The Rev. David McClure’s 19th of April

The Rev. David McClure (1748-1820) was a native of Newport who grew up in Boston, a childhood friend of Henry Knox.

McClure became a student and protégé of the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, received a degree from Yale in 1769, and as a missionary traveled as far west as Fort Pitt.

On 19 Apr 1775, McClure was back in Boston to preach in the Presbyterian meetinghouse as an interim minister. He wrote a detailed account of that day, evidently combining immediate impressions with later commentary. The entry begins:

While at breakfast, at my brother William’s at the South End, a neighbour came in, & said the Regulars had marched into the Country, & killed several men at Lexington. I went into the street & found the inhabitants in great perplexity and fear. They were unwilling to believe the report: but about 10 O’Clock, it was confirmed by a Mr. Pope, just returned from Lexington, who saw the men dead there, said to be 7 or 8.

About 11 O’Clock, Lord Peircy’s brigade marched out of town, with 2 field pieces, to reinforce Col. [Francis] Smith, who, it was said, was driven by the militia, & was hastily retreating. I stood in the street as they passed. They all appeared, except a few officers, to be young men, & had never been in action. Not a smiling face was among them. Some of them appeared to have been weeping. Their countenances were sad. Some of those poor fellows never returned.

Apprehensive that the town was soon to be shut, in the afternoon, with melancholy forbodings of the issue of this day’s awful tragedy, I got my horse & rode to Charlestown ferry, hoping to get out that way. There were some hundreds of the inhabitants there, and among them some of the ministers of Boston, wishfully looking over to the other side, & longing to get out of their once beloved town, where order, peace & righteousness once dwelt, but now murderers. A British Man of War [H.M.S. Somerset] lay in the river, & a barge from her met the ferry boat, crowded with passengers, & ordered it back. The fears of the people there waiting, were greatly excited by this unwelcome circumstance.

I turned about, with a resolution to try to get out at the neck leading to Roxbury, which the british had strongly fortified. Rode by several barracks; saw the soldiers paraded, under arms, and officers pale & running or riding from one barrack to another. It was thought, that they were under apprehension of the inhabitants rising on the remains of the troops now left in Boston; & no doubt, had the inhabitants been prepared, they could have made [Gen. Thomas] Gage & all his men in Boston, prisoners & shut up the town, and those who were without, with Peircy and Smith must have submitted to the militia, who were rapidly collecting from all the towns around; and thus, perhaps, an end would have been put to the war as soon as it was began. But providence was pleased to order it otherwise; & this small movement of the day, was necessary to begin that train of events, which extended through a long & distressing war, & which finally seperated the Colonies of America, from the Mother country. Thus, in his sovereign power & goodness, the Most High divides to the nations their inheritence, & seperates the sons of Adam.

I passed some tories in the street, who seemed to enjoy the confusion, & were calling to each other, “What think ye of the Congress now?”

At the neck, I passed the guards & centinels of the british, bowing to them, as I rode, although with no very pleasant feelings towards them, expecting every moment to be stopped, but they suffered me to pass, and I rejoiced to find myself in Roxbury, & beyond the reach of their arms.

I’ll return to McClure’s diary periodically.

Joanna Cleveland’s “Leap in the Dark”

Over the past two days I quoted dueling advertisements from issues of the New-London Gazette in January 1766, documenting the failed marriage of Robert and Joanna Hebbard.

I learned about those notices from the Twitter feed of Carl Robert Keyes and his Adverts 250 Project. (The first also shows up in the Runaway Connecticut database.)

Figuring out a little more about that marriage meant, among other things, delving into the affairs of the Cle(a)veland family of New England. They were fairly prominent, which usually provides good documentation, but they also moved around a lot. That means their vital milestones appear in the records of a lot of different towns. With the guidance of professional genealogist Liz Loveland, here’s what I found out.

According to the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Robert Hebbard was born 30 Apr 1706 in Windham, Connecticut. (His surname is also spelled Hebard and Hibbard.) At the age of twenty-four, he married Ruth Wheelock, sister of the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, eventually the founder of Dartmouth College.

Josiah Cleveland and Joanna Porter married in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in January 1735, according to The Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown. Josiah’s younger brother Aaron was a minister who married Joanna’s sister Susannah; he filled the pulpit in Haddam, Connecticut, from 1739 to 1746, giving the family a connection in that colony. (Later the Rev. Mr. Cleveland switched to the Church of England; he then traveled to London, Nova Scotia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, where he died.)

