“She was surprised by the firing of the king’s troops”

Last month Alex Cain at Historical Nerdery rounded up four accounts from women who had all-too-close encounters with British troops during the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Those are all stories preserved in the women’s own words, not questionable latter-day legends like Lydia Barnard.

Those accounts survive because:

• Hannah Adams and Hannah Bradish described experiences that the Patriots could present to the world as atrocities, and therefore wrote down and spread around in 1775.
• Mary Hartwell and Anna Munroe lived long enough to be among the few people to remember 1775, making other people more interested in hearing and recording their stories.

Here’s a taste of Hannah Bradish’s account:

about five o’clock on Wednesday last, afternoon, being in her bed-chamber, with her infant child, about eight days old, she was surprised by the firing of the king’s troops and our people, on their return from Concord. She being weak and unable to go out of her house, in order to secure herself and family, they all retired into the kitchen, in the back part of the house. She soon found the house surrounded with the king’s troops; that upon observation made, at least seventy bullets were shot into the front part of the house; several bullets lodged in the kitchen where she was, and one passed through an easy chair she had just gone from.

After the battle, Bradish reported finding many things missing, “which, she verily believes, were taken out of the house by the king's troops.”

Cain notes that the Rev. David McClure also wrote about seeing houses like Bradish’s along the battle road in Menotomy shot up with musket balls. Indeed, people can see the physical evidence of those shots in the Jason Russell House, as shown above.

But did the British muskets do all that damage? With a finite amount of ammunition, would the regulars have fired so many balls into a house with no one firing back from inside? Or might a lot of those bullets have come from provincial militiamen firing at the redcoats they saw around that house?

The First Captured British Officer to Die in the Revolutionary War

When provincial militia companies fired at the British soldiers holding the North Bridge in Concord, they wounded four army officers:

• Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould of the 4th Regiment, in the foot.
• Lt. Waldron Kelly of the 10th, in the hand or arm.
• Lt. William Sutherland of the 38th, only slightly.
• Lt. Edward Hull of the 43rd, in the arm.

Unable to march back to Boston, Gould commandeered a chaise in Concord and set out with Hull, who seems to have been more badly hurt. They raced back to safe ground through the hostile countryside.

Somewhere east of Lexington, the lieutenants met up with Col. Percy and the British relief column. Gould briefed the colonel about what had happened in Concord and drove on. But by the time the chaise reached Meontomy, the provincial militia was out in force.

Someone fired at the vehicle, wounding Hull again. Gould surrendered and was taken to Medford. Hull was carried into a deserted house beside the road. When the homeowners, Samuel and Elizabeth Butterfield, returned at the end of the day, they found a provincial man, Daniel Hemenway, shot in the chest but relatively healthy, and Lt. Hull, grievously wounded.

The next day, the Rev. David McClure had been in the Butterfields’ house. He wrote:

I went into a house in Menotomy, where was a stout farmer, walking the room, from whose side a surgeon had just cut out a musket ball . . .

In the same room, lay mortally wounded, a british Officer, Lieut. Hull, a youthful, fair & delicate countinance. He was of a respectable family of fortune, in Scotland. Sitting on one feather bed, he leaned on another, & was attempting to suck the juice of an Orange, which some neighbour had brought. The physician of the place had been to dress his wounds, & a woman was appointed to attend him. His breaches were bloody, lying on the bed. . . .

I asked him, if he was dangerously wounded? he replied, “yes, mortally.” That he had received three balls in his body. His countenance expressed great bodily anguish. I conversed with him a short time, on the prospect of death & a preperation for that solemn scene, to which he appeared to pay serious attention.

A rumor about Hull’s captivity circulated among his fellow officers in Boston, as recorded by Lt. Frederick Mackenzie on 30 April:

Lt. Hull of the 43rd Regiment who was dangerously wounded on the 19th Instant, was left in a house in the Village of Menotomy. ’Tis said the Rebels placed three deserters from the 43rd Regt over him while he lay on a bed unable to move, and that one of those Villains threatened to shoot him for having formerly brought him to a Court Martial.

