Charlestown’s Tea Burning at High Noon

As I noted back here, when the Boston Gazette reported on the people of Lexington burning their tea on 13 Dec 1773, the newspaper said Charlestown was about “to follow their illustrious example.”

It took a little while, and perhaps a boost from the Boston Tea Party, but on 3 Jan 1774 the Boston Gazette was able to report:

The Inhabitants of Charlestown, agreeable to a unanimous Vote of said Town the Tuesday proceeding [28 December], on Friday last voluntarily bro’t all their TEA into the public Market Square, where it was committed to the Flames at high Noon-Day.—An Example well worthy Imitation.!!

The tea burned in Lexington and Charlestown (and in other communities later) had already come ashore, so importers had already paid the tariff on it (unless they smuggled it in, of course). That tea was also owned by private citizens and local shopkeepers, not by the distant, rich East India Company.

The folks burning their tea were thus making a bigger sacrifice than the men on Griffin’s Wharf, and for a purely symbolic result—signaling their solidarity with the continent-wide tea boycott. That sort of commitment is hard to square with the idea that the Tea Party movement was driven by a handful of tea smugglers. There was real communal fervor.

In his new study, Tea, James R. Fichter writes that Charlestown’s businesspeople agreed at that Tuesday town meeting to divide up their losses so the people who had large inventories of tea wouldn’t be wiped out financially.

Prof. Fichter will no doubt speak of this event when he talks tea, international commerce, and revolution to the Charlestown Historical Society next weekend. That event will take place on Sunday, 31 December, starting at 1:00 P.M. at the Bunker Hill Museum, 43 Monument Square.

TOMORROW: Meanwhile, on the other side of Boston…

The Lexington Tea-Burning, in 1773 and 2023

As I recounted yesterday, on 13 Dec 1773 a town meeting in Lexington voted unanimously to resist the Tea Act, pledge not to help unload any East India Company tea, and condemn the consignees who were trying to import that tea.

That was the easy part. None of the people at the meeting were consignees, or Boston waterfront workers.

Then someone proposed a further measure: Any head of household in Lexington who would “Use or consume any Tea in their Famelies” should be treated with Neglect & Contempt.”

Even though all tea in town was by definition not imported under the Tea Act. Even though that tea might not even have been subject to the Townshend duties (if it had been smuggled in from Dutch islands).

No tea at all. As a gesture of solidarity with the people in Boston trying to stop the new tea cargoes from being landed, and a protest against Parliament’s revenue acts in general. Talk about giving up caffeine!

As I said before, Lexington was a strongly Whiggish community. We can see that in the fact that the meeting actually went through with this proposal, approving it without recorded dissent.

Furthermore, on 16 Dec 1773, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy reported:

We are positively informed that the patriotic inhabitants of Lexington, at a late meeting, unanimously resolved against the use of Bohea Tea of all sorts, Dutch or English importation; and to manifest the sincerity of their resolution, they bro’t together every ounce contained in the town, and committed it to one common bonfire.

We are also informed, Charlestown is in motion to follow their illustrious example.

As it turned out, Charlestown took longer to act (I’ll get to that story). When the Boston Gazette and Boston Post-Boy (newspapers on opposite political sides) reprinted the item days later, they left out that last sentence.

About a decade ago, Lexington began to reenact that tea-burning each year a few days before the Boston Tea Party commemoration. The town will have a sestercentennial reenactment on Sunday, 10 December, in and around Buckman Tavern, which faces the common and the site of the meetinghouse where the events of 1773 took place.

The schedule of events:

• 9:30 A.M. – 4:00 P.M.: Pop-up exhibit on historic hot drinks upstairs at Buckman Tavern
• 12:00 noon – 3:00 P.M.: Drop-in activities upstairs at Buckman Tavern
• 12:30 P.M.: The Lexington Minute Men practice military drill
• 1:00: 18th-century townspeople (and local Boy Scouts) begin to build a fire 
• 1:20 – 2:00: Music from the William Diamond Jr. Fife and Drum Corps and the Lexington Historical Society Colonial Singers
• 1:30: THE BURNING OF THE TEA
• 2:00: Concluding musket salute from the Lexington Minute Men

All outdoor activities are open to the public to watch. The tea has been provided by the Mark T. Wendell Tea Company.

Local Archeology for Local Historians in Charlestown and Medford

On Thursday, October 26, folks have a choice between two events on local archeology north of the Charles.

At 6:00 P.M., the City of Boston Archaeology Program, Boston’s Commemoration Commission, and the National Park Service will hold a “public listening event” at the Bunker Hill Museum, asking what people want to know about that battlefield and the destruction of Charlestown.

Co-sponsored by the Charlestown Historical Society and Charlestown Preservation Society, this session will feature Joe Bagley and the City Archaeology Program team, Genesis Pimentel of the Commemoration Commission, and Meg Watters Wilkes of the National Park Service. They will discuss previous archeological work around the battle and how new technology and methods might reveal more.

Folks can help the presenters prepare, or participate in the ongoing discussion, by filling out this form asking about interests in the battle.

At 7:00 P.M. the Medford Historical Commission will host “History Beneath Our Feet: The Archaeology of Thomas Brooks Park” at the Medford Public Library.

This event description says:

Located in West Medford, the wooded and grassy parcel is an important reminder of Native Americans, northern slavery and the Brooks family. The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. and the Commission will share artifacts which were excavated by volunteers from the recent archaeological dig and talk about how these tiny fragments provide greater insight into the people who inhabited the landscape.

Thomas Brooks owned that land in the mid-1700s, and he also owned a man named Pomp, who around 1765 built a decorative brick wall that’s preserved in the park. The area was recently restored, as described on the historical commission’s website, and part of that work was the new study.

(The photo above, courtesy of the Medford Historical Commission, shows one of the bricks from Pomp’s wall, preserving the impressions of the fingers of the person who made it.)

Open House at Boston Archaeology Program, 25 Oct.

On Wednesday, 25 October, the city of Boston’s Archaeology Program will open its new Mary C. Beaudry Community Archaeology Center to the public.

At this open house in West Roxbury, visitors can meet staff members, take a behind-the-scenes tour of the facility, and see the new exhibit on the archaeology of a Charlestown house dating from the 1630s.

The new facility features, behind glass walls:

• two processing laboratories
• an artifact-digitizing lab with 3D scanners, printers, and photography equipment
• a repository of over 1,000,000 artifacts from dozens of ancient and historical sites in Boston
• an extensive collection of historical ceramic and lithic raw material for comparisons
• a “specialized wet laboratory”
• a research library containing over 2,000 reference books and archaeological reports

The Archaeology Program still shares a building with the City of Boston Archival Center. Neighbors include archivists and collections librarians from the Boston Planning & Development Agency and the Boston Public Library.

