The Flight of the Cambridge Loyalists, part 1

The Cambridge neighborhood later dubbed “Tory Row” became a lot less populous after the “Powder Alarm” of 1774—which was only natural since all of those estates’ owners were either targets of the crowds or related to targets.

Attorney general Jonathan Sewall was the first to depart. He arrived in Boston “between 12 & one” on 1 September, having been “advised to leave his house,” according to a letter from his father-in-law, Edmund Quincy. (That letter is in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts collection.) 

William Brattle also left Cambridge on 1 September after learning that his letter to Gov. Thomas Gage, quoted here, had become public in Boston that afternoon. And that evening, a local crowd came looking for Brattle and Sewall.

Late the next afternoon, Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver faced off against what he counted as 4,000 men demanding his resignation from the Council. After signing their document under protest, he also hightailed it to Boston.

If Elizabeth Oliver and her children didn’t accompany Thomas to Boston then, they followed within days. So did Esther Sewall and her children.

William Brattle’s daughter, the widow Katherine Wendell, remained in the family’s Cambridge home—not only for the next several months but through the siege of Boston. She thus kept ownership of the house for the family while several nearby properties were confiscated by the state during the war.

Thomas Oliver’s wife Elizabeth was a Vassall by birth, and thus related to several other families in the area. One of her maternal uncles was David Phips, the royal sheriff of Middlesex County. Notes taken by the Loyalists Commission say:

He apprehended that his Life was in danger after he had removed the Gunpowder to Boston. . . . In Consequence of this treatment he removed himself to Boston & his family soon followed him.

Elizabeth Vassall’s paternal aunt Anna had married her stepbrother John Borland when she was thirteen and he twenty. In 1774 they lived in a Cambridge mansion originally commissioned by the Rev. East Apthorp, not counted as part of “Tory Row” since it wasn’t on the road to Watertown but near Harvard College. (In fact, today that house, shown above, is in the middle of the university’s Adams House.)

The Borlands also felt the “Powder Alarm” was too close for their comfort and moved into Boston. The 8 June 1775 New-England Chronicle reported:

DIED ] At Boston, on the 5th Instant [i.e., of this month], John Borland, Esq; aged 47 [actually 46]. His Death was occasioned by the sudden breaking of a Ladder, on which he stood, leading from the Garret Floor to the Top of his House.

According to none other than Jonathan Sewall, Borland “lost his life by a fall in attempting to get upon the top of his house to see an expedition to Hog Island.”

TOMORROW: More departures.

“You have heard of the taking ye. Windmill”

In The Road to Concord I quoted a lot from accounts of the “Powder Alarm” that Dr. Joseph Warren and Dr. Thomas Young sent to Samuel Adams on 4 Sept 1774. (Warren’s letter is undated, so that date is a guess based on context.)

Both those physicians had gone out to Cambridge common on 2 September along with other genteel Boston Whig leaders, hoping to calm the crowd and prevent violence. They could therefore share eyewitness details with Adams.

(In fact, the crowd was already calm, though determined. It didn’t verge on violence until later in the afternoon when Customs Commissioner Benjamin Hallowell, Jr., happened to roll by. And the inland farmers wouldn’t have recognized Hallowell if Bostonians like printer Isaiah Thomas hadn’t pointed him out, calling, “Dam you how doe you like us now, you Tory Son of a Bitch[?]” Needless to say, Thomas wasn’t part of the Boston committee.)

Adams also received a 5 September letter from the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper describing the “Powder Alarm.” That minister was not an eyewitness, so all his information was second-hand at best and inaccurate in some details. But that letter offers a look at what the Whigs were telling each other about the event.

You have heard of the taking ye. Windmill, at Cambridg [sic—Charlestown] with the Province Powder there by a Detachment.

The next Morning three thousand assembled at Cambridg. They conducted with Order & great Firmness. [Samuel] Danforth & [Joseph] Lee, expecting a Storm had resign’d the Day before. Sheriff [David] Phips has promis’d not to act upon ye. new Laws. Even the Lt. Governor [Thomas Oliver] resign’d his Seat at ye. Board [i.e., the Council].

The Assembly having done their Business, retir’d.

Hallowell pass’d on that Day thro Cambridg from Salem. When he had got a little Way fro the Assembly, one or two Horsemen follow’d him. He gallop’d with all the Speed he could make thro the blazing Heat to Boston.

When he got upon ye. Neck, as if all the Sons of Liberty in the Province had been at his Heels, He scream’d for the Guard: They ran from their Station to meet him. The Alarm was soon given to the Camp—and an apprehension instantly propagated of a Visit from Cambridg. The Soldiers lay on their arms thro the Night.

