“Two rough stones mark the spot”

Back in 2013, Boston 1775 published a series of postings about the British soldiers killed at the North Bridge in Concord, and what happened to their bodies.

Based on reports from army officers, the royal authorities complained in print that a soldier left wounded at the bridge had been “scalped” and otherwise mutilated.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress vigorously denied that charge. It published this deposition, taken down by justice of the peace Duncan Ingraham:

We, the subscribers, of lawful age, testify and say, that we buried the dead bodies of the King’s troops that were killed at the North-Bridge in Concord, on the nineteenth day of April, 1775, where the action first began, and that neither of those persons were scalped, nor their ears cut off, as has been represented.

Zechariah Brown,
Thomas Davis, jun.

Concord, May 11th, 1775.

Privately, however, militiamen who had been at the bridge deplored what they had seen. To begin with, that soldier had still been alive. Thomas Thorp of Acton recalled in 1835: “I saw him sitting up and wounded, as we had passed the bridge.” His killing “was a matter of horror to us all.”

In June 1775 the Rev. William Gordon acknowledged in print that “A young fellow…very barbarously broke his scull and let out his brains, with a small axe.” Gordon did not excuse that act, but he did insist it wasn’t scalping.

Still, Gordon’s source, the Rev. William Emerson of Concord, and other locals kept the young killer’s name secret. Charles Handley of Acton recalled: “The young man man who killed him told me, in 1807, that it had worried him very much; but that he thought he was doing right at the time.” It took more than a century before his name came out: Ammi White.

As for the dead soldiers, in 1827 the Concord minister Ezra Ripley wrote: “The two British soldiers killed at the bridge were buried near the spot where they fell, both in one grave. Two rough stones mark the spot where they were laid.”

In 1793 the town of Concord built a new bridge downstream. The span of the old bridge was dismantled, but some end portions remained. The pieces on the south side served as another landmark reminding locals where the two British men were buried.

TOMORROW: Erecting a monument.

Tilly Merrick, at Home and Abroad

Yesterday’s posting introduced Tilly Merrick (1755-1836), who grew up in Concord before the Revolutionary War and died in that town decades later, telling stories about the Revolution.

In between those periods, however, Merrick had a farflung business career.

When the war began, Merrick was home, working as a schoolteacher, drilling with the militia, and earning his master’s degree from Harvard.

His widowed mother Mary’s second husband, Duncan Ingraham, was considered a Tory, but he grudgingly cooperated with the rebel government after the war began.

Merrick went to work for a mercantile firm whose partners included his stepbrother Duncan Ingraham, Jr. (1752-1802). That meant traveling to Europe. The first sign of this appears to be an entry in Benjamin Franklin’s diary for 17 Feb 1779: “Gave a Pass to Mr Tilly Merrick, going to Nantes.”

He next pops up in the diary of John Adams for 21 May, during a long voyage home to Boston after his first, truncated diplomatic mission: “Mr. Ingraham and Mr. Merrick dined with me, in the Cabbin.”

In his later years, Merrick left his Concord neighbors with the impression that he was actually part of Adams’s staff: “During the Revolutionary War, Mr Merrick was connected with the embassy of John Adams to France and Holland, as an attaché, and was secretary while abroad…,” wrote a town chronicler.

In fact, that one dinner was the only time Adams mentioned him. As the author of Merrick’s entry in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates wrote in a footnote: “It is troubling that his name does not appear in the published correspondence of any of the era’s principal diplomats.”

On 18 Jan 1781 Adams was in Amsterdam on his longer and more successful mission. He wrote to the Massachusetts Board of War:

There are three Gentlemen, in the Mercantile Way, Mr. [Charles] Sigourney, Mr. Ingraham and Mr. [Henry] Bromfield, who are now in this City, and propose to reside here and establish a mercantile House. These Gentlemen are very well known in the Massachusetts, and therefore it is unnecessary for me to Say any Thing concerning their Characters.

These partners helped Adams find quarters, shipped supplies to his wife, and showed up often on social occasions in his diary.

In May 1781 Tilly Merrick arrived in Amsterdam as well to continue working for his stepbrother. He wrote back to a friend, Nathan Bond:

It was your opinion & that of many others in Boston, that it was impracticable for any stranger to do business here, & that it was confined to those who were brought up & fix’d in the business of the Country, & that an effort of settling here would be fruitless on act. of the Combination of the Merchants. . . . I would say that a person who can do business any where & understand the principles of Trade, can do business here. . . . The difficulties, common to a stranger in a place, have been combatted, & are removed.

From that period on, Merrick’s work is well documented in his own papers, now at the Concord library. Richard Lowitt studied them for an Atlantic Studies article titled “Tilly Merrick, Merchant in a Turbulent Atlantic World.”

