The Face of Esek Hopkins

To get back to my original point about the American Revolution Institute essay on a print issued in London in 1776, shown here is the same publisher’s portrait of Continental Navy commander Esek Hopkins.

This digital copy comes via the New York Public Library’s very helpful images collection.

As I noted two days ago, the London publisher Thomas Hart didn’t exist. Some other portraits of American leaders in the same series are clearly not based on actually looking at the men they claimed to depict.

Thus, we should be quite dubious that this image shows Esek Hopkins rather than any other white man on the planet. And thus skeptical that Hopkins, who would turn sixty in 1778, had a round face, dark hair, cleft chin, and other features visible here.

Yet if we look for other images of Hopkins, such as on this fine website about the Gaspée affair or this webpage from the U.S. Navy’s Naval History and Heritage Command wing, we find pictures clearly based on what Thomas Hart published.

One exceptional portrait on the U.S. Navy site is captioned:

Line engraving published in the Hibernian Magazine, Dublin, Ireland, August 1776. As with most contemporary Hibernian Magazine portraits, this is probably a purely fanciful representation of the subject. The engraver also provided an incorrect forename for Hopkins.

This portrayal is close enough to the Hart print that one could reasonably decide the two pictures show the same man. But if so, that man still probably wasn’t Hopkins.

In fact, only one image of Hopkins appears to have been created by an artist who actually knew him. That’s the infamous “Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam” painting by John Greenwood. (The Gaspée website includes a detail from this image on its Hopkins page as an alternative view.)

Greenwood wasn’t the greatest portraitist, and in this painting he put his effort into creating a broad scene of revelry rather than representing the precise facial features of every person involved.

Nonetheless, heirs of the man who commissioned and owned this picture understood that Greenwood had depicted some particular individuals, Rhode Islanders who traded in Surinam. Those identifications were written down in 1878 and published in Rhode Island History in 1977.

According to that tradition, “The gentleman on the far side of the table wearing a tricorn hat and blue coat with red facing is said to be Esek Hopkins. . . . Esek would have been about 40 when Greenwood painted the picture” in the late 1750s.

There’s still a lot of uncertainty involved, but the image of Commodore Esek Hopkins that we have the best reason to rely on is actually this one.

“Children of the Revolution” Tour, 17 Sept.

Saturday, 17 September, is this year’s Cambridge Discovery Day. The city’s historical commission is promoting free walking tours in several neighborhoods, as laid out in the schedule here.

I’m going to lead a tour called “Children of the Revolution: Boys & Girls in Cambridge During the Siege of Boston.” The description explains:

Hear the stories of children caught up in the start of the Revolution as political refugees, members of the army, servants in generals’ houses, and more.

This is a new tour, though still focused on the territory around Harvard Square. That was the center of Cambridge in the 1770s, after all. We’ll start at the Tory Row marker on the corner of Brattle and Mason Streets at 3:00 P.M.

One child I plan to talk about was John Greenwood, who grew up in Boston’s North End. When the war broke out, he ran away from his uncle in Maine to make his way back down toward Boston, hoping to get into the besieged town to see his parents. But the ferry from Charlestown was cut off. He later wrote:

Charlestown was at the time generally deserted by the inhabitants, and the houses were, with few exceptions, empty; so, not knowing what to do nor where to go and without a penny in my pockets, if I remember rightly, I entered a very large tavern that was filled with all descriptions of people. Here I saw three or four persons whom I knew, and, my fife sticking in the front of my coat, they asked me, after many questions, to play them a tune. I complied forthwith, but although the fife is somewhat of a noisy instrument to pay upon, it could hardly be heard for the din and confusion around.

After I had rattled off several tunes, there was one Hardy Pierce [Boston man, corporal of Capt. T. T. Bliss’s company] who, with Enoch Howard [Boston man, enlisted as private in Capt. Lemuel Trescott’s company, 24 May 1775] and three or four others, invited me to go up to Cambridge to their quarters, as they called it. When there they tried to persuade me to enlist as a fifer, telling me it was only for eight months, and that I would receive eight dollars a month and be found in provisions; moreover, they calculated to quickly drive the British from Boston, when I would have an opportunity of seeing my parents.

Greenwood’s name as fifer appears on the roll of Capt. Bliss’s company dated 1 Aug 1775, which records his service so far as two months and six days—i.e., since the last week of May. He ended up serving almost two years.

