Christopher Machell and the Additional Companies

Earlier this month I wrote about Capt. Christopher Machell of His Majesty’s 15th Regiment of Foot.

Some sources have said that British officer was wounded at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and I knew his regiment wasn’t even in North America at that time. Apparently more reliable sources said he was wounded in the “Battle of New York,” but when that was remained a mystery.

Also a mystery: Why if Machell lost an arm in 1776 did he remain on the regiment’s rolls through the end of the war?

I was pleased but not surprised to receive answers from Don Hagist, author most recently of Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution and editor of the Journal of the American Revolution.

Here’s Don Hagist as this month’s guest blogger, plugging the holes in that short series about Capt. Machell:

During the American Revolution British regiment on service in America maintained a cadre of officers and non-commissioned officers in the British Isles for recruiting. Called “Additional Companies”, these were not companies in a structural sense, but financial vehicles to allow for the expenses of the recruiters, and for the recruits.

Every so often, when enough recruits had been raised and trained, they were sent to America under care of one of the Additional Company officers, and an officer in America returned to Britain to join the recruiting service.

As the war progressed, it was quite common for wounded officers to return to Britain to recover, and joining the Additional Companies was a way to keep them at full pay and working while they convalesced.

Captain Christopher Machell commanded the 15th Regiment’s light infantry company, and was wounded at the battle of Harlem Heights on “New York Island” on 16 September 1776. Because he was no longer fit for that company’s active service, he was transferred into a battalion company, then the following June joined the Additional Companies in Great Britain, where he remained for the rest of the war.

Thanks, Don!

A Book “Taken in ye Field of Battle”

Last month the blog of the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, noted an unusual way of identifying books in its collection: as “battle estrays,” or books known to have been picked up in battle. No other library is known to use this term.

One example shown is the third volume of Jonathan Swift’s Miscellanies as published in London in 1742. It is inscribed:

22d-43d-54th-&-63d Regiments took possession of New York
—5 Brigade—
Taken in ye Field of Battle,
the 16th of September 1776—
J:B:

The library blog said:

First Library director Randolph Adams noted in The Colophon that the British occupied the lower part of Manhatten Island on the 14th and 15th of September, then started up the island on the 16th. The battle [of Harlem Heights] on the 16th, in which this book was picked up, took place about what is now 126th St.

Not mentioned in the blog post, but noted in the book’s cataloguing record, is the bookplate. It shows the volume had been owned by the Rev. Dr. Myles Cooper, the president of King’s College. That institution later became Columbia University. It’s now located near the site of the fighting on 16 Sept 1776, but back then it was housed in one large building near modern New York City Hall.

If a volume from Cooper’s personal library was on “ye Field of Battle,” it had probably been looted from the college hall or his house. Cooper himself had fled America in May 1775. The college shut down, its building becoming a military hospital, so a lot of people might have had access. An American soldier or civilian might have taken the book and then dropped it on the retreat north, where a British soldier picked it up.

New Words from Richard Henry Lee

The American Antiquarian Society just announced that retiree Kathy Major, back in the archive as a volunteer, had identified three previously unknown letters from Richard Henry Lee.

Lee is best recalled for having proposed independence at the Continental Congress in 1776, but he was active from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 (on both sides) to presiding over the Congress in 1784-85 to the first U.S. Senate in 1789.

The society’s blog explains:

The letters were donated to AAS almost thirty years ago by Mrs. Allan Carr McIntyre of Watertown, Massachusetts, and contain much valuable information about the military progress (or lack thereof) of the American Revolution from 1776 to 1778. Written in Philadelphia, all three were addressed to Col. John Page (1744-1808), then serving as lieutenant governor of Virginia.

Lee wrote the letters on 23 Sept 1776, 10 Oct 1777, and 7 Sept 1778. Those dates were, respectively, soon after the Battle of Brooklyn, soon after the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and soon after the Battle of Rhode Island. In other words, not at high points of the war from the American side.

Yet Lee emphasized the positive. Despite the “northern militias…immensely expensive and utterly useless,” he wrote, the Continental Army was ready to stop the British forces at Harlem Heights (which it did, but only for a couple of weeks). “We heard yesterday from Lake Champlain and have the pleasure to find things there in a safe situation for this Campaign at least,” that 1776 letter concluded.

In 1777 Lee treated Germantown as a near-victory, but he was writing from York, Pennsylvania, because the Congress had had to flee from Philadelphia. The Valley Forge winter was ahead. (News of Saratoga hadn’t reached York yet or Lee would surely have emphasized it.)

About the 1778 fighting in Rhode Island, Lee wrote, “Victory declared in our favor, the enemy being driven from the field in great disorder.” Of course the goal of the American campaign had been to drive the British out of Newport, and the British were still there. But victory was declared.