“His folio military dictionary with plates”

The Boston Athenaeum has digitized its copy of A New Military Dictionary, or, The Field of War: Containing a Particular and Circumstantial Account of the Most Remarkable Battles, Sieges, Bombardments, and Expeditions, Whether by Sea or Land. Such as Relate to Great Britain and Her Dependencies, Deduced from the Descent of Julius Caesar to the Present Time.

This edition appeared in London in 1760. The anonymous author was the journalist John Almon, ten years before he challenged the British government by printing the “Junius” letters, proceedings of the House of Commons, and the Remembrancer compendium of the year’s news.

The title of that book promises lots of stories, but there’s also a story hidden on the title page.

At the top right is the note “David M[torn] / His Book.”

Below that in a different, larger hand is the initial “K.” As the Athenaeum catalogue says, that indicates this book came from the library of Henry Knox.

Knox became the commander of the Continental artillery in late 1775, installed over the heads of all the regiment’s existing officers. Here’s a memory from Susan Smith, daughter of David Mason, who had started the war as third-in-command of that regiment:

As an instance of his good will to Knox, he lent him his folio military dictionary with plates, by Chambers, which he had some time before sent to London for and for which I think I have heard him say he paid ten guineas [£10.10s.]. This valuable book he kept through the war, and to this day, although my father frequently requested him to return it to him, but he always said he could not get along without it and another could not then be procured in the country.

That passage appeared in Smith’s profile of her father published in the Essex Institute Historical Collections.

A Prisoner at Reuben Brown’s

At the end of the day on 19 Apr 1775, the British commanders inside Boston had no idea what had happened to 2d. Lt. Isaac Potter of the marines.

For days Potter was listed as missing—the only officer whose fate was unaccounted for. Just before sending his report on the battle to London, Gen. Thomas Gage added at the bottom:

N.B. Lieutenant Isaac Potter reported to be wounded and taken prisoner.

Yesterday I followed Ellen Chase in guessing that Potter was traveling back to Boston in a chaise ahead of the withdrawing column, which suggests he had been wounded back in Concord. It’s also possible he was wounded and captured during the withdrawal. Whatever happened, it must have been chaotic for his fellow officers to have lost track of him.

The evidence suggests the provincials captured Potter in Menotomy and then sent him back to Concord, to the house shown above. That was the home of Reuben Brown, a maker of harnesses, saddles, and other leather gear. It stood beside a large workshop on the main road. Brown’s business helps to explain why the regulars took a chaise from his yard to transport their wounded.

The harness-maker lived until 1832 and evidently loved to tell stories about the opening of the war. After he died, the New England Farmer reprinted an obituary from the Boston Courier which said of Brown on that morning:

his wife with her infant children [was] instructed to manage for herself in the woods north of the town, with many other females and infirm people of the place. Mr Brown then mounted his horse again, it being now about day-break, and commenced the task of alarming the neighboring country. And his efforts will need no comment when we say that he rode that day about 120 miles in the performance of this noble duty.

Likewise, the author of a profile of Gen. Benjamin Lincoln published in The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans in 1865 mentioned:

The writer has frequently conversed with a venerable citizen of Concord [named in a footnote as Brown], since deceased, then an artisan in the village, who, having at the first news of the approach of the enemy some time before day-break, commenced the voluntary labor of alarming the neighboring country, actually rode on horseback more than one hundred miles during the next twenty-four hours…

Apparently Brown wasn’t even home for most of the day of the battle. It’s therefore unclear why Lt. Potter ended up in Brown’s house.

But he was there within a couple of days. According to Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 history of Concord:

Lieutenant Isaac Potter, of the marines, was taken prisoner, and confined some time at Reuben Brown’s. Colonel [James] Barrett was directed, April 22d, to give him liberty to walk round the house, but to keep a constant guard of three men, day and night, to present his being insulted or making his escape.

David Mason was in Concord working with Barrett to prepare cannon for the provincial army. Mason wrote “Lieut Potter of the Marines” in a notebook, so he must have crossed paths with the prisoner, too.

TOMORROW: Lt. Isaac Potter, house guest.

