“Stark repeatedly and at last absolutely refused to comply”

The New Hampshire general Nathaniel Folsom arrived on the siege lines around Boston on 20 June 1775.

However, Col. John Stark (shown here) had been in the action since April. The militia troops he had led into Massachusetts had become the 1st New Hampshire Regiment.

Col. James Reed had enlisted men into the 3rd New Hampshire Regiment in Fitzwilliam and joined Stark at the siege in early June.

Both regiments fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June, standing up against the British army’s right and taking casualties.

Stark didn’t respond happily to a new man appearing and declaring he was now in charge based on the vote of a quasi-legal congress and his war record from twenty years before.

On 23 June, Gen. Folsom wrote back to the New Hampshire government from Medford:

In my Letter to you yesterday I acquainted you that on my arrival here I Imediately waited on the Capt. General [Artemas Ward]; he then Order’d me to make return to him of the Two Regiments, viz. Colo. Stark’s & Colo. Reed’s, of their Situation and Circumstances; on my return here I sent orders to the Two Colos. to make return of their respective Regiments to me.

Colo. Reed Imediately obey’d the order but Colo. Stark repeatedly and at last absolutely refused to comply. I am well inform’d by Mr. Stark’s best friends that he does not Intend to be under any subordination to any Person appointed by the Congress of New Hampshire to the general command of the New Hampr. Troops. I have tried all conciliatory methods both by Personal Conversation and the mediation of Friends, but without effect.

In consequence whereof I this afternoon again waited on the Capt. General at Head Quarters to take his order on the matter; he requested me to advise with the Committee of Safety of New Hampr on the Business, as Colo. Stark has received no Commission yet from you, he thinks he does not properly come under his cognizance.

Gentlemen, it is I trust unnecessary to hint to you that without a Proper subordination it will be absolutely Impossible for me to Execute the Trust you have Reposed in me; in my last conversation with Mr. Stark, he told me he could take his Pack and return home (and meant as I suppose to Lead his men with him.) I represented to him the dishonorable part he would thereby act towards both Colonies.

I have since made Enquiry & find he would not be able to Lead off many more than the supernumerors of his Regiment, it still consisting of 13 Companys. I think a Regiment might be form’d of the men who have been under his command without his being appointed to the Command of ’em.

I must do the Justice to Letn. Col. [Isaac] Wyman to say he has behaved prudently, Courageously and very much like a Gentleman, and I think I could recommend him to the command as soon as any Person I know.

Wyman was Stark’s second-in-command and potential successor.

TOMORROW: Can this regiment be saved?

“Bearing on His Eccentricities”

Today Boston 1775 goes off on a tangent about Isaac Chauncey Wyman, who claimed descent from a Revolutionary War veteran, though his exact ancestors and how old they were and other details shifted over time. This posting has little to do with the eighteenth century, so you’re welcome to skip out. But some gossip I can’t ignore.

Isaac Chauncey Wyman’s big bequest to Princeton in 1910 made headlines across the country, and those news stories preserve even more family tensions and secrets than are evident in his professional profiles.

Marblehead vital records show that this man’s father Isaac Wyman married Elizabeth Ingalls on 2 July 1820, and died on 4 Oct 1836 at the reported age of 81 (suggesting that he was born in 1755). The Genealogy and History of the Ingalls Family in America says that Elizabeth Ingalls was born 19 Jan 1789, so she was more than thirty years younger.

That couple had three children who lived to adulthood: Susan, William, and Isaac Chauncey. When Isaac died in 1836, according to the Gulfport Daily Herald’s report decades later, he left $80,000 to Isaac Chauncey and nothing to his other son.

There’s also a claim that, despite marrying under her maiden name, Elizabeth Ingalls had an earlier marriage to a man named John Nourse, and a son by him named John Ingalls Nourse. Descriptions of John I. Nourse’s parentage were published well before it became a legal issue, with his daughter suing for a piece of Isaac Chauncey Wyman’s estate on the grounds that she was a half-niece.

John Ingalls Nourse had an interesting death in 1857:

John I. Nourse, probably the largest man in the State, died here [Andover] Aug. 1. He was formerly a seaman, and quite slender; but after receiving a severe fever a few years ago, continued to increase in flesh till his last sickness, when he weighed four hundred pounds.

But I digress (even within this tangent).

At Princeton, Isaac Chauncey Wyman convinced his guardian to advance him some money and speculated successfully in sugar, then in timberland. He got a law degree from Harvard in 1850 and practiced for eleven years, serving as assistant to the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts. Then he devoted himself to accumulating real estate.

