“A respectable and well-known Officer”

For Thomas Seward, his military service in the Continental artillery, rising from lieutenant to brevet major over eight years, remained an important part of his identity after the war.

Seward was an original member of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati and served on its standing committee in the 1790s.

Like a lot of networked Continental Army officers, he eventually accepted a job in the federal government, becoming an officer of the United States Customs in Boston in 1796.

When Alexander Hamilton was vetting officers for the “Quasi-War” with France in 1798, Henry Knox apparently told him that Seward was “advanced in years & corpulent,” and would be best as a “Garrison Capt” rather than in the field, but there were “few better Officers.”

Thomas Seward’s namesake son, a merchant captain, married in 1799. The following year, the major’s wife, Sarah, died in March.

On 28 Nov 1800 the Massachusetts Mercury reported in its Deaths section:

Yesterday, Major Thomas Steward, aged 60. A respectable and well-known Officer in the revolutionary army of the United States. His funeral will be from his late dwelling at the bottom of Middle-street, near Winnisimet-Ferry, this afternoon, which his relations and friends are requested to attended, without further invitation.

[pointing hand] The Members of the Cincinnati are respectfully requested to attend the funeral.

The next day’s Jeffersonian Constitutional Telegraph repeated the sentence describing Seward as a “respectable and well-known Officer” and added a new line: “A firm and determined Republican.” The major had taken sides in the nation’s political divide.

Seward died without a will, so probate judge George R. Minot appointed his late wife’s sister Abigail Brett to work out the estate. The inventory she filed shows that Seward owned many artifacts of gentility: a silver watch, a Bible and seventeen other books, an angling rod, two canaries in a cage, a $35 desk, $100 worth of wearing apparel. The house contained twenty pictures of various sizes, including two of “Bounaparte & Lady”—reflecting early Republican admiration for France.

That inventory also confirms that Seward owned a pew in the Rev. John Murray’s Universalist meetinghouse. At some point he had moved from an orthodox Congregationalist meeting to this liberal new sect. Among other converts to Universalism was Col. Richard Gridley, the artillery officer Seward had served under back in 1775.

TOMORROW: Why we remember Thomas Seward.

The Legend of Lemuel Robinson and Two Brass Cannon

After The Road to Concord was published, Earl Taylor of the Dorchester Historical Society sent me some pages from a book that preserves another family tradition about the Boston train’s stolen cannon.

The book is titled A Family Story, and the author was a great-grandchild of Lemuel Robinson of Dorchester. Which great-grandchild is unclear—there’s no author name on or inside the book. It ends with an 1888 letter, so the University of California cataloguer guessed the book was published around 1889.

The opening page quotes from an 1870 Robinson genealogy by the author’s brother Edward. That quotation matches a passage in William and Anne Robinson of Dorchester, Mass., by Edward Doubleday Harris (1839-1919, possibly shown here—see Leigh McKinnon’s Flickr page for the mystery). That genealogy was published in 1890, so either the author of A Family Story alluded to an earlier edition or that 1870 date is a misprint.

Edward’s book lists his siblings still living in 1890. Given the reticence, I suspect the Family Story author was one of his sisters—which narrows our search down to a mere five candidates.

The oldest Harris sibling, William Thaddeus Harris, had been librarian of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Several other relatives wrote antiquarian and historical books, so the family standards for historical evidence were above average. At the same time, the audience for this book was clearly other members of the extended family, unlikely to be skeptical about tales of ancestral heroism.

So here’s what A Family Story says:

We have found mention in the Provincial Records of the field pieces which Col: Robinson succeeded in taking out of Boston under the very eyes of the sentries. . . . The patriot army needed much these field pieces, the property of the province, but no fire arms nor ammunition were allowed to be taken out of Boston; strict watch was kept that none should be removed.

Col. Robinson donned a carter’s frock and mien, and drove into Boston with a large load of fresh garden truck which the inhabitants would gladly welcome;—later why should he not drive innocently out again, past all the keen-eyed, vigilant sentries[,] his large wagon heaped with a huge load of manure which the town desired to be rid of? (When I look at the portrait of the Colonel, I wonder that his eyes had not betrayed him!) Before many hours passed[,] the field pieces—two brass cannon—from beneath their malodorous cover, were snugly hidden in Colonel Robinson’s barn, northeast of his dwelling house.