Looking at “Leslie’s Retreat”

Today Salem commemorates “Leslie’s Retreat” on 26 Feb 1775, so I’m highlighting Donna Seger’s Streets of Salem posting about that event. She explores three points, to which I’ll add my thoughts.

“How many damn cannon(s) were there in Salem?”

Seger concludes that the most reliable number comes from Samuel Gray, as I quoted it here. Now I adore this account for preserving the forthright experience of a nine-year-old boy, but I don’t trust all the details. Young Samuel may not have been told accurate information, and he may not have remembered it exactly decades later.

I think the best source for the number of cannon involved in the incident at Salem is a small green notebook deposited at the Massachusetts Historical Society. David Mason used that notebook as he was gathering cannon for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Mason arranged for blacksmith Robert Foster to build carriages for the cannon tubes he collected from town fortifications, the Derby family, and other sources.

On one page of the notebook Mason totaled his own charges for the congress, including for “paint’g 17 Carridges Limbers &c.” On another page he wrote, “fosters acct. 17 field Pieces” [though that figure could also be read as 19]. So I think the most likely number of cannon in Foster’s smithy on the morning of 26 Feb 1775 was seventeen.

But the cannon Mason had collected in north Salem were only one part of what the Provincial Congress amassed in late 1774 and early 1775. That rebel government had artillery pieces in Worcester, Concord, and perhaps other towns. What’s more, some towns acquired cannon of their own. I wrote a whole book about Massachusetts’s effort to arm itself for war, and I still can’t say exactly how many damn cannon there were.

“Major Pedrick was a Tory!”

Quite definitely. According to many Salem historians, John Pedrick fooled Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie into letting him carry a warning about the redcoats marching in from Marblehead. But all contemporaneous sources show Pedrick favored the Crown.

Pedrick’s daughter Mehitable told stories about her family’s brave feats in the Revolution. Even some of her descendants didn’t believe those tales, but her daughter Elizabeth did, and she spread them to local historians. I discussed those family legends in the last chapter of The Road to Concord.

“‘Anniversary History’ was alive and well in 1775.”

Seger notes how newspaper reports of Leslie’s expedition appeared in New England newspapers alongside remarks about the anniversary of the Boston Massacre. With redcoats marching on the streets of Boston and Marshfield, and popping up on a Sunday in Marblehead and Salem, the threat of another confrontation ending in death was very real.

A year later, the date of the Massacre determined when the Continental Army moved soldiers and cannon onto Dorchester Heights. In the cannonade that provided cover for that operation, just a year and a few days after “Leslie’s Retreat,” David Mason was wounded by a bursting mortar.

“The fire was fast approaching the building”

Returning to The Saga of the Brazen Head, I’ll share some Bostonians’ experiences of the Great Fire of 20 Mar 1760, which began after dark in that brazier’s shop.

At that time David Mason was a decorative painter four days short of his thirty-fourth birthday. He had fought in the Crown forces in the French and Indian War, gaining experience in artillery at Fort William Henry before the enemy captured the site on 8 Aug 1757.

According to the stories that Mason told his daughter Susan, a group of Native Americans held him for days before he escaped to Albany. Eventually he made it back to Boston, where his wife Hannah insisted he not enlist again, even with the promise of a promotion. Instead, Mason became active in the local militia defense system.

Specifically, Mason was in charge of the gunpowder supply for the South Battery, near Fort Hill (shown above). And on the night of the 1760 fire, his daughter wrote:

The fire was fast approaching the building and there was a considerable quantity of powder in the house [at the battery] that was thought might be removed before the fire could reach it. He accordingly went to his house for the key, which was some distance from the fire.

When my mother learnt his intention it threw her into great distress in apprehension of the danger he was going to expose himself, and after he had used many arguments to quiet her mind and had made his way out of the house, she followed him to the door entreating him not to venture upon so dangerous a step, and in the midst of her pleadings the [powder] house blew up, but without injuring as many people as might have been expected.

From a calculation that was made of the time it would have taken him to have gone to his house and returned, had he persued his intention without hinderance, it was supposed he must have been in the house at the time of its blowing up. But his time was not yet come…

If Mason had been killed in that explosion, he could not have founded Boston’s militia artillery company or “train” with Adino Paddock a couple of years later.