Soon Merrick was trading on his own account, investing in any number of goods: cloth, Bibles, beaver hats, pen knives, tableware, hinges… Bond wrote back: “You will please in Future to examine more perfectly the goods you put up. I think that every Invoice as yet has had its errors.”

Throughout 1782 Merrick followed the peace negotiations between Britain, France, and the U.S. of A. closely, looking for business advantages. When the war finally did come to a close, he sailed for America—but not for Boston. Instead, Merrick decided to set himself up at some port in the south in partnership with another American named Isaac Course and use the commercial contacts he’d built up.

By summer 1783 Merrick was in Charleston, South Carolina (map shown above). Massachusetts governor John Hancock sent a certificate of his good standing. Soon the partnership was trading with Bond in Boston; Ingraham in Amsterdam and then Hudson, New York; Sigourney in Hartford, Connecticut; Bromfield in Bordeaux; his brother Augustus in North Carolina; and so on. In 1787 Mary Ingraham wrote from Concord, “Dear Child, I think you have for Got you have a Mother.”

Over the next decade Merrick did business in lots of goods, including enslaved Africans. He was successful enough to buy his own slave-labor plantation outside of Charleston. In lean times, however, he considered moving to another port, and even tried out Philadelphia in 1792. Since Pennsylvania had laws limiting slavery, that would have meant quite a change.

Back in Charlestown by 1795, Merrick co-signed $40,000 worth of notes for another merchant. That man went bankrupt in 1797, and Merrick had to liquidate his property. Around the same time, his younger brother John died, leaving him land in Concord. After nearly twenty years away, Tilly Merrick chose to return to his home town.

In midlife, Merrick shifted to a different lifestyle. No longer interested in global trade, he opened a country store and then paid little attention to profiting. Having been a bachelor into his forties, he married his cousin Sarah Minot on Christmas Day in 1798 and started a family. He became active in local civic organizations and represented Concord in the Massachusetts General Court four times between 1809 and 1816, siding with the Federalists.

And, of course, Tilly Merrick told stories about the first day of the Revolutionary War.

“Many were the disputes” with Duncan Ingraham

As part of my ongoing investigation of the cannon in Concord in April 1775, I’ve been gathering information about the merchant Duncan Ingraham, a recent arrival in the town.

Ingraham had made his fortune in business in Boston, then married the widow Mary Merrick and moved into her house in Concord. (A detail of her gravestone appears here.)

Back in Boston, Ingraham had left four iron cannon in his stable. His son sold them to the aggressive Patriot William Molineux in early October 1774 without Ingraham’s approval. A few months later, two of those guns were brought out to Concord to be mounted on carriages.

By that time, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson had made Ingraham a justice of the peace for Middlesex County. His neighbors suspected him of supporting the Crown. Indeed, as related by George M. Brooks in Memoirs of Members of the Social Circle in Concord (1888), Ingraham’s stepson Tilly Merrick (1755-1836) recalled arguing over politics: “many were the disputes on the issues of the day with his Tory father-in-law [i.e., stepfather].”

Merrick even described Ingraham welcoming British army officers into his wife’s home on the fateful 19th of April in 1775. The Ingraham/Merrick family lived at the corner of what became Main and Sudbury Streets, with a house, store, warehouse, and other outbuildings.

According to Merrick, when the British column arrived in Concord on 19 April, Maj. John Pitcairn called on Ingraham, leading to this anecdote:

During his call, the major went out of the back door of the house, and seeing one of Mr. Ingraham’s negroes standing by the large pear-tree in the rear of the house, with his hands behind him, commenced on him, as he did on the rebels at Lexington Common a few hours previously, by pointing a pistol at his head, and, in a loud tone of voice, ordering him to give up his arms; but as the unfortunate bondsman replied to order by holding up both his hands over his head, and saying, “Dem is all the arms I have, massa,” the serious consequence of the Lexington order was not repeated in Mrs. Ingraham’s back yard.

At this moment the report of the firing at the North Bridge was heard, and the major precipitately left, having more important business to attend to the remainder of the day than making social calls and bullying half-scared negroes.

For nineteenth-century audiences, this was mainly an entertaining story that bridged two genres: arrogant British officer thwarted and black slave too stupid (or too sly?) to answer a question correctly. Quite early Pitcairn became the subject of stories about British officers getting their comeuppance, even when the evidence points to other men. Need this anecdote have much basis in fact?

Examined against the background of the secret activities in Concord that spring, Pitcairn’s questioning might take on more significance. James Barrett was collecting cannon, gunpowder, and other military supplies for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Barrett’s family and some of his Concord neighbors were helping in that effort.

