“Major Barber was declared rebel”

On Monday, 19 Sept 1774, the Fleet brothers’ Boston Evening-Post reprinted the article from the New-York Gazetteer that I’ve been discussing, listing eighteen Boston men as “authors” of rebellion in Massachusetts.

That article took the form of a letter “To the Officers and Soldiers of his Majesty’s Troops at Boston.”

One obvious question is: Did those men get the message? Did that newspaper item have any effect?

For an answer, I point to the 3 October Boston Gazette. It contained a long letter from Enoch Brown, who owned a house and store on the Boston Neck. On the map shown here, it’s the building with a label in the lower left corner.

Writing to Edes and Gill on 24 September, Brown detailed a dispute with the British army that he said started a week before.

(Army officers argued that the trouble started back during the “Powder Alarm,” and I may analyze that part of Brown’s letter sometime. For now, I’m confining myself to what happened on 17 September and afterward.)

Brown refused to sell rum to a British soldier that Saturday afternoon. The redcoat swore at him and, Brown said, “attempted to strike me with a large club.” Brown ran to the army camp to complain. He was told to speak to Lt. Col. George Maddison. Then came the Sabbath, and Brown finally met Maddison on Monday.

“Col. Maddison…received me with great politeness,” Brown stated. The soldier was already on trial for “getting drunk,” so the colonel added Brown’s accusation as another charge and asked him to return for the trial the next day.

On the morning of Tuesday, 20 September, Brown came back to the camp with two witnesses, William Shattuck and Nathaniel Barber, Jr. The proceeding didn’t go well for the locals. The officers trying the case believed they were rebels and the soldiers were justified in calling them that or worse. One officer

ask’d Mr. Barber whether there was not a man in town called Major Barber—

yes sir, replied Mr. Barber and he is my father——

The officer then said, that Major Barber was declared rebel, and told the son that he was doubtless tainted with the same principles, and therefore unworthy to be admitted as evidence against a soldier;

to which Mr. Barber replied that his father was an honest man, but be that as it might, he thought it extremely hard to be censur’d for his father’s conduct;

A very honest man indeed! return’d the officer

Shattuck and Barber also described the presiding officer reprimanding Brown this way:

how dare you—you rascal! who are a rebel—have the impudence to come here to complain of a soldier, and bring for evidence the son of a declared rebel.

Something appeared to have happened between Monday morning, when Lt. Col. Maddison was polite to Brown and took his accusation seriously, and Tuesday morning, when officers of the same regiment lambasted Brown and Barber as lying rebels.

In between those two mornings, the Boston Evening-Post printed the item listing “Major Nathaniel Barber” among the leaders of rebellion in Boston. And the next day, army officers clearly knew his name.

TOMORROW: Nathaniel Barber to the end.

“An Attack Was Expected” in Roxbury

Earlier this year I had a few ideas about that note from Lt. Col. Robert Carr that Richard Ketchum quoted in Decisive Day but couldn’t explain.

To start with, the only Capt. Farrington mentioned in British Officers Serving in the American Revolution, 1774-1783, is Capt. Anthony Farrington of the Royal Artillery (son of Maj. Charles Farrington of the same service). So he was the British officer whom Carr asked to dislodge some American field-pieces—with an artillery barrage rather than an infantry attack.

As for “Brownes House,” Enoch Brown’s tavern was a landmark on Boston Neck, sitting between the British fortifications and the provincial lines. Gen. John Burgoyne proposed a parley there to Gen. Charles Lee in July 1775, but the Americans burned it down. So could this note refer to something happening near there, on the other side of town from the Battle of Bunker Hill?

Throughout 17 June 1775, each commander worried that, while so much of his army was engaged in Charlestown, the enemy would open a second front by attacking across the Neck. That danger kept Gen. Artemas Ward at his Cambridge headquarters, monitoring news from both wings. Gen. Thomas Gage was probably in his official residence, the Province House, doing much the same. (More discussion of his location here.)

I therefore wondered if Lt. Col. Carr was the officer in charge of the fortifications on the Neck—the “lines”—and not with his regiment in Charlestown. The fact that he wrote to Gage and not to Gen. William Howe, the battlefield commander, strengthens that hypothesis.