The guns of the Boston train, Paddock, and Mason are at the heart of the story I tell in The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War. So we can imagine an alternative universe in which Mason died in 1760 and I had nothing to write about.

Talk about David Mason in Salem, 28 Apr.

On Friday, 28 April, I’m headed back to Salem to talk about “Leslie’s Retreat” and The Road to Concord to the Explorers Lifelong Learning Institute of Salem State University. (I’m taking the place of another speaker, so I’m not listed on the website for that day.)

This event will be part of the Explorers’ “Friday Coffee” series, but I prefer tea, so I’ll share a story about tea that led up to “Leslie’s Retreat.”

According to Susan Mason Smith, interviewed in 1842 when she was “in her 80th year,” her father David Mason in 1774

was on a Com[mitt]ee (in Salem) to prevent the introduction of Tea in this Town.—

2 large chests, smuggled into Salem by a coloured man,—were seized—& put in Col Mason’s chamber closet for safe keeping over night—

This Tea was taken away the next day by the school boys who had much amusement in burning it on the Common

Smith apparently said “public square”; her interviewer wondered if that meant the common.

The story continued:

Mrs Mason was in feeble health, & it was thought necessary, that she should use Tea for her recovery for her relief. Her husband proposed to obtain special leave that she might use such a remedy; but she said “No, she would rather suffer inconvenience then it should be said she was enjoying a privilege her husband was appointee to take from her friends & neighbors.[”]

That autumn, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s Committee of Safety asked Mason “to make private preparation for the Revolution” by “collecting military Stores for the use of the Country.”

Come the following February, the stores David Mason had collected—namely a large number of cannon—were being mounted on carriages in the north of Salem. And Lt.-Col. Alexander Leslie and his redcoat soldiers had orders to search for them.

My “Friday Coffee” talk is scheduled to start at 10:00 A.M. at 10 Federal Street in Salem. I’m a bit worried about arriving on time from Middlesex County, but the session can run until noon, so we’ll get through everything eventually.

Cannon Moved from Salem to Concord

In early March 1775, soon after “Leslie’s Retreat” in Salem, Gen. Thomas Gage started to receive solid information about the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s effort to build a military force out in rural Massachusetts.

An anonymous informant who sometimes wrote in French for added security sent Gage multiple messages on 8 and 9 March. Those messages offered details about where cannon and other military supplies were hidden in Concord.

What’s more, that spy hinted that much of that ordnance came from Salem, and were thus probably the same guns that Lt.-Col. Alexander Leslie had been blocked from seizing there.

The informant wrote:

Eight more pieces of Iron Ordnance were this day (Le 8 de Mois de Mars) convey’d to Concord from L[eicester?] (where they had been deposited a few days preceeding their Last removal;[)]—Two of the Eight appeard to be Smaller than the rest & about three or four pounders—These last mentioned were met at a small distance from C[oncord] in three Carts there were no appurtenances, but it was said that carriages were made or making at Salem & soon to follow.—

It is conjectured & reported that a Large quantity of Cartridges are now preparing at Ch[arlestow]n; of Different Sizes, & numbered in order to distribute & distinguish properly.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress was consolidating guns, carriages, and gunpowder cartridges in Concord, prepping those artillery pieces for battle. Gage knew similar work was under way in Worcester. In addition, several towns were forming artillery companies on their own.

The same informant out in Concord told Gage that there were:

Four brass Cannon, & Two Cohorns or Mortars (so call’d by the Peasantry) Conceal’d at Mr: B, (Lately chose or appointed Minute Colo.) Suppos’d to be deposited in his Cellar.

“Mr: B” was James Barrett, colonel in the Middlesex County militia. (His house appears above.) Documents from both sides of the conflict indicate that Barrett was in contact with David Mason, the man who had collected the cannon at Salem. They were both working for the Provincial Congress.

Gage must have been struck by the mention of “Four brass Cannon.” Brass (or bronze) cannon were rare in Massachusetts—most were secure in the hands of the British military. But four small brass guns had disappeared from Boston’s militia gunhouses the previous September. And Gage wanted them back. For the next month, he focused his intelligence efforts on finding out more about those cannon in Concord.