At the same time, someone in Concord was sending Gen. Thomas Gage secret notes detailing where those supplies were being hidden around the town. In March 1775 Gage dispatched two army officers in disguise, Capt. William Brown and Ens. Henry DeBerniere, to Concord to confirm that information. The intelligence that Gage gathered guided his orders to Lt. Col. Francis Smith and Maj. Pitcairn about searching the town.

Because of Ingraham’s political leaning, personal interest in provincial artillery pieces, and genteel standing (Gage’s first intelligence reports from Concord arrived in French), he’s a leading suspect to be the Concord spy.

It might make sense, therefore, for Pitcairn to visit Ingraham on arriving in Concord and collect up-to-the-minute information on where his neighbors were holding the provincial weapons.

Or does it? Going to Ingraham’s house while the whole town was watching would make the neighbors even more suspicious about the squire than they already were. And if Ingraham was ready to share information, why interrogate his human property at pistol point?

I can concoct scenarios in which this story makes perfect sense. For example, imagine the enslaved man had grown up in the household of Mary Ingraham and was plugged into the Concord gossip network. He might have gleaned information about where folks were hiding weapons and talked about that at home, and his new master Ingraham might have collected all that intelligence and sent it to Gage. When the redcoats arrived, Pitcairn sought out Ingraham for the latest, and he answered, “You’ll have to ask my man.”

Conversely, I can also imagine a scenario in which Tilly Merrick simply made up this story to entertain people in Concord in the early 1800s. Or one in which he took an actual visit to his parents’ house by British army officers and tacked on a fictional encounter between Pitcairn and the enslaved man for the sake of a laugh.

“Two peices of Cannon Brought From Watertown to ye Towns”

The 3 Feb 1775 petition to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s committee of safety about eight iron cannon can’t answer the question of what happened to those guns.

Did the congress assume control of them and add them to their other weapons? Or did they remain under the control of the four towns that had undertaken to equip them for use?

Or did the congress and the towns come to some sort of compromise, in which the towns continued to assume responsibility for those guns but expected the province to pay for the work eventually?

We don’t appear to have enough records from two of the four towns to provide definite answers. For Lexington, Alex Cain has written:

Unfortunately, what became of the guns after February 1775 is unknown. Lexington’s town meeting minutes from the Spring of 1775 were stolen years ago. Records from December 1775 through the remainder of the war do not mention the cannons.

The Weston town records show no payments related to cannon in 1775. In March 1776 the town treasurer’s account for the preceding year includes 12 shillings “Recd. of Capt. Samel. Baldwin for the Use of two Guns Belonging to the Town,” but that price suggests those were muskets, not artillery.

On the other hand, we know there were mounted cannon in Watertown on 30 March. On that day, Col. Percy led troops in a march that was part springtime exercise, part an attempt to get the provincials used to seeing redcoats come through their towns. Capt. John Barker wrote in his diary:

The 1st. Brigade marched into the Country at 6 oclock in the morning; it alarmed the people a good deal. Expresses were sent to every town near; at Watertown about 9 miles off, they got 2 pieces of Cannon to the Bridge and loaded ’em but nobody wou’d stay to fire them; at Cambridge they were so alarmed that they pulled up the Bridge.

Lt. Frederick Mackenzie noted that march, as well as another on 10 April: “The 38th. and 52ed. Regiments marched out this Morning as far as Watertown.” Later, just after the war began, he wrote: “The 38th & 52ed Regiments marched once to Watertown, which indeed occasioned some alarm, and Cannon were fired, bells rung, and expresses sent off, to give the alarm.” So not only did the Watertown militia company have two cannon, but its men could move, load, and fire those guns, and the British army knew about them.

As for Concord, we have the documentation from James Barrett of what ordnance and other material he was storing for the provincial congress. That included:

Two peices of Cannon Brought From Watertown to ye Towns
Eight Peices of Cannon Brought to ye Town by Mr Harrington
Four Peices of Brass Cannon & Two Mortar from Col Robertsons [sic—Lemuel Robinson]

Thus, when Barrett wrote this note, he controlled two iron cannon secured by William Molineux in 1774, sent out to Watertown, and then sent on to Concord for mounting. But he also had the Boston train’s four brass cannon, the two mortars that James Brewer claimed to have smuggled out of Boston, and eight more guns from some guy named Harrington (which is a whole other mystery for me). And in March more ordnance arrived from Salem.

No wonder James Warren wrote to his wife Mercy from Concord on 10 April: “This Town is full of Cannon…” A royal spy specified there were twelve cannon mounted around the Concord courthouse under twenty-four-hour guard, three 24-pounder siege guns in the courtyard of the prison, plus the brass field-pieces from Boston back at Barrett’s farm.

