“The Ghost of Major John Pitcairn,” 24 June

Sticking with the saga of Henry Howell Williams and his quest for (over?)compensation meant I mustered only a brief mention of the Battle of Bunker Hill on its Sestercentennial.

But today I’m watching the reenactment of that battle in Gloucester, and I’ll discuss some aspects of the event in the coming days, both on this site and live.

On Tuesday, 24 June, I’ll speak on “The Ghost of Major John Pitcairn” for Old North Illuminated’s digital speaker series.

Our event description:

After Major John Pitcairn was killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill, he was remembered in Britain as “a Gentleman of universal good character.” In Massachusetts, however, people still accused Pitcairn of having ordered redcoats to fire at the Lexington militia two months earlier. The major’s body was laid in the crypt of the Old North Church, but his memory haunted American history through stories, rumors, and artifacts linked to his name.

In this talk, J. L. Bell, proprietor of the history blog Boston 1775, sifts through the evidence behind those legends before digging into how a church warden with a shaky reputation sent Maj. Pitcairn’s body back to Britain—or did he?

I suppose I should make clear that I know of no stories about Pitcairn’s spirit haunting people or places. Rather, his memory and Americans’ hunger to make meaning of that memory have produced several oft-repeated narratives.

I’ll talk about several legends of Maj. Pitcairn: his pistols and horse, who shot him at Bunker Hill, how Bostonians remembered him, and what happened to his body in the decades after his death. Some of those stories might even be true.

Register to hear this talk online with a donation through this Eventbrite page. It’s scheduled to begin at 7:00 P.M., and there will be time for questions afterward. Assuming the recording goes well, a video will appear online afterward.

The Career of Dr. Bela Lincoln

When Bela Lincoln was growing up in Hingham in the 1740s, his father—a wealthy farmer, town official, and militia colonel—insisted on sending him to Harvard College.

Some people didn’t think Bela had the smarts for it. Others felt that his talent was merely hidden by "a natural bashfulness.”

Bela Lincoln did fine at Harvard. After graduating in 1754, he returned to Hingham to study medicine with Dr. Ezekiel Hersey. In 1756 he took a province job as doctor for the community of Acadian exiles (“French neutrals”) resettled in Sherborn.

Young Dr. Lincoln was building his practice during the time he became engaged to Hannah Quincy, from a similarly upper-class family in Braintree. Most of our information about their courtship comes from the diary of John Adams, who also entertained thoughts of proposing to Quincy and therefore wasn’t a neutral observer.

Bela Lincoln and Hannah Quincy married on 1 May 1760. Yesterday I shared Adams’s alarmed description from that December of how rudely the doctor behaved toward his wife, her parents, and the entire gathering. Whatever bashfulness Lincoln had shown as a child, he didn’t show it that night—though perhaps he was overcompensating.

I don’t know of other evidence of strains in the Lincolns’ marriage, though, unless their lack of children counts. I haven’t found anyone else writing of Bela Lincoln as such an obnoxious, overbearing man.

Dr. Lincoln’s career seemed to advance steadily. In 1761, Gov. Francis Bernard appointed him a justice of the peace for Middlesex County. The men of Sherborn elected him to the Massachusetts General Court.

In late 1764 Lincoln sailed to Britain for more medical training, also carrying messages from speaker of the house Thomas Cushing to the province’s agent. He came back the next year with an M.D. from King’s College in Aberdeen, which reflected some combination of study and payment.

Now looking even more prestigious, Dr. Lincoln returned to Hingham to resume his practice. The governor made him a justice in Suffolk County. He trained younger doctors, including the hapless schemer Amos Windship, whom he set up in practice in exchange for a mortgage on an inheritance.

Then Dr. Lincoln fell ill. In the summer of 1771 Edmund Quincy described him as “in a very dangerous State.” At the time he and Hannah were on Georges Island in Boston harbor, perhaps for his health. They had been married more than a decade.

Dr. Bela Lincoln finally died in Hingham on 16 July 1774, leaving his wife Hannah a widow at age thirty-five. (His older brother Benjamin went on to have a distinguished political and military career.)

TOMORROW: A better prospect?

“The wrong coffin was delivered”?