Making the “Salem Connection,” 7 Apr.

On Friday, 7 April, I’ll speak at the Salem Athenaeum about “The Salem Connection: A Crucial Part of Massachusetts’s Secret Drive to Collect Artillery Before the Revolutionary War.”

This event is part of Salem’s commemoration of “Leslie’s Retreat,” the confrontation on 26 Feb 1775 when a Patriot crowd prevented Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie from searching a smithy near the North River for weapons.

As I describe in The Road to Concord, there actually were weapons in that forge—at least when Leslie and his soldiers arrived in town. But blacksmith Robert Foster had hastily moved them away while David Mason, the man who had collected those guns, blocked Leslie’s approach at a drawbridge. Those cannon were part of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s drive to build an army.

Salem was also the site of other significant actions resisting the royal government in the preceding year:

• the Massachusetts General Court’s vote on 17 June 1774 to send delegates to the First Continental Congress, which prompted Gen. Thomas Gage to dissolve that legislature.
• the Salem town meeting’s vote on 24 August 1774 to send delegates to an Essex County convention, which Gage tried to stop by detaining local activists and summoning troops; that didn’t work, so he gave up on Essex County and moved back to Boston.
• the first meeting of the Provincial Congress on 7 October 1774.

I’ll speak about how all those events tie together as part of a province-wide resistance to the Crown.

My talk is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. Admission is $10 for Salem Athenaeum members, $15 for others, free for students with identification, with the proceeds benefiting the host institution.

“Retreat and Resistance” in Salem, 26 Feb.

On Sunday, 26 February, Salem will have a “fun and informal reenactment” of the confrontation between Patriots and redcoats across the town’s North River on that date in 1775.

Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie had orders to lead his men from the 64th Regiment of Foot across the river and search Robert Foster’s smithy. But locals, led by David Mason, had raised the drawbridge over the river, blocking the redcoats.

A crowd gathered around the soldiers. Militia units mustered in nearby towns. There was some tussling, some swinging of hatchets, some poking with bayonets. A soldier pricked Joseph Whicher’s chest—enough that Salem historians have claimed the first blood of the Revolutionary War was spilled that day.

Eventually the town’s civilian leaders and Lt. Col. Leslie found a compromise, brokered by Anglican [nearby meetinghouse] minister Thomas Barnard. Mason lowered the drawbridge. Leslie marched his men across it, far enough that he could say he had fulfilled his orders, and then they turned around and went back to the ship awaiting them in Marblehead.

During the stalemate at the bridge, Mason’s confederates had moved all the cannon he had collected for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress out of Foster’s workshop and into a nearby woods. Those cannon were being mounted on carriages for battlefield use. Within a week, they were moved on to Concord, where a larger British force came looking for them in April.

The commemoration on Sunday starts with two gatherings:

• 10:30 A.M.: The First Church of Salem Unitarian-Universalist welcomes everyone for a service that will end with a warning that the redcoats are coming, just as happened in 1775. That will be about 11:30, when folks can also arrive at the church yard to join the congregants in heading to the bridge.
• 11:00 A.M.: Folks representing the British army will meet at Hamilton Hall with fifes, recorders, and slide whistles. They will walk up to a mile (weather depending) to recreate the soldiers’ approach from Marblehead.
• 11:45 A.M.: At the corner of Federal and North Streets (Murphy’s Funeral Home), Lt. Col. Leslie and militia captain John Felt will dispute whether the bridge must come down and what the soldiers must do. People are invited to observe and shout surly comments.
• 12:00 noon: At the end of the reenactment, everyone will be invited into the First Church for an hour of warmth and refreshment.

The 26 Feb 1775 confrontation was part of the larger competition for artillery pieces described in The Road to Concord. On Friday, 7 April, I’ll speak at the Salem Athenaeum about that town’s many crucial connections to the Massachusetts arms race. General admission will be $15, for members $10, and for students with ID free.

Folks in the region are organizing other talks and events in the coming weeks about Leslie’s Retreat and the surrounding conflict. I’ll share more news of those as they come near.

