Two Revolutionary Symposia Coming Up in New York

The month of May brings two gatherings of Revolutionary War researchers in upstate New York, just a scenic drive away from Boston.

Saratoga 250 will host its fourth annual Turning Point Symposium in Schuylerville on 3 May with these speakers:

• Dr. Phillip Hamilton – “Washington’s Artillerist: Henry Knox Commands the Continental Guns”
• Matthew Keagle – “My Dinner with Andre?: Henry Knox Arrives at Fort George on Lake George”
• Dr. Bruce M. Venter – “Irascible Ethan Allen: He Cared Little About Ticonderoga’s Guns”
• Michele Gabrielson – “American Calliope: The Writings of Mercy Otis Warren and Her Friendship with Henry Knox”
• Dr. Mark Edward Lender – “The Woman at the Gun Reconsidered: Molly Pitcher’s Legendary Performance at Monmouth”

Registration for that day is $89 and includes two meals.

The following day, 4 May, Hamilton will conduct a bus tour of the “Sled Tracks of Henry Knox.” That has a separate registration cost.

At the end of the month, the Fort Plain Museum convenes its annual American Revolution Conference in Johnstown. This year’s presenters include:

• Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson – “The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780”
• Maj. Gen. Jason Q. Bohm, U.S.M.C. (Ret.) – “The Birth and Early Operations of the Marine Corps: 250 Years in the Making”
• Alexander R. Cain – “We Stood Our Ground: 250th of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775”
• Abby Chandler – “Choosing Sides: North Carolina’s Regulator Rebellion and the American Revolution”
• Gary Ecelbarger – “The Mammoth of Monmouth: George Washington’s 1778 Campaign in New Jersey”
• Michael P. Gabriel – “Richard Montgomery and the Other Invasion of Canada”
• Shirley L. Green – “Integrating Enslaved and Free: Rhode Island’s Revolutionary Black Regiment”
• Don N. Hagist – “Marching from Peace into War: British Soldiers in 1775 America”
• Patrick H. Hannum – “The Virginia Campaign of 1775-76: Kemp’s Landing & Great Bridge”
• Wayne Lenig – “The Mohawk Valley’s Committee of Safety in 1775”
• James L. Nelson – “Bunker Hill: The First Battle of the American Revolution”
• Eric H. Schnitzer – “Breaking Convention: How a Fussy Detail about British Uniforms Doomed Burgoyne’s Army to Captivity”
• William P. Tatum III, Ph.D., the James F. Morrison Mohawk Valley Resident Historian – “‘To Quell, Suppress, and Bring Them to Reason by Force’: Combatting the Loyalist Threat in New York during 1775”
• Bruce M. Venter – “‘It is infinitely better to have a few good men than many indifferent ones’: Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys Take Fort Ticonderoga”

This program extends from the afternoon of Friday, 30 May, to the morning of Sunday, 1 June. Registration for people not already members of the museum costs $160 and includes lunch on Saturday.

The Fort Plain conference also offers a bus tour—in this case beforehand, on Thursday, 29 May. Alex Cain will guide attendees along the Battle Road in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. So that would be a busman’s holiday for folks coming from the Boston area.

“Illuminating” Symposium in Williamsburg, 7 Dec.

On Saturday, 7 December, the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation will present a symposium in Williamsburg, Virginia, on the theme of “Illuminating the Role of Six American Founders.” The day’s presentations will include:

Christian Di Spigna: “Founding Martyr: Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero.” A Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Columbia University, Di Spigna wrote the Warren biography Founding Martyr and is the Executive Director of the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation.

Edward G. Lengel, Ph.D.: “First Among Many Founders: George Washington Guides the Revolution to Victory.” For many years Lengel directed the Washington Papers Project. He has written fourteen books on different periods of American history, including General George Washington: A Military Life and Inventing George Washington.

Elizabeth Mauer: “There Were Founding Mothers Too: Martha Washington Supports the Revolution.” Maurer is the Chief of Programs & Education at the National Museum of the United States Army, having previously held various roles at Colonial Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, the National Women’s History Museum, and the D.E.A. Museum. She’s a former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Museum Education.