This open house will start with a ribbon-cutting ceremony with special guests at 9:00 A.M. and last the whole workday at the City of Boston Archival Center, 201 Rivermoor Street. The first-floor exhibits will be available for viewing year-round during business hours.

For the curious, Mary C. Beaudry (1950–2020) was a historical archaeologist and professor at Boston University. In the latter part of her career she focused on the anthropology of food. Among many other sites she studied the Spencer-Pierce-Little Farm in Newbury.

“The area is steeped in Revolutionary significance”

New York Magazine’s Curbed website just shared an extraordinary article by Reeves Wiedeman titled “The Battle of Fishkill.”

It details the long and ongoing conflict between a New York restaurateur and property developer named Domenic Broccoli and a group of local preservationists named the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot.

The land in question was part of a Continental Army logistics site. Archeologists have found bodies buried there, with ground-penetrating radar turning up signs of more. This has raised the question whether the land should be mostly set aside for study and commemoration, partially preserved, or developed as planned into a retail site called Continental Commons.

Wiedeman writes:

For more than a decade, the Friends [of the Fishkill Supply Depot] have argued — based on some evidence, but not as much as they would like — that there are more Revolutionary War soldiers buried on [Domenic] Broccoli’s land than anywhere else in the United States.

Broccoli argues that this is rubbish and accuses his foes — with some evidence, but not as much as he would like — of going so far as to plant human remains on his lot in their effort to make it seem more grave-stuffed than it actually is. . . .

The Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot are a group of history buffs and retiree volunteers, and yet Broccoli claimed he had found it necessary to spend more than a million dollars battling them with archaeologists, lawyers, and the private investigators he hired as “spies” to infiltrate the Friends. As it happened, one of his spies was at the Memorial Day protest holding up a STOP CONTINENTAL COMMONS sign while surreptitiously recording the group in case anything might help the RICO case Broccoli was building.

Broccoli insists that he’s not anti-history. He doesn’t dispute the fact that people are buried on his land or that the area is steeped in Revolutionary significance; his vision for the IHOP [in Continental Commons] involves a wait staff in tricorne hats and bonnets. But it was still a bit of a mystery exactly whose bones were buried on his property and who put them there.

And, besides, if there really were hundreds of soldiers beneath the ground, Broccoli believed it to be self-evident that he was the one pursuing the vision of life, liberty, and happiness that George Washington’s troops had fought and died for: the right to sell pancakes where they were buried.

In that last point, Broccoli’s not wrong. The Founding generation didn’t value landscape preservation. They put up small monuments in a few spots, like the hard-to-farm crest of Breed’s Hill in Charlestown, but plowed and built over most battlefields and other military sites. That’s why the only fortifications remaining from the lines around Boston are the small, late-built earthworks in Washington Park in Cambridge, preserved solely by the Dana family for generations.

Historical preservation became an American value in the late 1800s. By then, of course, the Revolutionary generation had died out. Fewer sites survived. What remained seemed all the more precious. With industrialization, it became easier to preserve (or restore) battlefields in rural areas, but urban sites got swallowed even faster.

The Fishkill Supply Depot didn’t make the cut for preservation then. The local culture barely remembered it, in fact. It was a logistical site, well away from the fighting. There was no ‘Battle of Fishkill’ to commemorate. Compared to other places (most, but not all, already preserved or commemorated in some way), its significance might fade.

Nonetheless, many Continental soldiers died at the site. Diseases spread naturally when eighteenth-century people gathered in large numbers. Andrew Wehrman, author of The Contagion of Liberty, has tweeted that Fishkill was also a site of mass inoculation against smallpox, which (given the use of the actual live virus at that time) meant a site of many smallpox deaths.

Our contemporary culture is more squeamish about dead bodies and graveyards than our ancestors were. Many of greater Boston’s hallowed burying-grounds have actually been excavated and relandscaped over time before arriving at what we now perceive to be their historic shape. We’d have a harder time stomaching that process now, even though there are probably fewer Revolutionary remains than ever.

As for the Fishkill Supply Depot, there doesn’t seem to be any resolution in sight. Though Sen. Charles Schumer supports the idea of making some of the land into a new national park, there are lots of details to be worked out and support to line up. This deadlock might end only when more people die out.

(The photograph above shows the Van Wyck Homestead, once the administrative center for the supply depot and now the only surviving structure from that large complex. It’s a New York state museum.)

Recruiting at Samuel Gettys’s Tavern

Yesterday I visited Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. What, you might ask, does that city have to do with Boston 1775?

After all, the boundaries of Gettysburg weren’t drawn until 1786, and it wasn’t incorporated as a borough for another twenty years after that.

Way back in 1761 a man from Ireland named Samuel Gettys settled at the intersection of roads between Philadelphia and Fort Pitt and between Shippensburg and Baltimore. He opened a tavern for soldiers, traders, hunters, and others traveling in that part of western York County.

When the Continental Congress resolved to recruit companies of riflemen to join the New England army besieging Boston, Gettys’s tavern was where most of the men of Capt. Michael Doudel’s company signed up, on 24 June 1775.

Those men marched out of York on 1 July, arriving in Cambridge twenty-four days later.

On 29 July, a letter back home to Pennsylvania reported, Doudel’s company was ordered “to march down to our advanced post, on Charlestown Neck, to endeavor to surround the enemy’s advanced guard, and bring off some prisoners, from whom we expected to learn the enemy’s design in throwing up the abattis in the Neck.”

Doudel led thirty-men to the right of the British position on Bunker’s Hill. By “creeping on their hands and knees, [they] got into the rear of the enemies sentries without being discovered.”

Meanwhile, Lt. Henry Miller led an equal number “in getting behind the sentries on the left.” The two lines of riflemen got to “within a few yards of joining” and surrounding the British advance guard.

But then “a party of regulars came down the hill to relieve their guard” and spotted Doudel’s riflemen. They fired from a distance of twenty yards. The Pennsylvanians fired back.

Then, it appears, almost all the soldiers dashed back to their own lines. The Continentals claimed “two prisoners and their muskets.” The British captured Cpl. Walter Cruise; there were soon rumors he was dead or executed, and it took well over a year before he made it back to the American side, as I’ve discussed elsewhere.

Shortly after that, Capt. Doudel fell ill, resigned, and returned home. Lt. Miller took command of the company for the rest of the siege of Boston.

After the war, the people of western York County started to agitate for their own governmental structure. In 1800 the state of Pennsylvania set off Adams County, named after President John Adams, and established the county seat as Gettysburg, named after the late tavern owner.

(The historical marker shown above is in York, where the Doudel’s company mustered before marching north. Fortunately, the area around where Samuel Gettys’s tavern stood has plenty of other historical markers and monuments.)

