the hill the other side of the Neck, the musketballs whistled merrily. I noticed my officers dodging, first one way, then the other. For my part I knew not which way to dodge. A ball struck my gun near the lock as I was carrying it on my shoulder, and split off a piece of the stock. All this, together with the frequent meeting of our men, bringing off the wounded and the dying, made it a trying time for young soldiers. I can not tell which way or how my hair stood, for it seemed to me it stood every way.

As we were hurrying on without much order, some one called to us to come that way, and there was a good place. We advanced to a post and rail fence through a shower of musket-balls, where we made a stand.

I discharged my gun three times at the British, taking deliberate aim as if at a squirrel, and saw a number of men fall. I had become calm as a clock. When loading my gun the fourth time, I happened to cast my eyes around, and, to my astonishment, my fellow-soldiers were running at full speed down the hill. I had heard no orders to retreat. That instant my sergeant, who stood near me, started to follow them.

Then it was I saw a company of British regulars marching rapidly toward us. I finished loading my gun as quick as I could. When they had got within a few rods of us, however, I fired it off at them, and then ran for my life. At the same time the British were ordered to halt, make ready, and fire.

The balls whistled again, but did no material injury. One of my mates received a flesh wound. Firing down hill they shot over us.

A very large number of men, both old and young, had now collected. All seemed to be bustle and tumult. Charlestown, now wrapped in flames, added greatly to the interest of the scene. I saw the lofty steeple when on fire. It trembled and fell to the ground. Our officers, with evident anxiety and perplexity, were running to and fro, endeavoring to devise some plan by which we could drive the British from the hill.

A noted officer (I do not recollect his name) now stepped forward, and marched round in the crowd calling for volunteers to attempt the retaking of the hill. A large body of us volunteered, and we marched on near to the neck, where our commander came upon General [Israel] Putnam. Our soldiers were very poorly equipped, nearly one-half being armed with old rusty guns without bayonets. I was so fortunate as to have a good gun and bayonet.

The British had now paraded on the top of the hill with heavy artillery. While General Putnam and our commanding officer were talking together, a cannon-ball struck the stone wall near the former. After conversing awhile, General Putnam wheeled his horse and rode off.

Prudence seemed to direct that the attempt should be abandoned. After remaining in suspense until near dark, we were dismissed, and with our officers marched back to our tents.

In the mean time some of our soldiers had been to Cambridge, and got a pail of rum for us to drink when we returned. It being hot weather, I had become very thirsty and was much fatigued. At the door of the tent stood a pail, containing water as I supposed, with a pint tin cup in it. Some one asked me to drink. I took the cup and dipped it almost full, and drank the most of it before I was aware that it was rum. I was very much startled, fearing the consequences of what I had done. Being very weary, I lay down, and was soon asleep, and did not awake until the next morning.

When I arose I found that my fears were not realized. I had sustained no material injury, as in ordinary circumstances I doubtless should have done, and I was ready to do my duty as usual.

After Gen. George Washington arrived, Fobes’s regiment was moved to Dorchester on the southern wing of the siege. In September he volunteered to join Col. Benedict Arnold’s expedition to Québec, but that’s another story.

Refighting Bunker Hill with the Angry Staff Officer

This is the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. For an overview of the action this year, I’m pointing to the Angry Staff Officer’s article “Warfighter: Bunker Hill.”

It sets aside the mysteries, ambiguities, and evidence that historians focus on, and also applies modern military terms to the situation in 1775. Here’s a taste:

On the night of June 16, Col. [William] Prescott with chief engineer Richard Gridley and about 500 men crossed Charlestown Neck and occupied Breed’s Hill. Equipped with survivability equipment, they began construction of a fighting position on the height of the crest. During the night, ISR assets on the Royal Navy ships in the harbor spotted the movement and called for fire on the hill. Rounds began to impact, but the guns soon fell silent: Admiral Richard [sic—Samuel] Graves had been awoken by the firing and ordered the men to cease fire. Working all night, the Patriots dug a substantial fortification on Breed’s Hill with earthworks and firing platforms. When the sun rose, the British found that the height had been seized and fortified.

During the morning hours, more men arrived on the neck and began improving the fighting positions. An earthen trench was constructed down the left side of the redoubt. Just behind it, the New Hampshire and Connecticut troops constructed additional defenses extending to the left using log fences and stone walls to erect a position that ran down the slope towards the Mystic River. Between the fence and the trench, pioneers dug three v-shaped trenches to tie in the trench and the fence. This still left the extreme left vulnerable to flanking parties moving along the coast, so Col. [John] Stark led a detachment down the bluff to the river and emplaced a series of rock walls in depth. He then placed detachments of marksmen behind each wall, with strict fire control measures. He drove a stake forty yards in front of this position, with instructions for his men to aim at the enemy’s feet; this compensated for the natural rise of the musket and would place their fire center mass.

