“The horses lately taken from Noddle’s Island”

The major fighting over Noddle’s Island, later elevated with the name of the Battle of Chelsea Creek, took place on 28 May 1775.

Provincial troops returned to the island on 30 May and 10 June to remove the remaining livestock and burn the structures still standing on Henry Howell Williams’s farm.

On 2 June, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress appointed a five-man committee to consider what to do with “the horses lately taken from Noddle’s Island.”

That committee decided to treat a significant number of those animals, if not all, as belonging “to our enemies” and thus as the spoils of war. Perhaps those horses really had been the property of the British military, left to graze on the island. But we know that Williams had raised horses on that island, and on 12 June he told the congress that provincial soldiers had taken more than eight horses from his farm.

Before that petition arrived, the congress had adopted its committee’s recommendation:

the same horses be delivered to the committee of supplies, to be by them used and improved for the benefit of the colony, as they shall think fit, until further order from this or some future congress, or house of representatives.

On 13 June, one horse was grazing outside Edmund Fowle’s house in Watertown, where Provincial Congress committees met. The congress assigned “the horse in Mr. Fowle’s pasture in this town, which was taken lately from Noddle’s island,” to James Sullivan. Along with two other delegates, he was about to head west to inspect Crown Point and Fort Ticonderoga, and he needed transportation.

On 3 July, the committee of safety resolved:

Henries Vomhavi, an Indian, having represented to this committee, that he had taken two horses at Noddle’s island, one a little horse, which he is desirous of retaining as some recompense for his fatigue and risk in that action, in which, it is said he behaved with great bravery; it is the opinion of this committee, that said Indian should be gratified in his request, which will be an encouragement to others in the service…

The next day the full congress heard the “recommendation of the committee of safety relative to an Indian’s having a horse.” Yet another committee endorsed the plan to give Vomhavi the small horse “to encourage his further brave conduct and good behaviour in camp,” and the congress agreed.

The Provincial Congress thus recognized how the Stockbridge company was a valuable part of its army, and how its men might have particular expectations in regard to warfare. While Sullivan was supposed the return the first horse, the second now belonged to Vomhavi.

TOMORROW: And for Henry Howell Williams?

“To day I have recd the Lt. Governors Cheese”

In 1797, Moses Gill (1734-1800, shown here in 1764) was the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. He was a Republican candidate for governor that spring, but came in a distant third after superior court justice Increase Sumner and attorney general James Sullivan. He handily retained the lieutenant governor’s office, though.

Gill was born in Charlestown and started his career as a merchant in Boston, but since 1767 he had lived the life of a country gentleman. Twice widowed and childless, Gill was the patriarchal squire of the town of Princeton and also the recent namesake of the town of Gill.

On 27 March, Lt. Gov. Gill wrote from Boston to the newly inaugurated second President of the United States, John Adams:

my Dear Sir.

By Capn. Constant Norton of the Schooner Jay you will receive a large Princeton Cheese, as by the inclosd. receipt, which you will Please to Accept from me, as a Small token of my affection and esteem; it is Packd in a Box and Divided, for the President of the United States, it will be in eating the first weake in may, And it woud be well to unpack it, and Keep it from the Sun in a Cold dry Cituation.

President Adams had received Gill’s letter only a week later and wrote home from Philadelphia to his wife, Abigail:

Lt Governor Gill has sent me one of his Princetown Cheeses, of such a Size as to require handspikes to manage it, according to Father Niles’s old Story.

“Father Niles” was what Adams called the Rev. Samuel Niles of Braintree, an acquaintance from decades before.

The President hadn’t actually seen the cheese yet, as his cordial thank-you letter to Gill the next day acknowledged:

Dear Sir

I have received your favor of the 27th of March and very Kindly thank you, for both the Letter and the generous Present of a Cheese from Princeton, I know very well the Value that is to be attached to Princeton and its inhabitants and Productions, Its Cheese in particular I know to be Excellent, and I shall prize it the higher for the place of its growth, I shall share it, and boast of it, and praise it and admire it as long as it lives,

I dare Say before I See it, that our America produces no thing Superior to it in its Kind your directions concerning it shall be observed

And Jonathan Sewall said Adams didn’t know how to flatter people.

Ten days later, the cheese finally arrived at the Presidential Mansion. John reported to Abigail on 14 April:

To day I have recd the Lt. Governors Cheese—like a charriot forewheel boxed up in Wood & Iron. it will last till you come.

According to the editors of the Adams Papers, presumably based on consulting the shipping papers, this wheel of cheese weighed 110 pounds. For comparison, Williams-Sonoma offers (for $3,000) a wheel of Parmesan cheese that was about the same weight before curing; it’s 18" across and 9" thick.

TOMORROW: Cheese for Abigail Adams.