The quotations I shared yesterday show how in the first decade of the 1800s people on both sides of the Atlantic understood that Dr. Amos Windship had sent the body of Maj. John Pitcairn from the basement of Christ Church in Boston’s North End to his family in London.

However, some folks in Boston suspected otherwise. Sometime between 1816 and 1827, Dr. Ephraim Eliot wrote the gossipy profile of Windship that I’ve been quoting from, and in it he said:

But the probability was that the bones were those of a Lieutenant of the Major’s battalion, who was much like the Major in size & shape. He died of an inflammation of the brain, this is probable from the circumstance of a large Blister plaster upon the head which was in this coffin, & was removed by a friend of the writer. . . . .

Now, I really do not think that he [Windship] had any idea that the wrong coffin was delivered to him, but am fully of opinion that the sexton imposed upon him, as he was as great a villain as ever went unhung.

Eliot’s manuscript wasn’t published until 1924, when it appeared in volume 25 of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts’s Transactions/Publications series. I’ve picked out only about half of its stories about Dr. Windship, so folks interested in the man should definitely read the rest. (And there may be still more to find out; here’s an article on his years in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which I don’t think Eliot mentioned.)

Despite remaining unpublished, the stories Eliot told about Windship circulated in Boston in the early nineteenth century. In 1848 Nathanial Dearborn published a version of the tale in Boston Notions:

when the body was taken from the vault, there was a blistering plaster on the top of its head which indicated that it could not be the body of the Major, and a certain gentleman removed the plaster, and the box was delivered into the hands of the Pitcairn family in London: a Lieut. Shea, belonging to the Major’s Regiment was a large portly man, very much the size and shape of Major Pitcairn, and he died of an inflammation of the brain, for which the aforesaid plaster was applied; but the sexton had often showed these remains to gratify the curiosity of individual friendship, as those of the Major; for the sexton was an unprincipled, low fellow.

There was a Lt. Richard Shea in the Marines’ first company in 1775. But he is listed among the British officers killed at Bunker Hill, always as dead rather than wounded or “wounded, since dead.” Gen. William Howe’s orderly book says that his and another officer’s effects were sold on 14 July. Does that match the story of a brain inflammation?

Samuel A. Drake repeated Dearborn’s tale in Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston (1873), and Charles Hudson did the same in an 1880 paper on Pitcairn for the Massachusetts Historical Society. Hudson added the mistaken detail that the Pitcairn family had re-interred the corpse in Westminster Abbey, and that resurfaced in Edwin M. Bacon’s Historic Pilgrimages in New England (1898) and Rambles Around Old Boston (1914). All those accounts lay the blame on the sexton, though later authors characterized him as “perplexed” rather than duplicitous.

And then the Colonial Society published Eliot’s manuscript. It offers lots of other stories about Windship’s complete lack of reliability. Even when the doctor did his best, his plans had a tendency to collapse around him—and he didn’t always do his best.

So these days, writers suggest that Windship himself was primarily responsible for sending the wrong body to England, either by mistake or not caring if the corpse was actually Pitcairn’s. This Pitcairns website calls Windship “a notorious conman and crook,” and this one says he was a “thief, fraudster and attempted bigamist.” (I told you there was more gossip about him.)

I don’t think Dr. Windship deserves all the blame. There was a trail of lost information. The confusion started when a Christ Church sexton—probably Robert Newman—showed visitors the Marine officers’ corpses, not taking much trouble about who was who. Around 1789 Windship apparently fired Newman, so it’s possible that no one left at the church had direct knowledge of which bodies were laid where in 1775.

Then one of Eliot’s friends removed the only detail that distinguished the corpses of two big Marine officers: the “Blister plaster” that had come off one skull. Eliot didn’t specify when his friend took that bandage, or why. If the man did so before Windship and the new sexton went down to move the body, then they would have only a fifty-fifty chance of picking out Pitcairn.

Dearborn’s later account differs somewhat from Eliot’s. It says the “certain gentleman” took the plaster right off the skull, not from inside the coffin, and did so as the body was being packed to go to London. Those details would suggest that the men were definitely not moving Pitcairn’s corpse, and were hiding evidence of that fact. But the story might have improved by the time Dearborn recorded it.