[The photograph above shows the William Diamond Junior Fife & Drum Corps about fifteen years ago at the Sudbury Muster. That event is coming up again on 24 September.]

RevWar Schmoozer on Hanover Street, 8 Nov.

Todd Andrlik, co-publisher of the Journal of the American Revolution and author of Reporting the Revolutionary War, has organized what he’s called a “Revwar Schmoozer” in Boston on Friday, 8 November.

Everyone involved in studying or promulgating Boston’s Revolutionary history is welcome to join the crowd upstairs at The Point (147 Hanover Street) from 4:30 to 7:30 P.M. That includes “Historians, authors, museum execs, publishers, literary agents, tour guides, professors, students and enthusiasts!” Park rangers back on the job, Ph.D.’s looking for one, tour guides and tourists, reenactors and bloggers—all can join the fun.

There will be a cash bar, and at some point in the evening we’ll toast the launch of the first Journal of the American Revolution hardcover. It sounds like Todd expects folks to drop by as their schedules allow, but we hope the schmoozing and storytelling makes every minute worthwhile.

The Real Story of “Old Put”

When I wrote yesterday’s essay about Gen. Joseph Spencer’s nickname, I asked myself, “And now will someone ask about ‘Old Put’?” And sure enough, on the Boston 1775 Facebook page Peter Fisk asked about “Old Put,” the fabled nickname for Gen. Israel Putnam.

And my answer to myself yesterday was, “Well, of course Putnam was called ‘Old Put’! He was old. His last name was Putnam. Every author in the world says he was called ‘Old Put’!” But I was fooled by every author saying Gen. Horatio Gates’s men fondly referred to him as “Granny,” which is where this week started off. So I decided I should calm down and do the research to answer Peter’s question.

There are several contemporaneous references to Putnam as “Old Put,” almost all of them coming from the very top of the Continental Army: Gen. George Washington’s headquarters.

• Mustermaster general Stephen Moylan to former military secretary Joseph Reed, 5 Dec 1775: “I would have given a good deal that you was here last Saturday when the stores arrived at camp. Such universal joy ran, through the whole as if each grasped victory in his hand, to crown the glorious scene there intervened one truly ludicrous, which was old PUT mounted on a large mortar which was fixed in its bed for the occasion, with a bottle of rum in his hand, standing parson to christen, while godfather [Thomas] Mifflin gave it the name of CONGRESS.”
• Moylan to Reed, 1 Feb 1776: “The Bay is open, everything thaws except Old Put. He is still as hard as ever, crying out for powder—powder—ye gods, give us powder!”
• Reed to Washington, 15 Mar 1776: “I suppose old Putt was to command the Detachment intended for Boston on the 5th Inst.—as I do not know any Officer but himself who could have been depended on for so hazardous a Service.”
• Washington back to Reed, 1 Apr 1776: “The 4000 Men destind for Boston on the 5th; if the Ministerialists had attempted our Works on Dorchester, or the Lines at Roxbury, were to have been headed by old Put.”
• Lt. Col. Joseph Ward, formerly aide to Gen. Artemas Ward, to John Adams, 9 May 1777: “Old Put—says, ‘Fact now is the time, I am for attacking the dogs without delay, drive them off that we me go home about our business’—thus he.”

So it’s hard to establish a nickname more solidly and officially than that.

Oddly, however, I didn’t stumble across any examples of enlisted men referring to their general as “Old Put.” The closest I found was veteran John Greenwood referring in his memoir to an operation ”planned by old Putnam.” More references might be buried in pension reminiscences or the like, but I was surprised, given how freely veterans spoke about his fellow Connecticut commander Spencer.

The Army and Navy Chronicle for 1837 yields one anecdote, credited to the New York Gazette, about that issue:

Original Revolutionary Anecdote.—

When the American army was stationed in Putnam county [New York], during the Revolutionary war, one of the soldiers saw a boat approaching, and he cried out, there comes “old Put,” a name familiarly applied to the gallant General Putnam.

A young upstart officer hearing this caused him to be put under arrest for speaking disrespectfully of the General.

On the arrival of General Putnam on shore, he inquired what that man was sent away for?

The officer said, he has spoken disrespectfully of your Excellency.

What did he say? inquired the General.

He called you “old Put.”

So I am old Put, said he; release him instantly.

That may be only a legend, but it certainly sounds true to Israel Putnam’s character.