There’s no hint of such treatment in provincial sources. The head of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, Dr. Joseph Warren, had written to Gen. Thomas Gage assuring him that Hull and Gould were getting medical care. He invited the general to send out any British army surgeon he chose.

In Igniting the American Revolution, Derek W. Beck writes that toward the end of the month, as Hull weakened, Warren sent Gage another note saying that the lieutenant hoped to see his regimental adjutant. That was Lt. William Miller; he was promoted to captain at the end of the year and was still at that rank when he died in 1789.

Hull died on 2 May. The next day, Gen. Artemas Ward ordered three lieutenants and three adjutants to escort the lieutenant’s coffin to Charlestown and turn it over to the British military. A barge from H.M.S. Somerset carried it across the Charles River to Boston.

On 4 May Lt. John Barker of the 4th Regiment wrote in his diary:

The late Lt. Hull of the 43d was buried today: he was wounded and taken Prisoner on the 19th and the day before yesterday died of his wounds; they yesterday brought him to town as he had requested it.

They won’t give up any of their Prisoners, but I hear they treat ’em pretty well.

(The photo above shows the monument to two British privates killed and buried near the North Bridge in Concord. We don’t know where Lt. Hull’s body was interred.)

The “juvenile sports” of Two Boston Boys in the Late 1750s

In 22 Dec 1788, the Rev. David McClure wrote from Windsor, Connecticut, to one of his childhood friends from Boston:

Dear Sir,—On the footing of that juvenile friendship and acquaintance with you with which I have been honored, and which was kept alive to our riper years, I now do myself the pleasure to address a line to you, to assure you of my respectful and affectionate remembrance of you, and of the satisfaction with which I sometimes call to mind those scenes of innocent amusement and play in which we were mutually engaged when we were boys.

I have often thought of our attempts to imitate the man who flew from the steeple of the North Church, by sliding down an oar from the small buildings in your father’s house-yard at Wheeler’s Point; and by letting fly little wooden men from the garret window on strings. Have you forgotten that diversion?

McClure was recalling how a traveling daredevil named John Childs had “flown” from Christ Church in the North End in September 1757, as discussed way back here. Childs actually slid face-first down a rope, which is why the boys at Wheeler’s Point tried “sliding down an oar” and “letting letting fly little wooden men from the garret window on strings” to replicate his feat.

The minister’s old playmate was Henry Knox (shown above), then in New York as Secretary of War. He replied on 25 Jan 1789:

Our juvenile sports, and the joyful sensations they excited, are fresh in my mind; and what to me renders the remembrance particularly precious is, that I always flattered myself that our hearts and minds were similarly constructed.

This is one of our few authentic glimpses of Henry Knox as a boy in the 1750s. Within a few years, Henry’s father suffered business reversals and left his family, dying in the Caribbean in 1762. Henry became indentured to a bookseller, his first career.

On Monday, 7 November, I’ll speak to the Sudbury Companies of Militia & Minute about the events that allowed the launch of Henry Knox’s second career, as an artillery officer in the Continental Army. How did Gen. George Washington come to view his artillery regiment as in dire need of a shakeup? That talk will take place at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury at 8:00 or so, and I’ll have copies of The Road to Concord for signing.

Scipio Moorhead’s “natural genius for painting”

Back in this post I mused on the mysteries of Scipio Moorhead, subject of Eric Slauter’s article “Looking for Scipio Moorhead” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World. I wrote:

Slauter also notes that the only evidence we have for Scipio Moorhead as an artist is Phillis Wheatley’s poem “To S.M., A Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works.” A note on an early copy gives that painter’s full name, and Wheatley addressed another poem to the Moorhead family. But no one else mentioned Scipio Moorhead’s art in surviving documents, and no known examples have survived.

I still haven’t come across any Scipio Moorhead artwork, but I did find another contemporaneous remark about his artistic talent and activity.