In any event, Pitcairn’s widow, relations, and friends in London never heard anything about the whispers back in Boston. They could feel satisfied at having the remains of the man they loved back with his family. In gratitude, Mrs. Pitcairn gave Dr. Windship her late husband’s watch, and later a small seal engraved with the words “Je blesse en secret.” According to Eliot, Dr. Amos Windship “fancied it to be a motto taken from Virgil.”

(The photo above comes from Sara L. Brooks’s Flickr set under a Creative Commons license.)

“When the corpse arrived here”

Yesterday I described how Dr. Amos Windship of Boston was asked to ship the remains of Maj. John Pitcairn to his widow and relatives in London, to be reburied with his family.

This webpage on the Pitcairns expresses doubt that any body actually to be interred:

It has been alleged that in 1791 the family sent for John’s body to be reinterred in his brother Dr. William Pitcairn’s vault at St. Bartholomew the Less in London [shown here]. . . . .

However,...there is no entry in the burial register at Bart’s about the alleged re-interment. The only Pitcairns buried there are John’s brother Dr. William (d. 1791), son Dr. David (1749-1809), Betty Dalrymple, John’s widow, who outlived her son by only a month (1724-1809), and David’s widow, Elizabeth Almack (1759-1844). So this looks very much like an old wives’ tale.

The Pitcairns and their circle in the early 1800s would disagree. In the Gentlemen’s Magazine for 1809, Dr. John Coakley Lettsom published a long letter addressing the question:

In answer to your Correspondent’s query, in June, p. 548, respecting the place of interment of the late Major Pitcairn; I am induced to explain the apparent contradiction noticed there, as I believe no other person is enabled to do it. . . .

Dr. Winship of Boston visited London about 20 years ago; and his indisposition occasioned my being consulted, and thereby acquiring his acquaintance. Some time afterwards I was daily in consultation with Dr. David Pitcairn; a circumstance which was casually mentioned to Dr. Winship, who then informed me, that he had with him the key of the vault in which Major Pitcairn had been deposited; that he saw him a little before his departure from Boston, in the vault in which he was laid, in his regimentals, as has been observed; and that he counted at least 30 perforations from balls, which must have entered his body; and that the stone vault, in the cold climate of Boston, had so preserved the corpse as to enable him to recognize his features. At the same time, the Doctor very politely assured me of his services to send the Major to England, were it desirable to the Son.

All this time I was attending a person near London, who had been Churchwarden at Boston at the period that the Major was placed in the vault there, who corroborated Dr. Winship’s narrative.

I communicated these particulars to Dr. David Pitcairn; who informed me, on the subsequent day, that he had consulted his uncle, Dr. William Pitcairn; and that it was their joint wish, to have the Major conveyed to London. They had then an interview with Dr. Winship, who undertook this kind office; and when the corpse arrived here, it was interred in a new vault, built purposely by Dr. William Pitcairn, in the burying-grouud of St. Bartholomew, near the Hospital; since which have been deposited the remains of Dr. William himself, the brother, and Dr. David, the son of Major Pitcairn.

In addition, in The Stranger in America, an 1807 travel book, Charles William Janson described a visit to Christ Church in Boston this way:

The tomb in which were deposited the remains of the gallant Pitcairn, was empty. The sexton informed us, that his brother. Dr. Pitcairn, of London, had obtained permission to remove them; but we saw many skeletons, which, we were told, were the relics of some who held commands under the Major.

On one of them hung the remains of regimentals, and a pair of leather breeches, in high preservation. The pipe-clay, with which the latter had evidently been cleaned, probably for the fatal occasion, appeared fresh and white; but the flesh of the body was entirely decayed. Another presented a fractured bone; and the whole formed a painful picture of mortality.

The effect it produces on the spectator is so much the more powerful, as these bodies are not deposited in coffins, but lie exposed one upon another in the vault, without any farther covering.—Gallant, but unfortunate men!

So in that decade people on both sides of the Atlantic clearly believed that Maj. Pitcairn’s body had been returned to his family in London, and reburied there.

TOMORROW: But was that the right body?

