Knowing Your Enemy by Name

The two pieces of testimony I quoted over the last two days have something in common besides how they both described violence between locals and soldiers near the ropewalks in central Boston.

In both cases the person describing the 3 Mar 1770 fight, putting all the blame on those nasty people on the other side, could also name one of those opponents.

Archibald McNeal wasn’t just menaced by unknown grenadiers, identifiable only by the wings on their uniforms. Rather, he referred to “One of the grenadiers, named Dixson.”

Pvt. John Rodgers didn’t say he was attacked by three anonymous Bostonians. He fingered one of them as Joseph Shed, whom we can identify as a carpenter.

That pattern reflects the extensive ties between soldiers and civilians that Serena Zabin explores in The Boston Massacre: A Family History. Since late 1768 soldiers had been living in Boston, a town of only 16,000 people. People saw each other on the streets, in taverns, in churches. In some cases soldiers worked part-time alongside locals. Their wives boarded with local homeowners. More than a few redcoats wooed or married Boston women.

As a result, some civilians knew some soldiers as individuals, and vice versa. They may not have liked each other, but their relationships went deeper than simply redcoat and local.

Another example of this phenomenon that Zabin highlights is the case of James Bailey, a sailor who was at the 3 March ropewalk confrontation and at the Massacre two days later.

At the ropewalk, Bailey was a bit of a provocateur, asking young McNeal why he didn’t answer the grenadiers’ taunts. (And then, not having a weapon to counter the soldiers’ bludgeons either, Bailey shut up.) But he could also be friendly to a soldier.

On King Street, Bailey testified, he spotted Pvt. Hugh White standing guard outside the Customs office and being badgered by angry boys. [Rightly so, I’d say, but that’s another story.] “I went up to him because I knew him, and to see what was the matter,” the sailor said—i.e., what was all this ruckus about?

When I first went up to him, I said, what is the matter? He said he did not know. The boys were throwing pieces of ice at him, and after I went to him, they threw no more; I stood with him five or six minutes.

Bailey was actually “standing along with the Sentry, on the Custom-house steps,” in effect shielding White from attack. During that time, the sailor recalled, “He said very little to me, only that he was afraid, if the boys did not disperse, there would be something very soon, he did not mention what.”

Pvt. White, in turn, looked out for Bailey. When more soldiers arrived from the main guard, one of them was Pvt. John Carroll. Bailey recognized him from the ropewalk a couple of days before, and it’s quite possible Carroll recognized him. Bailey stated:

When the soldiers came down, Carrol came up to me and clapt his bayonet to my breast, and White said do not hurt him. . . .

Montgomery…was the very next person to me, close to me. When White told him not to hurt me, he took his hand and pushed me right behind him.

Bailey was one of the witnesses who said Pvt. Edward Montgomery fired the first shot after being hit, though he disagreed with other witnesses on what happened just before that. Bailey had such a close-up view of the shooting because Pvt. White perceived him as friendly.

Back to the Ropewalks

In 2020 I presented five men’s perspectives on the fight between soldiers and ropemakers at John Gray’s ropewalk on 2 Mar 1770.

The next day, there was another, smaller fight as a follow-up. So here’s another, smaller post about that fight.

Revolutionary Boston contained more than one man named Archibald McNeil or McNeal. One was a baker who became a Loyalist. Another owned a ropewalk. A third was the second man’s son, a second-generation ropemaker born in 1750, thus not of legal age when the king’s regiments came to town.

Nonetheless, the younger Archibald had learned most of the art and mystery of ropemaking, and he was the boss’s son and heir, so he probably wielded some authority in the shop. Here’s how he described the events of 3 March:

Archibald McNeil, jun. of lawful age, testifies and says, that on Saturday the third instant, about half an hour after four in the afternoon, the deponent with two apprentices were spinning at the lower end of Mr. McNeil’s ropewalk, three stout grenadiers, armed with bludgeons, came to them, and addressing the deponent said, You damn’d dogs, don't you deserve to be kill’d? Are you fit to die?

The deponent and company being quite unarmed gave no answer. James Bayley, a seafaring young man, coming up, said to the deponent, &c. Why did you not answer?

One of the grenadiers, named Dixson, hearing him, came up to Bayley and asked him if he was minded to vindicate the cause?

Bayley also unarmed did not answer till James Young came up, who, tho’ equally naked [i.e., weaponless], said to the grenadier, Damn it, I know what a soldier is.