The Real Third Rider on the 18th of April

Dr. Samuel Prescott is usually described as the third alarm rider to carry Dr. Joseph Warren’s alert on 18–19 Apr 1775, but that label should really apply to another man. There was an earlier alarm rider completely lost to history.

The first rider was William Dawes, Jr., adjutant of the Boston militia regiment. Following Dr. Warren's instructions, he rode out through the town gates in the early evening of 18 April.

Warren then turned to his Plan B. He passed the same alert to Paul Revere, who put into motion an arrangement he had made with Richard Devens and other Patriots in Charlestown.

Revere in turn informed John Pulling, a vestryman of Christ Church in the North End, now better known as the Old North Church. Pulling summoned Robert Newman, sexton of that church. Around 10:00 P.M. those men hung two lanterns in the church’s tall steeple, a signal that the British army was starting their expedition by boat across the Charles River.

That launch for the British march hinted at where they were headed: west-northwest toward Cambridge, Lexington, and Concord rather than west-southwest toward Worcester. The committee of safety had just met in west Cambridge, with some delegates staying overnight, and top officials John Hancock and Samuel Adams were in Lexington. Both Concord and Worcester were storing multiple cannon and other military supplies.

The Patriots seem to have had good intelligence about the British government’s priorities. Lord Dartmouth, the secretary of state, had told Gen. Thomas Gage to start arresting leaders of the Massachusetts rebellion. Dr. Warren’s mission for Dawes, therefore, was to warn Hancock and Adams that troops were moving toward them. The Patriots didn’t know that Gage’s real focus was Concord, where his spies had located cannon spirited out of Boston armories back in September.

Old North’s two lanterns shone across the Charles River. Those lights were in the steeple only a short time. Newman and Pulling didn’t wait to be caught in the tower. Still, the signal lasted long enough for the Charlestown Patriots to spot it and take the next step in Plan B. On their side of the river, a man mounted a horse and started riding west toward Lexington.

And then that guy disappeared.

Not only do we not know what happened to that second rider, none of the people involved in sending him out preserved his name in their papers or reminiscences. I suspect that if British patrols had detained the man, or if he had betrayed the cause, the Patriots would have told the story in some way. Instead, there’s complete silence about the man’s identity in the record. That strikes me as likely a result of profound disappointment in the man rather than worry or anger.

Paul Revere made himself Plan C, a backup courier of Dr. Warren’s message to Hancock and Adams. He arranged for colleagues to row him across the Charles River to Charlestown. Arriving after 10:30, Revere consulted with Devens and other locals, got another horse, and started riding west, following the same route as the second rider.

After crossing the Charlestown neck into the west part of town, Revere almost fell into the hands of British army patrols. He had to wheel his horse and ride north, coming back onto the main road to Lexington after a few miles. Nevertheless, with a shorter route and a faster steed, Revere arrived in Lexington about half an hour before Dawes.

Presumably those same mounted British officers in west Charlestown stopped the second rider. Perhaps they detained him, as other officers would later detain Revere in Lincoln. Perhaps they simply scared him into abandoning his ride.

Either way, the third alarm rider that night was Paul Revere. And the second rider, the one who apparently never made it out of Charlestown, is completely forgotten.

“Go down to the ferry ways so as to see Charls”

Even after the siege of Boston began, the nearby ferries continued to operate, at least intermittently. Those boats offered ways to transmit information or goods, sometimes illicitly.

There was a ferry between Boston’s North End and Charlestown, operated by a man named Enoch Hopkins (d. 1778). On 15 June 1775, a Boston magistrate named William Stoddard wrote to James Littlefield in Watertown:

Your letter and the last, dated the 13th instant, by Mr. Hopkins, I have received. I waited on the Admiral [Samuel Graves] this morning, and have got you a fishing pass for your boat and three men, to come in and out of this harbour, which I now send you. You will carefully observe the pass; you must observe to go a fishing from Salem, before you come up here, and then you may come in and go out. I hope you will not meet with any obstruction at Salem; not forgetting, if in your power, to bring up veal, green peas, fresh butter, asparagus, and fresh salmon.

Mr. Miles went away yesterday in the afternoon, by water, in order to come to you, and we suppose he is with you before this. I hope you have received a cloak, with a bag of brown sugar, I sent over yesterday by Mr. Hopkins’s son. I have paid some of the ferrymen, and I shall pay them all for their trouble, when I have done with them. Do not pay them any thing; if you have, let me know; keep that to yourself. . . .

I wish you would send me last Monday’s newspaper, and this day’s paper. I shall be much obliged to you, if you can, before you go for Salem, send me some fresh butter, and half a bushel of green peas. I now send you two dollars in this letter, and an osnaburgh bag, by Mr. Hopkins’s son, to put the peas in. What other charges you are at I will settle with you hereafter.

On 28 July, Joseph Reed, Gen. George Washington’s military secretary, wrote about getting a secret message into Boston via “a Waterman” operating north of Boston, possibly Hopkins. And at some point during the siege, a Boston shopkeeper warned Gen. Thomas Gage that ferrymen named Hopkins and Goodwin were “as bad Rebels as any”:

I have seen them bring men over in Disguise—and they are up in Town every Oppertunity they have gathering what Intelegence they can and when they return communicate it to the Rebels the other side, and they again to the Rebel Officers.

This may be the same Enoch Hopkins who with his wife and seven children arrived in Concord as war refugees in November, as Katie Turner Getty has written about.

The British army took the Charlestown peninsula two days after the Stoddard letter above. That meant the ferry across the Charles River was fully within royal territory, and the Mystic River now defined the siege line. There were two ferries crossing the Mystic to Charlestown, one from Malden called the Penny Ferry and one from Chelsea called the Winnisimmet Ferry (spelled variously, of course).

On 6 August, British army raiders burnt the Penny Ferry landing house in Malden, and it was never rebuilt.

At Chelsea, Lt. Col. Loammi Baldwin was in charge, stationed at the ferry landing. On 28 July he became part of Reed’s chain of men sending information into Boston, and in return he sent headquarters several reports about people coming over the Winnisimmet Ferry.

As I quoted yesterday, in the summer of 1775 Dr. Benjamin Church discussed using the Winnisimmet Ferry as a conduit for information and what he really wanted, money:

If I am to Continue in your Service Major be so good to send me out a little Cash, Charly the ferry Man if you can trust him may give it me—Slyly—by heavens Major I shou’d loose my life if it was known by these people.

I attempted some time ago to write you, over Chalsey ferry but the Committy would not let me go down to the ferry ways so as to see Charls. After that I did not try but went to Newport and from thence wrote.

