“I am in a tremor”

This is the last of the series of postings analyzing Dr. Benjamin Church’s 24 Sept 1775 letter to Maj. Edward Cane, now preserved in the files of Gen. Thomas Gage.

As I wrote before, Henry Belcher published this letter in The First American Civil War but didn’t identify the writer. Books about Dr. Church and his spying didn’t discuss this letter. So I believe these postings are the first time this document has been analyzed in the context of Church’s life.

Toward the end of the letter Church warned his handler about a possible Continental Army attack on Boston, then pushed that off because of the gunpowder shortage:

I am very Certain it has been Concluded on in a Council of War as soon as ever they found Great Britain was determined to push Matters still farther, then they woud attack the Town, but then Sir this determenation was in Consiquence of the News that they had so large a Quantity of Powder close at hand, At present I am full as much persuaded there will be no more done this Season as that there will be, but Sir, this you may rely on I will give you the Earliest notice in my power by this ferry Man that comes over—that you must write me by him if you can trust him to deliver me a line privately which he can if he will.

Having laid out his value to the British command, Church then went on to ask for more money, to be sent out by that ferryman as discussed here.

By this point Church had been secretly delivering information to the British command for at least eight months. He had become the surgeon general responsible for the health of soldiers on one side of the siege lines while aiding the army on the other. He had seen war break out and stalemate.

Church was feeling more and more strain, as shown by his attempt to resign from the Continental Army that month and the postscripts to this letter:

N.B.—The poor people that have got out of Boston some time are in great Want Good God what are we to do I know not.

Excuse my incorrect manner of writing for I am in a tremor.

Two days after Dr. Church penned this letter, a baker in Newport named Godfrey Wenwood took a document to the Patriot authorities. Some sleuthing revealed that Church had tried to send that ciphered letter into Boston in July. By month’s end, the doctor’s career as both an army surgeon and a spy was over.

Apparently, the immediate prospect of being hanged restored Church’s sang-froid. In October he faced an army court-martial and in November a trial by the Massachusetts General Court, at both tribunals calmly insisting that he was innocent. American authorities never had enough evidence to prove his guilt, but never so little as to clear him.

Over two years later, after a proposed prisoner exchange thwarted by a riot, the state put Dr. Church on James Smithwick’s ship Welcome bound for Martinique. The ship, the captain, and the doctor were never seen again.

A Final Glimpse of Mary Lobb

Yesterday I discussed the precedent-setting marriage of Capt. James Smithwick in 1800. He appears to have died just ten years later, leaving his wife with two small children. Fortunately, her sister died in 1813. That meant the widow Smithwick could move her small family in with her widowed brother-in-law, looking after the house while he provided for everyone. The eldest of all the young cousins, Edward Kavanagh, eventually represented Maine in Congress. (This picture of him comes courtesy of the Maine Historical Society.)

Capt. Smithwick’s mother, Mary Lobb, died before 1817. Another item from the Massachusetts court records gives us a glimpse of her last years.

In her will Lobb had left one of her properties to a seven-year-old grandson, Francis Campbell Smithwick, specifying that the tenant, William Jordan, would be his guardian and manage the property for his benefit until he turned twenty-one.

Jordan then came up with deeds showing that Lobb had signed the same property over to him after that will. He now owned it outright, he said. And that was a step too far. Some of the boy’s relatives sued Jordan. The lead plaintiff was another grandson—also named James Smithwick, just to make my searches more confusing.

The court decided that Mary Lobb had shown “evidence of extreme old age, and habits of intoxication.” The deeds were therefore void, her “extreme old age and imbecility having been taken advantage of, by the pretended grantee.” The court removed Jordan as the child’s guardian and created a “trust estate” instead.

And that ends my gossip about James Smithwick and Mary Lobb.

The Younger James Smithwick’s Controversial Marriage

The sea captain James Smithwick, who disappeared at sea with Dr. Benjamin Church in 1778, left behind a son, also named James. I mentioned him back here. When young James grew up, he also became a mariner. Most of the references to “Captain James Smithwick” that I found when I was seeking reports of Dr. Church’s departure turned out to be about the son.

