William Jasper Article Available in the Latest J.A.R. Collection

Yesterday I quoted the New York Post reporting that I think one of Dr. Joseph Warren’s informants about the British operation on 18 Apr 1775 was “a pragmatic British-born knifemaker named William Jasper.”

The response of most people who’ve looked into that question might well be: “Who?”

Fortunately, my article making the case for William Jasper as “Dr. Warren’s Crucial Informant” is available in the Journal of the American Revolution 2025 Annual Volume, just published by Westholme and available through the University of Chicago Press and online booksellers.

That volume also includes another of my articles on the first battle of the Revolutionary War, “The Story of Isaac Bissell—and the Legend of Israel Bissell.”

Even better, the same book offers dozens of other articles on the broad American Revolution chosen and edited by Don N. Hagist. Contributors include Katie Turner Getty, Salina B. Baker, Gene Procknow, Tim Abbott, Philip D. Weaver, Todd W. Braisted, Phillip Hamilton, Jim Piecuch, Derrick E. Lapp, Tyson Reeder, Ray Raphael, Gary C. Shattuck, and many more.

Isaac Bissell and My “More Plausible Scenario”

Earlier this week the Journal of the American Revolution published my article “The Story of Isaac Bissell—and the Legend of Israel Bissell.”

With the sestercentennial of the Battle of Lexington and Concord coming up next spring, I thought it was high time to put on record the evidence that the name of the man who carried Joseph Palmer’s alert from Watertown was Isaac Bissell, not (as the name was first misspelled by people copying it in a hurry) Israel Bissell.

That core identification was made years back by Lion G. Miles, and I give him full credit in the article, as I have in my talks on the topic.

I also felt obligated to add something new to the story if I could. That led me into digging up new material on the close but secret relations between the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and the government of Connecticut, an earlier note sent by Palmer, and the details of Connecticut’s alert.

But still, the core of this article is Isaac, not Israel, Bissell.

The first footnote ends:

As of this writing, Wikipedia includes entries for both Isaac Bissell and Israel Bissell, the latter supposedly taking over in Worcester from a man with a nearly identical name. This article presents a more plausible scenario.

The same situation pertains today. It’s hard to correct hallowed traditions, even if replacing the name of one young Connecticut farmer for another makes little difference to most people today.

If during next spring’s anniversary more commemorations and articles name Isaac Bissell, I’ll feel this study has fulfilled its purpose.

We can thank Israel Bissell for his brief military service in 1776 and acknowledge that lauding him for the last century was literally a typographical error.

Facts, Fables, and Fiction about “Paul Revere’s Ride”

On the remaining Wednesdays in September, the Paul Revere Memorial Association [i.e., the Paul Revere House, getting fancy] is presenting a series of lectures on the theme “One Hundred and Fifty Years of ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’: Facts, Fables and Fiction.”

These lectures will start at 6:30 P.M. each Wednesday at the Old South Meeting House on Washington Street in Boston. The series is free to the public, thanks to a grant from the Lowell Institute. Here are the topics.

Wednesday, 8 September
Listen, My Children: Paul Revere’s Ride in Poetry and Legend
Using new research, historian and author Charles Bahne [a Boston 1775 guest blogger] will examine how Henry W. Longfellow created one of America’s most enduring legends—a tale which, like all legends, often strays from the truth. What did Longfellow know when he wrote the poem? Why did he include some details, and ignore or omit others? What about William Dawes and Samuel Prescott? Included in the program will be a world-premiere: the first-ever public reading of Longfellow’s complete first draft, including an entire stanza which was later deleted, and has never been published.

Wednesday, 15 September
The Lost and Legendary Riders of April 19th
Beyond Paul Revere and his companions, Americans have passed along stories of other notable riders on April 19, 1775. Historian J. L. Bell [that’s me!] investigates the facts and fiction behind such figures as Hezekiah Wyman, the dreaded “White Horseman”; Abel Benson and Abigail Smith, children said to have helped raise the alarm in Middlesex County [and never explored on Boston 1775]; and Israel Bissell, the post rider credited with carrying news of the fight all the way to Philadelphia.

Wednesday, 22 September
“A Friend” of Paul Revere: The Role of Family Histories in the Ongoing Mystery of Who Hung the Lanterns in Old North Steeple, April 18, 1775
On April 18, 1875, in front of a packed house at Boston’s Old North Church, Samuel Haskell Newman presented his family’s account of the night of April 18, 1775. Specifically, he identified his father, Robert Newman, as the man who hung the lanterns in Old North steeple on that historic night. One year later, in July, 1876, Reverend John Lee Watson of Orange, New Jersey, argued in a letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser that it was his relative, Captain John Pulling, who hung the signal lanterns. Old North Foundation historian and educator Bob Damon will evaluate these competing narratives and explore the important role that family histories play in our understanding of history.