Clearly the local Patriot authorities (“the Committy”) understood that people might use that ferry for nefarious purposes and didn’t let Church, or probably anyone, go there alone. 

I’ve tried to identify this ferryman named “Charly” or “Charls” (or, presumably, Charles) without success. While the men granted the right to run a ferry sometimes show up in the records, Charly may well have been an employee instead.

Stymied by that route, Church instead sent information through Newport, and ultimately that led to his arrest.

TOMORROW: Church’s report on the Arnold expedition.

“Admiral Graves foresaw a great likelihood…”

The Road to Concord describes the Boston militia artillery company’s theft of their own cannon in September 1774, and how Gen. Thomas Gage reacted to that.

Robert Beatson’s Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain, from 1727 to 1783, published in 1804, includes a passage describing how Gage’s counterpart in the Royal Navy, Adm. Samuel Graves, reacted to events in and around Boston that month.

This recounting of events was very characteristic of Graves’s own reports home:

The rebellious designs of the people became every day more evident, and a mob attempted to remove some pieces of cannon during the night from Boston; and actually carried some from Charlestown [on 7 September], which place may be regarded as a suburb of that town. The disaffected gave out at the same time, that their intention was to fortify a camp in the country; and soon after, the boats of the Lively and Preston seized a flat-boat belonging to the Americans [on 20 September], with six very good guns, six pounders, which they were carrying up Charlestown river, and were supposed to be destined for the same service.

From the disposition of the people, Admiral Graves foresaw a great likelihood, that there would soon be a want of artificers to work for Government, although Boston abounded with shipwrights, sailmakers, caulkers, &c. He therefore wrote, in the most pressing terms, to Captain [James] Ayscough of his Majesty’s sloop the Swan, then at New York, but under orders to return to Boston, to procure such work-people as might be necessary to keep the ships under his command in proper repair, lest those at Boston should refuse their assistance. This precaution eventually proved of great service; for after the skirmish at Lexington, none of the Americans durst work for the King, either in the navy or army departments, but at the hazard of their lives.

In sum:

• The Bostonians were a criminal mob deteremined on rebellion.
• By implication, Gen. Gage and the army couldn’t handle that problem.
• In contrast, Adm. Graves was far-sighted and realistic, and more people should have listened to him. 

As I said, characteristic.

This passage also strongly suggests that Gage never informed the admiral about the disappearance of the militia field-pieces. Otherwise, the admiral would surely have mentioned that embarrassing fact in London, as another thing that was by no means his fault.

What Towns Fought in the Battle of Lexington and Concord?

Twice in the past few weeks I’ve found myself discussing the question of which towns’ militia companies were actually in the fighting on 19 Apr 1775.

That’s not the same question as which towns saw fighting. There were fatal exchanges of fire in (west to east) Concord, Lincoln, Lexington, Cambridge, and Charlestown.

Later the west Cambridge village of Menotomy became the town of Arlington, and the west Charlestown area formed Somerville, so those modern municipalities are also on the Battle Road, but they didn’t exist as legal entities in 1775.

Scores of other towns mobilized their militia companies that day. Indeed, the “Lexington Alarm” continued to spread, so even more towns got the word the day after, and the day after that. Within a week there were men from western Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut on the siege lines around Boston.

But because of geography, timing, and the way Lt. Col. Francis Smith and Col. Percy directed the British army column as it withdrew to the east, only some militia companies came close enough to exchange fire with the redcoats.

All the militia companies that turned out in April 1775 could apply to the Massachusetts government for pay for the days they were active. The surviving pay records, now in the state archives, offer data on the companies, commanders, and men. They’re often reprinted in local histories. But those documents don’t differentiate between the units that saw combat and those that were ready to but didn’t.

To identify the towns that did exchange fire, therefore, we have to turn to news accounts (especially casualties), memoirs, anecdotes, and lore. Frank Warren Coburn set out to do this in The Battle of April 19, 1775 (1912), particularly the special edition with a long appendix of muster rolls, digitized here. Derek W. Beck retraced that research in Igniting the American Revolution, 1773-1775 (2015), appendix 14.

The towns with men killed or wounded were, in alphabetical order: Acton, Bedford, Beverly, Billerica, Brookline, Cambridge, Concord, Charlestown, Chelmsford, Danvers, Dedham, Framingham, Lexington, Lincoln, Lynn, Medford, Needham, Newton, Roxbury, Salem, Sudbury, Stow, Watertown, and Woburn.

However, the man from Salem who died, Benjamin Peirce, appears not to have marched with the Salem companies. The commander of that regiment, Col. Timothy Pickering, was bitterly criticized for not moving fast enough to engage the British. Peirce died in the fighting at Menotomy along with several men from Danvers and Lynn, so he had probably mustered in the company of a neighboring town.

Likewise, although two people from Charlestown were shot and killed—septuagenarian James Miller and teenager Edward Barber—that town’s militia company may never have officially mustered and entered the fight. According to Jacob Rogers:

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.

Since the most populated part of Charlestown was well within range of British army and naval artillery, town leaders had good reason to keep the militia company out of action. Miller and a friend were apparently shooting at the redcoats on their own in west Charlestown. Barber was a non-combatant looking out a window of his family home.

Thus, while the list of towns that suffered casualties is a good guide to which towns’ companies were in combat, it’s not the same.

TOMORROW: Coburn and his honorable mentions.

“Revolutionary War Refugees on Tory Row,” 20 Mar.

This is Evacuation Day in Suffolk County, celebrating when the British military left Boston in 1776.

In commemoration of the Continental Army’s first successful campaign under Gen. George Washington, I’ll deliver an online lecture for the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site and the Friends of Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters.

Sunday, 20 March, 2:00 P.M.
Revolutionary War Refugees on Tory Row
register through this page

Our description:

Like all armed conflicts, the start of the Revolutionary War produced a flood of refugees seeking safety. Loyalist families moved into Boston for the protection of the redcoats. Patriot families fled the besieged capital. The Battle of Bunker Hill destroyed most of Charlestown, leaving more people desperate for homes and livelihoods. Tracking the changes in one wealthy Cambridge neighborhood away from the battles shows the impact of war on ordinary women, children, and men.

As I’ve developed this talk, I realized that I should move beyond the 1774–1776 years I usually cover to discuss when thousands of homeless men, women, and children streamed slowly along the road from Watertown into Cambridge.

Hannah Winthrop, wife of a Harvard College professor, described those people rather uncharitably:

To be sure the sight was truly Astonishing, I never had the least Idea, that the Creation producd such a Sordid Set of Creatures in human Figure—poor dirty emaciated men, great numbers of women, who seemd to be the beasts of burthen, having a bushel basket on their back, by which they were bent double, the contents seemd to be Pots & kettles, various sorts of Furniture, children peeping thro gridirons & other utensils. Some very young Infants who were born on the road, the women barefoot, cloathd in dirty raggs

Such Effluvia filld the air while they were passing, had they not been smoaking all the time, I should have been apprehensive of being Contaminated by them.