The younger James Smithwick’s mother, Mary Lobb, appears to have raised him and his sisters as Catholics. He became a business partner of James Kavanagh and Matthew Cottrill, who arrived in Boston from County Wexford, Ireland, about 1781 and eventually set up a shipyard in Newcastle, Maine. Together the three owned a ship called the Hibernia, which was captured by a French privateer in 1800.

Father Francis Matignon, Boston’s first long-tenured Catholic priest, presided over Cottrill’s marriage in 1793, and Kavanagh’s in 1794. Then in 1800 the younger James Smithwick wanted to marry Mrs. Kavanagh’s sister, Eliza Jackson.

At this point Matignon’s former student Jean-Louis Lefèbvre de Cheverus was working as a missionary to the Indians out of Point Pleasant, Maine. He had become known, at least in America, as John Cheverus. (Eventually he became the first Catholic bishop of Boston, and the picture of him above comes from the blog of his latest successor.) Capt. Smithwick and Miss Jackson asked Cheverus to marry them at the Kavanaghs’ home on the first day of 1800.

The Columbian Phoenix and Boston Review was one of the publications that reported the wedding months later, when the news reached Boston:

At Damascotty [i.e., Damariscotta], by the Rev. John Chevers, Capt. James Smithwick, to the amiable and accomplished Miss Eliza Jackson, both of this town.

Naturally such an event led to a landmark lawsuit.

Under the Massachusetts marriage law of 1786, Cheverus was not authorized to marry Smithwick and Jackson. The law specified that a clergyman could marry couples only in the town where he was settled as a minister. But Cheverus had come to Damariscotta for the marriage; according to the Roman Catholic Church, his parish included all of Massachusetts and Maine.

Cheverus himself recognized the conflict between those two authorities because he advised the Smithwicks to go to a justice of the peace the day after the ceremony to make sure their marriage was legal in the eyes of the state. But he was nonetheless hauled up on charges.

Some analyses of this case say that Massachusetts Attorney General James Sullivan prosecuted it as a way of clarifying the law, perhaps even changing it. Sullivan had represented Matignon in a previous lawsuit aimed at freeing Kavanagh and Cottrill from having to pay taxes to support their town’s Protestant minister.

In August a grand jury in Wicasset indicted Cheverus. Cottrill paid his bail. The court of common pleas found in the priest’s favor, and Sullivan declined to prosecute further. However, Judge Theophilus Bradford took it upon himself to continue the case to the next court session. On the day in March 1801 that the second trial was to start, Bradford suffered a stroke. Nobody else pursued the matter, and thus a precedent was created.

TOMORROW: A last glimpse of Mary Lobb from yet another court case.

The Last Days of Dr. Benjamin Church

Sometime in early 1778, Capt. James Smithwick directed the sloop Welcome out of Boston harbor, carrying accused spy Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., to Martinique. On 24 April the Royal Pennsylvania Gazette reprinted some news from New York dated three weeks earlier:

Doctor Benjamin Church, was, about six weeks ago [i.e., mid-February], sent off from Boston in a vessel bound for Martinico, with orders never to return on pain of death.

The goal [i.e., jail] of Boston is crowded with persons who have refused to abjure the British Government, and swear allegiance to the Rebels, who are tendering these execrable oaths to every man they suspect to be a loyalist.

The same item appeared in the next day’s Pennsylvania Ledger. With the British army controlling New York and Philadelphia that season, the cities’ newspapers were decidedly pro-Crown.

Neither the Welcome, its captain, nor Dr. Church was seen again. I’ve found no comments on this mystery in 1778 newspapers or correspondence. The earliest surviving report of what happened may be an extract copied from a letter that a man named Thomas Brown sent from Halifax on 16 May 1782, filed in Britain’s National Archives.

Allen French’s General Gage’s Informers says Brown wrote that Church had been “exiled to some island in the West Indies, and threatened with death in case he shôd ever return.” E. Alfred Jones summarized Brown’s information this way in The Loyalists of Massachusetts:

it would seem that Dr. Benjamin Church was put on board a small schooner which Captain Smethwick bought of Jo. Clark and sailed from Boston in February, 1778, bound for the West Indies, and was lost at sea. A number of other vessels sailing at the same time foundered at sea. One man only was saved and brought back an account of the melancholy disaster.

That appears to mean only one man from all the vessels which hit the same weather. Gen. Thomas Gage’s highest placed spy had been swallowed by the Atlantic.

