“This Hawkshaw drew his sword upon us”?

Last week I wrote about some letters entrusted to Dr. Benjamin Church on 21–22 Apr 1775 which ended up in the files of Gen. Thomas Gage.

We have evidence that Gage or his staff actually read those letters for the intelligence they contained—because they got someone in trouble.

Thomas Hawkshaw was a lieutenant in the 5th Regiment of Foot, having served at that rank since 1771. He was involved in or witness to several conflicts in the first months of 1775.

In late January, Don Hagist reminded me, Lt. Col. George Maddison presided over an army court of inquiry into the actions of Lt. William Myers of the 38th. Myers testified that on 20 January two local men had baited him by calling, “The General was a Rascal” and even “The King was a Rascal.” After Myers “knocked down the man who had spoke in this manner,” the town watch showed up, bringing on a bigger confrontation.

Lt. Hawkshaw was among the witnesses in that inquiry. So, however, were more than twenty other army officers, a former army officer, seven enlisted men, two watchmen, and two civilians. That inquiry ended without apparent action on 28 January.

Four days later, on 1 February, Benjamin Alline and Philip Bass filed a complaint to Lt. Col. William Walcott of the 5th about Lt. Hawkshaw. According to Bass, he was escorting a young woman south of Liberty Tree about 9:30 P.M. the previous night, and Hawkshaw and another officer accosted them. After that confrontation, Bass went to an apothecary for a cut on his arm.

Lt. John Barker wrote in his diary for that day: “Lieut. H–ks–w of the 5th put under Arrest for having been concerned in a Riot yesterday evening, in which an Inhabitant was much wounded by him; it is supposed He will be brought to a Court Martial.”

Hawkshaw insisted, however, that he’d been in bed by 9:00 P.M. There’s no record of a formal army inquiry, so perhaps he found witnesses to confirm that and the locals had to let the matter drop.

Years back Prof. Gene Tucker of Temple University sent me transcriptions from the reminiscences of a Revolutionary War veteran named Samuel Cooper (1757-1840). He recounted several anecdotes about conflicts in Boston, but the details don’t match contemporaneous accounts, suggesting that Cooper was working with secondhand knowledge and faulty memory.

One incident stands out because Cooper said he was personally involved in it:

A party of young men, consisting of Benj. Eustis, his brother Geo[rge]., Jno. Cathcart, Ben Hazzard, Tim Green, Jim Otis, & myself had assembled about 9 o[’]cl[oc]k in the even[in]g at the corner of one of the streets, when we were approached by several officers, among them was a Lt. Hawkshaw of the 5th. We were comm[an]d[ed]. to disperse & go home & on our declining to do so this Hawkshaw drew his sword upon us but he had hardly time to raise it before he was disarmed by some of our party & the sword broken over his head; the rest of his associates withdrew.

Cooper didn’t specify when this happened, and frankly I doubted it happened as he described. In some of these fights an officer might lose his sword, as Ens. Henry King did in the January fracas. But this quick Yankee triumph sounds too good to be true, and no other report matches it.

Lt. Hawkshaw seems to have been very visible during those months in Boston. People complained about him by name while not identifying other officers who were with him. Or possibly Hawkshaw had become unpopular with the locals because of his testimony in the Myers inquiry, so people were eager to cast blame on him. But he was never brought to a court-martial.

In early April the lieutenant testified in the army inquiry about the dispute between his regimental commander, Lt. Col. Walcott, and Ens. Robert Patrick, discussed here.

And then came the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

TOMORROW: Shot in the face.

Exploring the Story of Samuel Dyer

This week I have two articles up on the Journal of the American Revolution:

• “The Return of Samuel Dyer: An Attempted Assassination in Revolutionary Boston”
• “The Secrets of Samuel Dyer”

These are two parts of the same research project. To borrow the summary from the second article:

in October 1774 a sailor named Samuel Dyer returned to Boston, accusing high officers of the British army of holding him captive, interrogating him about the Boston Tea Party, and shipping him off to London in irons. Unable to file a lawsuit for damages, Dyer attacked two army officers on the town’s main street, cutting one and nearly shooting another—the first gunshot aimed at royal authorities in Boston in the whole Revolution. Those actions alarmed both sides of the political divide, and Dyer was soon locked up in the Boston jail. Everyone seemed to agree the man was insane.

But there was a lot more going on than Bostonians could see. And Dyer resurfaced in an unexpected way.

Originally I wrote up this story for The Road to Concord, but it has only a passing connection to that book’s focus, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s cannon. Still, the events involved many of the same players and further raised tensions in October 1774. Dyer’s attack could even have started the war in a way quite different from how we remember it.

To spread the word about this project, I’ll do a couple of audio interviews in the next few days.