Winthrop was so hostile because those refugees were the British and German-speaking soldiers captured at Saratoga, along with their families. They were to be housed around Boston before being sent back to Europe. At least that was the initial plan for what became known as the Convention Army.

When I alighted on the topic of war refugees for this year’s Evacuation Day lecture, I had no idea how loudly it would resonate with current events. Or to be more exact, since war has never stopped sending families fleeing somewhere in the world, how loudly this topic resonates with the current news.

We plan to record this talk and make it available through the sponsoring organizations later this spring.

Panel in Honor of Warren’s First Oration in Charlestown, 5 Mar.

Here’s another in the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation’s series of events commemorating the Boston Massacre and the people who died from that violence on the 5th of March.

Saturday, 5 March, 6:00–8:00 P.M.
The 250th Anniversary of Dr. Joseph Warren’s Famous Boston Massacre Oration
Charlestown Historical Society
Memorial Hall, 14 Green Street, Charlestown

As at the preceding two events, Katie Turner Getty will analyze the testimony of women who witnessed the Boston Massacre. Christian Di Spigna will discuss Dr. Joseph Warren’s role in how the Whigs memorialized the Massacre victims. Artifacts related to Dr. Warren will be in display in the hall, a short distance from where he died on the slope of Bunker’s Hill.

For this evening’s discussion, Robert J. Allison will join the panel with a talk titled “Trial by Massacre”:

When remembering his defense of the British soldiers, John Adams declared that it was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my country.” What happened to the British soldiers who fired into the crowd on March 5, 1770? Why did John Adams, a high Son of Liberty, agree to defend them at the trial…was he a traitor to the “Cause?” 

Allison is a professor of history at Suffolk University and also teaches at the Harvard Extension School. In addition to writing a number of books on American history, including The Boston Massacre, he produced “Before 1776: Life in the American Colonies” and “The Age of Benjamin Franklin” for The Teaching Company’s Great Courses. He is president of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, a Life Trustee of the U.S.S. Constitution Museum, a fellow of the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society, and an honorary member of the Society of the Cincinnati.

Bob Allison is also the head of Revolution 250, one of the organizations co-sponsoring this series of discussions. Other partners include the Massachusetts Freemasons and the Massachusetts Society Sons of the American Revolution.

Admission is $15 with proceeds to benefit the Charlestown Historical Society. Register in advance through this site.

Black New Englanders Rescued from Out-of-State Enslavement

The natural-rights argument of the Revolutionary War inspired the New England states to end slavery or at least start phasing it out.

However, with most of the U.S. of A. and all of the territories around the Caribbean still gobbling up enslaved labor, there was a terrible ongoing market for people of African heritage who couldn’t prove they were free.

This month brought two online articles about black New Englanders being dragged away from their homes in the first years after independence, and how the new state governments responded.

At Small State, Big History, Christian McBurney discusses a dispute that began in early 1779 when John Rice came from North Carolina to Rhode Island and bought an enslaved woman named Abigail and three of her children. Rice then hired local farmer Lodowick Stanton to drive his new human property in a wagon to Connecticut. Apparently Abigail communicated her fears to Stanton before the caravan stopped at his house. McBurney writes:

The next morning Rice awoke and was informed that Abigail and her daughters were nowhere to be found. Stanton was not a good liar. At first he said that they had all gone to Block Island. Then he blamed [neighbor] John Cross for their disappearance.

In a petition Rice later submitted to the General Assembly, he stated: “In making enquiry for his Negroes, [he] has great reasons to believe that a number of people had combined against him to deprive him of his property.” In addition, Rice wrote that he “was informed his person was in danger if he . . . pursued after” Abigail and her children. Stanton and likely John Cross, among others, kept Abigail and her children hidden at their own expense for several weeks.

The Rhode Island legislature ultimately sided with Abigail. It passed a law that took no property from Rhode Island slaveholders but barred the sale of people out of state without their consent (unless a court held the enslaved person had “become notoriously unfaithful and villainous”). That slavery-limiting law has received little attention, overshadowed by the gradual emancipation law that Rhode Island enacted five years later. As for Abigail and her children, they evidently remained in the state, but their individual fates can’t be tracked.

McBurney’s next book is Dark Voyage: An American Privateer’s War on Britain’s African Slave Trade, about the wartime cruise of the Marlborough to attack British shipping along the African coast.

At the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Beehive blog, Benjamin D. Remillard shared “What then are our Lives and Lebeties worth”: The 18th Century Kidnapping Case that Shook Boston”:

Cato Newell…was a twenty-three-year-old baker from Charlestown, MA, when he enlisted alongside the rebels after the violence at Lexington and Concord. Boston’s Wenham Carey was a bit older by comparison, enlisting multiple times for short periods when he was already in his thirties. Luke (or Luck) Russell, meanwhile, while not a veteran, is believed to have been a member of Prince Hall’s growing African Freemason Lodge.

Life after the war, however, did not come without risks. Newell, Carey, and Russell discovered this for themselves when they were hired by a man named Avery to make boat repairs in February 1788. They travelled to Boston Harbor’s Long Island, where their employer directed the trio below deck to begin their work. After locking away his human cargo, the ship’s captain set sail for warmer waters.

It was not long before word of the abduction reached the men’s families. Writing from Charlestown, they decried the capture of those “three unhappy Africans,” and insisted that their loved ones were “justly intitled” to “the protection of the laws and government which they have contributed to support.”

The three men’s families, Hall, local Quakers, and others raised an outcry about this abduction. The Massachusetts establishment, led by Gov. John Hancock, responded with a new law and diplomatic correspondence. The situation was resolved happily by July 1788.

“The attempt had for several weeks been expected”

In the first half of the nineteenth century, American historians continued to write about the start of the Revolutionary War, of course.

But those authors didn’t dig into the question of whether someone close to Gen. Thomas Gage had leaked his plan for a march to Concord, as hinted by the passage from Charles Stedman’s book that I quoted yesterday.

Around the fiftieth anniversary of the event, there was a back-and-forth between Elias Phinney of Lexington and Ezra Ripley of Concord over where militiamen returned the first significant fire at the redcoats. That dispute produced eyewitness testimony from aged veterans, revealing that both towns were on alert well before the Patriot alarm riders from Boston arrived because of previous reports about British activity and the sight of army officers on horseback.

Likewise, James T. Austin’s Life of Elbridge Gerry (1828) offered evidence that members of the committee of safety were watching for Gage to act. It included documents confirming how the British army officers that Gage sent out to stop alarm riders actually provoked an alarm.