In mid-April, after warnings from Boston, Barrett and his family and neighbors began to move those artillery pieces even farther away. Four cannon reportedly went to the neighborhood of provincial congress receiver-general Henry Gardner in Stow. But four remained behind in Concord at the courthouse, according to Gen. Thomas Gage’s local informant. I suspect those were owned by the town, and it didn’t want to let them go.

I still don’t know who Gage’s spy was, but one candidate is Duncan Ingraham, the merchant captain who had retired to Concord a couple of years before. As described back here, his son had sold four iron cannon to Molineux in October 1774. Those comprised half of the artillery pieces that the 3 Feb 1775 petition discussed. In other words, there was a 50% chance that the pair of cannon assigned to Barrett had come from Ingraham. Had the captain spotted what he still considered his own property rolling through town?

Once again, my thanks to Joel Bohy of Bruneau & Co. and Antiques Roadshow for sharing the document from the Massachusetts archives that added new clues to this inquiry.

TOMORROW: The cannon that didn’t bark.

“Lodged in part pay for the said Cannon”

In September and October 1774, as I describe in The Road to Concord, Gen. Thomas Gage’s royal government and the Patriots in and around Boston engaged in an “arms race”: racing to grab every cannon and mortar they could.

The Crown took two small cannon from the Cambridge militia, the guns on Governor’s Island, and the stock of hardware merchant Joseph Scott.

In the same weeks, Patriots emptied the Charlestown battery, removed a “great gun” from along the Dorchester shore, and spirited four brass cannon out of the two gunhouses of the Boston militia train.

The Royal Navy spiked all the guns in the town’s North Battery, but locals said they would clear those. Someone tried to float a boat loaded with guns up the Charles River, but it got stuck on the dam that formed the Mill Pond and the navy seized it.

That was the period when the Boston Patriot firebrand William Molineux sent his son John to take four iron cannon out of a stable in West Boston owned by Duncan Ingraham, who a couple of years before had moved out to Concord with his new wife.

As I’ve been quoting, in 1791 Ingraham petitioned the Massachusetts General Court, of which he’d recently been a member, to compensate him for those cannon. He specified the amount this way:

Your Memorialist prays that he may be allowed for the aforesaid Cannon the aforesaid Sum of ninety six pounds, after deducting therefrom thirteen pounds six shillings & Eight pence which was lodged in part pay for the said Cannon at the Store of Duncan Ingraham Junr. as your memorialist has since been informed by said Mollineux

So William Molineux didn’t just take the guns; he left a down payment for them equal to a sixth of £80. (Where Molineux got his money and how much was actually his is a whole other question, linked to his sudden death on 22 October.) It’s not clear how Patriots slipped these weapons out of town, but they used various ways to smuggle military goods past the army guards on the Neck.

Ingraham wrote that he hadn’t known about Molineux’s payment at the time, and perhaps not until shortly before his petition. That hints at a rift between the merchant captain and his namesake son. In 1774 they were on different political sides: Duncan, Jr., spoke for the Cadets in their dispute with Gen. Gage over having John Hancock as their colonel while Duncan, Sr., was considered a Tory by his Concord neighbors. The older man’s new wife might also have been an issue. Whatever the reason, his son didn’t tell him about making a deal with Molineux, perhaps for years.

Even after deducting that first payment, Ingraham asked Massachusetts for more than £82. In March 1792, the General Court voted to grant him only £58.13s.4d. Do the math, and the legislature’s committee decided that Ingraham’s four cannon were worth only £72.

“I was requested by my Father to go to the Stable”

As I described yesterday, in 1791 Duncan Ingraham asked the Massachusetts government to compensate him for property taken from him before the Revolutionary War.

Specifically, Ingraham wanted to be paid for “four, four pound iron Cannon of the value ninety six pounds.” (A “four pound” cannon didn’t weigh or cost four pounds; rather, it shot a cannonball that weighed four pounds.)

To support that claim, Ingraham attached an affidavit from dry goods merchant John Molineux (1753-1794) which said:

I John Molineux of Boston in the County of Suffolk & Commonwealth of Massachusetts, declare, that according to the best of my remembrance, some time in the Month of October in the Year 1774, I was requested by my Father to go to the Stable, belonging to the House of Capt. Ingraham at West Boston, with two Teams, & take from thence two Pair Cannon, which was accordingly done, & conveyed into the Country, & beleive they were taken by Authority

Molineux’s father was the hardware merchant William Molineux, who had been at the forefront of the Boston resistance, pushing into confrontations, since about 1767. Ingraham was thus the second Boston businessman, after Joseph Webb, to formally claim that William Molineux had taken cannon from him for the use of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

That October 1774 date is significant. The congress convened for the first time on 7 October. Then delegates debated how best to oppose the royal authorities. Not until 20 October did the shadow legislature formally take up the question of “what is necessary to be now done for the defence and safety of the province,” and it took another week before the body appointed a committee to start buying military supplies.