But is there any evidence of the provincials advancing field pieces along the Neck, and the Royal Artillery trying to “make them remove,” as the note says? Indeed there is. Here’s an extract from the journal of Samuel Bixby of Sutton, Massachusetts, printed in volume 14 of the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings:

About noon we fired an alarm, & rung the bells in Roxbury; and every man was ordered to arms, as an attack was expected.

Col. [Ebenezer] Larned marched his Regt. up to the meeting house, & then to the burying yard, which was the alarm post, where we laid in ambush with two field pieces placed to give it to them unawares, should the regulars come.

About 6 o. c. [o’clock] the enemy drew in their sentries, & immediately a heavy fire was opened from the Fortification. The balls whistled over our heads, & through the houses, making the clap-boards and shingles fly in all directions.

Before the firing had begun, the Genl. [John Thomas] ordered some men down the street to fall some apple trees across the street, to hinder the approach of their Artillery.

Lieut [John] Hazeltine picked up a 12 lbs ball—we were anxious to get their balls as though they were gold balls.

If Carr was commanding on the Neck, the American field-pieces he wrote about weren’t any of the cannon left behind on the Bunker Hill battlefield, but the couple used as an ambush in the Roxbury burying-ground. There might still be a mystery in why Carr was separated from his regiment, and who was commanding those men back on the beach at Charlestown.

Bixby’s last line above is another example of Americans stationed in Roxbury “contending for cannon balls.” However, I still haven’t found an example of a man hurt by not waiting until a ball had stopped rolling to try to pick it up.

Burgoyne, Lee, and Enoch Brown's Tavern

On 8 July 1775, a trumpeter came out of occupied Boston with a letter from Gen. John Burgoyne (at right) to Charles Lee, a British officer who had served under him in Europe. Lee had become a general in the Polish army, then traveled to North America. In early June, a few days before receiving a commission as major-general from the Continental Congress, Lee had written a long, critical letter to Burgoyne. It said:

I sincerely lament the infatuation of the times, when men of such a stamp as Mr. Burgoyne and Mr. [William] Howe can be seduced into so impious and nefarious a service by the artifice of a wicked and insidious Court and Cabinet. . . .

What I have seen of Courts and Princes convinces me, that the power cannot be lodged in worse hands than in theirs; and of all Courts, I am persuaded that ours is the most corrupt and hostile to the rights of humanity. I am convinced that a regular plan has been laid (indeed every act since the present accession evinces it) to abolish even the shadow of liberty from amongst us. It was not the demolition of the tea, it was not any other particular act of the Bostonians, or of the other Province which constituted their crimes; but it is the noble spirit of liberty pervading the whole Continent which has rendered them the objects of ministerial and royal vengeance.

Burgoyne responded with a proposal that the two officers meet at Enoch Brown’s tavern to discuss matters. That tavern sat on Boston Neck between the town’s fortified gates and the provincial lines; the British army was using it as a forward base.

Lee wanted to take up this invitation, and asked the Massachusetts Provincial Congress to send someone along with him. The congress named Elbridge Gerry of Marblehead as their representative, but also expressed worry that the two generals might end up negotiating without due regard for Americans’ chosen representatives.

As it turned out, the New England army prevented any meeting from taking place, at least at Enoch Brown’s tavern. Boston selectmen Timothy Newell recorded what happened that night:

8th [July]. Saturday morning at half past 2 waked up with roaring of cannon and small arms upon the lines which continued two hours. Brown’s house burnt.

Gen. William Heath of Roxbury recorded the provincial attack in his diary:

A little after two o’clock in the morning, a number of volunteers, under the command of Majors [Benjamin] Tupper and [John] Crane, attacked the British advance guard at Brown’s house, on Boston Neck, and routed them, took a halbert, a musket, and two bayonets, and burnt the two houses.

Crane led an artillery company with two brass field-pieces that raked the tavern with grapeshot, forcing the British soldiers inside to run away.

Newell also described the British response on the 9th: “The Regulars last night made an advance battery near Browns on the Neck.” And then the American response to that: “10th July. Provincials last night attacked the Centinels at the lines, and burnt Brown’s shop.” Burgoyne and Lee never had their meeting.