How to Join the Massachusetts Army

On 5 May 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress decided how militiamen would sign up for longer service in its army:

Resolved, that all officers & soldiers of the Massachusetts army now raising for the defence & security of the rights and liberties of this and our sister colonies in america, shall each & every of them excepting only the the General Officers repeat and take the folowing Oath: (viz)

I, A B, swear, I will truly & faithfully serve in the Massachusetts army, to which I belong, for the defence and security of the estates, lives and liberties of the good people of this & the sister colonies in america, in opposition to ministerial tyrany by which they are or may be oppressed, and to all other enemies & opposers whatsoever; that I will adhere to the rules & regulations of sd. army, observe & obey the generals & other officers set over me; and disclose and make known to said officers all traiterous conspiraces, attempts and designs whatsoever which I shall know to be made against said army or any of the english american colonies, so help me God

This text came from a document in the Massachusetts Archives and was published in a volume of the state’s Acts and Resolves in 1886. The text published in The Journals of Each Provincial Congress of Massachusetts in 1838 has the same words but regularized spelling and punctuation.

The congress left generals out of that oath since they would have no superior officers to answer to. It took another twelve days, and a suggestion that Gen. Artemas Ward really ought to have a commission, for the body to come up with an oath for those commanders:

Resolved, That the general officers of the Massachusetts army, now raising for the defence and security of the rights and liberties of this and our sister colonies in America, shall each and every of them repeat, take, and subscribe the following oath, to be administered by viz.:

I, A. B., do solemnly swear, that, as a general officer in the Massachusetts army, I will well and faithfully execute the office of a general, to which I have been appointed, according to my best abilities, in defence and for the security of the estates, lives, and liberties of the good people of this and the sister colonies in America, in opposition to ministerial tyranny, by which they are or may be oppressed, and to all other enemies and opposers whatsoever; that I will adhere to the rules and regulations of said army, established by the Congress of the colony of the Massachusetts Bay, observe and obey the resolutions and orders which are or shall be passed by said Congress, or any future congress, or house of representatives, or legislative body of said colony, and such committees as shall be by them authorized for that purpose; and that I will disclose and make known to the authority aforesaid, all traitorous conspiracies, attempts and designs whatsoever, which I shall know to be made, or have reason to suspect are making, against the army, or any of the English American colonies.

That text comes from the printed Journals of Each Provincial Congress. It didn’t conclude with “so help me God,” the only one of the three oaths the congress dictated that didn’t contain that formula. Whether that was an oversight or a significant decision is unclear.

The congress took another two days to finish Ward’s commission. A biographer of James Sullivan stated that he drafted the document, and the other two members of the committee never had biographers to dispute that. On 20 May Samuel Dexter administered the oath to Gen. Ward, and Dr. Joseph Warren as president of the congress delivered the commission. It’s an impressive-looking document.

A Chance to Be on TV (kind of)

C-SPAN is recording William M. Fowler’s talk about his new book, An American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783, at the Social Law Library tonight. The event runs from 5:00 to 7:00 P.M., and organizers ask people to arrive promptly so as not to disrupt the recording. But hey, if you want to be a blurry shoulder crossing in front of a camera halfway through the event, here’s your chance.

Bill Fowler is also host of this New England Quarterly podcast from last summer discussing Richard Brown’s article “‘Tried, Convicted, and Condemned, in Almost Every Bar-room and Barber’s Shop’: Anti-Irish Prejudice in the Trial of Dominic Daley and James Halligan, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1806.”

Prof. Brown is a very interesting historian of early America who organized one of the first history conferences I attended. This paper grew from the same research that led to The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, written with Prof. Irene Quenzler Brown, and he’s doing other research on the criminal justice system. Even on a topic that obviously means a lot to him, Dick Brown is somewhat dry as a speaker, thoughtful rather than effusive, so to liven up this recording there’s also…

Michael Dukakis!

The former governor, now a professor of government at Northeastern, comes into the conversation because he issued a proclamation acknowledging the injustices of the Daley and Halligan trial, modeled on a similar proclamation about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Tell me he doesn’t sound loose, casual, and still very smart about government.

An interesting aspect of the discussion, not fully explored, is that Brown concluded that anti-Irish sentiment was not a factor in Daley and Halligan’s conviction, though their defense counsel raised that issue. The prosecuting attorney, James Sullivan, was only one generation removed from Ireland himself, and Massachusetts would elect him governor the next two years. Other Irishmen were acquitted in similar trials at the same time. On the other hand, the rules of the court in 1806 were not what any of us would consider fair today.

Dr. Amos Windship and the Christ Church Pew

Boston’s Anglican churches were rebuilding themselves in the 1780s. Not physically—they weren’t dismantled in whole or in part like some of the Congregationalist meeting-houses. But the war had made some of their richest members leave town, and they had to redefine their relationship with the king and Church of England.

That created openings for men like Dr. Amos Windship, who joined the congregation of Christ Church (now called Old North) in Boston’s North End. He was a warden starting on 28 May 1787, and a vestryman from 21 Dec 1789, deeply involved in church business.