“Requested my friend to send the Major to England”

In preparation for his second visit to London, Dr. Amos Windship convinced Harvard to give him degrees of Bachelor of Physic and Master of Arts in June 1790. He told the college that back in the 1760s he

being under the direction of his Guardian, was induced to dissolve his connexion therewith at the commencement of his Sophomore year.

In fact, he had entered Harvard at age twenty-two, past the age of majority, and left under a cloud before finishing a year. But Windship had practiced as a physician for over two decades, with service in the army and navy, so the college apparently granted him credit for life experience.

Dr. John Coakley Lettsom of London didn’t know about Windship’s tangled affairs. He introduced the eager American doctor to his colleagues, including Dr. William Pitcairn (1711-1791, shown here), president of the College of Physicians and brother of the late Maj. John Pitcairn of the Marines, and Dr. David Pitcairn (1749-1809), the major’s son and at some point “physician extraordinary to the Prince of Wales.”

The Pitcairns were no doubt interested to hear that Windship had shared a house with an officer of the Marines in the spring of 1775. And that he was a vestryman of the church where Maj. Pitcairn’s body lay. They introduced Windship to the major’s widow, and expressed a wish to have the major’s remains brought back to Britain.

Windship and the Pitcairn family made an arrangement which Dr. Lettsom described in a letter to a friend on 11 July 1791. (Lettsom, by the way, was a Quaker.)

Thou must remember the affair of Bunker’s Hill last war, when Major Pitcairn fell. A friend of mine, lately at my house on a visit from Boston, was a particular acquaintance of the Major’s, and this officer was beloved by all parties. My friend loved him as a father, although he is an American born and bred. The Major received 30 balls through his body.

He was brought into Boston, and buried in the King’s church, in a vault by himself in a close coffin, in his regimentals, and is at this moment in a perfect state. I informed Drs. Pitcairn, the brother and the son, of the circumstance, who requested my friend to send the Major to England, and I hope and believe he accompanies my bust of Washington.

According to Dr. Ephraim Eliot, Windship returned to Boston with another supply of medications bought on credit. Back in the North End, he ordered the Christ Church sexton to take Maj. Pitcairn’s coffin out from under the church, pack it in a box marked “Organ,” and ship it to London. Perhaps alongside a bust of Washington.

TOMORROW: And did it get there?

Dr. Amos Windship and the Christ Church Pew

Boston’s Anglican churches were rebuilding themselves in the 1780s. Not physically—they weren’t dismantled in whole or in part like some of the Congregationalist meeting-houses. But the war had made some of their richest members leave town, and they had to redefine their relationship with the king and Church of England.

That created openings for men like Dr. Amos Windship, who joined the congregation of Christ Church (now called Old North) in Boston’s North End. He was a warden starting on 28 May 1787, and a vestryman from 21 Dec 1789, deeply involved in church business.

Since 1777, William Montague had read in the Christ Church pulpit. Dr. Ephraim Eliot called him “a low bred man, of much cunning but mean literary abilities. He was a favorite among the lower class of the people.” Montague visited England in 1789, returning in August 1790 with the musket ball that supposedly killed Dr. Joseph Warren.

Some of the wealthier congregants took advantage of Montague’s absence to go to Halifax in 1790 and invite the Rev. Dr. William Walter (1737-1800) to become their minister. He had been rector at Trinity Church before the war, leaving Boston with the British military in 1776.

When Montague returned, he found himself in the position of assistant. He still preached a lot since Walter had also agreed to be minister at the Episcopal church in Cambridge. But there was soon conflict between the two men and their followers.

In March 1792 Montague asked to resign, citing “those who call themselves the Doctor’s [i.e., Walter’s] friends” and “the unchristian and abusive conduct of some towards me,—their constant endeavor to injure my Character and good name.” He went out to the Episcopal church in Dedham, where he spent a lot of his ministerial time on real-estate deals. Decades later, the congregation there asked him to step down.

During his trip to England, Montague had gotten into some sort of embarrassment. Eliot wrote that the man became

acquainted with some buckish English clergymen, who wishing to put a trick upon their raw Yankee brother, had introduced him into bad company.

And then the editor of Eliot’s manuscript for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts chose to omit a few lines. Just when it was getting good! Whatever happened, Dr. Windship had heard about it, and told other people in Boston.