TOMORROW: Might as well do a full week—the general with the most exotic nickname.

Living Conditions in Cambridge in the Spring of 1775

The second chapter of my report Gen. George Washington’s Headquarters and Home—Cambridge, Massachusetts is titled “The Arrival of the Provincial Army on the Vassall Estate.”

As I described last week, the Loyalist planter John Vassall and his family left his Cambridge home in September 1774. They probably expected to return after Gen. Thomas Gage quelled the nascent rebellion in Massachusetts. Another Vassall family remained behind: Tony, Cuba, and some of their children, enslaved to John Vassall and his nearby aunt Penelope.

The first sections of that chapter lay out what I could find out about that African-American family, who took the surname Vassall. Tony and Cuba both petitioned the state for pensions in their old age based on their service to the estate. One son, Darby, lived long enough to appear as a living relic of the Revolution at Abolitionist rallies and to see the opening of the Civil War.

The next couple of sections describe life in Cambridge as provincial militiamen flooded into the town on 19 Apr 1775 and were replaced by a New England army by the end of that month. Gen. Artemas Ward took a house near Harvard as his headquarters, and it looks like all the empty mansions on Tory Row were pressed into service as barracks.

Pvt. Caleb Haskell of Newburyport recorded arriving in Cambridge on 12 May and taking “our quarters at Bolin’s (a tory) house”—John Borland’s, now in the middle of Harvard’s Adams House dormitory. Five days later, Pvt. Nathaniel Ober said his company was in “Judge [Joseph] Lees house at Cambridge,” now headquarters of the Cambridge Historical Society. On 15 May, records of the Committee of Safety mention “three companies at Mr. Vassal’s house.”

An unidentified soldier arriving from Norwich, Connecticut, sometime before late May wrote back home:

There is about 250 soldiers in this House, and we are not much crowded, but I wish they were out, all except our company. This building that we are in belonged to one of the Tories, but he has gone and left this building for us. It is the finest and largest building in town…

I can’t tell whether that was John Vassall’s mansion or another, but it gives a sense of the crowding. A January 1776 report suggested that the Continental Army put twenty soldiers to a room at Ralph Inman’s estate.

As for living conditions, teenaged fifer John Greenwood recalled, “we had to sleep in our clothes upon the bare floor. I do not recollect that I even had a blanket, but I remember well the stone which I had to lay my head upon.”

In late May, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress decided to clear the John Vassall house of soldiers so the Committee of Safety could use it. The committee was working out of the same house that Gen. Ward was using. I couldn’t find clear evidence that the Committee of Safety actually moved into the Vassall house, though. I wish I had.

On 22 June Col. John Glover marched his regiment from Marblehead to Cambridge, and Gen. George Washington later wrote that the Marbleheaders were in the Vassall house before he moved in. There’s also an order from Gen. Ward for Lt. Col. William Bond to “occupy one room, in the south-east corner of Col. Vassall’s house, upon the second floor, for the sick belonging to said regiment,” originally commanded by Col. Thomas Gardner. So it looks like soldiers were still being assigned to the Vassall house whenever the army needed space.

Committee of Safety records link two men to the larger estate. Joseph Smith was “keeper of John Vassal, Esq’s farm” on 27 May, and Seth Brown was “the keeper of the colony horses” in Vassall’s stables on 24 June. Of course men I wanted to trace would be named Smith and Brown, right?

But I’m inordinately proud that I was able to identify those two. Joseph Smith was a Cambridge farmer born in 1740; his brother Parsons (1743-1816) supplied milk to Washington’s headquarters. Seth Ingersoll Browne (1750-1809) was a refugee from Charlestown who later tended bar at the Punch Bowl Tavern in Roxbury.

TOMORROW: One Connecticut officer tries to find quarters for his regiment.

George Washington’s Teeth, Yet Again

There are only two more years to visit Mount Vernon and see the teeth that Boston native John Greenwood carved for George Washington out of hippopotamus bone!

The webpage says:

On loan from The New York Academy of Medicine, the denture was the first of several dentures that John Greenwood made for Washington and is dated 1789, the year that Washington took his oath of office in New York City. The denture is engraved with: Under jaw. This is Great Washington’s teeth by J. Greenwood. First one made by J. Greenwood, Year 1789.