That means Molineux was collecting cannon—which have no peacetime use—for the Provincial Congress before that legislature officially voted to prepare for war. We know Molineux must have acted before that 27 October vote because he died on 22 October.

Nonetheless, in 1792 the official state legislature paid Duncan Ingraham for his four iron cannon, recognizing that they had become part of the Patriots’ artillery force. Molineux probably jumped the gun, or in fact several guns, but retroactively the government agreed that he’d acted “by Authority.”

TOMORROW: How much money did Ingraham get?

(The image above is a handwriting specimen that John Molineux produced in the 1760s for his writing-school master, Abiah Holbrook, now in the Harvard University library collection.)

“Severall Cannon the property of said Ingraham”

As I described yesterday, my suggestion in The Road to Concord that the people of Concord divested the Loyalist-leaning Duncan Ingraham of four cannon in October 1774 caught the eye of Robert A. Gross, dean of Concord scholars.

I based my guess on brief mentions in the Massachusetts house of representatives’ published records of Ingraham petitioning to be compensated for those cannon in 1778 and 1791. His first attempt was unsuccessful; there was a war on, and, even though Ingraham hadn’t gone over to the enemy and had even served a short time as a militia officer, people may still have had their suspicions about him.

In 1788 Ingraham worked his way into his neighbors’ graces to be elected to the Massachusetts house himself. He served three terms, forming connections that made it easier for him to lobby for his cause. In March 1792 the state granted him £58.13s.4d. for the cannon.

Behind the legislature’s officially reported petitions and votes were more documents, not published but (we hope) saved in the Massachusetts Archives. Bob Gross asked John Hannigan, curator at the state archives, what papers survived from Ingraham. It turned out his 1778 petition and supporting documents were tossed out at some point, but the 1791 request remains. And those papers offer more detail about how the merchant captain lost control of his cannon.

I’d assumed that since Duncan Ingraham moved to Concord in 1772, he brought all his property—including stray artillery—with him. Thus, the cannon must have been confiscated in Concord. But it turns out he left a lot behind in Boston. Which makes sense since the traditional use for such small, privately owned cannon was to arm merchant ships during wartime, and the closer the guns were to a port the more valuable they were—as long as Ingraham had a business agent he could trust in town.

The affidavits Ingraham collected to support his 1791 petition show that back in 1774 he still owned a house in Boston that he rented to Samuel Breck (1747-1809), a young merchant (and father of the Samuel Breck whose childhood experiences I’ve cited).

Breck’s partner in a business at the “Corner of Greene’s Wharf” was Benjamin Hammatt, Jr. (1746-1829). The partnership dissolved in 1778, and the Brecks eventually moved to Philadelphia, but Hammatt remained in Boston and was available to testify in 1791. He wrote:

severall Cannon the property of said Ingraham were conveyed away from the Stable of said House, and I fully believe by the Authority and for the Use of the State.

So Ingraham lost his cannon from a stable he’d rented out in Boston, not in Concord.

TOMORROW: Just who “conveyed away” those cannon?

[The image above is a detail of Duncan Ingraham’s gravestone.]

Digging Deeper into Duncan Ingraham

There are two big mysteries in my book The Road to Concord. The first is how in September 1774 Boston Patriots managed to get two cannon out of a locked militia armory with redcoat soldiers standing guard at the front door and an entire regiment camped across the street.

The second mystery is who in Concord was sending Gen. Thomas Gage detailed reports on the artillery and other military supplies that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s agents were amassing in that town in March and April 1775. That one I didn’t find a definite answer to.

In writing the book, I listed the retired merchant captain Duncan Ingraham as a possible suspect. As for what might have motivated him, I wrote about his tussles with the Patriots over artillery:

Some of those four-pounders [in Concord] came from Concord resident Duncan Ingraham, who in 1778 petitioned the legislature “that he may be paid for four Four-pound Cannon, which were taken for the public Service in October 1774.” Ingraham was a merchant captain who had settled in Concord with his new wife just the year before. Those cannon might therefore have been property left over from his maritime career. Ingraham was not a Patriot. He refused to participate in boycotts of British imports, he was ready to hold court sessions as a justice of the peace, and he hosted British army officers at dinner. The people of Concord showed their disapproval of this new arrival by hanging a sheep’s head and guts on his chaise. They also confiscated his property: on January 3, 1775, Dr. Joseph Lee wrote in his diary, “The mob unloaded Capt. Ingraham’s Bords that were to go to Boston,” where they might have been used by the army to build barracks. It seems likely that the community seized Ingraham’s four cannon for the public good.

