“As ever the two Armies met”

Yesterday we left schoolteacher Jonathan Hastings, Jr., and the rest of Col. Thomas Gardner’s Cambridge militia contingent caught near the Lexington meetinghouse on 19 Apr 1775.

Lt. Col. Francis Smith’s expedition to Concord (which Hastings called “the Detachment”) was headed back their way from the west, harried by other militia companies.

Col. Hugh Percy’s reinforcement column (“the Brigade”) was approaching from the east. Percy had more soldiers. And he had cannon.

We return to Hastings’s 11 June letter, now in the Thomas Gage Papers:

We were commanded to retreat into a thick Grove of Oaks over a Meadow, up to our Knees in water, wch. saved us. The Brigade turned their Artillery immediately upon us.—Their Cannon Balls cut down the Branches of the Trees merrily but none of us were killed.

As ever the two Armies met, it being about 3 Quarters after one OClock, they begun a precepitate Retreat for Bunkers Hill in Charlestown under the Protection of the navy. There were not above 400 that attacked them, being 1850 at once that day. Lord Peircy put the Cannon in Front, himself in the Centre, & the Marines were formed in the Rear. The Grenadiers & Marines were nobly peppered. Peircy had a Ball shot thro’ the Bosom of his shirt.

Two Officers were treppaned in the Red House leading to Charlestown. Quarters were offered them, they refused, replying their Orders were neither to give nor take any Favour. They met Death bravely.—

It is easier for you to imagine, than for me to describe the Horrid Barbarity & savage Cruelty of the British Troops in their Retreat. Houses plundered & burnt, wounded Men begging for mercy, had Bayonets struck into their Heads, & the Piece discharged, Women in Child Bed commanded into the Streets with a Gun at their Breasts, Old Men unarmed thrust thro’ their Bodies. Harmless young Fellows shot dead, such was the horrid Scene.

But on our side no such Vestiges of Cruelty were seen or exercised on any who chose to live: the wounded taken the utmost Care of, & when exchanged for our Men who were taken Prisoners, & have been treated most inhumanly: they cryed like Children to tarry among us.—

Of course, the redcoats had their own tales of atrocities by the enemy, starting with the “scalping” at Concord’s North Bridge.

I can think of one example of a woman who had recently given birth ordered out of her house (Hannah Adams of Menotomy) and one of a young teenager shot when he peeked out a window (Edward Barber of Charlestown). But Hastings’s letter rendered those examples as plural. And I’m not sure what he referred to with the bayonets.

Likewise, Hastings’s numbers of the troops engaged—400 militiamen chasing off 1,850 regulars—are skewed to make his side look good. Many groups of 400 provincials attacked the British column in turn. The Massachusetts force had a clear advantage in numbers.

Hastings wrote of emergency surgeries in “the Red House leading to Charlestown” as if his correspondent knew that location. Indeed, there appears to have been a brick house fitting that description. I haven’t been able to identify who owned or lived there, but sources do refer to its appearance and location.

On 12 May the Massachusetts committee of safety mentioned “the red house at the head of the creek near the road from Cambridge to Charlestown.” Soon provincials built the “Red House Fort,” more commonly called Fort No. 3, to guard a nearby crossroads, as shown in the detail of Henry Pelham’s map above. Today the site is just south of Union Square in Somerville.

TOMORROW: Finishing the letter.

“She was surprised by the firing of the king’s troops”

Last month Alex Cain at Historical Nerdery rounded up four accounts from women who had all-too-close encounters with British troops during the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Those are all stories preserved in the women’s own words, not questionable latter-day legends like Lydia Barnard.

Those accounts survive because:

• Hannah Adams and Hannah Bradish described experiences that the Patriots could present to the world as atrocities, and therefore wrote down and spread around in 1775.
• Mary Hartwell and Anna Munroe lived long enough to be among the few people to remember 1775, making other people more interested in hearing and recording their stories.