Jeremiah Lee’s Very Bad Night

Jeremiah Lee was a non-battlefield casualty of the fight on 18-19 Apr 1775. On the one hand, that’s appropriate because he was central to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s effort to build up an artillery force, which prompted the British army march tp Concord. On the other hand, Lee’s death was probably unnecessary.

Lee was a Marblehead merchant, militia commander, and member of the congress’s Committee on Supplies. He was the conduit for its payments to the Salem painter David Mason as he collected and mounted cannons.

On 18 April, Lee attended a joint meeting of the Committee on Supplies and the Committee of Safety at a tavern in Menotomy, the western village of Cambridge that’s now Arlington. When the meeting broke up, he and two other men from Marblehead, Elbridge Gerry and Azor Orne, decided to stay the night. Richard Devens of Charlestown later wrote:

After we had finished the business of the day, we adjourned to meet at Woburn on the morrow,—left to lodge at Newell’s [the tavern], Gerry, Orne, and Lee. Mr. [Abraham] Watson and myself came off in my chaise at sunset.

On the road we met a great number of B[ritish]. O[fficers]. and their servants on horseback, who had dined that day at Cambridge. We rode some way after we met them, and then turned back and rode through them, went and informed our friends at Newell’s. We stopped there till they [the officers] came up and rode by. We then left our friends, and I came home, after leaving Mr. Watson at his house.

Likewise, Gen. William Heath wrote of himself in the third person: “on his return home, soon after he left the committee, and about sun-setting, he met eight or nine British officers on horseback, with their swords and pistols, riding up the road towards Lexington.”

The province was abuzz with rumors that the London government had ordered Gen. Thomas Gage to arrest leaders of the rebellion—and those rumors were pretty much true. The committee men were naturally nervous. Gerry sent a warning west to John Hancock and Samuel Adams, then staying at Lexington. Nonetheless, Devens and Watson had passed through the British officers twice with no trouble.

Later that evening, a long column of British troops passed by the tavern on the way to Concord. Lee, Gerry, and Orne got out of bed to watch. Suddenly they perceived some soldiers from that column coming toward the front door. Half-dressed, the three men dashed out the back and threw themselves down in a field, hoping the stalks of the previous year’s crop would hide them. Heath wrote that he heard they suffered “some injury from obstacles in the way, in their undressed state.”

The three men remained on the ground for about an hour before they decided it was safe to return to the building. Lee, who had just turned fifty-four, took sick from the cold and stress. He died on 10 May, his family and friends blaming the events of that night.

Here’s the sad irony: those British troops weren’t seeking to arrest anyone on the Committee on Supplies. Gen. Thomas Gage’s orders for that march say nothing about arresting Provincial Congress members or searching buildings before the column reached Concord. None of the several British officers who left detailed accounts of the night wrote about such a search on the way west. Heath wrote that he’d heard the troops “halted” outside the tavern, which they might have done just to get water from a well, but he didn’t say they went inside.

In his 1828 biography of Gerry, James T. Austin wrote that British troops had searched Newell’s tavern on the night of 18 April. Of course, saying that made Gerry’s decision to hide outside in the fields seem more smart than scared. And although Austin claimed, “even the beds in which they had lain were examined,” he had to acknowledge that nothing, not even “a valuable watch of Mr. Gerry’s, which was under his pillow,” had been disturbed. No eyewitness accounts from 1775 said troops had gone into the tavern, and the Massachusetts Patriots hadn’t shied from complaining about British actions that day.

I therefore suspect that Lee, Gerry, and Orne could have stayed inside their bedroom the whole night without being disturbed. And Lee might have lived for many more years.

Should Today Be “Salem Gunpowder Day”?

Earlier this month the Boston Globe published an essay by the historian Peter Charles Hoffer that it headlined, “Happy Salem Gunpowder Day! Did American independence start with a peaceful protest? The case for a new holiday.”

That holiday would be today, 26 February, and the article began:

In nine weeks, America will once more celebrate Patriot’s Day, in honor of the battles of Lexington and Concord. . . . But when it comes to the start of the Revolution, history has forgotten another crucial British retreat, one that might just as well be the day we celebrate instead. It happened on a Salem bridge on Feb. 26, 1775—239 years ago next Wednesday.