When he died, Wyman owned large swaths of Essex County, as well as land in all or most of the other forty-eight states, Hawaii, Canada, Britain, Spain, and Bulgaria. The Gulfport Daily Herald said: “Living on the southern border of Marblehead, Mr. Wyman used to say that he could walk to the northern border of the town without leaving his own land.” In addition, “He frequently spoke of a coal mine, a silver mine and a railroad of which he was owner.” Those were apparently in Carpenter, Colorado, now a ghost town.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram published a dispatch from Salem that said:

In Lynn, Marblehead and this city, where the testator was best known, hundreds of stories are in circulation bearing on his eccentricities. . . . he refused to have a fire in his office even in the coldest days of winter, and [showed] his unwillingness to give away anything even of the most trivial value.

The Gulfport Daily Herald reported:

Collecting antiques was his sole diversion, although he said he occasionally dissipated to the extent of reading a novel. He found money so easy to get that he frequently said that there must be something the matter with the poor.

Sounds like he had trouble relating to people, right?

In fact, I think that was a congenital condition for Isaac Chauncey Wyman. I’m going out on a limb and hypothesizing that he had Asperger’s syndrome. Wyman had serious difficulties with interpersonal relationships. In Reminiscences of Princeton College, 1845-1848 his classmate Edward Wall wrote:

He was, when a student, a tall and slender young man, very shy, shrinking from acquaintanceship rather than seeking it. He, therefore, had hardly any friends. . . .

His household consisted of himself and housekeeper,—an elderly and quite plain woman, who milked the cow, and attended to all chores outside the house as well as everything within. He was very neat in his dress, very polite, never went into society, or visited any one, or received visitors at his house.

However, Wyman was intellectually sharp, and particularly good at memorizing facts in his chosen field. Again from the Gulfport Daily Herald:

He continued his studies throughout life and was a Latin or Greek scholar as well as being versed in economics. He possessed a remarkable memory and could quote offhand the corporation or land laws of every state.

Wyman’s combination of mental strengths and weaknesses allowed him to accumulate a large fortune, and left him with virtually no one to share it with. Princeton officials maintained contact with him—his faith in his father’s service on the Princeton battlefield no doubt helped, even though no one remembered him revisiting the campus. And in the end the college benefited, and grew into a university.

TOMORROW: Back to the literary side of “The White Horseman.”

The Gun at Wyman House

As I noted back here, when Isaac Chauncey Wyman died in 1910, he left most of his fortune to his alma mater, Princeton College. Newspapers immediately reported that the bequest could be worth up to $10 million. Within a few weeks that figure came down to $2 million. Still, in 1910 that was real money.

Along with Wyman’s money and far-flung real estate, Princeton received some of his antiques, including the gun he told people his grandfather had owned. Woburn researcher Chris Hurley found it mounted alongside a powder horn and sword in a display case in Wyman House, a university residence (shown above) that happens to stand on part of the Revolutionary battlefield.

From lock to mouth the barrel appears to be four feet long. I have no idea if this gun actually dates from the Revolution, or has any other identifying marks. However, Chris Hurley noted that the sign mounted in the same room has this to say:

JOHN WYMAN of Salem, Massachusetts, who had used this musket and powder horn in the French and Indian War, gave them to his son Isaac Wyman in 1776 and gave Washington £8000 to equip the brigade in which his son enlisted

ISAAC WYMAN, his son, when a boy of sixteen, carried this musket, powder horn, and sword here on this field where he fought in the Battle of Princeton under Washington, January 3, 1777.

ISAAC CHAUNCEY WYMAN, Isaac Wyman’s son, Princeton 1848, died at an advanced old age on May 18, 1910, and bequeathed most of his estate to the Graduate College, which stands on the battlefield of Princeton.

Just two years before, Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts said that Isaac Chauncy Wyman’s paternal grandfather was Hezekiah Wyman, not John. The memoir of him published in 1910 by the New England Historic Genealogical Society says the same. (Those two volumes were produced under the supervision of the same man, so they’re not independent sources.)

It’s possible that the Princeton sign is mistaken about the grandfather’s first name. But the £8000 gift to Washington is a new detail, not in any other article about the Wymans that I’ve found. (Nor is there any mention of it in Washington’s papers or other sources.)

The Princeton sign also says that Isaac Wyman was “a boy of sixteen” at the Battle of Princeton on 3 Jan 1777, meaning he was almost certainly born in 1760. Which conflicts with both birth years stated in the Wyman genealogies published between 1895 and 1910.

So it looks very much like Isaac Chauncey Wyman had no idea who his paternal grandfather was, but believed he must have been a hero in the French & Indian War and the Revolutionary War, and carried that gun.

Similarly, it looks like Isaac Chauncey Wyman had very little idea who his father was, but believed he must have been a hero of the Revolutionary War, and carried that gun.