Here’s a taste of Hannah Bradish’s account:

about five o’clock on Wednesday last, afternoon, being in her bed-chamber, with her infant child, about eight days old, she was surprised by the firing of the king’s troops and our people, on their return from Concord. She being weak and unable to go out of her house, in order to secure herself and family, they all retired into the kitchen, in the back part of the house. She soon found the house surrounded with the king’s troops; that upon observation made, at least seventy bullets were shot into the front part of the house; several bullets lodged in the kitchen where she was, and one passed through an easy chair she had just gone from.

After the battle, Bradish reported finding many things missing, “which, she verily believes, were taken out of the house by the king's troops.”

Cain notes that the Rev. David McClure also wrote about seeing houses like Bradish’s along the battle road in Menotomy shot up with musket balls. Indeed, people can see the physical evidence of those shots in the Jason Russell House, as shown above.

But did the British muskets do all that damage? With a finite amount of ammunition, would the regulars have fired so many balls into a house with no one firing back from inside? Or might a lot of those bullets have come from provincial militiamen firing at the redcoats they saw around that house?

Hannah Adams, Comic Book Heroine

The Massachusetts historian and author Hannah Adams (1755-1831) made an appearance in Wonder Woman, #28, published in 1946. She was the focus of a backup feature called “The Wonder Women of History,” and here it is.

Furthermore, it looks like the same story features a cameo by an (unrecognizable and anachronistically dressed) Dr. John Jeffries. His balloon trip across the English Channel might deserve a comics treatment of its own.

How Hannah Adams Spent the Revolutionary War

Hannah Adams was born in Medfield in 1755, daughter of a bookish farmer with little money. She had a big intellect, a nervous disposition, and even less money, but she made herself into a respected author in the new republic.

In her memoir, this is what Adams had to say about her war years.

During the American revolutionary war, I learned to weave bobbin lace, which was then saleable, and much more profitable to me than spinning, sewing or knitting, which had previously been my employment. At this period I found but little time for literary pursuits. But at the termination of the American war, this resource failed, and I was again left in a destitute situation.

With European goods once again coming into North America in quantity, the price for lace must have dropped, and Adams could no longer support herself by making it.

The photo above of a bobbin lace border in progress comes from the Chesapeake Region Lace Guild. Here are more action photos from Jill Hall at Plimoth Plantation.

Meeting Hannah Adams at the Library

I just noticed that the Boston Athenaeum’s featured author for November and December was Hannah Adams (1755-1831). Noah Sheola’s essay says:

Afflicted by chronic ill health, Adams spent her childhood [in Medfield] reading the contents of her father’s ample library. Living on the brink of poverty, the Adamses took in boarders, from whom Hannah learned the rudiments of Greek and Latin. Before long she was doing her part to support the family by tutoring the young men of Medfield who aspired to the college education she could not obtain. Drawing on her expansive reading, Adams began work on an exhaustive survey of Christian denominations, with the aim of publishing a kind of dictionary that would eschew the judgmental tone which, in Adams’s view, marred similar works then in print.

Adams’s liberal religious views became an issue when she set out to prepare a history textbook for schools, and complained about competition from another author, who also happened to be the very orthodox Congregationalist minister at Charlestown.

Her subsequent work, A Summary History of New England (1799), became the basis for a bitter dispute with Jedidiah Morse [1761-1826], author of the hugely successful Universal Geography, when in 1805 Adams wished to publish an abridgment of her history for school use. Morse was preparing a similar work and Adams felt that he was impinging on a market to which she had staked claim. Morse, a Calvinist pastor, countered that he had every right to publish whatever he pleased and accused Adams’s Unitarian backers of instigating the affair to bruise his reputation in the context of an ongoing interdenominational spat. While arbiters eventually determined that Morse owed her nothing, the moral victory belonged to Adams, for the public largely resented the pastor’s perceived indifference to the welfare of an aged woman of modest means.