Wednesday, 29 September
Revering America: The Politics of Remembering the Revolution
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was not the first, nor by any means the last, to make use of Revolutionary War history for other purposes. Just this past spring, George Pataki launched an anti-health care petition drive called RevereAmerica, from Boston’s Paul Revere Mall. Americans have always put the past to political ends. Jill Lepore, Kemper Professor of History at Harvard University and New Yorker staff writer, will discuss the fraught relationship between reverence and revolution.

The True Story of Isaac Bissell

We don’t have the original letter that Joseph Palmer dashed off on the morning of 19 Apr 1775, alerting the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s political allies in Connecticut that the British army had killed people at Lexington and asking speedy passage for the man carrying it. Instead, we have copies of that letter, hastily written at stops along the post riders’ route.

It’s only natural that errors crept into Palmer’s text. By the time the note reached New York, it referred to “Israel Bessel” and “T. Palmer.” Later copies, such as the one transcribed in Charles Burr Todd’s A General History of the Burr family in America (1872), appeared to render the rider’s name as “Trail Bissell.”

So we need to go back to the earliest copies that survive. The one from Brooklyn, Connecticut, now owned by the National Heritage Museum, gives the name Israel Bissell. But according to this article, a copy signed by Connecticut official Silas Deane and owned by the William L. Clements Library in Michigan names the rider as “Mr. Isaac Bissell.” And a copy transcribed from the Springfield archives also names “Mr. Isaac Bissell.”

The name “Isaac Bissel” appears in the records of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, authorizing payment for “a Post-Rider’s Account.”

That brings me to the research that Lion G. Miles has shared through iberkshires.com, the Berkshire Eagle, and Connecticut History.

According to Miles and his citations, all the papers in the Massachusetts Archives about the post rider who carried Palmer’s message are signed by “Isaac Bissell,” who identified himself as from Suffield, Connecticut, near the Massachusetts border. In July 1775, the Provincial Congress approved his bill for six days of expenses while riding “to Hartford,” but then that body dissolved for elections and no one got around to paying the man.

In March 1776 Bissell wrote to Palmer: “Sir you may Remember when Lexinton Fite was you gave me an Express to Cary to Hartford in Connecticut which I did. . . .I think I Earn my money.” Finally on 23 April the Massachusetts House voted to pay Isaac Bissell the £2.1s. he’d asked for.

So I now believe that Isaac Bissell rode to the Connecticut capital of Hartford, probably by way of Worcester and Springfield. An accurate copy of the letter he carried was sent on to Deane, who lived one town below Hartford in Wethersfield. Meanwhile, another rider or set of riders, names unknown to us, was carrying another copy of Palmer’s letter south from Worcester to Brooklyn, Norwich, and New London, and then along the coast to New York. That copy rendered the original courier’s name as “Israel Bissell,” and Isaac wasn’t around to correct that error or further deviations.

According to lineages published by the D.A.R. and S.A.R., after returning home to Suffield, Isaac Bissell (1749-1822) enlisted in a Connecticut regiment and marched back to Boston to participate in the siege. He was a sergeant in Col. Erastus Woolcott’s regiment until March 1776, and later mustered as part of the New Haven Alarm of July 1779. After the war he worked as a blacksmith in Suffield. His grave in the Suffield cemetery (shown in the thumbnail above; click for a full set on Flickr from caboose_rodeo) has been identified as that of a Revolutionary veteran for decades.

What about the Israel Bissell buried in Hinman Hinsdale, Massachusetts? His grave has gotten special attention from the D.A.R., and he’s been lauded in poetry, song, and art as the forgotten equal to Paul Revere. But all that celebration is just because of a spelling error.

Comparing Bissell and Revere

In a half-serious, half-parodic poem called “Israel Bissell’s Ride,” western Massachusetts newspaper columnist Gerard Chapman wrote:

He lacks the renown that accrued to Revere
For no rhymester wrote ballad to blazon his fame;
But Bissell accomplished—and isn’t it queer?—
A feat that suggested Revere’s to be tame.

But such praise for Bissell over Paul Revere is based on some important misunderstandings.

One mistake is assuming that Bissell rode all the way to Philadelphia, switching horses along the way. (According to legend, his first mount collapsed and died as he rode into Worcester, and he hopped on another.) Bissell’s name indeed appeared in all the copied letters because Joseph Palmer had mentioned him specifically before signing his name. But Palmer’s letter also specified Bissell’s job: to carry the message “quite into Connecticut.”

Other riders took over in that colony and carried the message south. That’s how the post system was designed to work. Alexander McDougall of the New York Committee of Correspondence even stated the name of the courier to New Brunswick: a “Mr. Moorbach.”