Arrayed across the dominant heights, the Patriot forces overlooked the key terrain where the British would have conduct an amphibious landing. Between this beach and the heights lay a series of swamps and rail fences that served as natural obstacles that would disrupt British movement and maneuver.

Secondary fighting positions were constructed on Bunker Hill to the rear of Breed’s Hill to serve as a fallback position for Patriot forces should they be forced to retrograde.

Fires

With their navy, the British brought significant fires dominance to the battlefield. Naval gunfire began again in the early morning hours of June 17 to suppress the Patriot lines. Over 100 guns were brought to bear on the enemy lines. This sustained fire was also meant to disrupt Patriot movement, but the natural lay of the land allowed Patriots to maneuver their forces in relative safety. In the afternoon, the British landed 12 pound and 6 pound batteries on the beach to provide additional suppressive fire.

The Patriots had four guns in position between the Connecticut and Massachusetts troops, but their gunners abandoned the field prior to the battle and so negated the majority of effects of the guns.

Sustainment

The British were forced to move all supplies via boat across the river, slowing their rate of supply and reinforcement significantly. The 6 pounder battery commander neglected to conduct a precombat inspection prior to deployment and found to their chagrin that their caissons were filled with 12 pound shot rather than 6 pound shot. This denied General [William] Howe his mobile fire support that he was counting on for close in fires.

On the Patriot side, they were already dangerously short of gunpowder. Each soldier had only about 30-40 rounds of ammunition. Lack of an overall field commander meant that there was no one individual tasked with overseeing logistics from the assembly area to the forward line of troops. This oversight would play an outsized role in the coming fight.

Now that we’ve reviewed the big picture, I’ll get into the smaller stories and questions.

An Archive about Commemorating Bunker Hill

The Raab Collection is offering for sale an archive of documents collected by the Bunker-Hill Memorial Association as it built the monument in Charlestown and commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

The Raab Collection webpage says the collection was “assembled in the 1870s” and refers to “George Washington Warren’s binding.” Warren (1813-1883) wrote The History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association in 1877, having been a mayor of Charlestown.

Most of the documents appear to be about promoting and planning the Bunker Hill Monument, even including budget estimates. That stone tower was the project of the generation that came after the Revolutionaries, in many cases literally. The leading voice was William Tudor, Jr., son of the first Judge Advocate General of the Continental Army. The engineer was Loammi Baldwin, Jr., son of the officer who oversaw the northern edge of Boston harbor during the siege.

The association also organized the commemoration of 1825. The Marquis de Lafayette came to Boston to help lay the tower’s cornerstone. Daniel Webster delivered an oration, just as he would nearly two decades later when the stone obelisk was finally finished. Both men are represented in the archive. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison couldn’t come, but they sent letters included here.

The volume includes some first-person accounts of the battle, such as a short statement by Robert Steele about his experience as a provincial drummer:

I Robert Steele of Dedham in the County of Norfolk… Listed 17 days before Bunker Hill fight in Col [Ephraim] Doolittle’s Regiment. After Major Mores [Willard Moore] was wounded, I was ordered down the hill to get some run [rum] to dress his wounds with Benjamin Blood. When we got to the shop the man was down cellar to keep out of the way of the shots which were fired from the gun boats that lay in the river. He asked who was there we told him our errand he then said take whatever you want. We delivered some rum and ran back as soon a possible but before we had time to reach spot they were retreating.

I quoted a longer telling from Steele back here. Note that that letter rendered his companion’s name as Benjamin Ballard, not Benjamin Blood; Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors agrees with the former. The picture of Steele’s letter in the archive show he was also asking for money since he’d lost his pension for not being poor enough.

I’d be pleasantly surprised if there are detailed new accounts from veterans in this collection. Warren’s history and the Raab Collection would no doubt highlight those. Rather, it’s about the effort to memorialize the event.

At least one collection of such accounts did come out the semicentennial event as historians swarmed over the old soldiers who attended. I’ll discuss what happened to that archive in this year’s run of postings on the history and memory of Bunker Hill.

Di Spigna on Dr. Joseph Warren in the Coming Week

Christian Di Spigna, author of Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero is making another swing through New England with book talks and signings.

These events coincide with the conjunction of the paperback edition of Founding Martyr, Warren’s birthday (both on the 11th), Father’s Day (the 16th), and the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill (the 17th).