That suggestion caught the attention of Robert Gross, the expert on Concord. In fact, I’d studied his Bicentennial classic The Minutemen and Their World to learn more about the town and locals like Ingraham, Dr. Lee, and James Barrett and his family. Look for his new study of Concord’s next greatest generation, The Transcendentalists and Their World, later this year. 

With the help of John Hannigan, curator (and the expert on Revolutionary documents) at the Massachusetts Archives, Bob Gross sought out the documents supporting Ingraham’s 1778 and 1791 petitions for compensation. They show that my guess about who took Ingraham’s cannon was mistaken—the people of Concord didn’t do that. Instead, the people of Boston did.

And like so many other radical acts in Boston between 1768 and 1774, William Molineux was in the thick of it.

TOMORROW: The cannon Duncan Ingraham left behind.

A Sestercentennial Stand-Off on King Street

By publishing Customs house documents that embarrassed the Whig merchants of Boston, John Mein knew that he made himself unpopular.

In fact, a confidential informant, the painter George Mason, told Customs Collector Joseph Harrison on 20 Oct 1769 that Mein was “oblig’d to go Arm’d, and ’tis but a few Nights since that two Persons who resembled him pretty much were attack’d in a narrow Alley with Clubs, and would in all probability have lost their Lives if the Mistakes had not been timely discover’d.”

Mein’s insulting “Characters” of top Whigs, published in his Boston Chronicle newspaper on 26 October and republished in a pamphlet two days later, pushed some of those enemies over the edge. Toward the end of the day on Saturday, 28 October, Mein and his printing partner John Fleeming, were walking along King Street.

Merchant captain Samuel Dashwood (1729?-1792) confronted Mein, angry at being called “the Grunting Captain.” With him were other Whig merchants, such as William Molineux (1713?-1774), Edward Davis (1718-1784), and Duncan Ingraham (1726-1811). Two of those men were in their forties, the other two in their fifties, but they were about to behave like the twenty- and thirtysomething gentlemen who had thrust themselves into the Otis-Robinson fight the month before.

According to Mein, writing on 5 November:

Davis first made a push at me with his Cane which struck me on the left side of the belly, and has left a Bloody Contussion, which now, 8 days after, still remains with great hardness all round; on being struck I immediately took a Pistol out of my Pocket, cocked, and presented it; instantly a large Circle was formed

As one would expect.

Mein, pointing his pistol, backed toward the main guard near the Town House (now the Old State House). “I often told them I would shoot the first Man who touched me,” he declared. Fleeming followed. The crowd, still at a distance, grew larger. Shopkeeper and importer Elizabeth Cumings, visiting a friend on King Street, heard “a violent skreeming Kill him, kill him” outside. Mein said people were throwing things. He spotted selectman Jonathan Mason within the crowd.

The main guard was the building where the army organized its sentries and patrols, where soldiers on duty that night were gathered. As the printer approached, an officer recognized him and “desired the Centries to keep their Posts clear” of people. Those soldiers probably stepped forward and presented their bayonets. Mein began “cooly stepping up the Guardroom steps.”

Thomas Marshall (1719-1800, shown above) didn’t want to see Mein get away. He was a tailor with a shop on King Street, but he was better known in Boston as the colonel in charge of the town’s militia regiment. Mein listed Marshall among the men who had first confronted him, but it seems just as likely that he came out of his store after he heard the commotion.

The colonel grabbed “a large Iron Shovel” from the hardware shop of Daniel and Joseph Waldo, the sign of the Elephant. He slipped around the sentries and came at Mein from the rear, swinging the shovel. Mein stated, “the Blow cut thro’ my Coat & Waistcoat, and made a Wound of about two Inches long in my left Shoulder.”

And then a gun went off.

TOMORROW: Manhunt.

Dr. Ezekiel Brown in the Concord Jail

Yesterday we found Ezekiel Brown back in his native town of Concord. He had left as a boy, his poor family seeking better farmland, and returned as a young man with enough skills and drive to set up a shop—only to be locked in jail for debt on the eve of the Revolution.

Brown rejoined his family in Concord in 1781, having read a bunch of medical books and served in the Continental Army for four years as a military surgeon. He entered private practice. Soon Dr. Brown’s neighbors again elected him to town offices and invited him to join the Social Club.

But then the war ended. From London, Brown’s old creditor Frederick William Geyer contacted his father-in-law—Duncan Ingraham of Concord, another member of the Social Club. Together the two men resumed Geyer’s lawsuit for debt.

