“Five thousand acres of land from Government”

As I described yesterday, the war separated Thomas and Eunice Hazard of Newport, Rhode Island for more than three years, starting when he left the town with the British military in late 1779.

Thomas had to leave since he was an active Loyalist—raiding New England shores for livestock before the British evacuation, spying on Newport’s defenses and commanding an outpost on Long Island afterward.

But with the end of the war in 1783, Thomas Hazard decided to come back to his home state. The Rhode Island Assembly had assigned Eunice his estate (at least, the part not taken to pay debts). What’s more, his older brother Jonathan J. Hazard, who had supported the Continental cause, was an influential member of that legislature.

I’ve found a couple of accounts of how Rhode Islanders received Thomas Hazard. Based on family tradition, his grandson Wilkins Updike wrote in his History of the Episcopal Church, in Naragansett, Rhode-Island (1847):

After the war, Mr. Hazard returned to this State, and the General Assembly, through the influence of his brother, Jonathan J. Hazard, a leading Whig, were inclined to restore his estates if a satisfactory submission should be made. This he indignantly refused, and the confiscation was consummated.

A couple of years ago the Loyalist Trails newsletter drew on Hazard’s own contemporaneous correspondence to provide this account:

Having successfully settled his financial matters in Martha’s Vineyard, Thomas Hazard returned to his Rhode Island home. He anchored his schooner in a convenient harbour and went ashore to see his family. Rebels arrested him, and imprisoned him for five days. They confiscated his vessel and seized all of its contents. The rebels then threatened to execute Hazard unless he paid “the most extravagant charges” to let him go. Ransoming himself, the loyalist was told never to return to Rhode Island “upon pain of death”. Hazard was furious. He concluded his letter to [Gen. Sir Guy] Carleton by saying “if the friends to Government are to be treated in this manner and no notice taken of it, I should be glad to know how to conduct myself for the future.”

Hazard’s attempt to get Carleton to restart the war on his behalf didn’t work.

His Loyalism reinvigorated, Thomas Hazard sailed to England in 1785 and petitioned the Crown for a reward. He received a large land grant in the new colony on St. John’s, now Prince Edward Island. In 1786 he summoned Eunice and his children to come settle with him there.

The three surviving children of Thomas’s first marriage had married in Rhode Island, however. He wrote to his daughter Abigail Watson, inviting her to emigrate:

I have got five thousand acres of land from Government, and am to settle it in one year, or give up that which will not be settled on. I have for you, if your husband will come and settle on it, five hundred acres of good land that lies on a harbor, where you can catch plenty of all kinds of fish, and there is good timber and hay on it; if you do not come or send and settle on it this summer, you cannot have it in the same place.

Neither Abigail nor her full siblings took up that offer to resettle in Canada.

Eunice made the move with her children, their ages then ranging from early twentysomething to preteen. That branch of the family changed the spelling of their surname to Haszard (which Thomas might have used previously). Reunited as a couple, Thomas Haszard died in April 1804 and Eunice five years later.

“Left her three years ago in a condition almost helpless”

Yesterday we left Eunice Hazard and her children in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1779 after her husband Thomas evacuated the town with the British military.

In February 1782 she described her situation in a petition to the Rhode Island Assembly:

that she is the wife of Thomas Hazard, late of Narragansett, now a refugee in New York; that the said Thomas Hazard left her three years ago in a condition almost helpless, with seven young children, one of them at the breast, and the rest unable to subsist themselves; and that from that time to this, she has encountered many difficulties in bringing up and supporting the said children, and hath at length exhausted all the resources in her power, and expended not only what remained in her hands of her said husband’s effects, but also nearly the whole of what came to her particular use from the estate of her late honored father; and thereupon she prayed this Assembly to take her unhappy case under consideration, and extend unto her and her children such grace and favor as may seem meet, and in particular to grant her that house and lot of land lying in Newport, which was her said husband’s late estate…

Eunice was a genteel descendant of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, so she commanded sympathy. Pending their final decision, the legislature ordered the official managing the Hazard estate to give her the current year’s rent.

That vote was striking since the state had decreed in July 1780 that Thomas Hazard had “joined the enemy.” Which he had. He had supported the British army during the occupation of Newport by raiding the New England coast for livestock.