That grenadier stood still, and the other who had threatened the deponent came up and struck at him, which Young fended off with his arms, and then turning aimed a blow at the deponent, which had it reached might probably have been fatal.

Patrick ——, Mr. Winter Calef’s journeyman, seeing the affray, went into the tan-house, and bringing out two batts gave one to a bystander, who together with Patrick soon cleared the walk of them

“James Bayley, a seafaring young man,” was the sailor named James Bailey who testified at length at the soldiers’ trial about what he saw at the Massacre two days later. At the end of that testimony he added that he’d seen defendant John Carroll “at the Rope walks in the affray there, a few days before the 5th March”—which of course confirms Bailey was there, too.

Ebenezer Winter Calef (b. 1729) was a tanner in Boston. He and his brother Joseph had lost a lot of property in the great fire of 1760, and a family history credits Winter Calef, a bachelor and thus apparently able to devote all his energies to business, with maintaining the family fortunes. (Joseph’s son, also named Ebenezer Winter Calef, became an officer in the Continental Navy.)

I wondered if Patrick, “Calef’s journeyman,” might be Patrick Carr, the leather breeches–maker fatally wounded at the Massacre, but he worked for John Field.

TOMORROW: More fighting on that Saturday.

What Happened to the Boston Massacre Defendants?

After being acquitted of murder at the Boston Massacre on 5 Dec 1770, Cpl. William Wemys and five private soldiers “went their Way thro’ the Streets,” the Boston Gazette reported. They probably boarded a boat to Castle William, where the 14th Regiment of Foot was stationed.

Nine days later, fellow defendants Edward Montgomery and Mathew Kilroy joined them, each with one hand bandaged after branding.

Lt. Col. William Dalrymple of the 14th had already decided how he would send those men back to the 29th Regiment, which had been moved to New Jersey. The commander wrote:

A bad disposition appearing in the Soldiers who were confined I shall send them round by sea, we have but too much reason to suspect their ententions to desert they are not at all to be depended on.

“I do not chuse to trust them any other way,” he added on 17 December. It would be great to know why Dalrymple was suspicious, but we don’t.

Until recently, the story of those eight British enlisted men stopped there. But Don Hagist has been doing thorough research on British troops during the War for Independence, culminating in the new book Noble Volunteers. Don found more information on some of those soldiers in the muster rolls and Chelsea pensioner records, which he generously let me publish here. I’ve added information on others over the years. So here’s what happened to all the defendants.

By May 1771, William Wemys was promoted to sergeant. He was still a sergeant when the company was stationed at Chatham, England, on 29 July 1775. His company’s muster rolls end there, so we lose track of him.

In the grenadier company, John Carroll and William Macauley were both made corporals. William Warren, despite being the tallest of the defendants, transferred out of the grenadiers to another company in the 29th.

As I related in this posting from 2006, Pvt. James Hartigan died on 4 Nov 1771 at the 29th’s next assignment in St. Augustine, Florida.

The regiment was in England when the war began, and army commanders decided to send it back to North America. That could have exposed Pvts. Montgomery and Kilroy to being captured by the American rebels, their hands still bearing the brand of the Massacre. On 22 Feb 1776 those two men appeared before a board of examiners for military pensions administered by Chelsea Hospital. Montgomery, age forty-one, was deemed “Worn Out,” and Kilroy, only twenty-eight, was found to have “a Lame Knee.” The board discharged both men from the army with pensions.

The rest of the 29th Regiment sailed to Canada, where different fates awaited different companies. Pvt. Warren and Pvt. Hugh White, the sentry, spent the American war at separate stations in Canada. White was finally discharged from the army on 10 Nov 1789, then aged forty-nine.

John Carroll, promoted to sergeant by February 1777, and Cpl. Macauley were still with the 29th’s grenadier company, which was assigned to Gen. John Burgoyne’s invasion force. Those two men might therefore have become part of the “Convention Army” of prisoners of war marched from Saratoga to Cambridge at the end of that year. But there’s no record of anyone in Massachusetts recognizing those two soldiers from the Massacre trial.

I discussed the evidence about Capt. Thomas Preston’s retirement here. He started to receive an annual £200 royal pension in 1772, and it continued until at least 1790. In the 1780s Preston was living in Dublin.

Of the defendants in the third trial, I profiled Hammond Green in this posting. He evacuated Boston in 1776 as a Customs employee, and his wife and children followed the next year. The royal government gave Green a Customs job at his new home of Halifax, and he was still working there in 1807.

