Grandmothers’ Tales and Grenadier Gibson

The story from Sarah H. Swan that I shared yesterday, about a British grenadier killed in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, has all the hallmarks of what I call “grandmothers’ tales.”

It was literally a story Swan heard from her grandmother, who in 1775 was Mary Stedman, wife of a Boston doctor. The anecdote comes in a meaningful shape, with a little lesson in fate and family patriotism that a good republican woman might want to pass on to her grandchildren.

I don’t think anyone involved in the story was still around when Mary Stedman first told it to the children of her second marriage, who passed it down. Mary’s first husband, Dr. John Stedman, was dead of yellow fever. Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., to whom Stedman had reportedly passed intelligence, had been lost at sea. Dr. Joseph Warren, who dispatched the riders to Lexington, died at Bunker Hill. Of course the unfortunate Pvt. Gibson was dead, and his wife had probably left Boston in 1776. So no one could contradict this claim.

As I poked into the background of the tale, I was struck by how little information remains about Dr. John Stedman. He and his twin brother Ebenezer were the sons of a well established Cambridge farmer, tavern-keeper, militia officer, and town official. They both graduated from Harvard College in 1765, having lived at home instead of in the dorms. The college granted them the usual M.A. degree three years later.

Ebenezer became the Cambridge schoolmaster and his father’s heir while John went into Boston and trained to be a doctor. In 1769, according to a family historian, he wrote in an almanac: “I am a young man just entering into the world with nothing to recommend me but my education and a few friends whom I obtained while I was assistant to a noted Physician in Boston who has recommended me to the world.”

In 1773, Dr. Stedman married Mary Quincy, daughter of merchant Henry Quincy. They moved into a house on Marlborough Street. But I can’t find mentions of Dr. Stedman as prominent in either political or medical circles. He unfortunately died too early for Dr. Ephraim Eliot’s rundown of the town’s medical men, published in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Proceedings.

Was the “noted Physician in Boston” who served as John Stedman’s mentor Dr. Benjamin Church? In addition to this anecdote, I found another tenuous connection: In October 1776, when Dr. Church was locked up on suspicion of treason, Dr. Stedman bandaged Benjamin Church, Sr.’s head. (That bill was still unpaid after Stedman died in 1780 and the elder Church died a year later.)

If Dr. John Stedman was known to be a protégé of the duplicitous Dr. Church, then perhaps his widow and her descendants felt a need to burnish the family’s Patriot credentials. What better way than to say the Stedmans provided crucial intelligence that helped John Hancock and Samuel Adams evade capture in Lexington? (Even if it’s questionable whether Dr. Church would have passed on that information, and the redcoats weren’t searching for Hancock and Adams anyway.)

As for the unfortunate grenadier private, the name Gibson is common enough to seem plausible. Indeed, there’s a Gibson back in the Stedman family tree.

So Sarah H. Swan’s family lore might belong in the category of myth, a “grandmother’s tale” developed for entertainment or moral guidance that a later generation grew up believing whole-heartedly and inserted into the national history during the Colonial Revival. Some of those late-blooming tales flourished, like the story of Betsy Ross and the first flag. Others have long been dismissed.

But this tale comes with one more wrinkle. Don N. Hagist, author most recently of These Distinguished Corps: British Grenadier and Light Infantry Battalions in the American Revolution, amasses images from British army muster rolls in this period to track individual soldiers as much as possible. I asked him if those documents had information relevant to this story.

Don answered:

In the regiments for which we have complete muster rolls, there was no soldier named Gibson in the grenadier or light infantry companies. I haven’t looked at all at the regiments in Percy’s relief column, so there’s that possibility.

There are no known rolls for the Marines, and that battalion suffered the most casualties on April 19. And there are no rolls for the 5th Regiment for 1775, so we don’t know which men of that regiment died on or soon after April 19.

