Samuel Akley, Continental Matross

The fourth Akley brother to serve in the Continental Army was Samuel.

He was baptized at the New South Meeting-House on 13 May 1764 and thus still only ten years old when the Revolutionary War began.

When Samuel had just turned four, the Boston Overseers of the Poor had indentured him to wheelwright John Merrill of Topsham, in the district of Maine, until 1785. But he didn’t serve that full term.

In February 1827 Samuel Akley, then living in Halifax, Vermont, applied for a Revolutionary pension. The text of that application can be read as an attachment to a later filing with the state of Maine, digitized here.

It says Samuel Akley

for the term of three years…Enlisted in the Company of Capt. [Thomas] Jackson and the Regiment of Col. [John] Crane. the first of March 1780, or 1781. enlisted in Topsham in the State of Mass: in the Mass: line—Passed Muster at Boston Mass. Joined the Army at West Point N.Y.

In 1848 Akley testified that he’d joined the army in April 1781. In 1855 he dated his service at West Point from 17 July 1780. He also said then that he was eighteen years old when he passed muster, which would mean the summer of 1782.

Samuel Akley of Topsham isn’t listed in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War. However, there is a listing for a man by the same name who received a bounty from Thaddeus Lovering of Holliston to serve three years in the army in his place.

Because no families named Akley (however spelled) appear in Holliston’s published vital records from that time, and because Lovering paid the bounty in Boston, I wonder if that farmer crossed paths with Akley while he “Passed Muster at Boston.” The receipt is dated 17 June 1782, which would match the latest indicator for when Akley enlisted.

In any event, Akley became a matross in Crane’s Continental artillery regiment, the equivalent of a private on a gun crew. He served “till the Army was disbanded, and was discharged at West Point.”

Samuel Akley made his way back to Topsham, Maine. On 18 Nov 1791 he married Elizabeth (Betsey) Moody there; she appears to have been around age twenty. According to a descendant, they had at least six children together. Three of those children, ages seventeen to twelve, were still living with their parents in 1827.

In 1831, the Akleys moved to Rumford, Maine. Betsey died in 1842. Six years later, Samuel applied to the government for an increased pension as an artillerist. Seven years after that, at the age of ninety-three, he put in the paperwork for a land grant from Maine.

Samuel Akley finally died on 17 July 1861, as shown on his gravestone above. By then he and his family believed he was just short of his hundredth birthday; in fact, he was ninety-seven. He had served in the last months of the Revolutionary War and lived to see the first months of the U.S. Civil War. On his gravestone is this memento mori:

Stop traveler as you pass by
As you are now so once was I.
As I am now so you must be.
Prepare for death and follow me

TOMORROW: Wrapping up the Akely family.

“They all four were buried in one grave”

On the afternoon of Thursday, 8 Mar 1770—250 years ago today—Boston had a huge public funeral for the first four people to die after the Boston Massacre.

This was only eleven days after the funeral for Christopher Seider, reportedly attended by 1,300 to 2,000 people. The March procession had, in the estimate of merchant John Rowe, at least five times as many mourners:

I attended the Funeral of the four Unhappy People that were killed on Monday last. Such a Concourse of People I never saw before — I believe Ten or Twelve thousand. One Corps with their Relations followed the other & then the Select Men & Inhabitants.

Christopher Davis alerted me through Facebook to a letter about this funeral from Henry Prentiss (1749-1821, shown here in middle age) to his father, a minister in Holliston. Prentiss had just finished an apprenticeship with the merchant Oliver Wendell and asked his father to check “what he [Wendell] was to give me when my time was up”—meaning he didn’t have a copy of his own indenture.

Prentiss sent his father an eyewitness account of the shooting on King Street and the government deliberations that followed. In a postscript, he added what information he’d gathered about the Massacre victims:

The Names of those persons that were killed and their occupation. Jackson a Molatto fellow. Sailor. Gray a Rope maker. Covil mate of a vessell. Munk a Boat Builder. Maverick a Lad about fifteen years of age. Wounded viz., Edwd Payne Mercht in this town shot thro his arm. Green a Taylor shot through his thigh. Patterson shot thro his arm. The Names of the Rest have slip’d my memory.

Even what Prentiss recalled had errors. The “Molatto fellow” was then being identified as “Michael Johnson,” though within days he’d been named as Crispus Attucks. “Covil” was James Caldwell.

It doesn’t appear that Prentiss was close to any of the victims. Indeed, he gave only one man’s full name—Edward Payne, a fellow merchant. 

The next morning, Prentiss appended his description of the funeral:

Yestaday Afternoon four of those unhappy persons that were shot last Monday Evening were inter’d, the procession was much the grandest of any ever seen in America. Gray’s Corps went first then his Relations, then Covil and his Relations, then Maverick and his Relations & then Jackson & after Jackson the Inhabitants walk’d four a brest. I imagine to the number of three or four Thousand, & then a vast number of Carriges, they all four were buried in one grave & young Snider dug up & put with them.

severall company’s of Soldiers are gone to the Castle and the Remainder embarking as fast as possible, to-morrow Night the town will be Clear of them.

Prentiss’s estimate of the crowd at “three or four Thousand” might have been more accurate than Rowe’s, but that was still the largest procession Boston had seen in decades. And speaking of estimates, it took a lot longer than two days to move all the soldiers out of Boston.

(My thanks to Christopher Davis, and to Holliston chronicler George F. Walker, for bringing this source to light.)

Peter Tulip: Lexington musician

Yesterday I quoted a description of a notebook recently sold at auction as part of the military papers of Gen. Henry Burbeck, in which someone had penciled on the inside front cover:

Peter Tulip
Lexington

What’s that all about?

Peter Tulip was born in Lexington on 8 Jan 1754. His parents, Robin and Margaret Tulip, were enslaved. Robin was a servant of John Bridge (1737-1806), who during the Revolutionary War became a major. (The thumbnail above shows Bridge’s house, courtesy of the Harriette Merrifield Forbes photography collection at the American Antiquarian Society.) That meant Peter Tulip also began life as a slave.

In 1783, slavery became legally unenforceable in Massachusetts. That November, the records of Holliston say, Patty Oxford of that town became engaged to Peter Tulip.

Peter and Patty Tulip (who was also known as Martha) had two daughters who grew to adulthood: Olive, born in October 1784, and a younger Patty, born in September 1786. For some reason, many months passed between those girls’ births and when they were baptized in the Lexington meeting-house.

People in Lexington remembered the Tulip family for serving and entertaining at dinners. The daughters would wait on people, and the father would play the fiddle. Albert W. Bryant’s article “Lexington Sixty Years Ago,” written in 1890, states:

Adjoining Harrington’s estate was the famous Dudley Tavern. This house, in its palmy days, evidently had more patronage from townspeople than any other public houses. On certain occasions it served as a rendezvous for free hilarity. One of those occasions was the evening after town meeting, when eating, drinking, dancing and making merry was the rule. Peter Tulip, a negro, with his fiddle, composed the orchestra, and many a joke was played on him. Peter’s fiddle at one time refused, in a very inexplicable manner, to give forth its usual sounds; but if one had seen Uncle Jonas [Munroe] standing behind him touching a candle to his fiddle-bow when it was drawn back, he would have discovered the reason.

Town records show that Peter Tulip died in the Lexington almshouse at an advanced age.

Why was Tulip’s name written inside that notebook? I have no idea. William Burbeck evidently started to use it to keep his account with the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and then someone else copied a military manual onto its pages. I don’t know of any Burbeck connection to Lexington, or any Tulip connection to the American artillery.