No shots were fired; no patriots or regulars fell. But on that day, for the first time, the Colonists stood up to a British Army serving field commander, and the British withdrew.

The story of the fierce but bloodless showdown that sparked the war is a reminder that our country was born not just out of violence, but from another kind of resistance altogether. If we were to commemorate that day instead—call it Salem Gunpowder Day—it would put a very different spin on our understanding of how our country’s war for independence began.

By no coincidence, Hoffer’s latest book is Prelude to Revolution: The Salem Gunpowder Raid of 1775. He was doing his job as an author, using the news media to bring attention to his book and argue for its importance.

But for me this essay left me less convinced Hoffer knows what he’s talking about. That’s harsh, especially since I’ve enjoyed some of his previous writing, but the run-up to the Revolutionary War in New England is a topic I’ve spent a lot of time on.

If we want to celebrate (mostly) non-violent resistance, then we should highlight the events of the late summer of 1774. Crowds in Massachusetts’s western counties closed their courts, and four thousand men massed on Cambridge common, all to protest the Massachusetts Government Act. Those unarmed crowd actions forced royal appointees to resign their posts or agree not to act under that law. By the end of the first week of September, it was clear that Gov. Thomas Gage exercised no authority outside of Boston. That opened a vacuum for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress formed weeks later.

If we want to spotlight the moment when the political conflict in New England turned military, then we might want to look at the shots fired at Fort William & Mary in Portsmouth harbor in December 1774. Nobody was killed there, but that confrontation got closer to being fatal than the Salem raid.

Why wasn’t the confrontation in Salem fatal? Hoffer paints the provincial obstruction as non-violent, but parts of the Essex County militia did mobilize and march to Salem. They simply arrived too late to get involved, after the British troops had started to withdraw. Only because the crisis was over by then could Hoffer call the event “bloodless.”

In fact, local historians didn’t call the confrontation at the drawbridge “bloodless.” Instead, Salem authors claimed that their townspeople shed the “first blood” of the Revolutionary War because the king’s soldiers pricked some locals in the chests with their bayonets. Not many authors from outside the county have agreed that that blood was so significant.

But most striking to me is how Hoffer refers to the “Salem Gunpowder Raid” and “Salem Gunpowder Day.” What gunpowder? In justifying the action to London, Gen. Gage wrote:

The circumstance of the eight field pieces at Salem led us into a mistake, for supposing them to be brass guns brought from Holland, or some of the foreign isles, which report had also given reasons to suspect, a detachment of 400 men under Lieut. Col. [Alexander] Leslie, was sent privately off by water to seize them. The places they were said to be concealed in were strictly searched, but no artillery could be found. And we have since discovered, that there had been only some old ship’s guns, which had been carried away from Salem some time ago.

Gage’s orders were all about cannon. That was why Lt. Col. Lesie headed for a blacksmith’s shop across the drawbridge across Salem’s North River—because David Mason had collected cannon there to be mounted on carriages.

Mason and his Patriot colleagues hadn’t collected gunpowder there. We know that because one of the rules that people in the eighteenth century knew to live by was:

You don’t store gunpowder in a blacksmith’s shop.

Generational Tension within the Artillery Regiment

The change at the top of the Continental artillery regiment that Gershom Foster’s early-1776 orderly book documents may have brought up some generational friction.

In his first regimental orders on 28 Jan 1776, the new colonel, Henry Knox, made a point to say:

The Colnl. is fully persuaded the officers of the Artillary Regt. will not loose the present opportunity. He wishes harmony to prevail in Every Company that the officers of Experience would Chearfully communicate their Knnowledg to the Younger and unexperienced Breathen that all the officers in their Respective spheres would inculcate to the noncommisioned officers & Soldiers the duty of their Stations & the advantage & necessity of a proper Subordination.

This message to “officers of Experience” came from a man in his mid-twenties who had just replaced a sixtysomething veteran of two wars, Col. Richard Gridley.

Furthermore, Knox now commanded Lt. Col. William Burbeck, who would turn sixty in 1776, and Lt. Col. David Mason, who would turn forty. Both those men had fought in wars against the French. Knox’s only military experience before 1775 was as a junior lieutenant in Boston’s militia grenadier company. Of course, he had won Gen. George Washington’s favor by helping to design fortifications in Roxbury and then cemented it by bringing more heavy artillery from Lake Champlain.