Isaac Chauncey Wyman was obviously not a reliable source of family lore about Hezekiah Wyman, or anyone else. He may well not have even been descended from that man. Thus, what he or his biographers wrote has little or no bearing on the question of what Hezekiah Wyman did on 19 Apr 1775.

[ADDENDUM: After a reader request, I’m posting a photo of the musket in its case by Chris Hurley, with permission from folks at Princeton. Click on the picture for a larger image. Obviously, this isn’t an ideal way to examine a gun, but it’s the best we can do from afar. And the likelihood that Hezekiah Wyman used this gun to pick off regulars on 19 Apr 1775 is infinitesimal anyway.]

TOMORROW: Closing remarks on Isaac Chauncey Wyman.

“Together with My Gun”

Back to the truth and fictions of Hezekiah Wyman. As I’ve noted, there was a fifty-four-year-old man named Hezekiah Wyman living in south Woburn (now Winchester) in 1775. Those details don’t exactly match the sixty-year-old Hezekiah Wyman living in central Lexington in “The White Horseman.” But was he close enough to have been that fictional story’s inspiration?

Earlier in this series I reported how Chris Hurley, who researches Woburn’s Revolutionary history, supplied me with a quotation from Hezekiah Wyman’s will confirming that he did indeed have a white horse when he died in 1779. That same will confirms that he had two others things which some sources ascribe to him.

First, Hezekiah listed his children as “my Sons Hezikiah, Seth, Daniel, Isaac & Joseph &...my Daughter Susanna.” The eldest son I’ve already mentioned as on the list of Weston militiamen who marched on 19 Apr 1775. The two genealogies of Isaac Chauncey Wyman I quoted back here both say he descended from Hezekiah through a son named Isaac, and this will confirms that there was such a son. (It doesn’t offer information about that son’s birth date, however.)

Furthermore, the will give son Daniel, in addition to the livestock already listed, “my Horse cart, & all my husbandry Utensils, together with my Gun.” So Hezekiah Wyman definitely owned a gun in 1779.

According to Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts (1908), Hezekiah “bequeathed outside his family the gun he carried” on 19 Apr 1775, but Isaac Chauncey Wyman bought it back. So there’s a contradiction there.

Perhaps by “outside his family” Isaac Chauncey Wyman meant out of his own particular line. Indeed, if his grandfather’s gun was in the hands of a cousin, that would make it more plausible that he could buy back the very same musket about a century later.

What’s more, Chris Hurley has tracked down the musket that Isaac Chauncey Wyman owned. In New Jersey.

TOMORROW: The story that musket tells.

“The Gun He Carried on that Eventful Day”

Normally the people most eager to preserve and retell the stories of a man’s heroism in the Revolutionary War are his descendants. The case of Hezekiah Wyman is unusual in that a heroic story about him was widely published and republished starting in 1835, but there was no family lore about him in print until sixty years later.

Isaac Chauncey (or Chauncy) Wyman (1827-1910, shown here) was an attorney in Salem. He never married, and left over two million dollars to his alma mater, Princeton. (This bequest turned out to affect Woodrow Wilson’s political career in a backhanded way, but that’s a different story.) Edward Wall’s Reminiscences of Princeton College, 1845-1848 contains an unflattering and rather sad profile of this Wyman. A member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, he appears to be the source of statements about his family history published around the turn of the last century.

An 1895 volume of The Bench and Bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, collecting profiles about lawyers for sale to those same lawyers, says this about Isaac Chauncey Wyman:

His father [Isaac] was born in Cambridge, January 1, 1762, and died in Salem in 1836, having been present at the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill and at the siege of Boston, acting as a substitute for an uncle who was a lieutenant colonel under General [John] Stark, and afterwards serving until the end of the war.

Isaac, the father, was the son of Hezekiah Wyman, a soldier in the army of General [James] Wolfe, who was born in Woburn and was the fifth son of Capt. [Seth] Wyman, memorable for the conduct of “Lovewell’s Fight” and who died of wounds received in that affair.

Lt. Col. Isaac Wyman (1724-1792) of Keene, New Hampshire, did indeed serve under Stark from 23 Apr 1775 to the end of that year. He then returned to New Hampshire and became a colonel in the state militia. His son Isaac (1756-1835) received a pension for Revolutionary military service.

I have no idea why this lieutenant colonel would need a “substitute,” and doubt anyone would have seen a thirteen-year-old boy as a fair replacement. Possibly the author meant “subordinate” or “subaltern”—but I’m not finding records to match that.