Thomas Greenwood was working for the Customs service in 1770 but wasn’t listed among the employees who evacuated in 1776. I don’t know anything more solid about him.

Edward Manwaring retained the post of chief Customs officer on the Gaspé peninsula until 1785 when he was succeeded by his neighbor Felix O’Hara.

John Munro carried on his business as a notary “at his Office South Side of the Town House.” The 12 Jan 1775 issue of the Massachusetts Spy reported that he had died the previous Tuesday at the age of thirty-nine after a “tedious illness.” He was buried out of Christ Church on 13 January.

Looking for Trouble, Even on the Sabbath

Among the men who brawled at John Gray’s ropewalk on 2 Mar 1770 were a young ropemaker named Samuel Gray (no known relation) and Pvts. William Warren and Mathew Kilroy of the 29th Regiment.

The next day, there were more fights in Boston. Some redcoats from the 29th, including Pvt. John Carroll, went back into Gray’s ropewalk and challenged the men working there, along with sailor James Bailey. Then there was another brawl, with one private reportedly badly injured.

Town watch captain Benjamin Burdick also had a run-in with soldiers on Saturday:

A young man that boarded with me, and was at the Rope-Walks, told me several of them had a spite at him, and that he believed he was in danger. I had seen two soldiers about my house, I saw one of them hearkening at the window, I saw him again near the house, and asked him what he was after;

he said he was pumping ship:

(“Pumping ship” was slang for urinating. This may have been a reference to William Green’s rude joke the day before about cleaning an outhouse. Then again, the soldier might have been urinating.)

Was it not you, says I, that was hearkening at my window last night?

what if it was, he said, I told him to march off, and he damned me, and I beat him till he had enough of it, and he then went off.

That incident made Burdick, and even more so his wife, decide that he should carry a Highland broadsword when he went out on duty.

Sunday was a day of rest in Boston, of course. Yet more military men visited Gray’s ropewalks then, 250 years ago today. But this delegation was at a higher level, as owner John Gray testified:

At Sabbath noon I was surprised at hearing that Col. [Maurice] Carr [of the 29th] and his officers had entered my rope-walk, opened the windows, doors, &c, giving out that they were searching for a dead sergeant of their regiment; this put me upon immediately waiting upon Col. [William] Dalrymple [of the 14th, senior army officer in Boston, pictured above after retirement], to whom I related what I understood had passed at the rope-walk days before.

He replied it was much the same as he had heard from his people; but says he, “your man was the aggressor in affronting one of my people, by asking him if he wanted to work, and then telling him to clean his little-house.”

For this expression I dismissed my journeyman on the Monday morning following; and further said, I would do all in my power to prevent my people’s giving them any affront in future.

He then assured me, he had and should do everything in his power to keep his soldiers in order, and prevent their any more entering my inclosure.

Presently after, Col. Carr came in, and asked Col. Dalrymple what they should do, for they were daily losing their men; that three of his grenadiers passing quietly by the rope-walks were greatly abused, and one of them so much beat that he would die.

He then said he had been searching for a sergeant who had been murdered; upon which, I said, Yes, Colonel, I hear you have been searching for him in my rope-walks; and asked him, whether that sergeant had been in the affray there on the Friday; he replied, no: for he was seen on the Saturday. I then asked him, how he could think of looking for him in my walks; and that had he applied to me, I would have waited on him, and opened every apartment I had for his satisfaction.

These gentlemen in the military and in business were trying to keep the peace, but also sought to protect the interests of their operations.

The 12 March Boston Gazette added detail, perhaps even reliable, to the story of the missing sergeant:

Divers stories were propagated among the soldiery that served to agitate their spirits; particularly on the Sabbath that one Chambers, a sergeant, represented as a sober man, had been missing the preceding day and must therefore have been murdered by the townsmen. An officer of distinction so far credited this report that he entered Mr. Gray’s rope-walk that Sabbath; and when required of by that gentleman as soon as he could meet him, the occasion of his so doing, the officer replied that it was to look if the sergeant said to be murdered had not been hid there.

This sober sergeant was found on the Monday unhurt in a house of pleasure.

On the day of rest there were no more brawls, but rumors flew among the townspeople that soldiers were plotting revenge on Monday. Oddly enough, rumors spread among the soldiers that townspeople were plotting revenge on Monday.

COMING UP: Another glimpse of Sergeant Chambers. But first…