The Rev. John Moorhead died in December 1773. Boston’s Presbyterian meetinghouse invited the Rev. David McClure to preach in his place for a while. McClure’s diary entry for 4 May 1774 reads:

Put up at the Widow [Sarah] Moorhead’s. Found the place convenient for study. The family small. The Widow is unhappily deranged. The distraction is of the melancholy cast, silent & averse to company or society. She was once an accomplished wit & beauty, tenderly beloved by her husband. Her distraction was thought to be the effect of an uncommon flow of spirits, and lively imagination, too intensely applied to reading and study.

One son and two daughters survive. The son, (Alexander) is now a surgeon in the british navy in Boston harbour. Her daughter Mary takes care of her poor mother, a negro young man does the housework. Scipio is an ingenious and serious African. He possesses a natural genius for painting, and has taken several tolerable likenesses.

Slauter noted conflicting hints about Scipio’s age, starting with his baptism in 1760. McClure’s reference to him as a “young man” in spring 1774 now stands alongside a reference to him as a “Negro man” late that year and a “likely Negro Lad” in a 1775 advertisement.

Sarah Moorhead was indeed a woman of intellect and talents. Her name appears on a pen portrait of the Rev. Cotton Mather (reproduction from Justin Winsor’s magisterial history of Boston shown above). People have often therefore speculated that she tutored Scipio in art.

It’s a pity that McClure attributed Sarah Moorhead’s depression to too much “reading and study” rather than, say, the death of her husband less than six months before.

The Rev. David McClure’s 20th of April

Here’s another extract from the diary of the Rev. David McClure as the Revolutionary War began.

The last installment left the minister at the home of Joseph Mayo, a militia officer in Roxbury.

At the dawn of day, the Major & I mounted our horses, & rode to Roxbury street, anxious to know what had been done. The town was still as a grave yard, the people from the thick settled part, having moved out. A few militia men only, I saw there.

Determining to see what had been done on the rout of the enemy, I rode to Watertown, & from thence came on the road leading to Lexington. I went almost to the meeting house, where the first american blood was wantonly spilt, but the rain necessitated me to return. Dreadful were the vestages of war on the road.

I saw several dead bodies, principally british, on & near the road. They were all naked, having been stripped, principally, by their own soldiers. They lay on their faces. Several were killed who stopped to plunder, & were suddenly surprised by our people pressing upon their rear.

I went into a house in Menotomy, where was a stout farmer, walking the room, from whose side a surgeon had just cut out a musket ball, which had entered his breast, & glancing between the ribs, had lodged about half way to his back. He held the ball in his hand, & it was remarkable, that it was flattened on one side by the ribs, as if it had been beaten with a hammer. He was a plain honest man to appearence, who had voluntarily turned out with his musket, at the alarm of danger, as did also some thousands besides on that memorable day.

In the same room, lay mortally wounded, a british Officer, Lieut. [Edward] Hull, a youthful, fair & delicate countinance. He was of a respectable family of fortune, in Scotland. Sitting on one feather bed, he leaned on another, & was attempting to suck the juice of an Orange, which some neighbour had brought. The physician of the place had been to dress his wounds, & a woman was appointed to attend him. His breaches were bloody, lying on the bed.

I observed that he had no shirt on, & was wrapped in a coating great coat, with a fur cap on his head. I inquired of the woman, why he was thus destitute of cloathing? He answered, “when I fell, our people (the british) stripped off my coat, vest & shirt, & your people my shoes & buckles.” How inhuman his own men!

I asked him, if he was dangerously wounded? he replied, “yes, mortally.” That he had received three balls in his body. His countenance expressed great bodily anguish. I conversed with him a short time, on the prospect of death & a preperation for that solemn scene, to which he appeared to pay serious attention. He lived about a week, & the people conveyed his body in a Coffin to Charlestown ferry, where I happened to be present, & a barge from the Somerset, took it to Boston.

According to Abram English Brown’s Beneath Old Roof Trees, Lt. Hull of the 43rd Regiment was wounded at Concord’s North Bridge and then again during the British withdrawal. He was taken into the nearby house of young farmer Samuel Butterfield, and Butterfield’s wife Elizabeth cared for him and a less seriously wounded man from Framingham, Daniel Hemenway. Hull died on 2 May, and his body was sent in to Boston as McClure reported.