By that time, Dr. Windship himself had been gotten in trouble with Christ Church. In 1791 he borrowed the Treasurer’s Ledger, and when he gave it back it now assigned pew number 30, in the back of the church, to him. Senior warden James Sherman wrote an angry note in the book:

this May Certifie all Whom it may Concern That the above Pew No. 30 was from the first settlement of Christ Church in Boston devoted wholy to the use of His Excelence the Governor and other Gentlemen and so continued untill August 1791 at which time this Ledger was in the Possession of Doctor Amos Windship who had borrowed it of James Sherman Senr Warden of said Church in order to settle his account with the Revd. Mr. Montague

he the sd. Windship kept it near a month and when returned “Governors Seat” as it stood above and as it was before was erased and “Dr. Amos Windship” as it now stands was wrote in its Stead with the account under it which account was brought from folio 91 which was erased about the middle of the lead, for which I the Subscriber as Warden and for the Honor of said Said was obliged to Lay the Same before the Attny. General and what followed may be seen by turning to a Meeting of the Proprietors of said Church Monday September 26th. 1791.

The two pages in question had apparently been treated with “some form of acid.” Attorney General James Sullivan advised the church to bring Windship to court, but in October the doctor admitted he had altered the ledger, saying it “was an error in judgement (and for which, I am very sorry).”

Dr. Windship started attending the Rev. Dr. John Lathrop’s New Brick Meeting. But he’d been involved with Christ Church long enough to move Maj. John Pitcairn’s body.

TOMORROW: At last! Mucking about with Maj. Pitcairn’s body!

Dr. Amos Windship’s “Description of a Dissection”

What did Dr. Amos Windship do after leaving the Continental Navy? I actually told the next chapter of his saga back here.

That trading voyage to London wasn’t a total loss for the doctor. While he was in London, he made the acquaintance of a leading British physician, Dr. John Coakley Lettsom (1744-1815, shown here courtesy of the Medical Society of London).

Windship returned to America with some medications, which he ended up never paying for (apparently because Bell’s creditors were seizing any money they could). The doctor kept up a correspondence with Lettsom, who offered to make him a corresponding member of the London Medical Society.

Of course that too led to trouble. Dr. Ephraim Eliot later explained:

Doctor Letsom now found that he had gone too fast in regard to our Doctors election, as the requisite qualification was, that the candidate must be a Batchelor or Doctor of Physic, to neither of wch. had he been admitted.

To save himself his friend Letsom advised that he should immediately go thro’ the courses of Lectures, requisite to obtain one of them, & if the expence should be more than he could spare, he gave him authority to draw upon him for it thro’ Mr. Crawley of London to the amount of fifty pounds sterling, after the object should be obtained.

He [Windship] complied. & when a diploma was taken out, he forwarded it to Letsom, together with the description of a dissection which he pretended he had made of a subject in which there were some uncommon appearances & some facts discovered which were not usual.

Doct Letsom supposing the communication to be designed for the society, presented it, & it was printed in their transactions.

Lettsom read the report from Windship at a meeting on 31 Mar 1788. The volume recording that event made its way to America, and Dr. Abijah Cheever (1760-1843) recognized the patient as one he had treated in 1786, and described in a paper for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on 31 Jan 1787. Eliot said of Windship, “probably he had no idea of its being published” in London.

Dr. Windship nevertheless made another voyage to London about 1790, and renewed his acquaintance with Dr. Lettsom. And on that trip Lettsom introduced the American doctor to the family of the late Maj. John Pitcairn.

TOMORROW: Meanwhile, back at Christ Church…

“Not without fears that they will be embezzled”

Abigail Adams didn’t like her husband John being away in Europe for years at a time, but as long as he was there, she asked him to send her fabrics and other goods that were scarce in wartime Massachusetts. Some of those things she used and most she resold at a profit. Woody Holton’s new biography of Abigail examines her investment activity in detail.

In a letter dated 12 May 1780, John wrote to Abigail that he had sent a chest of goods her way:

I have this day a Letter from Mr. Moylan, that he has delivered to Dr. [Amos] Winship in the Alliance a Chest with the Things you desired and others.