Writers like Chapman praise Israel Bissell for riding over a much longer distance than Paul Revere, and that doesn’t change even if he went only as far as Connecticut. But length is only one way to compare Revere’s and Bissell’s actions.

Revere rode on a night when the British military was out to stop messengers just like him. He evaded a Royal Navy warship, narrowly escaped capture after leaving Charlestown, and was actually captured in Lincoln. In contrast, Bissell rode in daytime, farther and farther from the battle, with no danger of being captured or shot.

Revere also did a lot of other things on 18-19 April: gathering intelligence about the British march for Dr. Joseph Warren, arranging to send the news by signal-light to Charlestown, alerting militia officers along his way west, helping Samuel Adams to convince John Hancock to leave Lexington, and finally helping to hide Hancock’s papers as the first shots rang out on Lexington common.

Bissell, on the other hand, stuck to his job as a mail carrier. There’s no evidence of him doing anything else for the Patriot cause in in 1775. Bissell did an important task, but another post rider could have taken his place and done the same. Revere had the connections and persistence to do more than any other alarm rider on 18-19 April.

TOMORROW: What’s more, it looks like Israel Bissell didn’t really ride at all.

(The image above is Grant Wood’s rendering of Revere’s midnight ride from the Grant Wood Gallery.)

The Legend of Israel Bissell

Yesterday I quoted the Brooklyn, Connecticut, copy of Joseph Palmer’s letter about the shooting at Lexington on 19 Apr 1775. Starting in the late 1800s and throughout the 1900s, authors began writing about Israel Bissell, the post rider named in that document.

Historians found Israel Bissell (1752-1823) and his brother Justis listed as joining in Capt. W. Wolcott’s company from East Windsor, Connecticut, in July 1776. He served in the army only one month, though. After the war the Bissell family moved to Middlefield, Massachusetts. Israel bought farmland, married Lucy Hancock in 1784, and fathered four children. He died in 1823 at age seventy-one, and was buried in Hinsdale.

Bissell’s gravestone in Hinman said nothing about his Revolutionary War service: “IN MEMORY of Mr. ISRAEL BISSELL, who died October 24th 1823, Aged Sev’nty One Years.” In 1967 the D.A.R. added a bronze plaque describing him as an important post rider.

Since then, Bissell has been celebrated in art and sermon and poetry. Almost all of those mentions compare Bissell to Paul Revere, made into an American legend by Henry W. Longfellow’s poem. For example, Clay Perry opened his ode with these lines:

Listen, my children, to my epistle
Of the long, long ride of Israel Bissell,
Who outrode Paul by miles and time
But didn’t rate a poet’s rhyme.

Most authors writing about Bissell credit him with carrying Palmer’s news of Lexington all the way to Philadelphia.

There are three problems with that celebration. A series of post riders, not one man, carried the message to Philadelphia. Revere rode less distance, but did a lot more. And Israel Bissell didn’t ride at all.

TOMORROW: Comparing Bissell and Revere.

“To alarm the country quite to Connecticut”

Last year I quoted Elizabeth Palmer on how her husband and her father-in-law, Joseph Palmer (shown here, courtesy of Warren S. Parker), responded to news of the shots on Lexington common at dawn on 19 Apr 1775.

As I noted in discussing Elizabeth’s tale of Dr. Joseph Warren’s last day, not all that family’s lore pans out. But in this case we have evidence that Joseph Palmer was at work that morning, spreading the word about that shooting.

Joseph Palmer was a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s Committee of Safety, basically the executive power in the province outside of Boston. He and his extended family had moved from Boston to Watertown to keep away from the royal authorities. Palmer decided to alert other Patriots about the start of the armed conflict by sending a letter off with the post rider heading west toward Worcester and down into Connecticut.

Palmer’s original letter hasn’t survived, but copies did, including this one on display at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington (and conveniently quoted on its blog):

Watertown Wednesday Morning near 10 o’Clock

To all the Friends of American Liberty, be it known that this Morning before breake of Day a Brigade consisting of about 1000 or 1200 Men landed at [David] Phip’s Farm at Cambridge & marched to Lexington where they found a Company of our Colony Militia in Arms, upon Whom they fired without any Provocation and killed 6 Men and Wounded 4 others.

By an Express from Boston this Moment, we find another Brigade are now upon their march from Boston supposed to be about 1000.

This was the reinforcement column under Col. Percy. And the earlier column under Lt. Col. Francis Smith would certainly have argued with Palmer’s statement that they had “fired without any Provocation.”

The Bearer Mr. Israel Bissel is charged to alarm the Country quite to Connecticut and all Persons are desired to furnish him with Fresh Horses as they may be needed.

I have spoken with Several Persons who have seen the Dead & Wounded. Pray let the Delegates from this Colony to Connecticut see this they know.