On 29 January, Knox’s regimental orders said, “the posts at prospect and Winter hills...are to be fired and directed by Colonel Mason.” Two days later Knox designated told all the artillery officers on the northern wing of the siege to report on their ordnance to Mason. The officers elsewhere in Cambridge were to report directly to Knox, and those at Roxbury to Maj. John Crane.

So where was Lt. Col. Burbeck in that arrangement? The Foster orderly book doesn’t mention the regiment’s second-highest ranking officer after the one regimental order he issued on 3 January. (It does mention “Capt. Burbeck at the Laboratory” on Cambridge common; that must have been one of the lieutenant colonel’s sons.)

Burbeck left the Continental Army when it moved south in April 1776, insisting that his contract was with Massachusetts. But perhaps he was already withdrawn from the regiment, or at least stopped behaving “Chearfully” around the new commander.

That’s another question scholars can investigate with the Gershom Foster orderly book, part of the archive at the Society of the Cincinnati’s Anderson House in Washington, D.C.

TOMORROW: Artillery officers versus infantry officers.

[The thumbnail above is Sharon Zingery’s photograph of William Burbeck’s gravestone in the Copp’s Hill Burying-ground, courtesy of Find-a-Grave.]

“Gossiping about the Gores” Now Online!

In January, I had the honor of speaking at Old South Meeting House in a series of lunchtime lectures on the Loyalists of the Revolution. My talk was “Gossiping about the Gores,” telling the stories of the family of decorative painter and paint merchant John Gore and his many children.

After participating in political protests against Parliament’s new taxes in the 1760s, John Gore sided with the Crown in 1774. As a result, he sailed away with the British military in 1776. But his wife and children stayed behind; in fact, several of the younger generation were very active Patriots. In addition to that political division, the family also had to deal with business challenges, riots, sudden death, stolen cannons, and at least one dicey marriage. Intrigued?

My talk has now been archived in audio form at the WGBH Forum. The videotape ran into technical problems, I understand, but really you didn’t miss anything. In fact, I can offer much better visuals than me talking.

Above is part of John Singleton Copley’s picture of the Gore children in the mid-1750s; John, Jr., is on the left, and Samuel on the right. The full image, including two older sisters, appears on Flickr and The Atheneum, and the original is at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware.

Below is part of the handout I prepared for the talk and alluded to a few times. It charts out John and Frances Gore’s many children and their spouses. Clicking on the image should take you to a larger version. Download and follow along!

A Deadly Barrage from the Continental Artillery

On 2 Mar 1776, the Continental Army began an artillery barrage against Boston, firing from Cobble Hill and Lechmere’s Point in Cambridge and Lamb’s dam in Roxbury. This was the opening of a spring offensive designed to drive the British military away from the town.

Remember how excited the Americans were back in November after capturing a British ordnance ship? The biggest prize was a thirteen-inch brass mortar that Gen. Israel Putnam and Quartermaster-General Thomas Mifflin christened “the Congress.” That was deployed for this bombardment, and was probably one of the first guns to be fired.

In his history of Middlesex County, Samuel Adams Drake wrote:

It was related by Colonel [William?] Burbeck that the battery containing the “Congress” mortar was placed under the command of Colonel David Mason. With this mortar Mason was ordered to set fire to Boston. His first shell was aimed at the Old South, and passed just above the steeple.

The next shell was aimed more accurately at the roof, which it would doubtless have entered had not the mortar burst, grievously wounding the colonel and killing a number of his men. . . .

Through the inexperience of those who served them, four other mortars were burst during the bombardment which preceded the occupation of Dorchester Heights.

Gen. William Heath of Roxbury wrote that the mortars “were not properly bedded, as the ground was hard frozen.” The Americans probably still lacked experienced artillerists, and were paying for it.

I suspect Drake relied on Richard P. Frothingham’s History of the Siege of Boston in counting five mortars burst over all. As of 3 Mar 1776, Heath and Dr. James Thacher had counted only three, so Frothingham may have counted two twice. Still, those deadly explosions must have been demoralizing for the Americans.