Capt. Seth Wyman (1686-1725) was indeed celebrated for “Lovewell’s Fight,” a guerilla battle with Pequawket fighters in the Maine woods in 1725 which sounds like a dreadful affair all around. He didn’t die of his wounds, but of dysentery on a subsequent mission.

I’ll address the other statements about Hezekiah and Isaac Wyman as they appear in more detail in volume 4 of Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts (1908). This series, edited by William Richard Cutter [him again!], combined family lore and genealogical research. Like the book on lawyers, the series was probably financed by the families it discussed.

The entry on the Wyman family describes Hezekiah this way:

He was a soldier in the French and Indian war, and was in General Wolfe’s army at the battle of Quebec. Tradition has it that he pointed out the secret path that led to the Heights of Abraham, by which the British and Americans were led to the plateau, met the French on equal footing and conquered the city.

In recognition of his services in this campaign he was granted a manor in New York, but never claimed his grant, and it was finally taken up by squatters.

When the revolution came he marched with his company on the Lexington alarm and took part in the fighting at Concord, April 19. 1775. When he died he bequeathed outside his family the gun he carried on that eventful dav, but it is now in the possession of his grandson, Isaac Chauncy Wyman, of Salem.

He was fifty-five years old at the time of the battle, and lived but a few years afterward. A picture of him, seated upon a white horse, is preserved in the public library at Woburn. His home was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in later years.

I can’t find Hezekiah Wyman listed as a veteran of Wolfe’s campaign against Quebec, or elsewhere in the French and Indian War. In 1890 the Winchester Historical Society published a list of the town’s veterans of that war, and it doesn’t include him.

A “manor in New York” should be well documented. But the only land grant connected to Hezekiah Wyman that I can find was in Massachusetts. In its 1772-73 session, the legislature granted “Hezekiah Wyman of Woburn” and his brother Ross some land in reward for their father Seth’s services in 1725. The province had granted Seth land which turned out to be over the New Hampshire border. In compensation, Ross and Hezekiah were allowed to develop 500 acres in western Massachusetts instead.

As for Hezekiah Wyman pointing out the secret path up the cliffs to Quebec, that’s an incredible feat for someone who’d never been in the area, isn’t it?

Most interestingly, this family lore says Hezekiah Wyman “marched with his company on the Lexington alarm.” It doesn’t mention him riding a white horse alone, though obviously that story had made it to the Woburn public library. Isaac Chauncey Wyman had supposedly brought his grandfather Hezekiah’s gun back into the family, presumably by buying it—yet his lore makes no mention of extraordinary marksmanship.

The same entry states that Hezekiah’s son Isaac was born in 1756, not 1762, which makes service in the siege of Boston much more likely—unless the genealogists simply confused him with his New Hampshire cousin. Further statements about Isaac:

He was an active and influential patriot in revolutionary days, and a distinguished military figure. He was with his father in the battle of Concord, and rose step by step to the rank of colonel of a cavalry regiment, or horse troops, as they were called. . . .

Colonel Wyman acquired military habits of arbitrary thought and action during the war, and was rather austere and stern. In business he commanded, and his word was law… Like most of the Continental army officers, he was a Free Mason.

He married, July 2, 1820, Elizabeth Ingalls. born in Lynn, January 19, 1789, daughter of Henry Ingalls, an officer at one time of the famous frigate “Constitution.”

I can’t find any mention of an officer on the Constitution named Henry Ingalls.

The only Revolutionary War officer named Isaac Wyman, “horse troops” or not, was the older man from New Hampshire. It’s possible that Isaac Chauncey Wyman’s father achieved the rank of colonel in the militia during peacetime, as stated in a 1910 N.E.H.G.S. obituary. It’s also possible that’s just one more unverifiable thing he said.

One final curiosity about these entries is that, although they give a detailed portrait of Isaac Wyman’s personality, they don’t offer a specific date of death. The latter doesn’t even state a definite year: “about 1836.” That suggests there was some rupture in the family. Several issues of the Salem Gazette in November 1836 carried an advertisement dated the first of that month saying Isaac’s widow Elizabeth had been appointed to administer his estate, meaning he’d died intestate. Isaac Chauncey Wyman was then only eight or nine.

So what can we conclude from Isaac Chauncey Wyman’s family lore?

• He really, really wanted to have ancestors with distinguished military records.
• A lot of the information he passed on can’t be confirmed from reliable sources.
• Despite his hunger for ancestral glory and his low standards of evidence, Isaac Chauncey Wyman didn’t think of his grandfather as the legendary “White Horseman.”

Instead, this Wyman imagined his grandpa Hezekiah and his father Isaac marching together on 19 Apr 1775.

COMING UP: After a pause for Bunker Hill, some concluding thoughts on Hezekiah Wyman.