As Dr. Ephraim Eliot wrote in his posthumous profile of Windship, “For years he was employed in the Navy of the United States, was first Surgeon of the Alliance.” As a naval surgeon, Windship traveled somewhat regularly between the U.S. of A. and France, and he was of the genteel class, worthy of trusting with valuable items.

Abigail’s feelings about Dr. Windship were more mixed. She knew him as a squatter in her house in Boston in 1777. But in June 1779, after John had sailed to Europe, the doctor’s wife Desire shared a letter from him, so the Windships also represented a lifeline to her husband.

Then in the fall of 1780 the Alliance arrived in Massachusetts without the goods for Abigail, and without Dr. Windship. On 24 November Abigail wrote to John:

Dr. Winship...neither came in the vessel or sent the things. I am not without fears that they will be embezzled. I have taken every opportunity to let you know of it, but whether you have got my Letters is uncertain.

The cabals on Board the Ship threw the officers into parties, and Winship chose to involve my trunk in them. He certainly sent goods by the same vessel to other persons. General [James] W[arre]n, my unkle and others examined and went on Board, but could find no Trunk for me.

The “cabals” Abigail referred to started with Capt. Pierre Landais of the Alliance becoming irrational and paranoid, as related in this American Heritage article from 1960. During the battle between John Paul Jones’s Bonhomme Richard and H.M.S. Serapis on 23 Sept 1779, Landais kept the Alliance out of the fighting for a long time, and then attacked Jones’s ship.

In the following year, Jones had taken over the Alliance, and Dr. Windship served under him. Then in July 1780 Landais had grabbed the ship back and sailed it to Boston. On the way, his officers and crew had turned against him. In all the tussles over who was in charge of what, and who was loyal to whom, the Adamses’ goods were moved and mislaid.

They ended up reaching Philadelphia early the next year, where Continental Congress delegate James Lovell unpacked the boxes and then sent the goods north in batches, including “two small Packages” entrusted to…Dr. Windship! He visited Abigail in Braintree in the spring of 1781, and she described his explanations this way:

Dr. Winship whom I have seen, says that when Mr. Moylan requested him to take them; he refused them, unless he would repack them, and purchase a hair Trunk for them; he replied that he had no money in his hands, that he had sent the account to you, and you had paid it, and that if he would not take it, he would deliver it to Capt. Jones, which he accordingly did; when Mr. L[ovel]l received them together with a Box for Mr. [Elbridge] Gerry, they were in a smoaking state.

He examined his [goods], found them rotton upon which Mr. L[ovel]l unpacked mine and found them so wet as to oblige him to dry every thing by the fire. The linnings, the diaper all damaged, Mrs. [Mary] Cranchs cambrick mildewed, happily the wollen cloths were only wet, the leather Gloves quite rotton. I could wish you to repeat that article by the first opportunity and order a peice of wollen between every pair as they are the most liable to damage by wet.

This enterprise fits a pattern in Dr. Windship’s affairs: he would build a connection to someone influential, promise to do that person an impressive favor, and then, through some combination of chicanery, overreaching, and bad luck, screw it up entirely.

TOMORROW: Which brings us back to Maj. Pitcairn’s body.

Dr. Amos Windship and the House on Queen Street

When John Adams was in Philadelphia at the Continental Congress, Abigail Adams had to handle the family finances. Among her responsibilities was a house that John had bought on Queen Street in Boston in 1772. Since Abigail and the children were living at the farm in Braintree, that house was sitting empty.

On 6 and 13 Feb 1777, the Continental Journal ran this advertisement:

To be Let, a House in Queen-Street, Boston, next Door to Powers and Willis’s printing-office.—For further Particulars enquire of the printer.

“The printer” was John Gill, formerly partner of Benjamin Edes. Abigail told John that when she placed the ad for the house, she, “supposing any person would chuse to see it, before they engaged it, desired him [Gill] to Let them know where the key was to be found.” (That means the house was locked but the key hidden somewhere convenient—a detail of everyday life.)