Carved from hippopotamus ivory, the denture contains real human teeth fixed in the ivory by means of brass screws. The denture, which was anchored on the one remaining tooth in Washington’s mouth, has a hole which fit snugly around the tooth and probably contributed to the loosening and eventual loss of that tooth.

The Mount Vernon website notes that there is no extra cost to see these teeth.

George Washington’s Teeth, Even Closer

Back in 2007, Boston 1775 ran an item titled “George Washington’s Teeth, Close Up.” It featured an image from the American Dental Association website of the first President’s false teeth, made by North End native John Greenwood. That A.D.A. webpage got edited away into the aether, as sometimes happens, and the image disappeared off the ’net.

But this year (actually next, judging by the copyright date) Lerner Classroom is publishing John Greenwood’s Journey to Bunker Hill, by Marty Rhodes Figley. The back of that book kindly recommends Boston 1775’s material on Greenwood. And then it says this site includes “a picture of the false teeth John made for George Washington!”

I can’t let the schoolchildren of America down. So with Google’s help I restored a smaller image of those teeth to the original posting. And now, thanks to Barista, I have the pleasure of sharing this larger picture of the same dentures. So now, children of America, you can sit down happily to your school lunches.

Still hungry? Here’s another set of Washington’s teeth on display at Mount Vernon.

Retracing John Greenwood’s Journey

Yesterday, just in time for today’s anniversary, I received a complimentary copy of John Greenwood’s Journey to Bunker Hill, written by Marty Rhodes Figley, illustrated by Craig Orback, and published by Lerner for classroom use.

John Greenwood is one of Boston 1775’s favorite veterans of the Revolution. As a boy he was close friends with Samuel Maverick, a victim in the Boston Massacre. At fifteen he enlisted as a fifer in the army outside Boston. He remained a soldier for years, then spent time on a privateer and in prison. As an adult, he was George Washington’s dentist. And he left a first-person memoir that’s actually fun to read.

Figley adapted the part of that memoir that starts with young John’s decision to run away from his uncle in Maine and head to Boston, where the war has just broken out, to make sure his parents are safe. The book ends with John’s mother leaving him to go back into occupied Boston. In between, there’s a little thing called the Battle of Bunker Hill.

John Greenwood’s Journey looks like a traditional picture book, with Orback’s color illustrations filling two-page spreads. Its text is longer than most of what’s in bookstores these days, but it’s a different sort of book. Lerner Classroom published this volume for teachers to use in “Reader’s Theater,” which is a technique I don’t remember from my own elementary school but have heard a lot about in the last few years. Twelve pages of the paperback repeat the story in script form for a class to read aloud.

The narrative carefully follows John Greenwood’s account of those months, with one deviation that I’ll discuss another day. Greenwood’s first-person memoir becomes a third-person omniscient narrator, so some details that might reflect his perceptions or wishful memories are stated as fact. Then again, Greenwood’s story is refreshingly open about his emotions, so the text can show us his ups and downs without adding to the record.

The one page spread that tripped me up shows the fight at Lexington. Roback’s picture of troops shooting in front of the meeting-house is clearly inspired by images that go back to the Amos Doolittle prints of 1775. But it shows two fallen British soldiers, though the regulars took minimal casualties that morning.

The text on that same page spread says:

Militiamen came from near and far. They chased the British soldiers all the way back to Boston. The British government was furious. Soon thousands of British soldiers poured into Boston to keep the colonists under control.

The British government was indeed furious about what happened on 19 Apr 1775, but they didn’t learn that news until the end of May. Thousands of British soldiers did indeed arrive in Boston between the start of the war and the Battle of Bunker Hill, but the London government had sent them off weeks earlier. Those sentences strike me as implying that the London government sent troops in furious response to the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but the tough part about managing an empire in the 1700s is that nothing was ever that quick.

If I were directing this reader’s theater, I might change the last two sentences to: “But there were many more British soldiers in Boston, and thousands more on the way. The British government was determined to keep the colonists under control.” Then again, I wouldn’t relish that challenge of explaining to a second-grader why I’d deviated from a printed text.

“A 13-inch bomb dropped directly opposite the door”

Yesterday I quoted an account from early July 1775 of American soldiers in Roxbury defusing an unexploded British mortar shell by kicking out the burning fuse before its spark reached the explosive charge.