In February 1786, Brown signed a certificate stating he had witnessed the death of Moses Parker in the Boston jail back in 1775, a document now held by the Boston Public Library. Two months later, Ingraham and Geyer won a judgment against him of more than £500.

Naturally, that made the Social Club meetings more rancorous. The oldest members of the group, later called the Social Circle, remembered Dr. Brown as the main reason that it broke up in the 1780s. Lemuel Shattuck wrote that he was a “notorious disturber” who wouldn’t let anyone else speak. John S. Keyes described him as “that hot-headed, long-winded, hard-used, rough-tongued, ill-bred, ‘jack at all trades,’” who “would out-talk his neighbors, especially choleric old Duncan Ingraham.”

On the other hand, Grindall Reynolds, who wrote a profile of Brown in 1871 later published in The Centennial of the Social Circle in Concord, took the doctor’s side of the quarrel. Reynolds made much of the fact that Brown was an American military veteran while Geyer was a Loyalist and Ingraham had Loyalist leanings before the war.

According to Shattuck, Dr. Brown offered to pay his debt in “government securities”—presumably at full face value. But 1786 was at the height of the economic crisis that provoked the Shays Rebellion. The market value of those securities was low. Ingraham refused the offer. There was no way Brown could raise enough cash. At depressed prices, even his property in the center of Concord couldn’t cover the debt.

Ingraham and Geyer had Brown committed to the Concord jail on 13 May 1787. The doctor escaped at some point but was locked back up on 8 May 1788. After a move to the Cambridge jail, the creditors finally agreed to let Brown go free in June 1789.

By then Dr. Brown and his wife Mary had seven children, the oldest fourteen and the youngest an infant. Their best option was to leave Concord for Maine, where Brown or his father had received a land grant before the war. The family settled on about 500 uncultivated acres in what was then Clinton and is now Benton. For the third time Dr. Brown set to work establishing himself.

Ultimately, Dr. Ezekiel Brown was able to regain his social and financial footing. He made his house a tavern. His sons held town offices and cleared their own farms. In 1818 the Revolutionary veteran applied for a federal pension. He stated that he was in reduced circumstances and had “lost the use of my left arm and hand by reason of an ague” while still supporting his wife, two widowed daughters (one “insane”), and a grandson.

Under the 1820 pension law, however, the federal government said Brown owned too much property to need support. He and the selectmen of his town petitioned Congress to approve a pension, but it doesn’t look like that happened before his death in 1824 at the age of eighty.

“Bateman, he thinks, could not have made the deposition”

When the Rev. William Gordon visited British prisoners of war in Concord in the spring of 1775, he reported that Pvt. John Bateman was “too ill to admit of my conversing with him.”

Bateman didn’t get any better. In 1835 local historian Lemuel Shattuck wrote that this wounded redcoat “died and was buried on the hill.” That was Concord’s elevated burying-ground, shown in the right foreground of the Amos Doolittle print of regulars searching the town.

In 1825 Elias Phinney’s History of the Battle of Lexington argued that the militiamen of Lexington were the first to shoot back at the redcoats. Two years later, the Rev. Ezra Ripley of Concord published A History of the Fight at Concord to refute that claim; five years later, Ripley brought out an expanded edition.

Both Phinney and Ripley gathered new testimony from veterans of the battle to support their case. Ripley also republished John Bateman’s deposition from 1775, which had said, “I testify, that I never heard any of the [Lexington] inhabitants so much as fire one gun on said troops.”

A few weeks back, I quoted some statements that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote into his diary after a visit from Thaddeus Blood, a long-lived veteran, on 5 Aug 1835. (Thanks to Joel Bohy for alerting me to this latter-day source.) After recording Blood’s recollection of Lt. Isaac Potter, Emerson wrote:

Bateman, he thinks, could not have made the deposition in Dr. R[ipley]’s History. A ball passed through his cap and he cried, “A miss is as good as a mile.” Immediately another ball struck his ear and passed out at the side of his mouth, knocking out two teeth. He lived about three weeks, and his wounds stunk intolerably. It was probably Carr’s or Starr’s deposition.

Evidently Bateman’s wound became infected, and he died in American custody. Don Hagist tells me the muster rolls of Bateman’s regiment, the 52nd, state he died on 21 April, but his deposition was dated 23 April and Gordon encountered him after that. He probably died in early May.

Was Blood correct in saying that Bateman was never well enough to give the testimony published over his name? Probably not. In addition to magistrates Dr. John Cuming and Duncan Ingraham on 23 April, four other people told Gordon that they “heard the said Bateman say, that the Regulars fired first, and saw him go through the solemnity of confirming the same by an oath on the bible.” Those four reported witnesses were Bateman’s fellow prisoners in Concord.