Gordon Steffey, Ph.D.: “‘Better known than acknowledged’: Richard Henry Lee and the American Cause.” Steffey is the Director of Research and of the Jessie Ball duPont Memorial Library at Stratford Hall. For nearly twenty years he taught at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, holding an endowed chair in Comparative Philosophy.

Bruce M. Venter, Ed.D.: “Rough-hewn and Enigmatic Founder: Ethan Allen Does Some Crazy Things.” President of America’s History, L.L.C., Venter organizes an annual conference on the American Revolution that’s considered the premier symposium for Revolutionary War enthusiasts, public historians, and scholars. He’s the author of The Battle of Hubbardton: The Rear-Guard Action that Saved America.

Stephen Wilson: “‘Give me liberty or give me death!’: One of America’s Most Important Speeches Celebrates its 250th Anniversary.” As Executive Director at the St. John’s Church Foundation, Wilson highlights the effect of Patrick Henry’s famous speech in that building on 20 Mar 1775.

This Founders Illuminated symposium will take place in the Williamsburg Regional Library Theatre starting at 9:00 A.M. The $95 registration fee includes lunch at the Hound’s Tale and snacks. For more information and to register, follow this link.

Though this event isn’t associated with Colonial Williamsburg, folks attending it will also be able to see that historic museum’s first Grand Illumination, or fireworks show, of the season.

“You will have doubtless have an account of their surprizing Ticonderoga”

One striking feature of Richard Lechmere’s 22 May 1775 letter to Henry Seymour Conway, partially transcribed here, is how well informed the Loyalist merchant was about events outside besieged Boston.

Lechmere wrote to the British politician:

you will have doubtless have an account of their surprizing Ticonderoga in which Fort, there was upwards of One hundred pieces of Cannon, and some Mortars, these they are bringing down, and a Considerable train are expected to arrive from Providence to Morrow...

Col. Ethan Allen had led the takeover of Fort Ticonderoga on 10 May, only twelve days before. Lechmere not only had that news, but also an estimate of how many artillery pieces the rebels would find there.

Lechmere understood that ordnance was to be brought to the siege lines around Boston. The Massachusetts committee of safety’s orders for Col. Benedict Arnold also stated that possibility. It wasn’t some wild brainstorm of Henry Knox later in the year.

The letter also refers to “a Considerable train…from Providence.” On 8 May the Rhode Island government had commissioned John Crane as a captain of an artillery company. However, he brought only four small cannon to the siege lines. Those weren’t “Considerable,” even by Rhode Island standards, though they did double the number of brass artillery pieces available to the Continentals. Most artillery in Rhode Island was, I suspect, being held back for privateering.

But that wasn’t all Lechmere had heard about. He had heard news from Pennsylvania:

Mr. [Benjamin] Franklyn & General [Charles] Lee are Arriv’d at Philadelphia the former chosen a Delegate to the Congress & most probably the Latter may be appointed Generalissimo of the Rebel Army. Birds of a feather flock together

Lechmere probably had only a dim awareness, if any, of George Washington from Virginia. Lee, on the other hand, was a celebrated veteran of the British army who had come through Massachusetts the previous year. Lechmere wasn’t the only contemporary to mention him as a candidate to be commander-in-chief.

New Collection from the Journal of the American Revolution

Next month Westholme Publishing will issue The Journal of the American Revolution Annual Volume 2024, edited ably once again by Don N. Hagist.

This webpage about the book says it will contain two articles by me.

In fact, the book will have only one article from me. That’s because I combined my two web articles about the confounding Samuel Dyer into one complete study.

This volume offers many other articles about Revolutionary New England, including:

• Remember Baker: A Green Mountain Boy’s Controversial Death and Its Consequences by Mark R. Anderson
• John Hancock’s Politics and Personality in Ten Quotes by Brooke Barbier
• Mercy Otis Warren: Revolutionary Propagandist by Jonathan House
• Captain James Morris of the Connecticut Light Infantry by Chip Langston
• Smallpox Threatens an American Privateer at Sea by Christian McBurney
• John Adams and Nathanael Greene Debate the Role of the Military by Curtis F. Morgan, Jr.
• The Perfidious Benjamin Church and Paul Revere by Louis Arthur Norton
• The Highs and Lows of Ethan Allen’s Reputation as Reported by Revolutionary-Era Newspapers by Gene Procknow
• Captain Luke Day: A Forgotten Leader of “Shays’s Rebellion” by Scott M. Smith
• Engaging the Glasgow by Eric Sterner

(My apologies to the authors of any other relevant articles I missed.)