Hemenway survived to lobby the Massachusetts government to pay his medical bills and support. According to the petition that Ellen Chase transcribed in her Beginnings of the American Revolution, the ball that went through Hemenway’s chest also hit his thumb and “broak the bone to shivers.”

Not far from this house, lay 4 fine british horses. The people were taking off their shoes. One informed me, that a waggon loaded with provisions was sent from Boston, for the refreshment of the retreating army, under an escort of 6 Granidiers. They had got as far as this place, when a number of men, 10 or 12, collected, and ordered them to surrender. They marched on, & our men fired, killed the driver & the horses, when the rest fled a little way, & surrendered. Another waggon sent on the same business, was also taken that day. It was strange that General [Thomas] Gage should send them through a country, in which he had just kindled the flames of war, in so defenceless a condition.

Several sources describe the capture of those wagons, one usually credited to David Lamson and the “Old Men of Menotomy.” The fleeing soldiers reportedly surrendered to Ruth Batherick.

Saw 3 regulars, in beds in a house in Cambridge, one of them mortally wounded. Conversed with them on their melancholy situation. One of them refused to answer, and cast upon me a revengeful look. Perhaps he was a papist, & his priest had pardoned his sins. The houses on the road of the march of the british, were all perforated with balls, & the windows broken. Horses, cattle & swine lay dead around. Such were the dreadful trophies of war, for about 20 miles!

The Rev. David McClure Finds Refuge with Joseph Mayo

When we left the Rev. David McClure on the afternoon of 19 Apr 1775, he had just managed to get out of Boston to Roxbury by the neck. Here’s what he witnessed the rest of that day.

The sun was about half an hour above the western horizon. Saw several men on horseback, on a rising ground, looking over to Cambridge, I rode up to them & immediately heard the noise of battle from Cambridge across the bay. There was a constant firing of small arms. The sound was dreadful. It was the first time, I had ever heard a gun fired in anger.

I found it difficult to perswade myself that people who had lived so long peaceably together, were now killing each other. But such was the dreadful reality. O War, “thou shame to man!” O why will “men forget that they are brethren!” Were there no other proofs of the deep, and universal depravity of our moral nature, the existence of war, is a sufficiently dreadful proof.

I was informed by one of the gentlemen, Major [Joseph] Mayo, that I could not get to Cambridge, as was my intention, for the bridge was taken up, to prevent the british returning that way. He invited me to go to his house, about 3 miles. I willingly accompanied him.

Mayo (1721-1776) owned a large farm a little past the intersection of modern Washington Street and South Street in Roslindale. He served as foreman of the jury that acquitted most of the British soldiers tried after the Boston Massacre. “I am much inclined to make him a major,” wrote Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, and he indeed promoted Mayo within his Suffolk County militia regiment. Nevertheless, Mayo was a part of many Roxbury town committees protesting new Crown measures.

Since the summer of 1774, Francis S. Drake’s history of Roxbury says, Mayo had hosted Elizabeth Checkley, widow of a Boston minister and first mother-in-law of Samuel Adams; her daughter Nancy; and a cousin named Sally Hatch, among others. The merchant John Andrews (whose numbers often seem to be off by a factor of two) stated that they formed “an agreeable, social family of about twenty-five females, with the master of the house.”

The atmosphere was not so happy on 19 April, McClure reported:

The house was a place of anxiety & sorrow. It was evening. 7 or 8 Ladies from Boston were there, & their husbands & families were in town. The night was spent by them in wakefulness & weeping. About 10 O’Clock in the evening, the Major’s son returned from the battle, to the great joy of his parents, & gave us the first information of particulars. It was wonderful that a collection of militia men, should be inspired with such courage, & drive the disciplined troops of Britain before them.

