Thompson Maxwell Sets Up Stakes on Breed’s Hill

Thompson Maxwell left at least three memoirs of his life; I’ve previously puzzled over his accounts of the Boston Tea Party.

In the autumn of 1818 Maxwell reportedly dictated the first memoir of his military service to Gen. James Miller (later a character in the first chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter).

Here is the old veteran’s account of June 1775, up to the Battle of Bunker Hill:

I then took command, agreeable to [ensign’s] rank in my company under Captain Wilkinson [actually Capt. Josiah Crosby and Lt. Daniel Wilkins]. We were formed into regiments, my company in Colonel James Reed’s regiment, and engaged for eight months.

Next fight was that of Bunker Hill. On the sixteenth of June Colonel Reed was ordered to Charlestown neck. About twelve o’clock the same day a number of our officers passed us and went on to Bunker Hill. General [Artemas] Ward with the rest returned and went to Cambridge. In the evening Colonel [William] Prescott passed with his regiment. My brother Hugh Maxwell was the senior Captain in this regiment; he stepped out and asked Colonel Reed and myself if we would come on to the Hill that night. We did so, we went on to Breed’s Hill.

We found Colonel [Israel] Putnam there, with Colonel Prescott’s command. Colonel Prescott requested my brother Hugh to lay out the ground for the intrenchment. He did so; I set up the stakes after him. Colonel Prescott seemed to have the sole command.

Colonel Reed and I returned to our command on the neck about eleven o’clock, P.M. At day in the morning, we again went on to the Hill, found Putnam and Prescott there. Prescott still appeared to have command; no other regiment was there but Prescott’s through the night.

Captain Maxwell after day suggested, in my hearing, to Colonel Prescott the propriety of running an intrenchment from the N. E. angle of the night’s work, to a rail fence leading to Mystic River. Colonel Prescott approved, and it was done. I set up the stakes after my brother.

About seven o’clock I saw Colonels Putnam and Prescott in conversation; immediately after Putnam mounted his horse and went full speed toward Cambridge. Colonel Reed ordered all his men to their commands; we returned and prepared for action. At eleven o’clock, A.M. we received orders from Colonel Prescott to move on. We did so. We formed by order of Prescott down by the rail fence, and part on the entrenchmemt. We got hay and wadded between the rails after doubling the fence by post and rails from another place.

It’s obvious that Maxwell was trying to provide evidence on the question of whether Prescott or Putnam was in command during the battle, a burning historiographical question in the early 1800s. But I think the real value of his account is showing the improvised nature of the provincials’ planning, with officers hurrying back and forth.

Thompson Maxwell’s niece Priscilla wrote a memoir of her father, Capt. Hugh Maxwell. That book described how Hugh was badly wounded at Bunker Hill, but said nothing about him having helped to lay out the American defense lines. However, Hugh Maxwell had experience as both a rural surveyor and a military officer, so that detail in his younger brother’s recollections strikes me as credible.

A Shays’ Rebellion Website

From the Massachusetts Humanities Council comes news of the Springfield Technical Community College’s multimedia website titled Shays’ Rebellion & the Making of a Nation.

The website explains:

Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) is located on the 55-acre Springfield Armory National Historic Site. In 1789, George Washington selected this site for the nation’s first armory; Springfield Armory was established by Congress in 1794. This location is the actual historic site where the Shays’ Rebellion assault on the Springfield Arsenal occurred; consequently the College has a special commitment to the preservation and the communication of the significance of this historic site.

The pages are rich in pictures of documents and artifacts about the Regulators in western Massachusetts in the mid-1780s, including a starred flag said to have been used by Lt. Col. Hugh Maxwell during the Revolution (shown above). However, there are also many portraits and pictures that don’t come from the period, so be sure to check the dates.

I’m a little confused by this map of how towns voted on the U.S. Constitution, which was a reaction to this uprising. Different webpages identify that map as showing results from 1788 (the correct date) and from 1792. Ratification was decided by a convention in Boston, furthermore, so does this show how a town’s delegates to that convention voted or how a town instructed its delegates to vote? 

It might also be interesting to see maps of the town-by-town votes on the two draft Massachusetts constitutions that towns considered in the late 1770s. This page explains how the Massachusetts legislature drafted the first of those, and in 1778 town meetings voted it down. The state tried again by summoning a convention to draft a document and then showing the result to the towns for their approval.

As I recall, both times many town meetings expressed only conditional approval. For the earlier draft, such votes were interpreted as “no, unless...,” so the constitution failed. The second time, the state’s political leaders decided to count such votes as “yes, as long as...,” even if the conditions weren’t met. And that constitution passed. (We still use it today.) By the mid-1780s some citizens were demanding a new or amended state constitution; that was part of the “Shaysite” cause.

Caitlin G. D. Hopkins featured another artifact of the conflict last month: a grave marker for a man killed in the state’s campaign to subdue the uprising. Jacob Walker was, it seemed, a victim of “the impious hand of Treason & Rebellion.” Funny—that’s what Loyalists saw as the problem ten years before.

Of course, there is a crucial difference between resisting a government one has had a chance to vote on and a government one hasn’t. Which brings us back to those ratification debates.

On 12 September, Springfield Technical will host an exhibition of Bryant White’s paintings illustrating Shays’ Rebellion, featured on this website. The next day there will be a symposium exploring the event’s continuing relevance.

Aaron Barr: Casualty on Bunker’s Hill

Yesterday I noted how George C. Gilmore’s research for A Memorial of the American Patriots who Fell at the Battle of Bunker Hill (1889) cast some doubt on the tradition that the first man killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill was Asa Pollard of Billerica. He was in Col. Ebenezer Bridge’s regiment, which indeed sent some of the first companies onto the battlefield, but that regiment’s records indicate that Pollard continued to draw pay for four days after the battle.

Looking at other muster rolls and similar records, Gilmore found a document contemporaneous with the battle stating that the first man killed was Aaron Barr of “Meryfield” (also spelled Myrifield, now Rowe), Massachusetts. Barr was in Capt. Hugh Maxwell’s company in Col. William Prescott’s regiment, which was also in the battle. There’s evidence that Maxwell oversaw the building of some of the redoubt on Breed’s Hill: his daughter later wrote that he used his experience as a town surveyor to complete Col. Richard Gridley’s fortification. Maxwell was definitely wounded in the battle.

Josiah Gilbert Holland’s History of Western Massachusetts, published in 1855, confirms that Barr was one of the first casualties of the battle—but it indicates that he could not have been the man whose head was taken off by a cannon. According to that book:

At the battle of Bunker Hill, Aaron Barr of Myrifield was the first wounded man brought into Cambridge, from the field. He belonged to Capt. Maxwell’s company. He was struck by a cannon ball in the morning, had his leg taken off, and died the same day.

So Barr wasn’t buried on the battlefield without his head, as Col. Prescott and other witnesses recalled.

Some authors have split the difference, saying Barr was the first man wounded and Pollard the first man killed. However, if both men were fatally wounded early in the fighting and died later, then we still don’t know whose head was taken off by that cannon ball. Pollard appears to be the more likely suspect, but I don’t know if we can say for sure. Like a lot of other details and anecdotes about the Bunker Hill battle, our earliest sources don’t appear until decades after the event.

TOMORROW: And then there’s the question of that chaplain.