“Letters were found in the Doctor’s pocket”

On 29 July 1775, the Middlesex Journal, a newspaper published in London, reported this tidbit about the Battle of Bunker Hill:

The day after the late battle in America, some of the Regulars searched the pockets of Dr. [Joseph] Warren, who was killed, and found three letters sent to him from some spies at Boston, which were immediately sent there, and the writers being soon discovered were sent to prison. 

On his blog about Warren, biographer Sam Forman quotes two more London newspapers running versions of the same news. From the 29 July Morning Chronicle:

A gentleman is arrived in town, who was present at the action on the 17th of June, at Charles Town, between the Provincials and the Regulars. . . . He further says, that the celebrated Dr. Warren, who commanded the Provincial trenches at Charles-Town, while he was bravely defending himself against several opposing Regulars, was killed in a cowardly manner by an officer’s servant, but the fellow was instantly cut to pieces; six letters were found in the Doctor’s pocket, written from some gentlemen in Boston, who were immediately taken into custody, and whose situations when he came away, were so perilous and critical, that their friends every moment feared their executions from some arbitrary and illegal sentence of the new adopted law martial.

And a number of early September newspapers reported this news from a recently arrived merchant vessel:

She sailed from Boston the 29th of July, but has brought no newspapers, and, we are well informed, that everything remained quiet, and would continue so till an answer was received by this ship. By the above ship we learn, that two persons have been taken up in consequence of some papers found in Dr. Warren’s pocket.

Those “two persons” were the schoolteachers James Lovell and John Leach, arrested on 29 June as described yesterday.

Only a month after those arrests, the London press was reporting on the letters in Warren’s pocket. Whatever ship first brought the news must have made a very fast passage—as fast as John Derby had sailed the Quero across the Atlantic in May to carry the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s report of Lexington and Concord to London. An average voyage was closer to five weeks or more, as with the merchant vessel that left on 29 July and arrived in early September.

That speed suggests some captains were sailing as fast as possible to bring news from the new war to the Crown, and getting lucky with the weather, too.

TOMORROW: How the letters implicated Lovell and Leach.

Upcoming Events of Interest in Salem and Taunton

Sometimes it’s good to get away from the crowded Boston Common of 1768, so here are a couple of interesting historical events taking place elsewhere in Massachusetts.

On Wednesday, 17 October, and then again on Wednesday, 24 October, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site will offer a special talk titled “Smuggling Stories from Captain Derby’s Wharf.” Richard Derby, Sr. (shown here), was a prominent Salem merchant captain whose sons Richard, Jr.; Elias Hasket; and John all played important roles in Massachusetts’s Revolution.

Drawing on recent research, park rangers will share real tales from the Salem waterfront, including:

• The Crown’s seizure and auction of Fayal wine from the Derby warehouse in 1771.
• The accidental sinking of the Crown’s Customs boat in the Salem harbor.
• John Derby’s smuggling adventure on the Quero.

This free hourlong program is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. on Derby Wharf, 173 Derby Street in Salem. The park urges people to bring lawn chairs and blankets because the talk will be delivered outdoors near the water. (If the weather is particularly poor, though, I understand there’s an indoor site at the ready.)

On the weekend between those talks in Salem, Taunton is celebrating its “Liberty and Union” Festival, inspired by the British flag with that motto sewn onto it that local Patriots raised in 1774.

On Thursday, 18 October, public historian and landscape architect Tom Paine will speak at the Old Colony History Museum about “That Spark of Liberty: Robert Treat Paine and America’s D.N.A.” Tom is a sixth-generation descendant of Robert Treat Paine, the Taunton lawyer who became one of Massachusetts’s signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Tom will delve into the Paine family stories that inspired descendants of the Civil War Generation. He will discuss Paine’s years as the first Attorney General of Massachusetts, including his roles in crafting the world’s oldest modern constitution and the legal abolition of slavery in the state.

This talk is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served at 6:30 P.M. with the talk to begin at 7:00. The museum is at 66 Church Green in Taunton.

The town’s “Liberty and Union” celebration has already reportedly gotten under way with middle-schoolers sticking flags into people’s lawns. But the big day is Saturday, 20 October. There will be a walking tour of historic downtown Taunton starting at 11:00 A.M. at the Old Colony History Museum. At 11:30 a procession from the statue of Robert Treat Paine to the museum will end with the raising off a “Liberty and Union” flag. Meanwhile, there will be music and dance, games and pumpkin-decorating for kids, crafts demonstrations and historical reenactors. The complete list of activities is here.

“A sad tale to relate”

Yesterday I noted a mistake I made in Reporting the Revolutionary War, saying that John Derby took the 28 Apr 1775 issue of the Salem Gazette to London to convince folks there that a war had broken out in New England.

Derby left Salem on 28 April, so he could have carried a copy of that day’s Salem Gazette—if there were one. But no copy of that issue exists.

It looks like printer Ezekiel Russell closed his newspaper only one issue into the war. He might have worried about economic disruptions and lack of supplies. He might have lost patronage; in Boston, friends of the royal government had paid him to put out the Censor, so folks in Salem could have seen him as a “Tory.”