That seems to have been what one did with shells that landed without exploding. Here are some more examples from the Cambridge side of the provincial lines. First, from the memoir of John Greenwood, who was a teenaged fifer in 1775:

Night was the time for frolicking, as the British were constantly sending bombs at us, and sometimes from two to six at a time could be seen in the air overhead, looking like moving stars in the heavens. These shells were mostly thirteen inches in diameter, and it was astonishing how high they could send such heavy things.

I have often seen them strike the ground when it was frozen and bound up like a foot-ball, and again, falling on marshy land, they would bury themselves from ten to twelve feet in it, whereupon, the wet ground having extinguished the fuse, the Yankees would dig them up to get the powder out.

On one occasion a 13-inch bomb dropped directly opposite the door of the picket guard-house where 200 men were on duty, and a lad about eighteen years old, named Shubael Rament [Raymond], belonging to our company, ran out, knocked the fusee from the shell, and took the powder out of it, of which I had some myself to kill snipe with.

A similar reminiscence appeared in the Memoir of the Life of Eliza S. M. Quincy, the wife of the Josiah Quincy who became mayor of Boston and president of Harvard. In October 1830 the Quincys hosted Dr. Amos Holbrook of Milton, who had been surgeon’s mate in Col. John Greaton’s Regiment starting in August 1775.

“The [Harvard] President’s house was given to the commissary of the army,” said Dr. Holbrook; “and I was quartered at the house of Mr. [David] Phips, in the neighborhood. The colleges were much injured by the garrison. The rooms in Harvard Hall, except the one then used as a library, were filled with barrels of salt beef, brought by the country people for the army. One day, during the siege of Boston, a shell thrown by the British from Copp’s Hill struck the ground in the square near the President’s house. The fuze was yet burning; and a soldier went and stamped it out, at the risk of his life.”

That house is now called Wadsworth House, no longer the college president’s home but an administrative building. The “square near the President’s house” is now Harvard Square. Click the thumbnail above for a larger picture by eileansiar of the area that seems to have been saved from shelling.

Boston’s Town Criers and Lost Boys

One of the most important functions of the town crier, I was surprised to learn when I investigated the office, was to act as a municipal Lost & Found Department. People who had found things would bring them to the crier, who would file them safely until anyone came to claim them. People who had lost things would pay the crier to make announcements about that property. And when a child was lost, the public crier sprang into action—though he apparently expected a suitable fee.

Several times I’ve quoted from John Greenwood (1760-1819), who grew up in Boston’s North End, became a Continental Army fifer at age fifteen, and eventually became George Washington’s dentist. The preface to the published edition of his memoir, written by a descendant, says:

The earliest incident connected with John Greenwood’s life is what, when quite young, he was taken out one day for a walk, escorted by a negro boy belonging to the family; when, attracted by the music and brilliant show of some passing soldiers, they followed along until the tired child was told to wait awhile and rest in a neighboring shop. Oblivious as to where he had laid his charge, the negro finally returned home empty-handed, and Johnny had to be recovered by the aid of the town-crier.

That descendant suggests, “This incident evidently refers to the landing, on Saturday, October 1, 1768, of some regular troops.” However, Johnny would have been eight years old then, and might have been able to get home himself. I wonder if this happened a few years earlier when troops passed through Boston as part of the French and Indian War.

Lost children were still a major part of the town crier’s business when tavern-keeper James Wilson held the office in the early 1800s, according to this account from Rambles in Old Boston, published in 1887:

Never was a man better fitted for a town-crier. Nature had endowed him with ready wit, a good flow of language, an imposing presence, and a voice which could touch the tenderest feelings of the heart by its pathetic tones, or, if occasion required, could alarm a whole neighborhood like the roar of a bull. His custom was to appear on the street, and ring three times to attract attention. Then, putting his bell under his arm, he would produce a paper, and announce with great solemnity that somebody’s cow had strayed away, or that certain articles of value were missing.

Occasionally his cry would be like this: “Child lost! There’s a child lost! A boy, between the ages of five and six years, left his home on Salem Street about seven o’clock last night, and has not since been heard from. When last seen, he had on a black cloth cap and a short red coat. He had light hair and blue eyes. Whoever can give information of such a boy, either to his anxious parents at No. — Salem Street, or at the crier’s office, will be suitably rewarded.”

Wilson would then ring his bell again three times, and move on to repeat the process in other parts of the town.