And there are of course lots of articles about the American Revolution in, you know, other places.

Ethan Allen, Potential Loyalist

At Borealia, the blog about early Canadian history, Benjamin Anderson, a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh, shared some of his research on the Loyalists of Vermont.

More specifically, Anderson wrote on the question of whether Ethan Allen, conqueror of Fort Ticonderoga and then a prisoner of the Crown for three long years, was ready to fall into that category:

It was the summer of 1780 when Ethan Allen, Vermont’s self-proclaimed leader, was approached by a man on a dusty road to Arlington. Beverly Robinson, a Virginian Loyalist and friend of British Commander-in-Chief Henry Clinton, looked down at Allen from atop his horse and handed him a piece of paper. It was a proposal to Allen and Vermont: renounce their commitment to the Union, return to the British Empire, and they could potentially be rewarded with a “separate government under the king and constitution of England” with their lands validated.

Allen, and later his brother Ira and their friend Joseph Fay, tried to play the British and Americans off against each other for local advantage. Ultimately the Franco-American victory at Yorktown changed the equation.

Yet that was not the end of the matter for Ethan Allen. Throughout the 1780s, he maintained contact with the British and continued to push for Vermont rejoining the British Empire. He was “as rapacious as a wolf,” according to [Gen. Frederick] Haldimand. As late as 1788, he made overtures about a potential alliance or Vermont rejoining the empire as a means of protecting Vermont from a threatening United States, as well as its invaluable trade that was dependent on Quebec and the St. Lawrence River.

Allen’s fame grew from his 1779 Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity, which appeared before his negotiations with British commanders. His infamy in early America came out of publishing Reason: The Only Oracle of Man, the argument for deism he created with Dr. Thomas Young. As a result, Allen’s dance with Loyalism, and what that says about his status as an American hero, got lost in the shuffle until recent decades. 

A Season of Talks at the David Library

Here’s the lineup of upcoming talks at the David Library of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania. That’s a striking venue with a loyal audience, and its offerings cover the entire war—note how many different people and events proved absolutely crucial to the Revolution.

Thursday, 20 September, 7:30
John Oller, “A Patriot (But Not THE Patriot)”
The author of The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution will explore the life and military campaigns of Francis Marion. Like Robin Hood of legend, Marion and his men attacked from secret hideaways before melting back into the forest or swamp, confounding the British. Although Marion bore little resemblance to the fictionalized portrayals in television and film, his exploits were no less heroic. He and his band of militia freedom fighters kept hope alive for the patriot cause in one of its darkest hours, and helped win the Revolution.

Thursday, 4 October, 7:30
Bob Drury, “The Existential Moment: How The Valley Forge Winter Saved the Revolution, Created the United States, and Changed the World”
Bob Drury is co-author (with Tom Clavin) of the new book Valley Forge. In his talk, he will outline how George Washington and his closest advisers spent six months on a barren plateau 23 miles from enemy-held Philadelphia fighting a war on two fronts—militarily against the British, and politically against a Continental faction attempting to depose him as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army. How he deftly prevailed on both of these fronts shaped the world as we know it today.

Sunday, 7 October, 3:00
Robert Selig, “The Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route National Historic Trail in the State of Pennsylvania”
In 2008, President Obama signed legislation establishing the land and water routes that were traveled by the allied French and American armies to and from Yorktown in the summer of 1781 as a National Historic Trail. That trail stretches from Newport, Rhode Island, and Newburgh, New York, and includes Pennsylvania from Trenton south to Marcus Hook. Yet the very existence of this trail is still largely unknown. Robert Selig, Ph.D., serves as project historian to the National Park Service for the Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route National Historic Trail Project. His lecture will introduce the trail and its historic significance, showing contemporary and modern maps, and important sites he has identified in his research, some of which was conducted at the David Library!