They have since doubled their Guard at the Fortification, and planted four Pieces of Cannon there.

Dr. Cooper had other things to say about the mandamus Councilors and what Gen. Thomas Gage was writing to his superiors in London. (How could the minister know?)

Cooper signed this letter “Amicus,” adding, “If you are at a Loss, Mr. [Thomas] Cushing will explain my Signature—conceal my name.”

How Andrew Pepperrell Became Heir to a Baronetcy

Andrew Pepperell was born on 4 Jan 1726 and grew up as the only son of the Maine-based merchant William Pepperrell (shown here) and his wife Mary.

When Andrew went to Harvard College in 1743, his parents moved to Boston to be closer to him. And also so William could participate in the Council.

Over in Cambridge, Andrew Pepperrell quickly got into trouble with David Phips, son of the lieutenant governor and later himself sheriff of Middlesex County. They were fined for “an extravagant drinking Frolick and afterward in making indecent Noises, in the College Yard and in Town, and that late at Night.”

Nevertheless, both Pepperrell and Phips ranked second in their respective classes, simply on the basis of their fathers’ social stature.

After graduating, Andrew Pepperrell became his father’s business partner while also working on his M.A. Meanwhile, as King George’s War began, William Pepperrell was among the gentlemen arguing for an expedition against the French fortress at Louisbourg.

That expedition set off in April 1745. Pepperrell was the commander-in-chief. Though some Royal Navy warships sailed in support, this was primarily a Massachusetts military enterprise. To many people’s surprise, it was a big success. After a six-week siege, Pepperrell and his men forced the French garrison to surrender.

In 1746, William Pepperrell received a singular honor from the Crown: he was made a baronet, or hereditary knight. Indeed, he was the only American ever made a baronet. That meant Andrew was the heir to a title, as well as a growing fortune.

Andrew Pepperrell was already investing his share of that fortune. Not always speculating wisely, his father thought, though he did make money in ship-building. One particular project was a large mansion house in Maine near his parents’ estate. The younger Pepperrell imported both labor and furnishings for this grand building.

As an impetus for that construction, it appears, in 1746 at the age of twenty Andrew Pepperrell engaged to marry a young woman named Hannah Waldo.

TOMORROW: The lucky lady.

Going through the Motions on Election Day

On 25 May 1768, 250 years ago today, Election Day finally arrived in Boston.

At 9:00 A.M. the towns’ representatives to the Massachusetts General Court gathered in the Town House and took their oaths of office. They unanimously reelected Thomas Cushing as the assembly’s speaker and Samuel Adams as the clerk.

At 11:00, Gov. Francis Bernard walked over from his official residence, the Province House, escorted by two upper-class militia units: the Horse Guards under Col. David Phips and the Cadets under Lt. Col. Joseph Scott. Bernard received Cushing and approved the assembly’s choice, and then everyone walked a block to the Old Brick Meeting-House to hear a sermon by the Rev. Daniel Shute (1722-1802) of Hingham.

Shute had chosen to speak on Ezra 10:4: “Arise: for this Matter belongeth unto thee; we also will be with thee: be of good Courage; and do it.” While hearing that exhortation to action, the gentlemen got to sit for a long time. According to merchant John Rowe, “This was a very long sermon, being one hour & forty minutes.”

Then came the midday dinner. Boston’s town meeting had barred the use of Faneuil Hall as long as the governor invited the Commissioners of Customs to dine. Many of the Cadets had said they wouldn’t participate in any such event, either. But Gov. Bernard was not about to back down on an issue of respecting the royal prerogative.

Therefore, there were two dinners on that Election Day. As the 26 May 1768 Boston News-Letter reported, Bernard and Cushing “together with the Council, and several other Gentlemen, went in Procession to the Province House, (preceded by the Militia Officers, and escorted by the Cadets,) where an elegant Dinner was provided by His Excellency…”

Meanwhile, “A public entertainment was provided at the British Coffee-House, where the militia Officers, Troop of Guards, and Company of Cadets dined, & where also many loyal Toasts were drank.” There were also traditional cannon salutes from the North and South Batteries and Castle William.

The week before, most of the Cadets were refusing to promise to participate in the Election Day pageantry. Maj. John Hancock had reportedly torn up his commission, and company members talked about replacing Lt. Col. Scott as their commander. But, most likely because of an after-hours meeting that Thomas Flucker facilitated between Hancock and Gov. Bernard, the Cadets did escort the governor after all. The separate dinners meant they didn’t have to sit down with the Customs Commissioners.