Not every parent thought Wilson’s work was as valuable as he thought himself, as shown by this item in the Boston selectmen’s minutes on 24 Mar 1819:

The Chairman informed that Mr. Galen Holmes had complained to him, that the town crier had charged an exorbitant fee for crying two children that were lost some time since;—that he (the Chairman[)] had sent for Mr. Wilson and made enquiry on the subject;—that he had advised Mr. Wilson to return Mr. Holmes one half the sum which he had received, which he consented to do.—That Mr. Holmes had since received from Mr. Wilson two notes couched in very reprehensible language—and requested the Board would take the subject under consideration and afford him such redress as the nature of the offence demanded.

The board ordered Holmes and Wilson to appear before them the following Wednesday, but—alas!—there’s no record of what happened then.

TOMORROW: A kidnapped child?

Mary Greenwood Crosses the Siege Lines

On 13 July 1775, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, military secretary to Gen. George Washington (shown here courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania), provided a pass to a woman named Greenwood allowing her to travel through the siege lines into Boston. Reed sent this note to Gen. Israel Putnam, adding precautions that “she receive no papers from anyone,” according to a précis of the commander’s papers created by the Library of Congress.

This woman was Mary Greenwood. She had been born “in some Irish garrison town in 1725,” according to her son John’s memoirs. She and ivory-turner Isaac Greenwood recorded their intention to marry in Boston on 21 Jan 1757, and they raised their children in the North End. Isaac’s apprentice Samuel Maverick was the youngest person killed in the Boston Massacre.

Mary Greenwood left Boston on 16 June 1775 to hunt down her son Johnny, who was then fifteen years old and had run away from his uncle’s up in Maine. He has joined the provincial troops as a fifer, and was more than a little startled to see his mother. That’s a story in itself, which I’ll tell one day. For now, here is his later account of her passage into besieged Boston:

One day, as I was standing by my tent, who should I see but my mother coming toward me in company with Sergeant (afterward Major) Mills.

“Well, Johnny,” said she, “I am going at last to see your father, thank God! I hope you will behave like a soldier, and who knows but what you may be a general.”

She bade me good-by, and the sergeant who had the care of conducting her to the British lines went with her to a fort on Prospect Hill, or as the enemy, believing it impregnable, had called it, Mount Pisgah. It was nothing, however, but a common dirt fort made of ground and covered with sods of grass, mounting about eight or ten iron guns, from 9- to 18-pounders, nevertheless it was strong enough for them.

John Greenwood frequently ridiculed the British army’s prowess in his memoir, not always accurately. For instance, he claimed that at Bunker Hill, “The British had ten men to our one, as history will inform you; and I was an eye-witness.” An accurate count is impossible, but the best estimates today say the British troops numbered about 3,000 and the Americans about 2,400.

Back to Mary Greenwood’s trip into Boston.

She…asked them [American officers] what she should say if the English asked her any questions about them. Their answer was: “Tell them we are ready for them at any time they choose to come out to attack us.”

My mother was then taken to the lines and walked alone from the American to the British sentry, whereupon a portion of the guard came down from Bunker Hill and escorted her into the fort. There the commanding officer, Major [John] Small, an acquaintance and friend of my father, treated her with the greatest politeness (for every person who was acquainted with him knows he was a real gentleman) and waited upon her himself to her residence in Boston, whence she was desired to attend on Governor [Thomas] Gage.

Mary Greenwood reportedly told the British commander exactly what American officers had instructed her to say. Her son insisted that Gage was “frightened” by her remarks.

Individuals to Follow through the Revolution?

Yesterday Ray Raphael described a challenge he set for himself: find a bunch of individuals to follow through the Revolution whose stories could also tell the story of the founding of the U.S. of A. He chose seven people. As a proud owner of a copy of the resulting book, Founders, I can’t fault those choices. But just for fun, I can second-guess them.

Ray wrote that George Washington is virtually a given. So naturally, to be perverse, I have to question that conclusion. Henry Knox (shown here, later in life) spent nearly the whole war at Washington’s side, so it would be possible to follow the Continental Army’s top command through his eyes rather than through the commander’s. And Knox would bring some further advantages:

• He was present at the Boston Massacre and may have been a crucial informer for Paul Revere just before the war.
• After Washington’s first farewell in 1783, Knox became Secretary of War for the Confederation while the commander went home to Mount Vernon.
• Knox’s alarmist letter to Washington about Shays’ rebellion convinced the older man to throw his prestige behind a movement for a new constitution.
• Knox served as Secretary of War again under President Washington.
• Knox’s personal story from fatherless apprentice bookseller to general, large landowner in Maine, and founder of the Society of the Cincinnati exemplifies the social mobility possible in the Revolution.

