“To submit myself to all the orders and regulations of the army”

On 21 April 1775, two days after fatal fighting began, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s committee of safety adopted this oath for men enlisting in the provincial army:

I, A. B. do hereby solemnly engage and enlist myself as a soldier in the Massachusetts service, from the day of my enlistment to the last day of December next, unless the service should admit of a discharge of a part or the whole sooner, which shall be at the discretion of the committee of safety; and, I hereby promise, to submit myself to all the orders and regulations of the army, and faithfully to observe and obey all such orders as I shall receive from any superior officer.

Most men were already required to serve in the militia, but the committee was now thinking about “the army.”

It took until 1 May before another committee of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress came up with language for an officer’s commission:

THE CONGRESS OF THE COLONY OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY.

To                 Greeting:

We, reposing especial trust and confidence in your courage and good conduct, do, by these presents, constitute and appoint you, the said                 to be                 of the regiment of foot                 raised by the Congress aforesaid for the defence of said colony.

You are, therefore, carefully and diligently to discharge the duty of a                 in leading, ordering and exercising the said                 in arms, both inferior officers and soldiers, and to keep them in good order and discipline; and they are hereby commanded to obey you as their                 ; and you are yourself to observe and follow such orders and instructions as you shall, from time to time, receive from the general and commander in chief of the forces raised in the colony aforesaid, for the defence of the same, or any other your superior officers, according to the military rules and discipline in war, in pursuance of the trust reposed in you.

By order of the Congress,                 the                 , of A. D. 1775.

The congress ordered a thousand copies of that form to be printed.

The Massachusetts Historical Society shares the image of one of those forms, given to Lt. Gamaliel Whiting of Great Barrington on 19 May.

The provincial congress listed Whiting as an ensign when it issued commissions for Col. John Fellows’s regiment on 7 June. It looks like “Ensign” was scraped off and the word “Lieutenant” inserted in three places, and by August the province did list Whiting as a lieutenant.

Someone added a note to this document about an “officer resigning and leaving the company at Springfield on the march to Boston,” allowing/necessitating Whiting’s promotion. Contrary to that note, there’s no evidence he achieved another promotion to captain before the end of the year. So I think family members recalled him stepping in for another man, but they mistakenly thought that happened after this commission rather than before.

(Until recently, the webpage for this document identified it as “Appointment as lieutenant in Massachusetts militia,” but now it correctly says, “Appointment as lieutenant in Massachusetts Bay Colony Regiment of Foot.” That reflects the misconception I discussed back here, that until Gen. George Washington arrived the Americans at the siege of Boston were all militia men. We’re all working on getting that transition right!)

TOMORROW: In the neighboring colonies.

“Capt. Ingersoll was tried by a Court Martial”

In 1766, at the age of thirty-one, Peter Ingersoll opened a tavern and inn in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. (It still exists in greatly expanded form as a bed-and-breakfast called the Wainwright Inn, shown here.) He was from one of the town’s leading families, though not from one of its leading branches.

In 1775, Ingersoll was one of the town’s militia captains. News of the fighting at Lexington and Concord reached Berkshire County on 21 April. Ingersoll and his men assembled, and they marched east five days later. When Massachusetts organized an army for service to the end of the year, Ingersoll and many of the men signed on as part of Col. David Brewer’s regiment.

That regiment ran into problems in the fall. Col. Brewer was tried by court-martial and dismissed on 23 Oct 1775 for insisting that his son, also named David, be ranked and paid as a lieutenant. Such nepotism wasn’t uncommon, but in this case David Brewer, Jr., was back home in Berkshire County while his father was still collecting his pay. So that left the regiment leaderless, and perhaps resentful.

In early December, Capt. Ingersoll was brought up before another court martial—apparently at the regimental level since it’s not mentioned in Gen. George Washington’s general orders. Lt. Gamaliel Whiting of Great Barrington wrote in his diary, transcribed in Charles J. Taylor’s History of Great Barrington: “Dec. 4. Peter Ingersoll try’d by Court Marsh’ll.”

A more detailed account, and a different date, appear in the diary of Pvt. Samuel Bixby:

Dec. 7th, 1775. Thurs: Capt. Ingersoll was tried by a Court Martial for spreading false reports about the Country, tending to defame the General. He was fined £8, and dismissed the service. —

8th. Friday. The same Court fined one man £8.7s., and sentenced him to two years imprisonment in the New Gate Prison in Simsbury [Connecticut], for stealing & deserting; and another man, John Smith, for similar offences, was fined £8, and sentenced to six months at Newgate.

A third diarist, Sgt. Henry Bedinger of Virginia, also recorded court-martial verdicts on 7-9 December, overlapping with Bixby’s account, but not exactly. (He wrote that one man was named John Short.) So it’s not clear whose diary is most reliable. Yet it does seem significant that Bedinger didn’t mention Ingersoll’s case, nor have I found references to it elsewhere. Mike Sheehan was kind enough to look for the captain’s name in Summer Soldiers, James C. Neagles’s listing of more than 3,000 courts-martial in Continental Army records, and it’s not there. So was this proceeding deliberately kept quiet?

Perhaps manuscript records of this proceeding survive in some unexpected archive. They could offer details of what “false reports” Ingersoll spread and how they tended to “defame the General”—namely Washington. Was the tavern-keeper frustrated by the slow pace of the siege? Angry about Brewer’s dismissal? Pessimistic about the Patriot cause?

Whatever the details, Ingersoll went home to Great Barrington, probably in a huff. He went away without filing the paperwork the state would need to pay his men. Since it was already December, and people’s enlistments were up at the end of the year, his early return might not have been that conspicuous. (After all, David Brewer, Jr., had come back much earlier.)

Still, word got around town. The next March, after one of Great Barrington’s militia companies narrowly elected Ingersoll their captain, some men complained. New colonel Mark Hopkins described the problem to the Massachusetts Council:

a large number of the soldiers appear to be very uneasy with the officers elected. Those of the South Company say that Captain Peter Ingersoll was broke last fall by the sentence of a Court-Martial in the Continental Army, and was then declared incapable of sustaining any office in the Continental service.

By July, Ingersoll was out of Hopkins’s regiment and in another, still a captain. But I don’t know how long that lasted. Ingersoll died in 1785.

Local histories—even the one that quoted a neighbor and fellow officer saying he went before a “Court Marsh’ll”—treat Capt. Peter Ingersoll as an admirable contributor to the American cause. They say nothing about how he was cashiered for defaming Gen. Washington.

TOMORROW: Trouble in the Berkshire County militia.