Josiah and Joanna Cleveland had a son named Aaron baptized in Medford, Massachusetts, in December 1736. They had a daughter named Joanna in East Haddam, Connecticut, in June 1739, where the couple had evidently moved to be near their siblings/in-laws.

In 1757, Ruth Hebbard died, leaving her husband Robert with several children, the youngest aged five. (The oldest were already married and having children themselves.)

Three years later, on 12 May 1760, Robert Hebbard married Joanna Cleveland. She was about to turn twenty-one, the niece of a minister. He, having already married into another ministerial family, was of the same social class. He might have had money or land. He probably needed a wife to look after the home and children. No matter that he was thirty-three years older than she was.

That’s the marriage that didn’t last. By the end of 1765, he was in Amenia, New York, where his eldest son had settled with his wife and children. She was in Norwich, Connecticut, perhaps with her brother Aaron. (Unfortunately, another Aaron Cleveland, ten years older, was a prominent man in Canterbury, Connecticut, at this time, confusing matters.)

Thus, when Robert Hebbard took out an ad in New London to declare his wife had eloped and he wasn’t going to honor any of her debts, the Connecticut gentleman who came to her defense—Aaron Cleaveland—was her older brother. He called the marriage “a Leap in the Dark,” regretting that she didn’t know her husband better before they wed.

Hebbard died in 1771. His son was a militia captain during the Revolutionary War. Aaron Cleaveland of Norwich was a Connecticut legislator in that period, advocating an end to slavery. I haven’t found a record of Joanna Hebbard’s later life. She would have been only thirty-two when her husband died, able to remarry if she wanted to take another leap.

(The photo above shows, for want of anything better, the pre-1740 Edmund Gookin House in Norwich’s Bean Hill district, where Aaron Cleaveland lived.)

Samson Occom’s Harsh Words for Eleazar Wheelock

The Occom Circle is an interesting online collection from the Dartmouth Library.

In past decades, this collection might have been presented under the name of the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, writer or recipient of most of the documents, or of the college he founded in New Hampshire.

But here they’re organized around the Rev. Samson Occom (1727-1792, shown here), a Mohegan Presbyterian missionary who studied under Wheelock in Connecticut.

Occom was quite a curiosity in the eighteenth-century British Empire. Wheelock sent him to Britain to raise funds for a new project: a seminary to train more Native American ministers to convert more Native Americans, and so on.

That project led to Dartmouth College, whose students were mostly white. In July 1771 Occom broke with Wheelock as a mentor in a dramatic letter shown and transcribed here:

I am very Jealous that instead of Your Seme­nary Becoming alma Mater, She will be too alba mater to Suckle the Tawnees, for She is already aDorn’d up too much like the Popish Virgin Mary She’ll be Naturally asham’d to Suckle the Tawnees for She is already equal in Power Honor and Authority to and any College in Europe, I think your College has too much wordly Grandure for the Poor Indians they’ll never have much benefet of it . . .

Your having So many white Scholars and So few or no Indian Scholars, gives me great Discouragement — I verily thought once that your Institution was Indtended Purely for the poor Indians with this thought I Chearfully Ventur’d my Body & Soul, left my Country my poor Young Family all my Friends and Relations, to Sail over the Boisterous Seas to England, to help forward your School, Hoping, that it may be a lasting Bene­fet to my poor Tawnee Brethren, with this View I went a Volunteer — I was quite willing to become a Gazing stock, Yea Even a Laughing Stock, in Strange Countries to Promote your Cause — we Loudly Proclaimd before Multitudes of People from Place to Place, that there was a most glorious Prospect of Spreading the gospel of the Lord Jesus to the furtherest Savage Nations in the wilderness, thro’ your Institution, we told them that there were So many Missionaries & So many Schoolmasters already Sent out, and a greater Number woud Soon follow

But when we got Home behold all the glory had decayd and now I am afr’aid, we Shall be Deem’d as Liars and Deceivers in Europe, unless you gather Indians quickly to your College, in great Numbers and not to have So many Whites in the Charity, — I understand you have no Indians at Present except two or three Mollatoes — — this I think is quite Contrary to the Minds of the Donors, we told them, that we were Beging for poor Miserable Indians

In addition to this dispute over the Dartmouth student body, Occom also resented how his family had not received the support Wheelock had promised.

For the rest of his life, Occom lived with his Christian Mohegan community, moving from Connecticut to the Oneida lands in New York in 1785.