An Acquittal and a Conviction

On 29 Aug 1775, Gen. George Washington told Richard Henry Lee, “I have at this time one Colo., one Major, one Captn, & two Subalterns under arrest for tryal.”

The colonel was John Mansfield of Lynn, originally scheduled to be tried in early August. The major was Scarborough Gridley of Stoughton, in the artillery regiment. As I described yesterday, Gridley had stayed out of the main fighting at Bunker Hill and ordered Mansfield (who had a higher rank) to keep his infantry regiment nearby.

The captain was another artillery officer, Capt. Edward Crafts (1746-1806). He was a younger brother of Thomas Crafts, one of the Loyall Nine who organized the first public protest against the Stamp Act and then remained active in Whig politics. Thomas was an officer in Boston’s militia artillery company, and Edward trained in that unit as a young man.

Edward Crafts was a tinner by profession. He was still in Boston in 1770, when he supplied a deposition for the town’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre. But back in 1768 he had married a country girl, Eliot Winship of Lexington. In 1771 the growing family moved to Worcester. At the end of 1773 Edward became a founding member of the American Political Society, his new town’s new club for Whig politics.

As the province moved toward military conflict in 1774, Worcester put Crafts on a committee to acquire and mount four cannon. He started to train a militia regiment to use those guns. Both Massachusetts Provincial Congress records and spy reports to Gen. Thomas Gage describe a large number of artillery pieces in the town by the spring of 1775.

When war broke out, however, Edward Crafts marched as a private in the town’s minuteman company. Then he returned home and recruited an artillery company to serve through the rest of the year. According to most listings of the Massachusetts artillery regiment under Col. Richard Gridley, Crafts was the senior captain.

That might have given him the stature, and the boldness, to challenge Maj. Scar Gridley. The colonel’s son was nominally fourth in command of the regiment, but in practice he was the colonel’s main aide and protégé. Sometime in the summer of 1775, after Maj. Gridley had behaved so ineffectually at Bunker Hill, he and Capt. Crafts exchanged words and accusations.

That led to the first of a series of court-martial proceedings, starting 1 September. The next day’s general orders announced the verdict:

Capt. Edward Crafts of Col. Gridley’s regiment of Artillery, tried yesterday by a General Court Martial, is acquitted of that part of the Charge against him, which relates to [“]defrauding of his men,” and the Court are also of opinion, that no part of the Charge against the prisoner is proved, except that of using abusive expressions to Major Gridley; which being a breach of the 49th Article of the Rules and Regulations for the Massachusetts Army; sentence the Prisoner to receive a severe reprimand from the Lt Col. of the Artillery in the presence of all the Officers of the regiment and that he at the said time, ask pardon of Major Gridley for the said abusive language.

The lieutenant colonel of the regiment was William Burbeck. I have no idea if he made Capt. Crafts perform this ritual before the end of the month because there was still more legal business to get through.

According to the diary of Lt. Benjamin Crafts (an Essex County cousin of the Crafts brothers from Boston), Col. Mansfield’s court-martial started on 8 September. A week later, on 15 September, the commander’s general orders declared the outcome:

Col. John Mansfield of the 19th Regt of foot, tried at a General Court Martial, whereof Brigdr Genl [Nathanael] Green was president, for “remissness and backwardness in the execution of his duty, at the late engagement on Bunkers-hill”; The Court found the Prisoner guilty of the Charge and of a breach of the 49th Article of the rules and regulations of the Massachusetts Army and therefore sentence him to be cashiered and render’d unfit to serve in the Continental Army.

The General [Washington] approves the sentence and directs it to take place immediately.

Notably, although the Continental Army kicked Mansfield out, the voters of Lynn chose him for their town committee of correspondence, inspection, and safety almost every year until the end of the war, and also voted to have him moderate town meetings.

Likewise, the voters of Newbury sent Samuel Gerrish to the Massachusetts General Court in 1776, the year after the army cashiered him the same way. Those gentlemen’s neighbors felt they still deserved leadership responsibilities.

COMING UP: The trial of Scarborough Gridley.

[The photo above shows the modern marker on Edward Crafts’s grave in Potter, New York, where the family moved in 1792, courtesy of Find a Grave. The original stone also survives there.]

Dueling Depositions about the 5th of March

Yesterday I quoted from Edward Crafts’s deposition, dated 17 Mar 1770, about what he’d heard from a British corporal named “McCan.” Crafts was testifying about his encounter with soldiers in the hours shortly after the Massacre:

on Monday evening, the fifth instant [i.e., this month], between 11 and 12 o’clock, Mr. Joseph Ayers [Eyres] met me at my gate, and I asked him where he was going. He answered, “To call Mr. Thomas Theodore Bliss to attend at the Council-chamber, to give evidence of the Captain’s giving the soldiers orders to fire on the inhabitants.”

On leaving Mr. Bliss’s door, there passed by us two corporals with about twenty soldiers, with muskets and fixed bayonets; and on their observing our moving towards the Town-house [shown here], the soldiers halted, and surrounded us, saying we were a pack of damn’d rascals, and for three coppers they would blow our brains out.