The Athenaeum became a circulating library in 1827, and two years later gave Adams free borrowing privileges. As a poor author she probably couldn’t afford a full membership, and as a woman she probably wasn’t offered it.

(Wikipedia being as it is, I see that about half of its entry on Jedidiah Morse is about his part in the Illuminati scare of 1798. More on that here if you’re interested.)

“No Religious Test Shall Ever Be Required”

Tea Party Nation, one of the many overlapping political groups that grew out of the Republican right last year, has sent out an email stating reasons to vote against Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota. Among them:

He is the only Muslim member of congress.

That’s factually wrong, as Rachel Maddow’s commenters pointed out; two Congressmen are Muslim.

It’s also directly contrary to the language of the U.S. Constitution, which states in Article VI:

…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

The Constitution doesn’t bar individual voters from exercising their private bigotries, of course. But Tea Party Nation’s message undermines that movement’s claim to comprehend and follow the Constitution better than anyone else.

Indeed, this stipulation in Article VI is significant because it’s part of the original document, predating even the Bill of Rights. In an essay at History News Network, Prof. Jon Butler of Yale, among the most respected historians of religion in early America, argues that the legislative history of the First Amendment shows Congress choosing to expand the religious freedom it implied:

In June 1789 Congress declined a proposal from James Madison for a constitutional amendment about religion that said, “nor shall any national religion be established.” In September 1789, Congress rejected several additional proposals for a narrow religion amendment. These would have prohibited establishing “one religious sect or society in preference to others,” or “establishing any religious sect or society,” or “establishing any particular denomination of religion in preference to another.”

In the final version of the First Amendment, congressmen and senators used the broader word “religion,” and when discussing the issue of “free exercise” of religion they never limited its meaning to Christianity or Judaism.

No wonder. The new states in the 1790s already exhibited exceptional religious diversity—at least twenty-five different versions of Christianity, plus Judaism and Islam—and Americans seemed more fascinated than worried about religious diversity. In 1784 Hannah Adams of Medfield, Massachusetts, found a huge audience for her book “Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects which have Appeared in the World from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Present Day.”

That book is available online here. It’s mostly about Christian divisions and subdivisions, but Adams (shown above) discusses “the Mohammedans” in her Appendix, starting here and proceeding for thirteen pages.

Tracking the Tale of Joel Adams

Yesterday I left nine-year-old Joel Adams in his Arlington home shortly after some British soldiers had marched on toward Boston on the afternoon of 19 Apr 1775. Four of Joel’s siblings were hiding in the house, their parents were hiding outside, and those soldiers had set the furniture on fire.

Joel and his siblings hurried to douse the flames with water from a cask outside, and with their father’s home-brewed beer. There was some damage to the family pewter, but the house survived and no one was injured.

Joel’s mother, Hannah Adams, gave an indignant deposition about how the soldiers had treated her to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. His father, Joseph Adams, and a fellow deacon eventually bought the local meeting’s communion service back from a silversmith in Boston. And the Adams children grew up to tell their story of the redcoat home invasion to their baby sister Ann, their own children, and their grandchildren.

Samuel Abbot Smith printed this story in his West Cambridge on the Nineteenth of April, 1775, published in 1864. (The Arlington Historical Society has reprinted this short book, as shown above. Smith did a good job of collecting his town’s lore.) Smith cited:

Mrs. Thomas Hall, grand-daughter of Mrs. Adams. Rev. Mr. Brown’s sermon on James Hill. S. G. Damon’s article in Christian Register, Oct. 28. 1854.

It’s always wise to seek the earliest printed version of a story, so I began looking for that sermon and article (since Mrs. Hall is probably no longer available).

Locating an undated sermon by a man named Brown about a man named James Hill isn’t easy. I got lucky and stumbled across a reference to its publication in 1852 under the title “Old Age.” So that went onto my to-do list the next time I visit the American Antiquarian Society, which has a great collection of such things.