Since 1777, William Montague had read in the Christ Church pulpit. Dr. Ephraim Eliot called him “a low bred man, of much cunning but mean literary abilities. He was a favorite among the lower class of the people.” Montague visited England in 1789, returning in August 1790 with the musket ball that supposedly killed Dr. Joseph Warren.

Some of the wealthier congregants took advantage of Montague’s absence to go to Halifax in 1790 and invite the Rev. Dr. William Walter (1737-1800) to become their minister. He had been rector at Trinity Church before the war, leaving Boston with the British military in 1776.

When Montague returned, he found himself in the position of assistant. He still preached a lot since Walter had also agreed to be minister at the Episcopal church in Cambridge. But there was soon conflict between the two men and their followers.

In March 1792 Montague asked to resign, citing “those who call themselves the Doctor’s [i.e., Walter’s] friends” and “the unchristian and abusive conduct of some towards me,—their constant endeavor to injure my Character and good name.” He went out to the Episcopal church in Dedham, where he spent a lot of his ministerial time on real-estate deals. Decades later, the congregation there asked him to step down.

During his trip to England, Montague had gotten into some sort of embarrassment. Eliot wrote that the man became

acquainted with some buckish English clergymen, who wishing to put a trick upon their raw Yankee brother, had introduced him into bad company.

And then the editor of Eliot’s manuscript for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts chose to omit a few lines. Just when it was getting good! Whatever happened, Dr. Windship had heard about it, and told other people in Boston.

By that time, Dr. Windship himself had been gotten in trouble with Christ Church. In 1791 he borrowed the Treasurer’s Ledger, and when he gave it back it now assigned pew number 30, in the back of the church, to him. Senior warden James Sherman wrote an angry note in the book:

this May Certifie all Whom it may Concern That the above Pew No. 30 was from the first settlement of Christ Church in Boston devoted wholy to the use of His Excelence the Governor and other Gentlemen and so continued untill August 1791 at which time this Ledger was in the Possession of Doctor Amos Windship who had borrowed it of James Sherman Senr Warden of said Church in order to settle his account with the Revd. Mr. Montague

he the sd. Windship kept it near a month and when returned “Governors Seat” as it stood above and as it was before was erased and “Dr. Amos Windship” as it now stands was wrote in its Stead with the account under it which account was brought from folio 91 which was erased about the middle of the lead, for which I the Subscriber as Warden and for the Honor of said Said was obliged to Lay the Same before the Attny. General and what followed may be seen by turning to a Meeting of the Proprietors of said Church Monday September 26th. 1791.

The two pages in question had apparently been treated with “some form of acid.” Attorney General James Sullivan advised the church to bring Windship to court, but in October the doctor admitted he had altered the ledger, saying it “was an error in judgement (and for which, I am very sorry).”

Dr. Windship started attending the Rev. Dr. John Lathrop’s New Brick Meeting. But he’d been involved with Christ Church long enough to move Maj. John Pitcairn’s body.

TOMORROW: At last! Mucking about with Maj. Pitcairn’s body!

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.

Henries Vomhavi and Two Captured Horses

On 3 July 1775, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety considered a special request from a provincial soldier:

Henries Vomhavi, an Indian, having represented to this committee, that he had taken two horses at Noddle’s island, one a little horse, which he is desirous of retaining as some recompense for his fatigue and risk in that action, in which, it is said he behaved with great bravery; it is the opinion of this committee, that said Indian should be gratified in his request, which will be an encouragement to others in the service, provided, the honorable Congress should approve thereof.

I quoted a couple of reports on the fighting on Noddle’s Island back in May 2007. The major purpose of the provincial raid was to seize cattle and sheep, depriving the besieged garrison of meat. Those two horses were a bonus.

The Provincial Congress records for the afternoon of 4 July say:

A recommendation of the committee of safety relative to an Indian’s having a horse, was read, and committed to Doct. [John] Taylor, Mr. [George] Partridge, and Mr. [John] Glover. . . .

The Committee upon the Letter relative to the Indian’s having a Horse, reported. The Report was accepted, and is as follows, viz:

Resolved, That a small Horse, taken by Henries Vomhavi from Noddle’s Island, be granted to the said Henries for his own use, to encourage his further brave conduct and good behaviour in camp.

What about the bigger horse that Vomhavi had secured? The Congress had already put that to use on 13 June, resolving “That Mr. [James] Sullivan have liberty to use the horse in Mr. Fowle’s pasture in this town which was taken lately from Noddle’s island for his journey to Ticonderoga.” The legislature was then meeting in Edmund Fowle’s house in Watertown, now home to that town’s historical society. Evidently the horse was kept as provincial property nearby.

I’d love to know more about Henries Vomhavi, but as far as I can tell this is the only record of him.