In his History of the Siege of Boston (1849), the Charlestown historian Richard Frothingham published Richard Devens’s description of the committee’s activity and of the lights in Old North Church as seen from the opposite shore. That account lined up well with Revere’s.

Frothingham quoted Stedman’s story but not the detail of Gen. Gage telling only one other person besides Col. Percy about his plan. Instead, he emphasized how Massachusetts Patriots had gathered multiple signs that the army was about to act even as the general considered his planning secret.

As a result, the most authoritative American historian of the time, George Bancroft (shown above), presented events this way in his 1860 History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent:

On the afternoon of the day on which the provincial congress of Massachusetts adjourned, Gage took the light infantry and grenadiers off duty, and secretly prepared an expedition to destroy the colony’s stores at Concord. But the attempt had for several weeks been expected; a strict watch had been kept; and signals were concerted to announce the first movement of troops for the country. Samuel Adams and [John] Hancock, who had not yet left Lexington for Philadelphia, received a timely message from [Dr. Joseph] Warren, and in consequence, the committee of safety removed a part of the public stores and secreted the cannon.

On Tuesday the eighteenth, ten or more sergeants in disguise dispersed themselves through Cambridge and further west, to intercept all communication. In the following night, the grenadiers and light infantry, not less than eight hundred in number, the flower of the army at Boston, commanded by the incompetent Lieutenant Colonel [Francis] Smith, crossed in the boats of the transport ships from the foot of the common to East Cambridge. There they received a day’s provisions, and near midnight, after wading through wet marshes, that are now covered by a stately town, they took the road through West Cambridge to Concord.

“They will miss their aim,” said one of a party who observed their departure. “What aim?” asked Lord Percy, who overheard the remark. “Why, the cannon at Concord,” was the answer. Percy hastened to Gage, who instantly directed that no one should be suffered to leave the town. But Warren had already, at ten o’clock, despatched William Dawes through Roxbury to Lexington, and at the same time desired Paul Revere to set off by way of Charlestown.

Revere stopped only to engage a friend to raise the concerted signals, and five minutes before the sentinels received the order to prevent it, two friends rowed him past the Somerset man of war across Charles river. All was still, as suited the hour. The ship was winding with the young flood; the waning moon just peered above a clear horizon; while from a couple of lanterns in the tower of the North Church, the beacon streamed to the neighboring towns, as fast as light could travel.

Quite dramatically rendered, and Bancroft skipped right over the question of whether anyone leaked Gage’s orders.

TOMORROW: New sources and new suspicions.

“The present popular Punishment for modern delinquents”

The 6 Nov 1769 Boston Gazette carried this item at the top of its local news:

Last Thursday Afternoon a young Woman from the Country was decoyed into one of the Barracks in Town, and most shamefully abused by some of the Soldiers there:—

the Person that enticed her thither, with promises of disposing of all her marketing there (who also belonged to the Country) was afterwards taken by the Populace and several times duck’d in the Water at one of the Docks in Town; but luckily for him he made his escape from them sooner than was intended;—

however, we hear, that after he had crossed the Ferry to Charlestown, on his return home, the People there being informed of the base Part he had been acting, took him and placed him in a Cart, and after tarring and feathering him (the present popular Punishment for modern delinquents) they carted him about that Town for two or three Hours, as a Spectacle of Contempt and a Warning to others from practising such vile Artifices for the Delusion and Ruin of the virtuous and innocent:

He was then dismissed, and permitted to proceed to the Town were he belonged, for them to act with him as they should think proper.

The same text appeared word for word later that day in the Boston Evening-Post, in the middle of the local news. Then it was repeated in various out-of-town newspapers, copied from one of the Boston articles.

So far as I know, this is the only record of such an event taking place on 2 November. As a Thursday, that was indeed a market day when people from rural towns brought their goods into Boston to sell.

Unlike other tar-and-feathers attacks, such as the assault on sailor George Gailer on 28 October, there’s no mention of this mobbing in contemporary letters or diaries. None of the people involved appears to have filed a lawsuit (though it’s possible we still need to take a thorough look at Middlesex County records). I haven’t found a mention in other Boston newspapers published later that week.

This attack would be unusual in another way: All the other examples of tarring and feathering around this time involved punishing people who worked for or helped the Customs service, or broke the non-importation boycott which that agency opposed.

In contrast, this episode involved punishing a man for putting a young woman in sexual danger from soldiers. That was another way of violating community values, but on a much more local scale.

Does that suggest rural towns were inflicting similar tar-and-feather chastisements regularly? Or might Charlestown have used those materials only because the attacks on Cape Ann and in Boston a few days before had indeed made that “the present popular Punishment”?

Contrariwise, did the Boston Whig press make up this incident, or insert details like the out-of-town tar and feathers, in order to distract public attention from the well documented attack on Gailer? Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson was issuing proclamations and promises of rewards for finding the culprits in that riot. The Whigs might have seen benefits in confusing newspaper readers with a similar incident, or spreading the idea that the victim the acting governor was talking about had actually harmed a young woman.

“Old Mr. Thompson” and Charlestown Cannon

For this posting I’m indebted to a tip from Chris Hurley, whom one can see at colonial reenactments demonstrating cider-making, among other skills.

Timothy Thompson (1750-1834) was a carpenter in Charlestown. He married Mary Frothingham in January 1775, and their first child arrived eight months later. By that point Thompson was a sergeant in the provincial army, Mary was a war refugee in Woburn, and their home was in ashes.

Charlestown rebuilt after the British left, so those years were probably a good time to be a carpenter. Thompson bought real estate, built on it, then expanded. He built two Federal houses for himself and his son Benjamin that today help to anchor the “Thompson Triangle.”

On 26 July 1830, Edward Everett, then a member of Congress, wrote in his diary:

Visited old Mr Thompson & received from him an account of stealing the Cannon from the Battery in the Navy Yard.—

He said that for ten years there had not been a new house added to the town prior to the Revolution.—

(So that decade before the war was not a good time to be a carpenter.)

Thompson’s story of “stealing the Cannon” took place on 7 Sept 1774, shortly after the “Powder Alarm” had pushed people on both sides of the political dispute into looking for military solutions.

At the time, Charlestown had a battery guarding its waterfront, cannon pointing out at where enemy vessels might round the Boston peninsula. In 1770 Capt. John Montresor had counted five iron eighteen-pounders in that battery.

According to the Boston merchant John Andrews, Gen. Thomas Gage heard rumors that the locals planned to move those guns out of his control. On the morning of 7 September, he sent an army officer across the river to scout out the site. By the time a squad of artillerymen arrived that evening to seize the ordnance, the five guns were gone.