Wednesday, 17 October, 7:30
An Evening with Nathaniel Philbrick
This program comes in cooperation with nearby Washington Crossing Historic Park, which will host the event. The New York Times best-selling author, hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “one of America’s foremost practitioners of narrative nonfiction,” will give a talk about his newest book, In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown. Tickets are $50 for a single seat, and $80 for two. Each individual or couple admission price includes an autographed copy of In the Hurricane’s Eye. Proceeds benefit the David Library and the Friends of Washington Crossing Historic Park. Visit this site to buy tickets in advance.

Thursday, 25 October, 7:30
Stephen Fried, “Reclaiming Dr. Benjamin Rush, Our ‘Lost’ Founding Father”
Bestselling author Stephen Fried, whose latest book is Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father, will help us see the American Revolution, the Federal Period and the human saga of the entire birth of our nation from the unique, fascinating perspective of founding father, physician, philosopher and confidant Benjamin Rush.

Thursday, 1 November, 7:30
Ricardo A. Herrera, “American Citizens, American Soldiers: Civic Identity and Military Service from the War of Independence to the Civil War”
From 1775 through 1861, American soldiers defined and demonstrated their beliefs about the nature of the American republic and how they, as citizens and soldiers, were part of the republican experiment. Despite uniquely martial customs, organizations, and behaviors, the United States Army, the states’ militias, and the war-time volunteers were the products of their parent society. Understanding American soldiers of all ranks, in war and in peace, helps us understand more about American society writ large and how that society shaped its armed forces in the years of the Early Republic. A former David Library Fellow, and currently Professor of Military History at the School of Advanced Military Studies in Kansas, Ricardo A. Herrera, Ph.D., is the author of For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861.

Thursday, 8 November, 7:30
Christopher S. Wren, “Vermont: The Most Rebellious Race”
Before Vermont was Vermont, it was a British territory fought over by such figures as Ethan Allen, who helped form the American Revolutionary War militia known as the Green Mountain Boys. This lecture, by the author of Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom: Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys and the American Revolution, will consider the story of the tough, brave, and wild crew of characters who faced some of the harshest combat in the American Revolution, and made their own rules to create an independent Vermont.

Sunday, 18 November, 3:00
Tilar J. Mazzeo, “The Private Lives and Loves of the Schuyler Sisters”
Mazzeo is the author of the new biography Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton. Her lecture will take a lively look into the lives of Eliza, Angelica and Peggy, the daughters of Philip Schuyler, and the context of colonial and early national women’s lives in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The lecture will draw on information from private family letters and documents, and will cover everything from Eliza Hamilton’s first crushes to the Schuyler family wedding cake recipe to how colonial women leveraged coterie networks to support spy rings in the Revolution.

Thursday, 6 December, 7:30
Christian di Spigna, “‘The Greatest Incendiary in all America’: The Rise and Fall of Dr. Joseph Warren”
Joseph Warren was the Boston physician who played a prominent role in the earliest days of the Revolution. As president of the revolutionary Massachusetts Provincial Congress, it was he who enlisted Paul Revere and William Dawes on April 18, 1775, to leave Boston and spread the alarm that the British garrison in Boston was setting out to raid the town of Concord. Christian di Spigna is the author of Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution's Lost Hero. His lecture will trace Warren’s rise from humble beginnings to his bloody death at Bunker Hill, and examine Warren’s postmortem journey over the years from Revolutionary hero to relative obscurity.

(My own talk at the David Library a couple of years back can be viewed here.)

Top Honors from the Journal of the American Revolution

The Journal of the American Revolution just announced its 2014 Book of the Year Award.

The winning title is Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities During the War for Independence, by Ken Miller. The Continental authorities housed 13,000 British and Hessian prisoners of war around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and this is an in-depth study of how that affected the community. I haven’t read this book myself—without a New England connection, other titles keep going higher on my list—but I’ve heard good things.

Shortlisted and receiving honorable mentions are:

Nick Bunker, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America. I shared my complimentary thoughts on this book here.

John J. Duffy and H. Nicholas Muller, III, Inventing Ethan Allen. I’m reading this now and enjoying it—but of course I’d like a book that compares a New England legend to contemporaneous sources.

Revolutionary War Comic Coming in 2015

Last month the Nerdist website announced that in April 2015 Dark Horse Comics will launch the comic book Rebels, which “will explore the lives of soldiers, ordinary colonists, and the extraordinary men and women that lived and died during the Revolutionary War era.”