Furthermore, in that same month of July 1780, as Christian M. McBurney reveals in Spies in Revolutionary Rhode Island, Hazard had landed back in Rhode Island to gather information on the newly arrived French fleet. After four days stranded behind enemy lines, Hazard escaped back to New York. He then drew a map of the French warships and land defenses that survives in Gen. Sir Henry Clinton’s papers.

In September 1780, Hazard was setting up a military unit at Manor St. George on Long Island. Maj. Benjamin Tallmadge, Continental dragoons officer and spy manager, raided that site in November. The Americans carried off at least one of Hazard’s soldiers—a black man named Misick Parlay.

Despite her husband’s work, in November 1782 the Rhode Island Assembly decided that Eunice Hazard could have his property. But only that part remaining after some was “surrendered to the creditors of the said Thomas Hazard.” And only after she paid the state for “a debt due from the said estate to Martin Howard, Jr.,” apparently the same man who had been colony’s stamp agent in 1765.

Several months later, the war ended. And Thomas Hazard decided to return to his family.

TOMORROW: So how did that go?

The Hazards of Thomas Hazard

Thomas Hazard was born 22 Feb 1727 on the west side of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. He was the descendant of a man of the same name who had come to Boston in the 1630s Puritan migration, then helped to found Newport in 1639.

Hazard inherited a large farm in an area of Kingstown called “Boston Neck.” (Why Rhode Islanders called the western side of Narragansett Bay “Boston Neck” I don’t know, but it’s very confusing.) But Hazard was more interested in the mercantile trade.

About the time he turned twenty, Hazard married Mary Bowdoin. Her grandfather was a Huguenot emigré to Maine; her father moved to Virginia while her uncle James settled in Boston. Mary Hazard was thus a cousin to the James Bowdoin who helped to lead the Boston Whigs and later became governor of Massachusetts.

By marrying a Virginia woman, Thomas Hazard became known as “Virginia Tom,” which distinguished him from his cousin “College Tom” and several other Thomas Hazards living in Rhode Island at the time. The Puritans and their descendants tended to keep reusing the same names.

Thomas and Mary Hazard had nine children, but only three survived to adulthood. The youngest was born Susannah in 1758. When she was a little over a year old, her four-year-old sister Mary died. Susannah was then renamed Mary after her sister and mother, who died in early 1760. Like I said, reusing the same names.

In 1761 Thomas Hazard married nineteen-year-old Eunice Rhodes, a descendant of Rhode Island’s founder, Roger Williams. The next year, she bore her first child. Thomas and Eunice had eight children in all, and seven grew to adulthood. By the last two the family had apparently run out of family first names and had to reuse the surnames of Thomas Hazard’s two wives, Bowdoin and Rhodes.

In 1760, Thomas Hazard and Henry Wall had financed a privateer (possibly the Success, captained by Abel Mincheson) to fight in the Seven Years’ War. It captured a French ship, burdening the investors with “eleven Frenchmen” as prisoners of war. Hazard and Wall secured permission from the Rhode Island Assembly to exchange those men in the Caribbean for “so many English prisoners to be brought back into Newport as the vessel will carry.”

When the Revolutionary War began, Rhode Island was split in two. The British seized Aquidneck Island in December 1776. The rest of the state remained independent. Thomas and Eunice Hazard were in occupied Newport along with their children, ranging from two twentysomethings from Thomas’s first marriage to little Rhodes, born in September 1777.

Soon, as Christian M. McBurney describes in Spies in Revolutionary Rhode Island, Thomas Hazard was participating in raids on the New England coast to collect meat for the Newport garrison. With “sixteen Refugees” he first “brought off a flock of sheep,” outracing ”two privateers” to get back into harbor.

Hazard then signed up under George Leonard, a Plymouth Loyalist who had been one of Lt. Col. Francis Smith’s guides out to Concord on 18-19 Apr 1775. Leonard was organizing Newport Loyalists into military units for both naval and land operations.

Working under Leonard’s command in May 1779, Hazard reported, “We went by my advice to Point Judith and brought off eleven hundred sheep (one hundred of which was my own property). Also brought off sixty head of cattle.” On another they “took a Rebel guard of sixteen men and some inhabitants,” though at the cost of “a Negro man (his property).” Then Hazard “bought a share in an armed vessel” for more raids and scouting missions.

Then the British military pulled out of Newport in October 1779. Hazard sailed with them to New York, leaving Eunice and the children behind.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

(Map of Narragansett Bay from 1777 courtesy of Graham Arader.)