On the morning of Friday, 7 April, starting at 10:00 A.M., I’ll be Jimmy Mack’s guest on the Dave Nemo show on Sirius XM, discussing the months leading up to April 1775. This will be part of the show’s “Revolution Road” segment featuring writers from the Journal of the American Revolution.

On Sunday, I’ll discuss these articles with Brady Crytzer for the Dispatches podcast. That episode will drop later this month.

“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.

“Five field Officers, to enquire into the circumstance of the Riot”

The morning after the fight between British army officers and town watchmen that I reported yesterday, the higher authorities swung into action.

That morning six selectmen met at Faneuil Hall: John Scollay, John Hancock, Thomas Marshall, Samuel Austin, Oliver Wendell, and John Pitts. The record of that session says: “Mr. [Benjamin] Burdick & other Constables of the Watch, appeared and complained to the Selectmen of great abuses received from a number of officers of the Army, the last Night.”

The selectmen must have asked the watchmen to produce sworn testimony because that afternoon “Mr. Isaac Pierce, Mr. Joseph Henderson & Mr. Robert Peck & Mr. Constable Burdick gave in their Depositions.”

Gov. Thomas Gage, who was also the general in charge of the soldiers, took steps the same day—a politic move to calm the town. Lt. John Barker wrote in his diary, “A court of Enquiry is order’d to set next Monday, consisting of five field Officers, to enquire into the circumstance of the Riot.”

The prospect of punishment might, however, have made some officers more resentful. The merchant John Andrews wrote on 22 January:

The Officers’ animosity to the watch still rankling in their breast, induc'd two of them to go last night to the watch house again at about 10 o’clock and threaten the watch that they would bring a file of men and blow all their brains out.

The watch thereupon left their cell and shut it up, and went and enter’d a complaint to the Selectmen—some of whom waited on the Governor at about 12 o’clock, who was very much vex’d at the Officers’ conduct, and told the Gentlemen that he had got the names of three that were concern'd in Fryday night’s frolick, and was determin’d to treat them with the utmost severity—and likewise order’d a guard to patrole through every street in town and bring every officer to him that they should find strolling or walking.

Fortunately, the 22nd was a Sunday, so nobody really expected to be out having fun in Boston, anyway.

On Monday, 23 January, the court of enquiry met. It was headed by Lt. Col. George Maddison of the 4th regiment, with two other lieutenant colonels and two majors on the bench. They took testimony every day from Monday to Saturday, according to records in Gen. Gage’s files.

Barker wrote, “it is supposed it will be a tedious affair, and will not be finished for some time.” Andrews also reported:

Yesterday the Officers were all examin’d at the New Court house, respecting fryday night’s affair, being carried there under arrest, nine in number (after which the General is to deal with them): being a great number of evidences they were oblig’d to adjourn till [to] day.

The list of witnesses included:

• five army captains, including Hugh Maginis of the 38th, who had fought with the watch back in November.
• twelve lieutenants from the army and Marines, including Gage’s aide de camp Harry Rooke; Lt. House of the 38th, who had sustained a cut on his forehead; William Pitcairn of the Marines, son of the major commanding that unit; and William Sutherland of the 38th, who would later leave a detailed report on the Battle of Lexington and Concord.
• seven ensigns, including Ens. King of the 5th, whose sword had been taken.
• a sergeant and at least five privates.
• “Mr. Winslow,” who had been escorting Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver’s wife Elizabeth home from “Mr. Vassall’s,” probably her brother, John Vassall.
• watchman William McFadden.
• “Thomas Ball Esqr. late Capt. in the Royal Irish Regt. of Foot,” who testified that townspeople were yelling at the soldiers to fire.

At the start of the inquiry John Andrews had high expectations: ”the Captain of the Guard [John Gore] at least will be broke, for being drunk when on duty.”

Meanwhile, some of the town’s justices of the peace held their own hearings.

TOMORROW: The magistrates’ findings.

“King Hancock” and Samuel Dyer

A few days back, I quoted two appearances of the phrase “King Hancock” from 1770, noting that it was written down only when one side of the political divide was attacking the other, usually sarcastically.

That makes it very hard to figure out the phrase’s original meaning—was it ever a sincere compliment to John Hancock? It’s also hard to know who in pre-Revolutionary America actually used the term, as opposed to who was accused of using the term by political opponents.

Take, for example, this appearance of the phrase in the 20 Oct 1774 Norwich (Connecticut) Herald, reporting news from Newport, Rhode Island:

Last Tuesday arrived…Mr. Samuel Dyre, of Boston; who gives this account of himself;---That on the 6th of July last, early in the morning, he was kidnapped by the soldiers in Boston, in consequence of orders from Col. [George] Maddison, and carried into the [army] camp, confined in irons, and kept so till early the next morning, when he was conveyed on board the Captain, Admiral [John] Montague, still in chains.