J. Palmer, one of the
Committee of S——y

Copies of Palmer’s letter provided the first news of the war to many people between Watertown and Philadelphia. It was printed in various newspapers and handbills, and eventually reprinted in the Remembrancer, a London review of the past year’s news.

But Palmer’s short, sketchy report was quickly superseded by more detailed accounts, and this letter was basically forgotten for about a hundred years. Then historians started to cite it as evidence of how the Lexington alarm spread. By the late 1800s Henry W. Longfellow’s poem had made Paul Revere a household name in the U.S. of A., so people wanted to know more about the rider whom Palmer had “charged to alarm the Country.”

TOMORROW: On the trail of Israel Bissell.

Joseph Palmer’s Letter on Lexington

At the blog of the National Heritage Museum in Lexington, Jeff Croteau offered a look at an official period copy of Joseph Palmer’s letter about the shots at Lexington, sent south with an express rider named Israel Bissell. That letter will be on display in the museum for the rest of this week only.

Joseph Palmer (1716-1788) was born in England and came to Massachusetts in 1746 with his wife Mary and her young brother, Richard Cranch. The two men developed a glass factory (archeological debris here) and other workshops in the Germantown section of Braintree, as explained in this lecture by Warren S. Parker. Cranch married Abigail Adams’s older sister Mary. The Palmers had a son, Joseph Pearse Palmer, and all three men were drawn into Revolutionary politics. Reportedly the older Joseph broke with the London government only after the Boston Massacre.

In 1774, Joseph Palmer became a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and then of its Committee of Safety. On 18 Apr 1775, he was staying in Watertown at the house of Joseph P. Palmer’s in-laws, the Hunts. That son’s wife, Elizabeth Palmer, later wrote this account:

On the night of the eighteenth of April, I heard the drum beat; I waked Mr. Palmer and said, “My dear, I hear the drum”

He was out of bed with the rapidity of a bullet from a gun and, while he was dressing, his father entered and said, “My son, we must ride, I have received an express. Three men lie dead at Lexington.” My husband was off in an instant.

I entreated the old gentleman not to go, but he would not stay. He told me that there would probably be another brigade along soon and that I had better remove out of the way. They had their horses saddled and their pistols loaded in the barn, for they expected some sudden alarm. They were gone immediately. I never saw anything more of them until the next night at ten o’clock.

I don’t believe all that; the family’s legends don’t all add up. But the letter in the National Heritage Museum’s collection shows that Palmer was active on the morning of 19 Apr 1775, spreading the word about the fight at Lexington on behalf of the Provincial Congress.

Today Jeff has posted about Israel Bissell’s route from Watertown to New York, using Google Maps. It took Bissell only four days riding, which shows how much he hurried. Along the way officials copied Palmer’s letter in order to pass the news on to others, and this document is one of those hurried copies, made for the Committee of Correspondence in Norwich, Connecticut.

[ADDENDUM: Please see Boston 1775’s 2010 postings about Isaac Bissell.]

Israel Bissell and the Press

Today’s Patriots’ Day posting comes via the Associated Press, which is distributing David Weber’s dispatch on Israel Bissell spreading the news of the Battle of Lexington on 19 April 1775. The first modern expert cited in the story is, well, myself. (Here’s the Hartford Courant link in case the Boston Globe version is unavailable.)

The edited article states:

Dozens of other messengers also raced on horseback to spread the word, making it likely that Revere was a composite of these brave men, said J.L. Bell, a Massachusetts writer who specializes in Revolutionary War-era Boston.

Of course, the historical Paul Revere was real, and an individual, and quite significant in how things turned out. My comment here on Boston 1775 was that Henry W. Longfellow’s Revere, waking “every Middlesex village and farm” including Concord, was a composite. But that’s the difference between narrative poetry and history.

The A.P. story doesn’t quite make clear how Revere (and William Dawes, and Dr. Samuel Prescott, and many other men) rode on the night of 18-19 April 1775, before and during the British march. They spread the word of what the army might do to Massachusetts provincial leaders and supplies, and summoned militia units in response.

Israel Bissell set out for the south on the morning of 19 April after the skirmish at Lexington had occurred and while the army was in Concord. His job was to spread the news of what the army had done, as the Massachusetts Provincial Congress wanted that news spread. Bissell was a professional post rider, or long-distance mail carrier, and he had an official commission from the congress to carry out that job. His news went into many newspapers and printed broadsides along the way.

Bissell rode much further than Revere and Dawes, eventually reaching Philadelphia. But unlike those Bostonians, he didn’t have British officers trying to stop him. Those three riders and the many anonymous men who also carried the messages were all important nodes in the Patriot communication system, but they had different jobs to do at different times.

[ADDENDUM: Please see Boston 1775’s 2010 postings about Isaac Bissell.]