Here are Christian’s upcoming public appearances:

Monday, 10 June, 7:00 P.M.
West End Museum, 150 Staniford Street, Boston

Tuesday, 11 June, 7:00 P.M.
Charlestown Historical Society, 43 Monument Square, Charlestown

Wednesday, 12 June, 7:00 P.M.
Adams National Historic Park, 1250 Hancock Street, Quincy

Thursday, 13 June, 6:00 P.M.
General Henry Knox Museum, 30 High Street, Thomaston, Maine

Tuesday, 18 June, 1:00 to 3:00 P.M.
Paul Revere House, 19 North Square Boston

Pickering on the Beginning of the Siege

Earlier this week the Journal of the American Revolution made the first publication of a 21 Apr 1775 letter by Timothy Pickering, colonel of the Essex County militia. The letter now belongs to the Harlan Crow Library in Dallas.

The title of library curator Samuel Fore’s article emphasizes Pickering as an “Eyewitness to the British Retreat from Lexington.” However, the letter doesn’t say anything about the events of 19 April (including Pickering’s own actions, which were controversial for decades).

Rather, on 21 April Pickering wrote about how the siege of Boston was taking shape. Or at least about the situation on the northern wing of the siege; he didn’t mention what was going on in Roxbury at all. Instead, he told a colleague from Essex County:

The regulars were entrenching on the first hill beyond Charlestown neck; also on a point of ground (as well as I could learn) in Cambridge river, just as it opens to the Bay. For what purposes I cannot tell, but conjecture to prevent the provincials entering Boston by the way of Charlestown, or by boats going down Cambridge river. The provincials, perhaps three or four thousand men, were scattered about Cambridge common too much at random.

Lack of discipline by the common soldier was a fairly constant theme in Pickering’s military writings.

As a regimental commander, Pickering was invited to a council of war in Cambridge headed by Gen. Artemas Ward and Gen. William Heath, with Dr. Joseph Warren sitting in. Characteristically, Pickering voiced his opinions, including on whether the Massachusetts troops should attack the British positions:

I ventured to declare my opinion “That we ought to act only on the defensive; but some thought that now was the time to strike, & that now the day might be our own, & end the dispute. I could not think so: for besides the scanty portion of ammunition we at present could come at, our men were not sufficiently prepared for action; they were not disciplined even for an irregular engagement; few, very few, have had experience; & the officers in general have neither instructed themselves nor men how to act: The confusions of yesterday, testified by every officer I could talk with, fully justify these assertions. . . .

Another & what appeared to me an important reason for acting only on the defensive was this. The attack is universally said by our people to have been begun by the King’s troops: This may serve to justify a return of fire from us; and tho by pursuing them we seemed to act offensively, yet that was a natural consequence of the first attack, & might be excused: but to attack the troops, while they remained, as now, quiet in the trenches, would be deemed a much more atrocious act, & fatally prevent an accommodation, which notwithstanding yesterday’s skirmish, did not appear wholly impracticable.[”]

That reinforces Pickering’s reputation for wanting to find an “accommodation” with the royal government when other Massachusetts Patriots were ready to push harder. People groused that his attitude had kept the Essex County troops from engaging with the British column on 19 April.

Another question the Massachusetts commanders faced was whether to maintain maximum forces around Boston or send some militia units back home to defend their coastal towns from possible attack by the Royal Navy. Pickering didn’t want to leave Salem undefended:

I told them the seaports were so greatly exposed it appeared to me & others not expedient that any of the militia should leave them, & therefore, after consulting with the chief officers present I had directed and advised the Salem, Beverly, and Manchester militia to return. This was rather contrary to the previous desire of the Council of War, (composed of the General & field officers above mentioned;) but afterwards it appeared that they also judged it expedient, by directing the Ipswich companies to return:

That shows us how loose Gen. Ward’s authority was. The previous day’s council of war had agreed to keep troops at the siege lines, but Pickering had already sent some of his men home.

Toward the end of his letter, Pickering wrote: “I have also just heard by a man from Boston, that Earl Percy is badly if not dangerously wounded.” That rumor was false. Lt. Col. Francis Smith had been wounded, though not badly, but Col. Percy was unhurt.

Upcoming Events in Charlestown and Weston

Here are a couple of interesting Revolutionary history happenings in the next few days.

On Thursday, 25 April, the Bunker Hill Museum will host a talk by Salem Maritime National Historic Site historian Emily Murphy titled “‘I Am An Honest Woman’: Female Revolutionary Resistance.”