But Russell was really an opportunist. He reissued his report on the first day of fighting as a broadside titled “A Bloody Butchery by the British Troops.” At the bottom was “A Funeral Elegy to the Imortal Memory” of the fallen militiamen, beginning:

Aid me ye nine! my muse assist,
A sad tale to relate,
When such a number of brave men
Met their unhappy fate.
At Lexington they met their foe
Completely all equip’d,
Their guns and swords made glit’ring show,
But their base scheme was nipp’d.

(Complete transcription of a later, inexact reprint here.)

TOMORROW: Who wrote that elegy?

Footnotes on “Reporting the Battle of Lexington”

Last night’s talk at the Lexington Historical Society was fun, and I learned new stuff while preparing it.

For instance, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston owns this John Smibert portrait of Samuel Pemberton painted in 1734 when he was eleven years old. Not too young to shave his head and wear a wig, however. In 1770, Pemberton was on the committee with James Bowdoin and Dr. Joseph Warren to prepare Boston’s official report on the Boston Massacre.

The main thesis of my talk was that the Massachusetts Patriots, and Warren in particular, learned from that episode in 1770 that they could be scooped by royal officials if they didn’t send their version of events to London quickly. So after the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775, Dr. Warren and his Massachusetts Provincial Congress colleagues worked fast and commissioned the Derby brothers of Salem to speed their documents to London ahead of Gen. Thomas Gage’s dispatches.

In writing about that voyage in Reporting the Revolutionary War, I said that John Derby sailed with issues of the Salem Gazette dated 21 and 28 Apr 1775. I was relying on my notes on Robert S. Rantoul’s article in the Essex Institute Historical Collections for 1900, “The Cruise of the ‘Quero’.” As shown here, Rantoul wrote that Derby “had with him copies of the Salem Gazette for April 21st and 25th.” The Salem Gazette, like almost all colonial newspapers, was a weekly, so issue dates had to be seven days apart. I figured either Rantoul or I had made a mistake in our notes and “25th” should be “28th.”

Before my talk Todd Andrlik, chief author of Reporting the Revolutionary War, sent me an image from the 27-30 May 1775 London Chronicle showing a long quotation from the 25 April Essex Gazette, published up the coast from Salem in Newburyport. So that was one of the newspapers Derby had brought to convince people in London there really had been a battle. I should have corrected Rantoul not on the date but on the name of the paper: Derby sailed with the 21 April Salem Gazette and the 25 April Essex Gazette.

“Reporting the Battle of Lexington” Lecture, 7 Feb.

On Friday, 7 February, I’ll speak to the Lexington Historical Society about how the start of the Revolutionary War was reported.

The society’s events page says this talk “discusses Reporting the Revolution, a new publication showcasing newspaper reporting of the Revolution in real time.” It’s more accurate to say my talk will be inspired by one of my articles in Reporting the Revolutionary War, the volume that Todd Andrlik edited in 2012. But since those chapters are too short to fill an hour, I’ll go into more detail about some stories that didn’t get into the newspapers.

The Massachusetts Patriots faced a couple of challenges on the morning of 18 Apr 1775. The first was alerting New England allies and the Continental Congress about the fighting. The second was to manage the flow of information, both in North America and to Britain, so that it supported their image of having been unfairly attacked. I plan to talk about dispatch riders like Isaac Bissell, the Provincial Congress’s report on the first day of fighting, and John Derby’s voyage of the Quero to Britain.

This event will start at 8:00 P.M. in the Lexington Depot at the heart of town—there’s ample parking nearby. The talk is free and open to the public.

Reading the London Gazette in 1775

From Jon Kukla and the H-OIEAHC email list came word of the searchable database of the London Gazette—the official British government newspaper. (The same database includes the Edinburgh Gazette, published sporadically between 1699 and 1794, and the Belfast Gazette, launched in 1922.)

The search function is a little awkward, and the result comes as a PDF download named “page.pdf.” That could become confusing if you don’t immediately rename the files you’ve downloaded. Nonetheless, this is a useful look at what the London government wanted its subjects to believe.

Here, for example, is the official word from His Majesty’s government on 30 May 1775:

A REPORT having been spread, and an Account having been printed and published, of a Skirmish between some of the People in the Province of Massachuset’s Bay and a Detachment of His Majesty’s Troops; it is proper to inform the Publick, that no Advices have as yet been received in the American Department of any such Event.

There is Reason to believe, that there are dispatches from General [Thomas] Gage on board The Sukey, Captain Brown, which, though she sailed Four Days before the Vessel that brought the printed Account, is not yet Arrived.

Remain calm! All is well!

The same issue reported important international news:

Warsaw, May 13. The very uncommonly dry and cold Weather, which we have had for some Time past, has occasioned a great Mortality in and about this Town.

The newspaper account the Gazette referred to and tried to refute was the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s account of the outbreak of war, brought to London on a fast boat by Capt. John Derby of Salem. Gage’s report on the Battle of Lexington and Concord didn’t reach Whitehall until 10 June.

TOMORROW: “Online Resources” Week segues into “Lexington and Concord” Week.