The series was conceived by scripter Brian Wood, and the art will come primarily from the Italian illustrator Andrea Mutti and American-Irish colorist Jordie Bellaire.

Wood created the series Northlanders, about Vikings, which Vertigo published from 2007 to 2012. The Nerdist says:

Wood has proven that he is no stranger to taking a piece of history, modern or ancient, and putting it under the microscope. When it came to tackling a new piece of historical fiction, it was a no-brainer that he wanted to shine a light on the American Revolution. “I’ve had the idea for AGES to write an Ethan Allen story,” Wood explained, “and I made a couple attempts at a screenplay trying to tell a very epic, visceral Ridley Scott type of story about the guy. I couldn’t quite figure it out but its been in the back of my head all this time.”

But Allen won’t be the main character for the whole series. Wood will follow the model of his Northlanders, which told a series of separate stories about different Vikings over the centuries. The scale of Rebels will be smaller, with all the tales set during America’s Revolutionary fight, but there will once again be a variety of characters and conflicts.

Digging for “Heretical” Roots

Matthew Stewart’s new book Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic is getting a lot of attention now. Here are interviews with Stewart in:

• The Boston Globe
• Church & State

And here are reviews of the book in:

• Kirkus
• Christianity Today
• The New Republic
• The Los Angeles Times, which uses a picture of Thomas Young the nineteenth-century British scientist instead of Dr. Thomas Young the eighteenth-century American physician.

As one should expect, the Christianity Review piece by a professor at a Christian college is much more critical than the piece in Church & State, which is the newsletter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Stewart is clearly arguing against claims of our modern religious right that the U.S. of A. was founded on and for Christian beliefs—almost always the beliefs of the people making those claims. As Stewart points out, people of a particular faith tend to assume that when historical figures they admire mention “God,” that means the same God they themselves believe in. But even when people of the past specifically allude to Christianity or Jesus, they may not share the same understanding of those terms and ideas as their modern readers.

That can cut in all directions. “Presbyterian“ was often used as a general derogatory term by eighteenth-century non-Presbyterians. John Adams’s understanding of “Unitarianism” doesn’t map directly onto the modern Unitarian-Universalist creed. And so on.

The interviews and reviews indicate that Stewart has focused his work on certain Revolutionary figures: Young, his friend and coauthor Ethan Allen, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine. But those men were only a narrow slice of a mass movement toward independence and repuhlicanism.

Samuel Adams, for example, appears in those articles above only in the Globe interview as “Sam Adams,” comrade of Young’s. Yet Adams clearly had more influence on the course of the Revolution than Young, who never served in public office and died in 1777. Adams was also a devout Calvinist, and therefore less helpful to Stewart’s thesis.

As much as I’m pleased to see the name of Dr. Young in a Boston newspaper again, I thought the Globe interview didn’t offer an accurate picture of the man. Stewart twice calls him a “street warrior” but doesn’t identify him as a physician. While Young’s free thinking allowed him to imagine political change (he was a true democrat as early as the late 1760s), his deism was a liability to the local Whig movement; friends of the royal government used Young’s unorthodox beliefs to discredit him in heavily Calvinist Boston. Young and Allen were clearly outliers in the spectrum of American religious thought during his lifetime.

Stewart’s academic background is in philosophy, not history, and he’s shining a spotlight on the classical roots of Enlightenment deism. I hope Nature’s God does better at putting those ideas in the full context of Revolutionary history than the short interviews and reviews allow.

How Long Did Slavery Linger in Vermont?

Last month the Seven Days alternative newsweekly in Burlington reported on Harvey Amani Whitfield’s research on remnants of slavery in Vermont, which we New Englanders usually consider to be the foundation of our anti-slavery tradition:

Whitfield’s research explodes the myth that the abolitionist provision in the Republic of Vermont’s 1777 constitution ended slavery in the territory. The ban on holding black adults as slaves was indeed the first of its kind in the New World and launched Vermont’s progressive tradition, Whitfield acknowledges. But, he adds, an unknown but significant number of black Vermonters remained in bondage several years after slavery was supposedly prohibited.

“In fact, the state is home not only to a rich abolitionist history, but also to the more troublesome story of slavery,” Whitfield writes in The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, 1777-1810.