I therefore think Bateman’s 23 April deposition was authentic, though he may well have been under the duress of being a prisoner and needing medical care.

TOMORROW: So who was “Carr” or “Starr”?

Duncan Ingraham, Justice of the Peace

Yesterday I quoted two depositions of British soldiers taken prisoner on 19 Apr 1775—John Bateman of the 52nd Regiment and James Marr of the 4th.

Both depositions were dated 23 April and attested to by justices of the peace from Concord: Dr. John Cuming (also spelled Cumings, Cumming, and Cummings, of course) and Duncan Ingraham. Interestingly, both those magistrates had Loyalist ties.

First, Ingraham (1726-1811). A sea captain, he was one of the Boston merchants who attacked Loyalist printer John Mein in late 1769.

After a wealthy marriage, Ingraham settled in Concord in 1772 and moved away from the Whig movement. He refused to participate in the renewed boycott of British imports, was ready to hold court sessions in late 1774, and even hosted British army officers at dinner. His neighbors showed their disapproval of that behavior by hanging a sheep’s head and guts on his chaise.

The people of Concord also confiscated Ingraham’s property. In October 1774 the town took four four-pounder cannon from Ingraham—quite possibly the four that were still in town on 19 April. On 3 Jan 1775, Dr. Joseph Lee (another Crown supporter) wrote in his diary, “The mob unloaded Capt. Ingraham’s Bords that were to go to Boston,” where the army might have used them to build barracks.

Because of those conflicts, I’ve even suspected Ingraham of being the “Concord spy” discussed in The Road to Concord, but there’s no smoking cannon to reveal that informant’s identity.

Within a few days after the battle, however, Ingraham was helping to gather and certify depositions from local militiamen, as well as those two captive soldiers, for the Patriot cause. He remained in America through the war and eventually gained enough trust from his neighbors to be elected to the Massachusetts General Court. (That’s when he finally got paid for those cannon.)

After another wealthy marriage, Ingraham moved on to Medford for the last decades of his life. A detail from his gravestone appears above.

TOMORROW: Coming to Dr. Cuming.

[The crossed-out sentence above was corrected in a series of 2021 postings including this one.]

Burying the Bodies at the North Bridge

At the end of 19 Apr 1775, the people of Concord faced a big problem. Massachusetts was, of course, now in armed rebellion against the royal authorities holding the province’s capital. There were dead and dying royal soldiers in town. But Concord shared those problems with other towns.

The big problem specific to Concord was that one of those British soldiers had not only been shot but had obviously suffered a major head wound inflicted at close range. An inhabitant named Ammi White, born about 1754, had struck a wounded and defenseless man with his hatchet. The town’s minister, the Rev. William Emerson, had apparently seen him do this. See D. Michael Ryan’s article for more detail.

Concordians dug a grave for the soldiers who died near the North Bridge, put the bodies inside, and covered them up. But then Gen. Thomas Gage had a “Circumstantial Account” of the battle published in Boston, and (as quoted yesterday) it said that one soldier at the bridge had been “scalped, his head much mangled, and his ears cut off, though not quite dead.” So that required a response.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress published its own report complaining about British soldiers’ behavior, particularly later in the day. That narrative also stated:

A paper having been printed in Boston, representing, that one of the British troops killed at the bridge at Concord, was scalped, and the ears cut off from the head, supposed to be done in order to dishonour the Massachusetts people, and to make them appear to be savage and barbarous, the following deposition was taken that the truth might be known.

We, the subscribers, of lawful age, testify and say, that we buried the dead bodies of the King’s troops that were killed at the North-Bridge in Concord, on the nineteenth day of April, 1775, where the action first began, and that neither of those persons were scalped, nor their ears cut off, as has been represented.

Zechariah Brown,
Thomas Davis, jun.

Concord, May 11th, 1775.

Those men gave their oath to magistrate Duncan Ingraham. As a merchant captain, he had been part of the genteel mob that attacked Loyalist printer John Mein in Boston in 1769. He retired to Concord in 1772 and two years later acted friendly enough with British army officers to have a Patriot mob attack him—symbolically, by attaching a sheep’s head and guts to his chaise.

By May 1775, however, Ingraham was firmly among the Patriots. The deposition he helped create deflected Gage’s specific charges: scalping and cutting off ears. Brown and Davis didn’t say anything about whether they’d noticed if one of those soldiers had suffered a terrible head wound. As with many other depositions that the Massachusetts Whigs collected in the 1770s, I think this testimony was the truth but not the whole truth.

TOMORROW: Did that bury the controversy?