That was one of the earliest moves in what The Road to Concord calls an “arms race” all around Boston in September 1774. Everett had heard about Thompson’s story at least once before. In 1878 the president of the Bunker Hill Monument Association, Richard Frothingham, reported:

…the account of the proceedings of the Standing Committee of August 2, 1824, has the following in the handwriting of Edward Everett, the Secretary: “An account of the carrying off and secreting some heavy artillery from a fort in Charlestown, in the year 1774, by Timothy Thompson, one of the persons engaged in that exploit, was presented by Col. [Samuel D.] Harris, and ordered to be filed.” This paper cannot be found.

In his own local history published in 1845, Frothingham had included the names of three men he believed had participated in that action: William Calder, William Lane, and Timothy Thompson.

Ens. DeBerniere’s Last Trip to Concord

Ens. Henry DeBerniere went back to Concord on the British army expedition of 18-19 April.

Indeed, DeBerniere probably served as a close advisor to the mission’s commander, Lt. Col. Francis Smith (shown here). The young officer had been to the town the previous month, had learned about the cannon at James Barrett’s farm, and was in Smith’s own 10th Regiment.

After the column reached central Concord, DeBerniere led Capt. Lawrence Parsons of the 10th Regiment with “six light-companies” farther across the North Bridge to Barrett’s. The ensign wrote afterward, “we did not find so much as we expected, but what there was we destroyed.”

The serious action, DeBerniere came to learn, was back at the bridge, where Capt. Walter Sloane Laurie of the 43rd, whom he called “Capt. Lowry,” and three companies “were attacked by about 1500 rebels.” (As usual, people tended to overestimate the enemy’s numbers.)

In that fight, “three officers were wounded and one killed” along with three soldiers DeBerniere didn’t name. He counted Lt. Edward Hull of the 43rd as “killed.” In fact, Hull was merely wounded at the bridge but wounded again while riding in a carriage to Boston. He finally died in provincial custody on 2 May, which suggests that DeBerniere wrote his account at least two weeks after the battle.

During that exchange of fire at the bridge, Parsons, DeBerniere, and those six companies were still up at Barrett’s farm, searching. The ensign wrote of the local militia:

they let Capt. Parsons with his three companies return, and never attacked us; they had taken up some of the planks of the bridge, but we got over; had they destroyed it we were most certainly all lost; however, we joined the main body.

Actually, Laurie’s men had taken up planks of the bridge. But it’s true that those provincial companies didn’t try to cut off the search party, waiting until all the British forces had left the center of Concord before attacking. (Parsons reported that at least one of the soldiers killed at the bridge was “scalped,” but DeBerniere said nothing about that.)

Elsewhere in Concord, Ens. DeBerniere noted, that “Capt. [Mundy] Pole of 10th regiment…knock’d the trunnions off three iron 24 pound cannon and burnt their carriages.” These guns were the only provincial artillery left in Concord, possibly because they belonged to the town and possibly because they were just too darn big to move.

DeBerniere’s report continued with a description of the British withdrawal under fire; “there could not be less than 5000…rebels,” he now guessed.

we at first kept our order and returned their fire as hot as we received it, but when we arrived within a mile of Lexington, our ammunition began to fail, and the light companies were so fatigued with flanking they were scarce able to act [as flankers], and a great number of wounded scarce able to get forward, made a great confusion;

Col. Smith (our commanding-officer) had received a wound through his leg, a number of officers were also wounded so that we began to run rather than retreat in order—the whole behaved with amazing bravery, but little order; we attempted to stop the men and form them two deep, but to no purpose, the confusion increased rather than lessened:

At last, after we got through [into] Lexington, the officers got to the front and presented their bayonets, and told the men if they advanced they should die: Upon this they began to form under a very heavy fire

Finally Col. Percy arrived with fresh troops and two field-pieces. That changed the balance of power, and the regulars resumed withdrawing east in more orderly fashion. But there was heavy fighting in Menotomy:

out of these houses they kept a very heavy fire, but our troops broke into them and killed vast numbers; the soldiers shewed great bravery in this place, forceing houses from whence came a heavy fire, and killing great numbers of the rebels.

Around seven o’clock, DeBerniere wrote, the army column reached Charlestown. There the soldiers “took possession of a hill that commanded the town,” the soon-to-be-famous Bunker’s Hill. The town’s selectmen, who were strong Whigs but didn’t want their homes consumed by fire and sword, sent a message to Col. Percy saying

if he would not attack the town, they would take care that the troops should not be molested, and also they would do all in their power for to get us across the ferry;

the Somerset man of war lay there at that time, and all her boats were employed first in getting over the wounded, and after them the rest of the troops; the piquets of 10th regiment, and some more troops, were sent over to Charlestown that night to keep every thing quiet, and returned next day.

Thus ended Ens. DeBerniere’s third and last journey into the Massachusetts countryside.

COMING UP: DeBerniere’s papers.

Joseph Hayward Comes Home from the Fight

Yesterday we heard William Tay, Jr., of Woburn describe the opening of the Revolutionary War and finally get to the point of why he was petitioning the Massachusetts General Court in September 1775.

Tay was part of the loosely organized Massachusetts militia force chasing the British troops back east along what we now call the “Battle Road.” In or near Charlestown he and “several others” came across a house with three redcoats firing from inside it. They stormed the house, killed two of those men, and captured the third with his weapons.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.

But so it happened, that while your petitioner was busied in securing his prisoner, others coming up and rushing into said house, those arms were carried off by some person to your petitioner unknown, which arms are since found in the hands of Lieut. Joseph Howard, of Concord;…

A rival claimant!

We actually have the other side of this dispute in Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 history of Concord:

Lieutenant Joseph Hayward, who had been in the French war,…observing a gun pointed out of the window of a house by a British soldier, he seized it, and in attempting to enter the house found it fastened. He burst open the door, attacked and killed by himself two of the enemy in the room, and took a third prisoner. One of their guns is still owned by his son, from whom I received this anecdote.

Hayward thus passed on much the same story as Tay, except his son got the impression that he had singlehandedly killed two soldiers and captured the third.

We also have a contemporaneous record of Lt. Hayward grabbing a horse and carriage back from British army officers racing to Boston. He had returned the carriage to Reuben Brown and was offering to return the horse to its owner.

But the captured gun? Hayward kept that. He was more senior than Tay. He had just turned sixty years old and held the rank of lieutenant since the last war. Tay was eleven years younger and wouldn’t become a lieutenant until later in the year. But he wanted the gun back.

How can we resolve this 1775 chapter of Grumpy Old Men?

TOMORROW: A third voice, and government action.

William Tay, Jr., Enters the Fight

Here’s a first-person account of the opening day of the Revolutionary War from William Tay, Jr., of Woburn.