Limiting the ban to African males older than 21 and females over the age of 18 meant children could lawfully remain enslaved in Vermont for as long as 20 years after the constitution was promulgated. But plenty of adult Vermonters of African descent also did not gain freedom because the 1777 decree went unenforced, Whitfield points out.

Many residents of what would become the State of Vermont in 1791 apparently had no problem with neighbors who continued to hold slaves, Whitfield suggests. Those defying the emancipation initiative included some of “the most respectable inhabitants of the state,” the historian observes in his book.

Among this slave-holding and lawless elite were Vermont Supreme Court Judge Stephen Jacob and Levi Allen, described by Whitfield as “Ethan’s troublesome brother.” And nearly 60 years after the supposed abolition of slavery in Vermont, Ethan Allen’s daughter, Lucy Caroline Hitchcock [1768-1842], returned to Burlington from Alabama in possession of two slaves—a mother and child. Hitchcock continued to enslave this pair for six years in the Queen City.

Ethan Allen himself may also have been a slave owner, Whitfield suggested in an interview. “I can’t say this will be proven, but he does refer to having servants, and in the English Atlantic world references to ‘servants’ often means ‘slaves,’” Whitfield said.

Whitfield is a professor at the University of Vermont, and his book is published by the Vermont Historical Society. Whitfield is speaking at Phoenix Books in Burlington on 13 March.

TOMORROW: Stephen Jacobs and “a certain Negro woman by name of Dinah.”

Richard Carpenter “apprehended and confined in irons”

Two hundred thirty-five years ago today, the British fleet pulled away from Boston’s wharves, carrying several thousand soldiers, about a thousand Loyalist refugees, and a few prisoners that Gen. William Howe deemed too valuable to leave behind.

The most prominent of those was James Lovell, former assistant teacher at the South Latin School. Letters from him were apparently found in Dr. Joseph Warren’s pockets after the battle of Bunker Hill. Lovell had been locked up since the summer of 1775, and had unsuccessfully pleaded with Gen. Washington to exchange him.

Another prisoner on the fleet was Richard Carpenter, the barber who swam from Boston to Dorchester and back in late July 1775.

Boston newspapers tried to keep track of men known to be prisoners (see the examples at Rag Linen), and they spread more news of Carpenter in late July 1776. Here’s the version that appeared in the Boston Gazette on the 29th:

Last Tuesday Evening came to town from Halifax, Lieut. Scott of Peterborough, in New Hampshire Government, who was wounded and taken Prisoner at the memorable Battle of Bunker Hill the 17th of June, 1775, and has been a Prisoner ever since.

He informed, That he with 13 others broke Goal about 5 Weeks ago, and betook themselves to the Woods where they separated; that Captain [Sion] Martindale and his first and second Lieutenants, John Brown, Rifleman, Leonard Briggs of Ware, and himself arrived at Truro at the head of the Cobbecut river, after a travel of 3 days, where they procured a boat and got to the Eastward;

that Richard Carpenter formerly Barber in this town, Philip Johnson Peak, David Kemp of Groton, and Corporal [Walter] Cruse of Virginia, and two others took the road to Windsor where they were apprehended and confined in irons;

that Benjamin Willson of Billerica, one of the Bunker Hill Prisoners died lately in goal; and that he left Master James Lovell still confin’d, in high health and spirits

On 18 September the Connecticut Journal had a long report on prisoners of war “still confined in one room at Halifax, among felons, thieves, robbers, negroes, soldiers, &c.” At the top of that long list were “James Lovil & Richard Carpenter of Boston.” Further down was “Col. Ethan Allen, of Bennington.”

The report concluded, “All in the goal but [Bunker Hill prisoner Daniel] Sessions, are well and in good spirits; but wishing greatly for an exchange.”

TOMORROW: Richard Carpenter free at last.

Ethan Allen and Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

Jeremy Dibbell at PhiloBiblos provided links about a previously uncollected letter from Ethan Allen to Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (shown above), now being auctioned at Christie’s, and a Vermont Times-Argus article about it.

Crèvecoeur (1735-1813) was the first of a long line of French intellectuals who spent some time in the United States and then returned to Europe to write a book about it. In fact, he settled in Orange County, New York, years before the Revolution and raised a family there. Crèvecoeur left for Europe during the war. In 1782, while in London, he published the first edition of his Letters from an American Farmer, which was such a hit that he expanded it through the 1780s. After the Treaty of Paris, Louis XVI made Crèvecoeur the French consul to the states of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, so he was back to the U.S. with some standing.