One of the corporals (viz. Eustice), gave orders for one-half the soldiers to cock, and the rest to make ready. On which we told them, we had nothing to say to them, but were on other business. The corporal, Eustice, struck Mr. Haldan, then in company, and turning to me, aimed a blow at my head with his firelock, which I took upon my arm, and then, with all his might, he made a pass at me, with his fixed bayonet, with full intent to take my life, as I thought. This I also parried with my naked hand. Then a soldier stepped out from among the rest, and presented his musket to my breast, and six or seven more at about eight or ten feet distance also presented.

Upon this I called Corporal McCan, who came to me with a drawn sword or cutlass in his hand, and pushed the gun from my breast, saying, “This is Mr. Crafts, and if any of you offer to touch him again I will blow your brains out.”

Corporal Eustice answered and said, “He is as damn’d a rascal as any of them.”

The next evening about dusk coming by Rowe’s barrack, I saw Corporal McCan who saved my life. He asked me if my arm was broke, I answered no. He said the gun with which Eustice struck me, was broke to pieces. And continued, “You would have been in heaven or hell in an instant if you had not called me by name. One man in particular, would have shot you, seven more presented at you!”

We also have a deposition from Cpl. Hugh McCann of the 29th Regiment about his memories of that night. He was interviewed on 28 July 1770 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where the unit had been sent after the Massacre. At the time, royal officials were trying to gather information about how badly Bostonians had treated the soldiers. That effort might even have been designed to respond directly to details in the town report that contained Crafts’s deposition, and that might have reshaped the soldiers’ testimony. In any event, here’s McCann’s recollection:

on the fifth of March at the South End of said Town, in the Evening, as he was walking near the Neck Guard, he was assaulted and struck by Mr. Pierpoint without provocation given and A Mob with him, and with much ado got away with his Life, that the said Pierpoint struck this Deponent with A Broad Bludgeon, and said that the Soldiers were Murdering the Towns People at the Town House, that he the said Pierpoint would never be satisfied while there was A Soldier in the Town.

So who is this “Mr. Pierpoint”? That was almost certainly Robert Pierpont, who owned land near the Neck and made many complaints about soldiers stationed nearby stealing his firewood. In fact, his attempt to serve a writ on an officer there in October 1769 had prompted a nearly fatal riot.

And what do you know? Pierpont also left a deposition about the night of 5 Mar 1770:

that [while he was] going to see a sick neighbor between the hours of seven and eight on Monday evening, the fifth current [i.e., this month], two soldiers armed, one with a broad sword, the other with a club, passed him near the hay market, going towards the town-house, seeming in great haste. In a few minutes they returned and hollowed very loud, “Colonel.”

Before the deponent reached Mr. West’s house, where he was going, they passed him again, joined by another, with a blue surtout, who had a bayonet, with which he gave the deponent a back-handed stroke, apparently more to affront than hurt him. On complaint of this treatment, he said, the deponent should soon hear more of it, and threatened him very hard

Pierpont was one of Boston’s two elected coroners in 1770, so he got to preside over the inquiries into some of the Massacre victims’ deaths—which involved collecting more depositions.

All that legal testimony is wonderful for historians, but it’s vital not to look at the complaints from just one side. As these documents show, almost everybody resented the other side’s actions, and told only part of the story.

How Could Six Shots Hit Eleven People?

Last month a gentleman asked me to give a short speech about the Boston Massacre at a private event. Could I cover the whole event in about fifteen minutes?

Cover the whole event? Hey, I could do fifteen minutes just on how many balls were in the British soldiers’ guns, I said. This was all by email, so I didn’t get to hear him say, “Oh, God, no!”

I was just making a point, not really offering to discourse at length on that one detail. But you folks aren’t so lucky.

On King Street that 5th of March, there were eight soldiers, each with one musket that he could fire only once before reloading. Witnesses testified that Pvt. Edward Montgomery shot into the air, and that the soldier on the other end of the line (probably Cpl. William Wemys) didn’t fire. So that leaves six shots into the crowd.

Yet there were eleven people killed and wounded. Even considering that a musket ball fired at point-blank range would go right through someone’s body, that’s a lot of damage for six balls. Furthermore, Crispus Attucks had twin wounds on his chest, as Dr. Benjamin Church described in his autopsy report.

The most likely explanation is that the soldiers each had two balls in their muskets. Those guns worked more like shotguns than like modern rifles. When gunpowder ignited inside the tubes, it pushed out whatever had been tamped down in there—one ball, two balls, buckshot, nothing but powder (called “snapping” the gun).

In fact, we have evidence of soldiers elsewhere in Boston that night being ordered to put two balls into their muskets. On 17 March, future American artillery captain Edward Crafts (younger brother of coroner Thomas Crafts) told the town’s investigation that the day after the Massacre he’d talked with a “Corporal McCan”—probably Hugh McCann of the 29th Regiment.

McCann reportedly told Crafts that on the night of the 5th:

his orders were, when the party came from the guard-house by the fortification [on the Boston Neck], if any person or persons assaulted them, to fire upon them, every man being loaded with a brace of balls.

”Brace” is an antique synonym for “pair,” usually used these days in the context of hunting. Folks of the late eighteenth century seem to have liked the alliteration of “a brace of balls,” since it shows up in other newspaper stories.

So those eleven people on King Street were probably felled by twelve balls.