There was a long sequence of William Tays in Woburn, and the “Jr.” suffix suggests this account came from the middle of the three then living, born in 1726 and thus in his late forties.

The picture above, which comes courtesy of the Middlesex Canal Association, shows the house where Tay grew up and his father still lived in 1775. It gained the name of the Samuel Tay Homestead after his little brother, who inherited it.

In late 1775, William Tay submitted a petition to the Massachusetts General Court describing his actions on 19 April. Richard Frothingham printed that document in his History of the Siege of Boston. Joel Bohy located the original in the Massachusetts Archives and shared a transcript with me, showing that Frothingham regularized Tay’s spelling, capitalization, and punctuation but didn’t add or remove any words. I’m using Frothingham’s version because tonight I’m too busy to fight autocorrect to reproduce the original.

Here’s what Tay would have written had he followed mid-nineteenth-century standards:

…on the 19th day of April, 1775, being roused from his sleep by an alarm, occasioned by the secret and sudden march of the ministerial troops towards Concord, supposed to intend the destruction of the colony’s magazine there deposited,—to prevent which, your petitioner, with about 180 of his fellow-townsmen, well armed, and resolved in defence of the common cause, speedily took their march from Woburn to Concord aforesaid, who, upon their arrival there, being reinforced by a number of their fellow-soldiers of the same regiment, smartly skirmished with those hostile troops, being deeply touched with their bloody massacre and inhuman murders in their march at Lexington, where we found sundry of our friends and neighbors inhumanly butchered on that bloody field;

and other salvage cruelties to our aged fathers, and poor, helpless, bed-ridden women under the infirmities of child-bearing; together with their horrible devastations committed on their ignominious retreat the same day, (shocking to relate, but more so to behold,) to the eternal infamy of those British arms so frequently and so successfully wielded in the glorious cause of liberty through most of the European dominions, now made subservient to the ambitious purposes of a very salvage cruelty, inhuman butchery, and tyrannical slavery.

Tay appears to have been trying to make a political point there, wouldn’t you say? He was also echoing the Patriot government’s official take on the events of the day, aligning himself with that stance. The petition continued:

These shocking scenes continually opening to view, served to heighten resentment, and warm endeavors to reap a just revenge upon those inhuman perpetrators, and to risk our lives in defence of the glorious cause, as the heroic deeds of our troops through the whole series of the tragical actions of that memorable day abundantly testify.

In which your petitioner, by the joint testimony of all his fellow-soldiers, lent, at least, an equal part through the whole stretch of way from Concord to Charlestown aforesaid, where your petitioner, with several others, passing by an house, were fired upon by three of the ministerial troops planted within, who, returning the fire, killed two of them; thereupon your petitioner rushed into the house, seized the survivor, a sergeant, in his arms, gave him sundry cuffs, who then resigned himself and arms to your petitioner, none others being then within said house.

But then, Tay said, a thief came along!

TOMORROW: A rival claim.

Capt. Dobel at Home and on the Far Side of the World

Except for several months as a Continental Navy lieutenant under Capt. John Manley, which ended badly, Joseph Dobel appears to have spent the Revolutionary War ashore in Boston. Certainly when he was in charge of confining suspected enemies of the state he was at home.

After peace came, Dobel resumed work as a merchant captain, commanding a three-masted ship called the Commerce in 1789. Newspapers indicate he made regular trips to Liverpool and also sailed to Cadiz, Spain.

In December 1790, Dobel’s first wife, Mary, died at age fifty-five. I haven’t found mention of any children from this marriage. A little less than three months later, Capt. Dobel married “Mrs. Susanna Joy,” who was about forty years old.

In the early 1790s, the Boston town meeting started to elect Capt. Dobel as a culler of fish (or dry fish). That was one of several minor offices tasked with making sure that particular goods sold in town met quality standards. Dobel’s election shows what his neighbors felt he was expert in. With his colleagues he periodically advertised in the newspapers warning against unofficial fish-culling.

In 1793 Capt. Dobel was living “in Bennet-Street, opposite the North-School.” Early in that year he dissolved a business partnership with Thomas Jackson. I can’t find any earlier advertisements from this firm, so I have no idea what they dealt in.

In those years, American merchants and captains were seeking new business outside the British Empire—beginning the new nation’s “China Trade” and “East India Trade.” One distant destination was the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, then called “Isle-of-France.” In March 1792, after a full year away from Boston, Capt. John Cathcart brought in the Three Brothers from Mauritius “with a cargo of Sugars” for the merchant Thomas Russell. In May 1795 the Massachusetts Mercury ran a report that Cathcart was back at Mauritius.

Cathcart returned to Massachusetts again that year and oversaw the construction of a new ship, the Three Sisters, in Charlestown. It was about 340 tons burden, “Copper Bolted and sheathed.” Soon he took it out on its maiden voyage to Asia.

And then in May 1796 the Boston newspapers reported that Capt. Cathcart had died “two days sail from St. Jago”—Santiago, the largest island in the country of Cape Verde. The merchants who invested in that cruise and the families of all the crew must have worried about what would happen next. But all they could do was collect snatches of news brought back by other ships’ captains.

As of August, the first report to reach the newspapers said, the Three Sisters was at Mauritius, its next stop uncertain. Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser stated that in February 1797 it was at Bengal. In May the Boston Price-Current said that the ship was at Manila. By this time the principal investor, Russell, had died.

I mention all that because Joseph Dobel had signed on as Cathcart’s next-in-command. He had the responsibility of completing the voyage. Most of those dispatches listed Cathcart as the Three Sisters’ captain, adding that he was dead, while a couple gave Dobel’s name. Meanwhile, the ship was still lingering on the far side of the world. The Massachusetts Mercury reported that “The Three Sisters, Doble, of Boston, sailed from Calcutta for N. York Sept. 19 [1797], sprung a leak, and returned.”

It wasn’t until that spring of 1798 that the Three Sisters was back in the north Atlantic. In late March there were two reports of it being spotted in or near Delaware Bay. Finally, on 27 June, Capt. Dobel brought the ship into New York harbor. That was more than two years after the news that Cathcart had died.

On 31 July a notice in the New-York Gazette announced that the Three Sisters “will be sold reasonable, with all her stores as she came from Calcutta, and the terms of payment made convenient.” Another advertisement, noting that the ship was built “under the superintendence of the late Capt. JOHN CATHCART,” appeared in Russell’s Gazette in Boston the next month.

Those ads promised that the Three Sisters was “a remarkable fast sailer” and only two and a half years old. But the expense of the extraordinarily long voyage meant the ship’s owners needed cash fast.

TOMORROW: Capt. Dobel and the U.S.S. Constitution.