“Also embarked Colonel Richard Prescott”

In late 1774 the British 7th Regiment, known as the Royal Fusiliers, was stationed southwest of Montréal, guarding the frontier of the British Empire.

But its commanding officer, Col. Richard Prescott (shown here), wasn’t with them.

The 17 October New-York Gazette reported:

On Thursday Morning last Major General [Frederick] Haldimand embarked on board the Transport named the Countess of Darlington, attended by Major of Brigade [Thomas] Moncrieff, Capt. Thomas Gamble, Assistant Quarter-Master General, Captain [Dietrich] Brehm, Aid de Camp, and Captain [Francis] Hutcheson;

with General Haldimand also embarked Colonel Richard Prescott of his Majesty’s Royal Fusileers, a Company of the Royal Artillery, with a large Quantity of Ordnance Stores for Castle-William.

Also headed to Boston were the 47th Regiment, three companies of “the Royal Regiment of Ireland” (18th), an artillery company, and artificers to build barracks.

Those transport ships arrived on Sunday, 23 October, as reported four days later in the Boston News-Letter. This was part of Gen. Thomas Gage’s military build-up after the “Powder Alarm.” Indeed, by the end of the year the 7th would be one of the few regiments in North America not stationed inside Boston.

Col. Prescott was still in Boston when the war began because on 12 June 1775 Gen. Gage wrote to the Secretary of War, Viscount Barrington, that “Colonel Prescot, now declared Brigadier,…is going to Canada to Assist General [Guy] Carleton.”

In addition, this 1905 publication by the Canadian Archives stated that Gage sent the same news that day to Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State: “The Colonel Prescott goes immediately to Canada to assist General Carleton, for I hear the Rebels, after surprising Ticonderoga, made Incursions, and committed Hostilities upon the Frontiers of the Province of Quebec…” I haven’t found a copy of that letter in Gage’s papers at the Clements Library, but its online database and transcriptions are still a work in progress.

Thus, through the first half of October 1774 Col. (later Gen.) Richard Prescott was in New York, where Hugh Gaine printed A Letter from a Veteran, to the Officers of the Army Encamped at Boston, as discussed here.

Prescott then sailed north. Eight days after he arrived, booksellers Cox and Berry advertised that pamphlet for sale in Boston.

As a senior officer in Gage’s force, particularly one not engrossed in the daily duty of his regiment, Prescott had the motive and opportunity to pen advice from a “Veteran” to younger officers. He was much closer to the situation in Boston than his younger brother Robert.

When William Tudor, Jr., recorded that people said A Letter from a Veteran was written by “General Prescott,” he most likely meant Richard Prescott.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

“The supposed Author of a Pamphlet”?

The pamphlet titled A Letter from a Veteran, to the Officers of the Army Encamped at Boston didn’t specify an author, printer, or place of printing, simply the date of 1774.

The earliest mention of this publication that I’ve found is an advertisement from the bookselling firm of Cox and Berry in the 31 October Boston Post-Boy. (Price: “6d. Sterling.”)

Edward Cox and Edward Berry were British by birth, and Isaiah Thomas wrote they went back across the Atlantic during the war. So it makes sense that they would sell a pamphlet said to be by a British officer for other British officers. 

Nobody claimed that the Letter from a Veteran was actually printed in Boston, however. The 10 November New-York Journal stated: “[Hugh] Gaine, has lately published, or at least sells, a pamphlet, called ‘a Letter from a Veteran, to the Officers of the Army, encamped at Boston.’”

An item in the 8 December New-York Journal listed A Letter from a Veteran first among “Several pamphlets…lately published by Mr. [James] Rivington and Mr. Gain.”

Modern analysis has confirmed that supposition. In a bibliography supplied to the Colonial Society of Massachusetts in 1956, Thomas Randolph Adams wrote that A Letter from a Veteran “has been assigned to Gaine because all but one of the eleven type ornaments used in this pamphlet are also found in the Laws…of the City of New York also printed by him in 1774.”

As for the author, people had different ideas at the time. On 17 November the New-York Journal published an open letter signed “A Friend to the Liberties of Mankind” which started:

To D——r ————‚ the supposed Author of a Pamphlet (which has made its appearance within a few Days) intitled, A Letter from a Veteran to the Officers of the Army at Boston…

That letter then began “Revd. Sir.” It sneered that the “Veteran” hadn’t really been educated as “a soldier” but had simply “assumed” that identity. (I quoted that article’s criticism of the whole “infamous Piece” yesterday.)

Obviously, the “Friend of the Liberties of Mankind” believed the author of A Letter from a Veteran was a minister with a doctorate. The Rev. Dr. Thomas Bradbury Chandler fits that description, and he was writing other pro-Crown pamphlets at the time. But later when he listed his political publications for the Loyalists Commission, Chandler didn’t claim to be the “Veteran.”

TOMORROW: A postwar attribution.