You all perhaps have heard the tale of the search by the exasperated British soldiers sent out by the orders of Gen: [Thomas] Gage, when it became known that the field pieces were gone, and suspicion turned upon Col: Robinson; how they came to our ancestor’s house and found only women and children to answer their angry questioning, who could give them no information concerning the missing treasure. After searching the premises, they turned to the barn and swinging open the great [front] doors, were confronted by such a mass of cobwebs across the entrance, that a laugh burst from them all, and they turned horse and rode away—leaving the field pieces for the use of the Continental Army.

The first line about “Provincial Records” produces some skepticism for me. Our unnamed author has clearly done some research about the brass cannon taken from Boston, two of which at that point had been on display in the Bunker Hill Monument for decades. As a result, we’re not getting the unvarnished Robinson family tradition. We’re getting that tradition polished and perhaps trimmed to fit around the enshrined cannon and the author’s other sources.

TOMORROW: Assessing the details.

“How the Cambridge Alarm Led to the Concord Fight,” in Cambridge, 20 Oct.

Last March I spoke at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site about “The End of Tory Row.” That talk was about that Cambridge neighborhood in the early 1770s, defined by one extended family of wealthy Anglican sugar-plantation owners. Their comfortable community came to an abrupt end on 2 Sept 1774.

On Thursday, 20 October, I’m returning to the Longfellow–Washington site to tell the next chapter of that story: “How the Cambridge Alarm Led to the Concord Fight.” Like the story of the “Tory Row” neighborhood, that narrative also involves extended family networks. The Road to Concord includes a dive into the family of young Samuel Gore, including his brothers-in-law Thomas Crafts and Moses Grant, to see why they became ready to rebel. But there are other families I could have traced out the same way.

Let’s take George Trott (1741-1780), a jeweler and goldsmith in Boston. Trott and Crafts were both members of the “Loyall Nine” who organized the public protests against the Stamp Act in 1765. Trott became the second-in-command of the train, Boston’s militia artillery company, while Crafts was the third-ranking officer.

Trott married Ann Boylston Cunningham (1745-1810), daughter of James and Elizabeth Cunningham. Her youngest sibling, Andrew (1760-1829), was the teen-aged assistant to South Writing School master Samuel Holbrook in September 1774. That’s when the train’s four small brass cannon disappeared, two of them from a building right next to the school. Coincidence? I doubt it. (I’ll describe who removed those cannon and how in my talk.)

By early 1775 those four brass cannon had been smuggled out of Boston to Lemuel Robinson’s tavern in Dorchester. Robinson (1736-1776) was an obvious choice to hide those guns. He was the captain of the militia artillery company for Suffolk County outside Boston, and he was active in the Whig movement. He put Liberty Tree on his tavern sign and hosted Boston’s Sons of Liberty at a big dinner in 1769.

Was there a family connection between Trott and Robinson? Robinson was raised in Dorchester by his maternal grandfather, Thomas Trott (1685-1762). George Trott’s father was also named Thomas Trott (1705-), a blacksmith of Boston. Genealogists have had trouble sorting out or connecting those families, though.

Robinson’s wife was born Jerusha Minot in 1734. Her brother named John (1730-1805) had a son he named George—i.e., Lemuel and Jerusha’s nephew—in 1755. A tradition in Roxbury published as early as 1835 credits a George Minot, son of John, with helping to smuggle two of the train’s four cannon out of Boston. Coincidence? Well, I’m not so convinced by the Minot stories, but if he was involved I’m sure the Robinson-Minot family network played a role. (A Dawes-Williams family network was definitely involved in moving cannon, as I’ll explain.)

My talk at the Longfellow–Washington site, 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge, starts at 6:30 P.M. (Stretches of Brattle Street open up for free parking at 6:00.) We’ll have copies of The Road to Concord for sale and signing afterward. To reserve seats in the carriage house, please call (617) 876-4491 or email reservationsat105@gmail.com.