Nathaniel Willis, one of the two men printing the Independent Chronicle next door to the Adams house, went to Abigail in Braintree to discuss it. They reached a deal for a rent of “22 per annum.” But Willis had trouble moving in, as Adams described:

Upon his return to Boston and applying to Mr. G–ll for the key he found the famous Dr. [Amos] W[ind]ship had taken it and would not deliver it to him, tho He let him know that he had hired the House of me, and this same Genious had the Confidence to remove his family into the House without either writing to me or applying to me in any shape whatever, and then upon the other insisting upon having the House, he wrote to Let me know that he had moved in and would pay his Rent Quarterly, and that he supposed Mr. G–ll had the Letting of the House, which was absolutely falce for Mr. G–ll never gave him any leave, and had no right to.

In Reply to him I let him know that I had Let the House to Mr. W——s, that I could do nothing about it, that I had nothing more to do with it than with any other House in Town. He and Mr. W——s must settle the matter between themselves.

In this Time Mr. W——s had taken advice upon it and was determind to prosecute him; tis near a Month since they have been disputing the Matter, and the Dr. finding Mr. W——s determind has promised if he will not put him to farther Trouble to remove in about a week.

Given that history, one might think that John Adams would have been upset to find Dr. Amos Windship as the surgeon on the ship taking him to Europe in 1779. But Windship, with his knack for social climbing, found the way to win over the most important man aboard: he told Adams that other people were secretly badmouthing him.

On 11 May, Adams wrote in his diary:

Dr. W. told me of [navy captain Samuel] Tuckers rough tarry Speech, about me at the Navy Board.—I did not say much to him at first, but damn and buger my Eyes, I found him after a while as sociable as any Marblehead man.—Another [anecdote] of [captain Elisha] Hinman, that he had been treated with great Politeness by me, and his first Attention must be to see Mrs. Adams, and deliver her Letters.

Yes, Abigail Adams would be so happy to encounter Dr. Windship again.

TOMORROW: Dr. Windship and Abigail Adams’s trunk.

Dr. Windship Assures Gen. Washington

Yesterday we left Dr. Amos Windship stuck in Boston at the start of the Revolutionary War. According to Dr. Ephraim Eliot, recording stories he’d heard from and about the man:

In the disguise of a sailor, with his head shaved & covered with a milled cap, he escaped from the town

That was in July 1775, and Windship, with a drive for social climbing, appears to have gone right to the top. On 21 July, Gen. George Washington reported to John Hancock, chairman of the Continental Congress:

I have also received a more authentick account of the loss of the enemy in the late battle [Bunker Hill], than any yet received. Doctor Winship, who lodged in the same house with an Officer of the Marines, assures me they had exactly one thousand and forty-three killed and wounded, of whom three hundred fell on the field, or died within a few hours; many of the wounded are since dead.

That was a fairly accurate count; Windship might even have helped in treating the British wounded, as some Whiggish physicians did from a sense of professional responsibility.

Washington’s report is interesting in a couple of other ways. It suggests that Windship had heard the memorable stories of Maj. John Pitcairn’s death from the Marine officer. And in an ironic twist nobody could have foreseen, Washington’s headquarters, where the doctor probably went to make his report (shown above, courtesy of the National Park Service), would after the war become the home of Nathaniel Tracy, who had gotten Windship booted out of Harvard.

During the siege, according to Eliot, Windship

got employment as a surgeon in the military hospital at Cambridge, where he continued several months, was every intimate with the Director general Doctor [Benjamin] Church, who being charged with holding a treasonable correspondence with the Enemy, our Doctor was suspected of having concern with him, but the suspicion soon died away, and he was never called to an account.

No evidence has ever surfaced that Windship was involved in Dr. Church’s espionage. This was probably just an example of his knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time just when he thought he was doing well.

TOMORROW: I know this series is supposed to be about Maj. Pitcairn’s body, but I have to share an anecdote about Dr. Windship and Abigail Adams.

Dr. Amos Windship and Nathaniel Tracy’s Four Guineas

Tracking Maj. John Pitcairn’s body means getting a handle on that Christ Church warden who reprimanded sexton Robert Newman in 1788, as I mentioned yesterday.

Dr. Amos Windship (1745-1813) was a man of energy and ambition who repeatedly plunged himself into awkward situations, but never stopped striving. He seems to have been both pushy and pathetic, and after his death Dr. Ephraim Eliot wrote down a lot of juicy stories about him; I’m going to get to only a fraction of those.