When he was first confined in the camp, Col. M-------n asked him who gave him orders to destroy the tea, to which he replied nobody; the Col. said he was a damned liar, it was King Hancock, and the damned sons of liberty, and if he did not tell he should be sent home in the ship Captain, where he should be hung like a dog; then told him to prepare a good story, that General [Thomas] Gage would come to examine him, &c. . . .

We must leave time to unfold this dark, very dark affair, of governmental kidnapping, which is a true spawn of hell, nursed up by the church of Rome!

We thus have another American describing how another Briton described other Americans. More specifically, another American Whig, quoted in Whig newspapers, accused a British military man of using the term “King Hancock” to suggest that was how Americans thought of John Hancock. [And I bet you didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition to show up at the end there.]

Adding to the confusion, Dyer is an unreliable witness. He told wild, and wildly different, stories to people on either side of the conflict. He tried to assassinate a British officer. He persecuted American prisoners. And yet he really was held captive and transported by the British military. (Someday I’ll trace Dyer’s whole twisted story.)

So I don’t think this newspaper story is solid evidence of what Lt. Col. Maddison actually said in 1774. But it is solid evidence that Americans of that time thought it was credible for a British officer to refer to one of their leaders sarcastically as “King Hancock.”

Gen. Gage Secures the Provincial Powder

On 1 Sept 1774, I believe, the American Revolution became a military contest. There was no direct confrontation between military forces (that would not come until December), and there was no violence. But the events of that day and the next seem to have convinced the competing factions that they had to use military as well as political means to thwart the other side.

Before daybreak on that Thursday, 280 British soldiers under Lt.-Col. George Maddison landed from boats in the Mystic River and marched over the hills to the provincial gunpowder storehouse in what’s now called Somerville. That stone building is still standing. (Photograph from Flickr thanks to Bunkosquad. More details from The British Redcoat.)

Gen. Thomas Gage had sent those soldiers after receiving a letter from a general of the Middlesex County militia, William Brattle of Cambridge. It’s a curious missive, written in a courtly third person and never directly coming out and saying what Gage should do. As a member of the Massachusetts Council, Brattle had been a thorn in the side of Gov. Francis Bernard in the 1760s. However, in recent years he had come to side with the Crown authorities. On 27 August he wrote:

Mr. Brattle presents his duty to Governor Gage. He apprehends it his duty to acquaint his Excellency, from time to time, with every thing he hears and knows to be true, and is of importance in these troublesome times, which is the apology Mr. Brattle makes for troubling the General with this letter.

Capt. [Jonas] Minot of Concord, a very worthy man, this minute informed Mr. Brattle that there had been repeatedly made pressing applications to him, to warn his company to meet at one minute’s warning, equipt with arms and ammunition, according to law; he had constantly denied them, adding, if he did not gratify them, he should be constrained to quit his farms and town. Mr. Brattle told him he had better do that than lose his life and be hanged for a rebel: he observed that many captains had done it, though not in the Regiment to which he belonged, which was and is under Col. Elisha Jones, but in a neighboring Regiment. Mr. Brattle begs leave humbly to query whether it would not be best that there should not be one commission officer of the militia in the Province.

This morning the selectmen of Medford came and received their town stock of powder, which was in the arsenal on quarry-hill, so that there is now therein the King’s powder only, which shall remain there as a sacred depositum till ordered out by the Captain-General. To his Excellency General Gage, &c. &c. &c.

Gage didn’t take the drastic step of canceling all militia commissions, but he did send those soldiers to secure the “King’s powder” in the powderhouse before anyone in the countryside thought of removing it. He had legal authority to issue those orders: that powder belonged to the province of Massachusetts, and as governor he was the commander (“Captain-General”) of its militia.

Therefore, dawn on 1 September found Maddison and his soldiers waiting outside the powderhouse until the Sun rose—you don’t go into a gunpowder storeroom with a lit lantern. The men probably took off their boots as well so there was no chance the nails in their soles would set off sparks on the stone floor. As soon as the light was good, they started moving 250 half-barrels of gunpowder from that building onto waiting wagons. Meanwhile, about two dozen soldiers went to Cambridge common, met royal sheriff David Phips, and took possession of two small brass cannons used by the Middlesex County militia.

The wagons of gunpowder and the cannons were all wheeled through Cambridge, Roxbury, and Dorchester to Castle William, the fort in Boston harbor that the army had been using since 1770. The whole operation was over by noon. It had met no opposition. Gage felt secure enough to issue a call later that day for new legislative elections. But the reaction was just beginning.

TOMORROW: The militia rises.