Meanwhile, Allen was a big man in the independent republic of Vermont. He too was an author, known for his Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity. But Allen was losing influence with his fellow Vermonters, many of whom wanted to join the U.S. of A. He thought the republic’s interests lay with Canada, its major trading partner, and even talked about giving up independence to rejoin the British Empire. He left the capital of Bennington and settled in Burlington, closer to Vermont’s northern neighbor.

During their correspondence, Allen was able to make Crèvecoeur’s American sons into citizens of Vermont, and to have the town of St. Johnsbury named in his honor. (Crèvecoeur used St. John as his surname when he was farming in America.) Allen also sent the consul the book he’d developed from a manuscript of the late Dr. Thomas Young—Reason, the Only Oracle of Man—hoping it would find favor in France.

The newly discovered letter, dated 29 Aug 1787, reveals Allen’s jaundiced view of the prospects for the U.S. of A.:

I fancy that the confusions in the United States have increased beyond your expectation for so short a time, ever since the peace I have been apprehensive that the Federal Government of the United States would be but of short duration. This I suggested to you in our late personal conference. Liberty is not, nor will be, by the bulk of the People distinguished from licentiousness, and any Government that allows such freakish liberties to its subjects cannot endure long. Thirteen independent heads to one connective Government is a political monster and monsters are always short lived...

By “freakish liberties,” Allen was probably talking about the 1786-87 uprising in western Massachusetts that came to be called Shays’ Rebellion. He refused to support that movement, seeing it as a danger. Many of Allen’s fellow Vermonters, however, supported the men behind the uprising; Daniel Shays and others found shelter in the republic.

Even as Allen wrote, the U.S. Constitutional Convention was taking place in Philadelphia, and the New York delegates quietly agreed to let Vermont join the “more perfect Union,” dropping their state’s claim to that land. Vermont was admitted in 1791 at the same time as Kentucky, preserving a north-south balance. Allen had died two years before.

Consider Howland, Privateer Captain

Yesterday I wrote that I don’t know what American prisoner the British gave up for the young midshipman John Loring. But I know it wasn’t privateer captain Consider Howland, even though that man was originally supposed to be part of the deal.

Howland, born in Plymouth in 1745 and given an old family name, was master of the Washington, which sailed out on 2 Dec 1775. And was captured the very next day, as the Pilgrim Hall Museum explains.

Howland and his fellow prisoners were sent to Britain on board the same ship as Ethan Allen and other Americans captured while invading Canada. Many of them died of disease during the voyage, and others got pressed into service in the Royal Navy. Most of the rest were then sent back across the Atlantic to Halifax to be ready for a prisoner exchange.

Howland and some comrades escaped from jail there, but the British authorities recaptured him. In September 1776, when John Loring was probably annoying neighbors in Framingham, Howland, Allen, and some prisoners from the Battle of Bunker Hill were all locked in one chamber of the Halifax jail.

After the British military took the city of New York in a series of battles that fall, the Commissary of Prisoners had Howland and other captives brought south and incarcerated on ships moored off Brooklyn. At that time those ships were probably no worse than the other places they had been held—in later years the New York prison ships would become infamous.

Royal officials let Howland go on 25 Dec 1776, after slightly more than a year in custody. They ordered him to travel to Boston to be exchanged for Midshipman Loring—who was, oddly enough, the little brother of the British Commissary of Prisoners, Joshua Loring, Jr. (His wife, Elizabeth Loring, was becoming notorious as the mistress of Gen. Sir William Howe.)

However, when Howland arrived in Massachusetts, he discovered that the young midshipman had already been exchanged for someone else. In a letter dated 1 Feb 1777, the Commissary of Prisoners told Howland that he should still consider himself as on parole, bound by oath not to take part in the war. He wouldn’t be legally free until he was traded for a prisoner to be named later. After seven months Howland was exchanged for Capt. Gideon White, another Plymouth man who was loyal to the British.