That bombardment was only the first part of the Continental commanders’ plan, however. The artillery fire was meant to keep the British busy while Americans fortified the heights on Dorchester point. The image above, from the Dorchester Atheneum, shows how that town’s peninsula overlooked the Boston peninsula to its northwest (so small it’s not even labeled on this map) as well as a narrow point in the harbor.

At the Battle of Bunker Hill, the provincials had started their redoubt in the middle of the night before the battle. The provincials improvised more protection for themselves along a rail fence, and had superior numbers available, but they ran out of gunpowder and couldn’t stop the British from taking not only the redoubt but the whole Charlestown peninsula.

Gen. George Washington and his commanders were determined to make the Dorchester fortifications strong enough to withstand a British counterattack. That required preparing parts of the works in advance, to be assembled on the heights, and a multi-day construction effort. Hence the need to distract the British with cannonballs and shells.

British Officers Taken Prisoner

On Wednesday I shared some reports of a prisoner exchange between the British and provincial armies, 232 years earlier. The Essex Gazette reported the provincials’ prisoners as:

Major Dunbar, and Lieut. Hamilton of the 64th on horse-back; Lieut. Potter, of the marines, in a chaise; John Hilton of the 47th, Alexander Campbell of the 4th, John Tyne, Samuel Marcy, Thomas Parry, and Thomas Sharp, of the marines, wounded men, in two carts

Few sources on the siege of Boston say anything more about those men, so here’s what I’ve been able to gather.

Maj. William Dunbar was a retired British officer who had been traveling in New England when the war broke out; he was captured in Cambridge while seeking to ride home to Canada. On 29 April the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s Committee of Safety ordered that “Major Dunbar, now a prisoner at Head-Quarters” in Cambridge, be taken “to Woburn, under a strong guard, and...kept in safe custody.” (The committee also authorized the company escorting Dunbar to charge their tavern bill to the province.) According to Historical Sketches of Andover, relying on correspondence between Dunbar and Samuel Osgood, the officer was “Mayor of Quebec,” but there seems to have been no such office until 1833; that might simply have been a misreading of “Major.” Dunbar died in Montreal in 1788.

Lt. Hamilton of the 64th Regiment was probably one of the British officers who rode out on horseback early on 18 April to scout the route to Concord, stop alarm riders like Paul Revere, and otherwise prepare the way for the army’s march that evening. He was captured, unwounded, by provincial militiamen as he tried to get back to his regiment at Castle William. (He was not Lt. James Hamilton of the 10th, who had refused to ride out the night before, claiming illness.)

In an invisible-ink report to Gen. Thomas Gage dated 6 May 1775, Benjamin Thompson of Woburn said that “Dunbar from Canada, & Ens. Hamilton of [tear] Regt. with their Servants are Prisoners in this town.” Ensign was the rank below lieutenant, the equivalent of a 2nd lieutenant in today’s U.S. army, so Thompson wasn’t far off. (Judge Peter Oliver, in a letter to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, referred simply to “Mr. Hamilton, of the 64th Regiment.”) Did Dunbar and Hamilton have servants with them who did not return to Boston, or did Thompson assume the enlisted men were their servants?

Lt. Isaac Potter of the marines was wounded near Lexington, according to Gage’s report to London. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 History of the Town of Concord reported:

Lieutenant Isaac Potter, of the marines, was taken prisoner, and confined some time at Reuben Brown’s. Colonel [James] Barrett was directed, April 22d, to give him liberty to walk round the house, but to keep a constant guard of three men, day and night, to present his being insulted or making his escape.

Maj. David Mason of the Massachusetts artillery regiment wrote “Lieut Potter of the Marines” in a notebook he was keeping in 1774-75, so their paths must have crossed.

As for the enlisted men, it’s typical of British military sources not to name them. Gage reported all the officers killed, wounded, and captured in his report to London, but simply gave numbers for lower-ranking men. Similarly, the officers traveled to this prisoner exchange on horses and a chaise while the enlisted men shared wagons. The American newspaper account might therefore be our best printed source on the private soldiers. For more information, someone might have to page through original manuscripts in the U.K.’s National Archives.

COMING UP: And the British military’s prisoners?