There may have been another part of the deal. On 2 June, the News-Letter reported:

His Excellency the GOVERNOR hath appointed JOHN HANCOCK, Esq; to be first Major of the Independant Company of Cadets, and WILLIAM COFFIN, jun. Esq; to be second Major of the said Company.

Hancock already held the rank of major; I don’t know if becoming “first Major” was a promotion. Nor can I tell if he participated in the Cadets’ procession on Election Day or sat that one out. But, even after his vocal protest, Bernard restored Hancock’s high rank.

Hancock may have come around to the position that the Cadets should respect the office of the governor even when they disagreed with his actions. In May 1773 there was another controversy over the presence of the Customs Commissioners at an Election Day gathering. Two Cadets, Moses Grant and James Foster Condy, clubbed their muskets and participated in the raucous protest outside. By then Hancock had become the colonel in charge of the company, and he booted Grant and Condy out.

In the end, the public dispute about the Customs Commissioners and the dinner was symbolic. But Election Day was also about allocating real political power.

TOMORROW: Electing the governor’s Council.

“Powder Alarm” Talk in Sudbury Tonight

On the morning of 1 Sept 1774, the Boston merchant John Andrews wrote this in a letter to a relative in Philadelphia:

Yesterday in the afternoon two hundred and eighty men were draughted from the severall regiments in the common, furnish’d with a day’s provision each, to be in readiness to march early in the morning.

Various were the conjectures respecting their destination, but this morning the mystery is unravell’d, for a sufficient number of boats from the Men of War and transports took ’em on board between 4 and 5 o’clock this morning, and proceeding up Mistick river landed them at the back of Bob Temple’s house, from whence they proceeded to the magazine (situated between that town [Charlestown] and Cambridge [now in Somerville and shown here]) conducted by judge Oliver, Sheriff Phips, and Joseph Goldthwait, and are now at this time (8 o’clock) taking away the powder from thence, being near three hundred barrells, belonging to the Province, which they are lodging in Temple’s barn, for conveniency to be transported to the Castle, I suppose.

Andrews was reporting what he’d heard inside Boston, which shows how quickly people were bringing in this news.

Which is not to say those reports were accurate. Andrews’s reference to “judge Oliver” probably meant Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, a Cambridge Loyalist, magistrate, and militia officer. But Oliver’s detailed accounts of what followed say nothing about helping the royal troops collected the gunpowder in that early morning. (The reference could also be to Chief Justice Peter Oliver, but he didn’t live nearby.)

In contrast, Sheriff David Phips (1724-1811) acknowledged helping those British soldiers on their mission, pointing out that he was following the governor’s orders. Joseph Goldthwait (1730-1779) was a former provincial officer appointed commissary to the royal troops in 1768 and barrack master during the siege.

Gen. Thomas Gage’s move to take control of the provincial gunpowder supply, along with two cannon assigned to the Middlesex County militia, set off the reaction known as the “Powder Alarm.” I’ll speak about that important event tonight at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury, at the invitation of the Sudbury Minutemen. I’ll light up my slides a little after 8:00 P.M.

I also wrote about the “Powder Alarm” and its newspaper coverage in Reporting the Revolutionary War, the new illustrated book assembled by Todd Andrlik of Rag Linen. Barnes & Noble is selling a special limited edition of that book that comes with reproductions of four front pages of American newspapers published during the war.

John Nutting: Loyalist Carpenter

This is the anniversary of the Powder Alarm, the brief uprising of New England militiamen in 1774 that presaged the Battle of Lexington and Concord the following April. One of the men caught up in that event was John Nutting (1740-1800), a Cambridge carpenter and militia officer. The local historian Samuel Francis Batchelder published an article about Nutting in 1912.

Nutting was born into a poor branch of an old New England family, and trained as a housewright. He married his master’s daughter Mary Walton and started having children with her in 1762, having bought land on the east side of what’s now Massachusetts Avenue opposite Waterhouse Street, very close to Cambridge Common. In the 1760s he did a substantial £140 worth of work on Elmwood, the mansion of future lieutenant governor Thomas Oliver (shown here).

Nutting also invested in land and houses up at Penobscot Bay in Maine, and got himself overextended financially about 1770. He mortgaged his Cambridge properties and stopped making payments for his pew in the Congregationalist meeting-house. Early in 1774, Nutting joined Christ Church—one of only a few Anglican churches in the province.

Because Nutting had served in the Massachusetts militia during the French & Indian War, first marching west at age seventeen, it was natural for his neighbors to choose him as a militia officer. His new religious affiliation might have made him seem reliable to Crown officials; the relatively few Anglicans in Middlesex County were clearly more supportive of the royal government than the Congregationalist majority. And that combination of circumstances put Nutting in a delicate position.