BUT: on the 5th’s rolls for the second half of 1774, prepared on 16 January 1775, there is a grenadier named John Gibson. And he’s not on the next set of rolls covering the first half of 1776. That’s true for a lot of men in the 5th, and I suspect most of the missing are Bunker Hill casualties, but it’s entirely possible that John Gibson was among the April 19 casualties.

“A grenadier in full regimentals knocked at the door”

Here’s another anecdote about how Bostonians learned about the British march to Concord, passed down in a family and first published in the 1880s.

The story is said to come from Mary Stedman (1752–1835), wife of Dr. John Stedman (1743–1780). In the 1770s they lived on the corner of Winter Street and Marlborough (now Washington) in Boston.

Three years after the doctor died, his widow married William Donnison (1757–1834). The Donnisons had four children, and Mary Donnison told them stories about the Revolutionary War. Their daughter Elizabeth Quincy Donnison (1794–1876) married the Rev. Richard Manning Hodges (1794–1878) of Bridgewater.

Richard and Elizabeth Hodges in turn had children, including Sarah (1825–1910, shown here). She grew up in Cambridge, married the minister John Augustus Swan (1823–1871), returned to Cambridge, joined clubs, and did charity work. As a widow, she wrote down the stories that her mother Elizabeth Hodges had passed on from her grandmother Mary Donnison.

Sarah H. Swan fed this particular anecdote to the creators of The Memorial History of Boston, a four-volume edifice published in the 1880s. The tale went into a footnote, credited to “a granddaughter of Dr. Stedman,” though in fact Swan was a step-granddaughter of the doctor. In 1897 she included a slightly different version of the family story in her New England Magazine article, “The Story of an Old House and the People Who Lived in It.”

Here’s the first telling of this story from 1775, in Elizabeth Hodges’s voice:

It was difficult at that time to obtain servants, and Mrs. Stedman had been glad to secure the services of a woman whose husband was a British soldier named Gibson.

On the evening of the eighteenth of April a grenadier in full regimentals knocked at the door and inquired for Gibson. On being told that he would soon be at the house, an order was left for him to report himself at eight o’clock at the bottom of the Common, equipped for an expedition.

Mrs. Stedman hastened to inform her husband of this alarming summons, and he at once carried the intelligence to Dr. Benjamin Church, who lived near by on Washington Street.

Gibson soon came in and took leave of his wife, pale with anxiety at the doubtful issue of this sudden and secret enterprise. “Oh, Gibson!” said my mother, “what are you going to do?”

“Ah, madam!” he replied. “I know as little as you do. I only know that I must go.”

He went, never to return. He fell on the retreat from Lexington. A few minutes before receiving the fatal shot he remarked to one of his comrades that he had never seen so hot a day, though he had served in many campaigns in Europe.

And the second:

In the early evening of April 18, 1775, the young wife [Mary Stedman] was somewhat startled by a peremptory knock at the outer door. She opened it herself, and saw a British grenadier, who inquired if Gibson were there. Gibson was a soldier, whose wife was Mrs. Stedman’s cook. She that he would probably be there soon. “Tell him to report at the foot of the common, equipped, at eight o’clock.”

Gibson soon came in to take Ieave of his wife and child. “Oh, Gibson, what does this mean?” exclaimed Mrs. Stedman.

“Ah, madam,” he said, “I know as little as you do.”

When Dr. Stedman returned home and heard of what had occurred he hastened to carry the intelligence to his neighbor, Dr. Benjamin Church, then a trusted member of the vigilance committee, and thus the warning of the approaching expedition was conveyed to [John] Hancock and [Samuel] Adams, who had taken refuge at Lexington.

Gibson never returned. He fell on the retreat from Lexington, just after remarking to a comrade that “altho’ he had served in many campaigns in Europe he had never known so hot a day.”

It’s a fine anecdote. It conveys two women’s perspectives on the outbreak of war, with most of the action taking place in the kitchen. It offered the pathos of the doomed soldier while appearing as upper echelons of U.S. society were feeling more sentimental ties to Britain than earlier. But it also gives the tellers’ grandmother a crucial role in the American response to the march.

TOMORROW: But is this story credible?