In July 1780 Capt. Consider Howland received the command of the privateer Phoenix, a schooner that carried “2 carriage guns, 6 swivel guns & 12 men.” It was lost at sea that fall. His brother’s headstone in Plymouth contains the additional notice:

In memory of Consider Howland who was lost at sea Octr 1780 aged 35 years.

Crean Brush in “Very Distressed Times”

On 10 Mar 1776, Boston selectman Timothy Newell described a new development in the British authorities’ evacuation of Boston:

Lord’s day P M. Embarking orders are given to deliver Creen Brush esqr. all the woolen and linen goods—

Some persons delivered their goods, others he forced from them, to a great value. Shops, stores, houses, plundered, vessels cut to pieces &c. &c. Very distressed times.

Gen. William Howe had issued this order:

AS Linnen and Woolen Goods are Articles much wanted by the Rebels, and would aid assist them in their Rebellion, the Commander in Chief expects that all good Subjects will use their utmost Endeavors to have all such Articles convey’d from this Place:

Any who have not Opportunity to convey their Goods under their own Care, may deliver them on Board the Minerva at Hubbard’s Wharf, to Crean Brush, Esq; mark’d with their Names, who will give a Certificate of the Delivery, and will oblige himself to return them to the Owners, all unavoidable Accidents accepted.

If after this Notice any Person secretes or keeps in his Possession such Articles, he will be treated as a Favourer of Rebels.

Brush had been the British governors’ designated collector of valuable goods since 1 Oct 1775, when Gen. Thomas Gage issued this proclamation:

To CREAN BRUSH, Esquire.

WHEREAS there are large Quantities of Goods, Wares, and Merchandize, Chattels, and Effects, of considerable Value left in the Town of Boston, by Persons who have thought proper to depart therefrom, which are lodged in Dwelling-Houses, and in Shops, and Store-Houses adjoining to, or making Part of Dwelling-Houses.

AND WHEREAS, there is great Reason to apprehend, and the Inhabitants have expressed some Fears concerning the Safety of such Goods, especially as great Part of the Houses will necessarily be occupied by His Majesty’s Troops and the Followers of the Army, as Barracks during the Winter Season; To quiet the Fears of the Inhabitants, and more especially to take all due Care for the Preservation of such Goods, Wares, and Merchandize:

I have thought fit, and do hereby authorize and appoint you the said CREAN BRUSH, to take and receive into your Care, all such Goods, Chattels, and Effects, as may be voluntarily delivered into your Charge, by the Owners of such Goods, or the Person or Persons whose Care they may be left in, on your giving Receipts for the same; and you are to take all due Care thereof, and to deliver said Goods when called upon, to those to whom you shall have given Receipts for the same.

For Americans who found that Brush had taken their stuff, receipts or no, he became one of the most unpopular Loyalist officials of the war. Perhaps because of that unpopularity, it’s not easy to find solid information about him, especially about his family life. Americans were primed to believe the worst.

But this seems to be the most reliable information, collected by John J. Duffy and Eugene A. Coyle in their 2002 article “Crean Brush vs. Ethan Allen: A Winner’s Tale” in Vermont History (available as a P.D.F. download). Crean Brush was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1727. He became a lawyer, a militia officer, a husband, and, in short order, a father and a widow. Leaving his young daughter with relatives, Brush set out for the colony of New York, arriving by 1762.

Over the next few years Brush accumulated grants for an estimated 50,000 acres in the part of New York that was also claimed by New Hampshire—i.e., what became Vermont. In 1770, he moved to Westminster, where he was the local grandee and royal officeholder. From 1773 to 1775 he represented the town in the New York legislature, firmly supporting the royal authorities. In March 1774, a law Brush helped to draft offered rewards of £50-100 for the capture of Ethan Allen and other men resisting New York control over what they called “the New Hampshire grants.”

After the war began, Brush made his way to Boston and offered his services to Gen. Gage. In January 1776, he proposed to raise a regiment of 300 men to patrol the land between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain for the Crown. But his main activity was collecting goods, which to some looked like pillaging under the cover of military law. As to why Howe and Brush were so eager to confiscate “Linnen and Woolen Goods,” cloth was relatively rare and expensive before the invention of spinning and weaving machines.

More about Crean Brush’s adventures in Boston to follow. The portrait above of him as a young man appeared in Benjamin H. Hall’s History of Eastern Vermont, copyrighted in 1857.