In the late summer of 1774, as large crowds closed western county court sessions and held meetings in defiance of the Massachusetts Government Act, Gov. Thomas Gage decided he had to take control of the province’s supply of gunpowder stored in a stone tower in what is now Somerville. This is Nutting’s account of what happened to him next.

He was quiet until August, 1774, when he was required by Colonel [David] Phipps [who was also Middlesex County sheriff] to assist him in removing the gun Powder from Cambridge to Boston [on 1 September], which he did, although the Mob, desired & insisted that as an officer of Militia he should prevent the ordnance stores from being moved.

This conduct made him very obnoxious to his Countrymen—he was obliged to fly to Boston

Nutting didn’t state exactly when he left Cambridge, at least not in this testimony to Commissioners who visited Canada in 1785 to interview Loyalists. But the Powder Alarm involved up to 4,000 men crowding into Cambridge on 2 Sept 1774 and demanding apologies from everyone who was assisting the royal governor. That event revealed that Gage no longer exercised any authority in Massachusetts beyond the gates of Boston. And unlike Phips, Oliver, and other high officials, Nutting wasn’t protected by the society’s traditional deference to gentlemen. It looked like a good time for a “precipitous Retreat.”

TOMORROW: John Nutting finds work in Boston.

Gen. Gage Secures the Provincial Powder

On 1 Sept 1774, I believe, the American Revolution became a military contest. There was no direct confrontation between military forces (that would not come until December), and there was no violence. But the events of that day and the next seem to have convinced the competing factions that they had to use military as well as political means to thwart the other side.

Before daybreak on that Thursday, 280 British soldiers under Lt.-Col. George Maddison landed from boats in the Mystic River and marched over the hills to the provincial gunpowder storehouse in what’s now called Somerville. That stone building is still standing. (Photograph from Flickr thanks to Bunkosquad. More details from The British Redcoat.)

Gen. Thomas Gage had sent those soldiers after receiving a letter from a general of the Middlesex County militia, William Brattle of Cambridge. It’s a curious missive, written in a courtly third person and never directly coming out and saying what Gage should do. As a member of the Massachusetts Council, Brattle had been a thorn in the side of Gov. Francis Bernard in the 1760s. However, in recent years he had come to side with the Crown authorities. On 27 August he wrote:

Mr. Brattle presents his duty to Governor Gage. He apprehends it his duty to acquaint his Excellency, from time to time, with every thing he hears and knows to be true, and is of importance in these troublesome times, which is the apology Mr. Brattle makes for troubling the General with this letter.

Capt. [Jonas] Minot of Concord, a very worthy man, this minute informed Mr. Brattle that there had been repeatedly made pressing applications to him, to warn his company to meet at one minute’s warning, equipt with arms and ammunition, according to law; he had constantly denied them, adding, if he did not gratify them, he should be constrained to quit his farms and town. Mr. Brattle told him he had better do that than lose his life and be hanged for a rebel: he observed that many captains had done it, though not in the Regiment to which he belonged, which was and is under Col. Elisha Jones, but in a neighboring Regiment. Mr. Brattle begs leave humbly to query whether it would not be best that there should not be one commission officer of the militia in the Province.

This morning the selectmen of Medford came and received their town stock of powder, which was in the arsenal on quarry-hill, so that there is now therein the King’s powder only, which shall remain there as a sacred depositum till ordered out by the Captain-General. To his Excellency General Gage, &c. &c. &c.

Gage didn’t take the drastic step of canceling all militia commissions, but he did send those soldiers to secure the “King’s powder” in the powderhouse before anyone in the countryside thought of removing it. He had legal authority to issue those orders: that powder belonged to the province of Massachusetts, and as governor he was the commander (“Captain-General”) of its militia.

Therefore, dawn on 1 September found Maddison and his soldiers waiting outside the powderhouse until the Sun rose—you don’t go into a gunpowder storeroom with a lit lantern. The men probably took off their boots as well so there was no chance the nails in their soles would set off sparks on the stone floor. As soon as the light was good, they started moving 250 half-barrels of gunpowder from that building onto waiting wagons. Meanwhile, about two dozen soldiers went to Cambridge common, met royal sheriff David Phips, and took possession of two small brass cannons used by the Middlesex County militia.

The wagons of gunpowder and the cannons were all wheeled through Cambridge, Roxbury, and Dorchester to Castle William, the fort in Boston harbor that the army had been using since 1770. The whole operation was over by noon. It had met no opposition. Gage felt secure enough to issue a call later that day for new legislative elections. But the reaction was just beginning.

TOMORROW: The militia rises.