Dr. Church’s father, who had lobbied for his release from jail, resisted the conclusion that his son had died. In his will he still mentioned the doctor as a potential heir. The doctor’s widow, Sarah Church, moved to England, as described here.

In contrast, Thomas Brown wrote in 1782 that “Captn. Smithwicks widow has married another husband.” And indeed, Mary Smithwick remarried in March 1779 at Christ Church. Her new husband, stepfather to her three young children, was a man named George Lobb.

COMING UP: More about Mary Lobb. (That new marriage was a mistake.)

James Smithwick: mariner

James Smithwick was a mariner from Britain or Ireland, according to the understanding of descendants related in Charles Hudson’s History of the Town of Lexington. That fits with how when he came to Boston he attended the town’s Anglican churches rather than its many Congregationalist meetings.

On 20 Aug 1763, Capt. Smithwick married Mary Connell at Christ Church, now often called Old North. The couple’s first child, also named Mary, died a year and ten days later. They also lost children a daughter named Margaret at fifteen months in 1769 and a son named Peter at two years in 1773.

Happily, other children survived: James, born 11 Mar 1770 (six days after the Boston Massacre), Francis in 1773, and another Mary in 1774.

During the war Christ Church was closed for a while, and the family might then appear on the Trinity Church records. A “Capt. John Smithwick” and his wife Mary had a son named Cunnell or Connell in July 1777, and he died in October 1778. That unusual given name was Mary Smithwick’s family name.

By the mid-1770s Capt. Smithwick was prosperous enough to own real estate and slaves. On 23 Sept 1777 two of his enslaved servants, Rose and Waterford, announced their intention to marry.

(Waterford Smithwick remarried in 1787 to a woman listed as “Tamer Phillips.” In 1792, Tamar Smithwick married a man named James Scott; both were labeled as “molattoes.”)

In 1776, Capt. Smithwick’s name came up in a draft for the Continental Army from Boston’s ward 3, in the lower North End. (This listing of Smithwick in connection to ward 3 might be why Hudson wrote that the captain “was warden of the town in 1776.” He never held that office.)

The captain paid a fine to be excused from army service, as most men of means did. That left him free to continue sailing out of Boston harbor.

TOMORROW: Which turned out not to be the best idea.

Dr. Benjamin Church Sails Away at Last

Yesterday I quoted from the Massachusetts House records on that body’s vote on 8 Jan 1778 to put accused but unproven spy Dr. Benjamin Church on board the brig Friendship, which Joshua Winslow was supposed to sail to “Martinico.”

However, the resolution that actually came out of the state legislature the next day said something different:

That Doctr Benjamin Church be & he hereby is permitted to take Passage on board the Sloop Welcome Capt. James Smithwick Master bound for the Island of Martinico;

And the Majr. Part of the Council are desired to give Order to the Sherriff of the County of Suffolk to remove the said Doctr Church on board the said Sloop, when she is ready for Sailing, directing him to search his Person & Baggage to prevent his carrying any Letters or other papers that may be to the detriment of the American States;

And the sd Church is not to return to this State during the Continuance of the present War without Leave therefor first had & obtain’d from the General Court, under such pains & penalties as they shall see fit to order.

The House records make no mention of the change in ship between its first vote and final approval. Perhaps Capt. Winslow objected to carrying Church. Perhaps Capt. Smithwick was leaving earlier, or Capt. Winslow had already sailed.

(As printed decades later, the Massachusetts Acts and Resolves gives the captain’s name as “Smitharick,” but other sources say “Smithwick,” and A Staunch Whig has confirmed that that’s what the original document in the Massachusetts Archives says.)

“Martinico” was the Caribbean island now known as Martinique. In 1778 it was part of the French Empire, the U.S. of A.’s new ally. Wikipedia says that one of the island’s inhabitants that year was the future Empress Josephine. Apparently that was far enough away for Dr. Church and the Massachusetts authorities to agree that it would be safe for him to be there.

I’ve found no mention of the Welcome and its sailing date in early American newspapers. Not all departures were reported, and during the war printers might have been especially careful with that information. So all we can say is that Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., left Boston a short time after 9 Jan 1778.

And promptly disappeared.

TOMORROW: Who was Capt. James Smithwick?

(Photo of Martinique coast above by guillaumeo, via Flickr.)