Windship was born in Holliston to a middling farm family, and his father died when he was eight. He was raised by relatives and guardians as a farm boy. In 1767, he got into Harvard. At twenty-two he was older than almost all the other undergraduates, and almost certainly poorer, but he’d managed to educate himself enough to qualify.

Alas, Windship left after eight months under shadowy circumstances. According to Eliot, the young man:

was freshman [i.e., designated gofer] to N[athaniel]. T[racy]. of Newburyport who was a monied Lad. Frequently missing money from his desk, suspicions were excited against our friend.

One day in order to ascertain who was the pilferer if possible, he [Tracy] pretended to be obliged to leave Cambridge a few days, his chambermate being also absent. It was customary for freshmen to study in their senior’s rooms, and he left the care of his room to Windship.

Returning after a few hours, he enquired if any one had been there? was assured that no one had, & that he himself had not been out of the room, not even to prayers. On examining his desk, he missed four guineas, and directly charged his freshman with the theft.

It was strenuously denied, but symptoms of guilt appearing in his countenance, he was searched and no money found. But T[racy]. insisted upon his leaving College at once or he would prosecute him, he wisely followed his directions, and ran away without taking up his bond, & did not finish his education there, or at any other seminary.

After a few days the sweeper on removing the bedstead in T[racy]’s room, found a guinea under each Bed post.

Eliot seems to imply that Windship hoped to return to Tracy’s room to retrieve those hidden coins. But if he didn’t expect Tracy back that afternoon, why didn’t he just take the money? Are there circumstances Eliot didn’t record? Was it all a set-up? In any event, Windship was gone from Harvard after July 1768.

He then studied medicine with Dr. Bela Lincoln of Hingham, brother of the later general Benjamin Lincoln, and possibly with other rural physicians. Windship set up a practice at Wellfleet for a few years. He moved to Boston in 1774, when other men were moving out because of the Port Bill, and was stuck there when the war began.

TOMORROW: Dr. Windship’s intelligence for Gen. Washington.

“The Happy Peace Taking Place So Suddenly”

According to an reminiscence by Dr. Ephraim Eliot, the Boston merchant Daniel Bell (1752-1791) and his brother-in-law, Dr. Amos Windship (1745-1813), conceived of a novel business venture early in 1783. Nantucket had oil from whaling. Britain had a good market for that oil. So why not send a shipload to England?

Because, technically, Britain and America were still at war. Windship had even served in the medical departments of both the Continental Army and the Continental Navy, so he was well aware of that situation. But that didn’t deter him from signing onto this voyage as supercargo (a job that sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is).

Windship first went to New York, still held tight by the British military, and “obtained a private licence” for the trip. Somehow the partners arranged a deal with an American merchant in Amsterdam to extend credit for the venture, and with merchants in London to buy the oil.

But not “buy” in the usual way. According to Eliot’s account:

The ship with the Doctor on board, was to hover on the coast of England; to be taken by a british privateer & then claimed by the London partners. The Admirals protection [obtained in New York] was to screen him from all other captures.

Unfortunately for the adventurers peace took place while he was on the ocean.

The Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War in September 1783. British privateers returned to port, their licenses to take enemy shipping no longer valid. Which left Dr. Windship on his ship off the English coast, waiting for a capture that never came.

Windship decided that the best way to make a profit was “going immediately into the Thames & selling the oil,” perhaps for even more than originally planned. He didn’t consider that once Great Britain recognized the U.S. of A. as an independent country, American goods were subject to the same stiff Customs duties as other cargoes arriving in London from elsewhere outside the British Empire. And of course the local merchants who had made the previous, surreptitious deal weren’t going to expose that to the authorities.

The tariffs on the Nantucket oil “amounted to more than it was worth,” so the cargo and ship were seized and sold. But Bell still had to pay off that Dutch loan. He eventually applied for legal protection from creditors, pleading the unfortunate fact of “the happy Peace taking place so suddenly and unexpectedly.”

And this brings to an end “No Relation” Week at Boston 1775. So far I know, I’m not related to printer Robert Bell, deputy sheriff John Shubael Bell, any Sgt. Maj. Bell, bricklayer William Bell, or merchant Daniel Bell. And in some cases, that might be a very good thing.