Dr. Murphy will describe how middling-class women in Boston, Salem, and other towns of eastern Massachusetts participated in the colony’s resistance in the years before 1775. Though restricted by law and society, colonial women still found ways to express their political convictions.

This talk is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. in the lower-floor meeting room of the museum, 43 Monument Square in Charlestown. It is free and open to the public.

On the afternoon of Sunday, 28 April, Brian Donahue, associate professor of American environmental studies at Brandeis, will lead a walking tour of Weston, exploring its eighteenth-century landscape.

Donahue, author of The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord, has created G.I.S. maps detailing how Weston big man Isaac Jones assembled and used his farm. This tour will start at the Golden Ball Tavern with a short presentation showing how innkeeper Jones’s farm developed over several generations and was divided among heirs.

Participants will then walk for one to two hours south, crossing Route 20 and on trails and roads back to Chestnut Street and into Highland Forest—all part of the Jones farm—and then back by a slight variation. We will look at lanes and stone walls and talk about what various parcels were likely used for (meadow hay, tillage, orchard, pasture, woodland) along the way. (There will be a turning-off point for those who do not want to continue up into Highland Forest.)

To join in all or part of this walk through history, please send an R.S.V.P. to gbtmuseum@gmail.com and hope for a lovely spring day. The Golden Ball Tavern is at 662 Boston Post Road in Weston.

“To be sold by Wholesale and Retail, By James Jackson”

As I research Mary Jackson and her family, I must say it would be a lot easier if they weren’t named Jackson. And if they hadn’t kept choosing first names like James, William, and Mary. But of course they weren’t the only family in eighteenth-century New England who set traps for researchers that way.

As I reported before, James and Mary Jackson had their second son baptized James at King’s Chapel on 8 May 1735. Boys named Jackson were admitted to the South Latin School in 1740 and 1742. Unfortunately, those school records don’t include full names. It’s possible that those boys were William and/or James Jackson, who would have been aged nine and seven respectively. If so, like most boys who started at a Boston grammar school in the 1700s, they never graduated, probably shifting to a writing school for better education in business skills.

This is just a guess based on their later paths, but I suspect William spent his adolescence helping Mama at the Brazen Head while James clerked for another import merchant. I’m even ready to guess that businessman was William Rand (1716-1758), who sold cloth and other dry goods “in Cornhill, The Corner Shop on the North side of the Townhouse,” per the 24 June 1751 Boston Evening-Post. In other words, very close to the Brazen Head.

This shopkeeper William Rand is often mixed with Dr. William Rand (1689-1759), who was an apothecary and a town tax collector. To confound matters further, that doctor had a namesake nephew, who in this period was a Harvard student and medical trainee and later was a counterfeiter. But I digress.

James Jackson came of age in May 1756. Already the town’s ministers were reading a notice that he intended to marry Sarah Rand—possibly the baby sister of shopkeeper William Rand, born in Charlestown in 1729. On 27 May, the couple wed at King’s Chapel. (The record there gives Sarah’s first name as Mary, just to add to the genealogical muddle. But that’s clearly an error, judging by the intention of marriage and later records of the couple.)

James Jackson thus married at an unusually young age, perhaps to a woman six years older. However, there’s no indication Sarah Rand was pregnant when they married, as many New England brides were. Instead, he seems to have been mature for his years.

James and Sarah Jackson had their own little baby James baptized at King’s Chapel on 26 June 1757, with his mother Mary standing as one of the sponsors. Five years later, on 10 Mar 1762, their son William was baptized in the same church; grandmother Mary and uncle William Jackson were sponsors.

On 26 Feb 1759 the Boston Evening-Post ran this advertisement:

Just Imported from LONDON, in the Brigantine Hannah, John Ayers Master, and to be sold by Wholesale and Retail,
By James Jackson,
At his Shop opposite Ebenezer Storer, Esq; and Son’s Warehouse in Union-street, BOSTON, very reasonable for ready Money,

A Great Variety of European and India GOODS, consisting of such a Number of Articles as would be tedious to the Reader. Likewise, a fine Assortment of Cutlery Ware, English Shoe Soles, Writing Paper, Looking Glasses, Raisins, Currants, Starch and Spices.

A similar ad followed in the Boston Post-Boy. Young Jackson had opened his own shop in the North End and was importing from Britain and beyond.

In March, the Boston town meeting elected James Jackson as one of twelve Clerks of the Market, alongside such peers as the silversmith Nathaniel Hurd. That was an entry-level elected position which the community usually gave to a young man seen as reliable and on his way up.

TOMORROW: Taking a chance with the Jackson brothers.