“The said Short is a midling sized man”

During the siege of Boston, Benjamin Edes published the Boston Gazette out of Watertown. His main competition was the New-England Chronicle that Samuel Hall printed in Cambridge.

Geography put Edes’s print office closer to the Continental camp in Roxbury. On 13 Nov 1775, and for the next two weeks after, the Boston Gazette carried this advertisement:

DESETED [sic] from Capt. Earl Clap’s company in Col. Theophilus Cotton’s regiment, on the 12th of June last, and taken up on the 9th of this inst. [i.e., this month] at Cambridge, John Short, and in conveying him to Roxbury he ran-away again.

The said Short is a midling sized man, goes a little stooping, fresh looking, lately had the small pox, with a scarr on the right side of his face, and dark complection: Had on when he was last taken a blue coat, wash leather breeches, a surtout of a greyish colour, small brim’d hat with a white ribbon round the crown, and boots on.——

Whoever will take up said run-away, and secure or return him to the regiment he deserted from, shall receive four Dollars reward and all necessary charges paid by me.

Roxbury, Nov. 10, 1775. EARL CLAP.

“Wash leather” meant a form of chamois.

Short was evidently caught in late November or early December since the ad stopped appearing and he was court-martialed on 4 December, as recounted yesterday.

In addition to running away twice, as the ad described, Short’s trial record says he’d gotten Capt. Clapp to pay 36 shillings “for a former theft.” No wonder the army was ready to throw the book at him.

Part of Short’s sentence was to repay Clapp that sum plus £1.16s. for the “expense of advertising and apprehending him.” Most of that was probably the $4 reward, then pegged at £1.

TOMORROW: Witnessing the punishment.

“From his own incoherent stories”

On 4 Dec 1775, Col. Jonathan Ward of Southborough convened a court-martial in the Continental Army camp at Roxbury.

Col. Ward presided over a board of officers that included four captains and seven lieutenants.

Pvt. John Short of Rochester was one defendant in that proceeding. He had marched under Col. Theophilus Cotton and Capt. Earl Clapp (represented above by his shoe buckles) during the Lexington Alarm and then enlisted under them for the rest of the year.

Short was charged with “desertion and theft.” He pled not guilty. The record of the court-martial published in American Archives states:

On hearing the evidence brought to support the charge, the Court are unanimously of opinion the prisoner is guilty. It likewise appears very clear to the Court, from sundry papers that were found with him, and from his own incoherent stories, that he is guilty of a breach of the 27th and 29th, and also the 3d article of the Rules and Regulations of the Massachusetts Army.

[Those articles forbade corresponding with the enemy, leaving one’s post to plunder, and provoking mutiny, respectively.]

According to said rules, the Court adjudge the following sums of money to be paid out of his wages and effects, viz:

To Captain Earl Clapp, the sum of 1£.16s., for expense of advertising and apprehending him; also, 36s., that said Clapp paid, at said Short’s desire, for a former theft.

To William Cowing [also listed as Cowen], a soldier in Captain Clapp’s company, 36s.10d., that he carried away with him when he deserted.

To Daniel Crawford [also Croxford], in said company, 4£.16s., for the damage done him by stealing his clothes.

Likewise adjudge him to be whipped thirty-nine stripes on the naked back, and suffer two years imprisonment in Newgate Prison, in Symsbury [Connecticut], and as much longer as the present contest between Great Britain and the American Colonies shall subsist.

The court then turned to Pvt. John Smith, a soldier in Capt. Peter Harwood’s company of Col. Ebenezer Learned’s regiment. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors includes many pages of John Smith entries, of course, but this information matches a man from Brookfield who had enlisted on 12 June.

Smith was charged with “attempting to desert to the enemy.” He pled guilty. The court sentenced him to “pay the sum of eight shillings to Brigadier-General [John] Thomas, to defray the expense of bringing him back to camp, and suffer six months imprisonment in Newgate Prison, in Symsbury.”

Finally the officers considered “Owen Resick, a transient person,” for “aiding, advising, and assisting John Smith to desert to the enemy.” He denied the charge. (Based on other sources, I now think this man’s surname should have been transcribed as Ruick.)

After “hearing and examining the evidence,” the panel found Ruick guilty and sentenced him to “one year’s imprisonment in Newgate Prison, in Symsbury, and as much longer as the present disputes between Great Britain and the Colonies shall subsist.”

Gen. Artemas Ward affirmed those sentences. They don’t appear in Gen. George Washington’s general orders, issued out of Cambridge.

TOMORROW: A glimpse of John Short.