As for the article, I thought I’d gotten lucky when I found Harold Murdock’s footnote for this same anecdote in The Nineteenth of April, 1775:

This is the story as repeated in 1854 by Mrs. [Ann] Hill, then in her eightieth year, to Samuel Griffin Damon: see Christian Register, October 28, 1854, vol. 39, p. 169.

Clearly Murdock had traced back the article since he included more detail than Smith had.

I learned that the Christian Register was a weekly newspaper published for Unitarian churches from 1821 to 1957, and that the Harvard library system has a full run on microfilm. So a couple of years ago I went into Cambridge to find this story.

The staff at the university’s main library told me this microfilm was in the collection of the Divinity School library, on the other side of campus. So I had a pleasant walk over there, found the right building, found the right desk, asked for the reels, and started cranking away.

And the first thing I discovered was that Murdock’s citation to “vol. 39, p. 169,” had no visible link to the date of 28 Oct 1854. Volume 39 covered the year 1860. Cranking and scrolling and peering at the closely set columns, I still couldn’t find Ann (Adams) Hill’s recollection in October 1854. By then my eyes were beginning to swim, so I’m going to check again later. Until I read the earliest printed versions of his tale, Joel Adams stays on my list of Lost Youth.

Joel Adams and the Redcoats

I’m concluding “Lost Youth Week” at Boston 1775 with two postings on the story of Joel Adams and the redcoats. On 19 Apr 1775, the Adamses were living in the western part of Cambridge, then called Menotomy and now called Arlington. According to vital records, the family consisted of:

• father Joseph, fifty-nine-year-old deacon of the local meeting.
• mother Hannah, Joseph’s second wife.
• Thomas, born in 1751 and not yet married.
• Rebecca, born in 1753.
• Susanna, born in 1758.
• Mary, born in 1761.
• Nathan, born in 1763.
• twins Joel and Amos, born in 1765.
• Daniel, born in 1768.
• Abigail, born in 1772.
• little Ann, born less than three weeks before on the first of April.

It’s possible some of those children had died, or were living elsewhere in 1775.

On the night of 18-19 April, the British troops sent to search Concord had marched west past the Adams house. Col. Percy’s reinforcement column marched past that morning, and in the afternoon the family learned that the soldiers were coming back. The house was close to the road, and thus well within the area where the redcoats and provincial militia companies were conducting a running battle. Probably Thomas Adams, then twenty-three years old, was already with his company.

Father Joseph Adams was at home as the fighting neared, and he decided it would be best to run and hide in a neighbor’s hayloft, leaving his wife and children behind. The British column arrived. Some soldiers entered the house, probably to ensure there were no militiamen hiding inside. They found Hannah Adams in her bed with little Ann and told her to get out. She fled with the baby to the “corn-house,” leaving five other children behind.

The soldiers kept searching the house and spotted one of those kids peeking out from under a bed. A redcoat asked this boy, “Why don’t you come out here?”

Joel Adams answered, “You’ll kill me if I do.”

“No, we won’t,” said the soldier, so Joel crawled out and started following the soldiers around his house. The redcoats were thus up against one of the most indomitable forces of nature: a nine-year-old who thinks he’s in the right.

By this time, the soldiers were pocketing various things they thought they might be able to carry back to Boston and sell, including bits of the family silver and the works of their clock. (The workless clock is preserved at the Jason Russell House.) Then the men found the communion silver that Deacon Adams was guarding for his meeting-house.

Joel told the soldiers not to touch those things. “Daddy’ll lick you, if you do,” he reportedly said. Meanwhile, Daddy was still hiding in that hayloft. (That rendering of Joel’s words looks like a late-nineteenth-century portrayal of childhood, not an eighteenth-century one, indicating a story passed down orally.)

We can guess how fond the soldiers had grown of Joel from what they did when they left: they made a pile of wood chips and broken furniture on the floor of the Adams house and set it on fire.

TOMORROW: What happened next, and tracking down the tale.