Several circumstances in providence, appeared to be ordered in favor of our righteous cause. These circumstances, struck the minds of all; and men of no religious principle at other times, now seemed to be affected with them. Among other things, it is proper to mention, that the element of air helped our cause. He who caused the stars in their courses to fight against Sisera, who wared against Israel, caused on this day, the wind to rise, & follow the retreating enemy, covering them with such a cloud of dust, that blinded them, yet not so but that they were, in their crowded ranks in the road, a plain mark for the militia.

All night, the people were silently marching by the house, from neighbouring towns. I did not take off my clothes; but lay down a little while on the bed.

Some traditions among Mayo’s descendants say he was with Israel Putnam at the time of the Lexington Alarm, but McClure’s diary says otherwise. Those traditions also say Mayo became a major in the Continental Army, but it appears his rank came from the militia before the war; no source identifies Mayo’s Continental regiment.

(The picture above is John Ritto Penniman’s painting of Meetinghouse Hill in Roxbury from the 1790s. It is now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.)

The Rev. David McClure’s 19th of April

The Rev. David McClure (1748-1820) was a native of Newport who grew up in Boston, a childhood friend of Henry Knox.

McClure became a student and protégé of the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, received a degree from Yale in 1769, and as a missionary traveled as far west as Fort Pitt.

On 19 Apr 1775, McClure was back in Boston to preach in the Presbyterian meetinghouse as an interim minister. He wrote a detailed account of that day, evidently combining immediate impressions with later commentary. The entry begins:

While at breakfast, at my brother William’s at the South End, a neighbour came in, & said the Regulars had marched into the Country, & killed several men at Lexington. I went into the street & found the inhabitants in great perplexity and fear. They were unwilling to believe the report: but about 10 O’Clock, it was confirmed by a Mr. Pope, just returned from Lexington, who saw the men dead there, said to be 7 or 8.

About 11 O’Clock, Lord Peircy’s brigade marched out of town, with 2 field pieces, to reinforce Col. [Francis] Smith, who, it was said, was driven by the militia, & was hastily retreating. I stood in the street as they passed. They all appeared, except a few officers, to be young men, & had never been in action. Not a smiling face was among them. Some of them appeared to have been weeping. Their countenances were sad. Some of those poor fellows never returned.

Apprehensive that the town was soon to be shut, in the afternoon, with melancholy forbodings of the issue of this day’s awful tragedy, I got my horse & rode to Charlestown ferry, hoping to get out that way. There were some hundreds of the inhabitants there, and among them some of the ministers of Boston, wishfully looking over to the other side, & longing to get out of their once beloved town, where order, peace & righteousness once dwelt, but now murderers. A British Man of War [H.M.S. Somerset] lay in the river, & a barge from her met the ferry boat, crowded with passengers, & ordered it back. The fears of the people there waiting, were greatly excited by this unwelcome circumstance.

I turned about, with a resolution to try to get out at the neck leading to Roxbury, which the british had strongly fortified. Rode by several barracks; saw the soldiers paraded, under arms, and officers pale & running or riding from one barrack to another. It was thought, that they were under apprehension of the inhabitants rising on the remains of the troops now left in Boston; & no doubt, had the inhabitants been prepared, they could have made [Gen. Thomas] Gage & all his men in Boston, prisoners & shut up the town, and those who were without, with Peircy and Smith must have submitted to the militia, who were rapidly collecting from all the towns around; and thus, perhaps, an end would have been put to the war as soon as it was began. But providence was pleased to order it otherwise; & this small movement of the day, was necessary to begin that train of events, which extended through a long & distressing war, & which finally seperated the Colonies of America, from the Mother country. Thus, in his sovereign power & goodness, the Most High divides to the nations their inheritence, & seperates the sons of Adam.

I passed some tories in the street, who seemed to enjoy the confusion, & were calling to each other, “What think ye of the Congress now?”

At the neck, I passed the guards & centinels of the british, bowing to them, as I rode, although with no very pleasant feelings towards them, expecting every moment to be stopped, but they suffered me to pass, and I rejoiced to find myself in Roxbury, & beyond the reach of their arms.

I’ll return to McClure’s diary periodically.