Following Nathanael Greene offers some of the same possibilities: involvement in prewar conflicts (Greene was probably involved in the Gaspee incident of 1772) and social mobility. In addition, his handling of the Continental forces in the southern states was crucial to the end of the war. Greene’s support for black soldiers is interesting, as is his turn to being a southerner with his own slave-labor plantation.

Such a book would need to follow someone deeply involved in running the American government—i.e., the Continental Congress—during and shortly after the war. My perverse suggestion for that figure is James Lovell. Son and assistant of the Loyalist master of Boston’s South Latin School, he was a Whig politics newspaper essayist and orator. The British military arrested him as a spy in 1775 after officers found his letters on Dr. Joseph Warren’s body. He was reportedly taken to Halifax in chains.

After James Lovell was exchanged and returned to Massachusetts, the state elected him to the Congress. He supported Gen. Horatio Gates over Washington in 1777, and wound up virtually running American foreign policy and intelligence efforts since no one else wanted those responsibilities so badly. His father and siblings were in exile, and his illegitimate son was in the Continental Army. For added interest, in Philadelphia he reportedly roomed in a brothel while his wife and children were back home in Boston. On the down side, Lovell’s a hard man to understand—John Adams reportedly paced the floor in Holland, trying to figure out what his official instructions meant—and to sympathize with.

Another potentially exemplary character is Thomas Machin, a British veteran who ended up as a captain in the American engineering corps. He oversaw the effort to build a chain of obstacles across the Hudson River to prevent the Royal Navy from sailing too far north—a major industrial undertaking in a sparsely settled area. Later Machin was one of the artillery officers who accompanied Gen. John Sullivan on an expedition against the Crown’s Native American allies in upper New York. And, as a kicker, the standard story of Machin before joining the Continental Army in 1776 is a lie; this immigrant (or his descendants) reinvented his life in the New World.

For a southern perspective, I might consider John Laurens: son of a bigwig in Congress, young Continental Army officer, proponent of emancipation, prisoner of war, diplomat, and army officer again. Regardless of what far one concludes that Laurens went with Alexander Hamilton, the close relationship of those two young men shows how military service shaped them.

A book like this needs at least one female figure. Since most women, even those who became involved in political causes, stuck close to their homes, I’d look for candidates in the Middle and Southern states where most of the fighting was. Those women saw the most of, and suffered the most from, the war.

One possibility would be Esther Reed of Pennsylvania: wife of a Continental Congress delegate, military officer, and governor. In 1777 she had to flee from her home. Three years later she organized an effort to support the army, struggling against both wartime shortages and Washington’s expectations for women.

Another candidate is Annis Boudinot Stockton of New Jersey, who became a refugee in 1776. She wrote some political poetry, and had a close-up look at developments in the government through her brother, Elias Boudinot; son-in-law, Dr. Benjamin Rush; and husband, Richard Stockton. Unfortunately, little of her writing is very personal.

And of course a book like this needs to reflect the American enlisted man’s experience. One possibility would be to stitch together three or four people’s accounts of serving in the ranks, both to cover the waterfront and to emphasize how the army was composed of many men working together rather than individuals standing out on their own. (Yes, that goes against the very idea of focusing on individuals that Ray set out to try.)

Among the soldiers who left enough personal material to follow might be fifer and private John Greenwood, privateer sailor and prisoner of war Ebenezer Fox, and soldier’s wife and camp helper Sarah Osborn. Adding dragoon Boyrereau Brinch to that mix would mean bringing in the rarely documented African-American soldier’s experience.

Folks might notice that a lot of my choices lean toward people from greater Boston, simply because I know that region best. In addition, my list leaves out some really obvious candidates. I didn’t pick any of the people Ray Raphael followed in Founders, even if they’d be my first choices as well—which is a good clue to the names he actually picked.

Memories of Samuel Maverick

Samuel Maverick was the youngest person to die in the Boston Massacre: only seventeen years old. Printers Edes and Gill of the Boston Gazette and their engraver Paul Revere highlighted Maverick’s youth in the woodcut to the left by decorating his coffin with a sickle and hourglass—symbols that he’d been cut down before his time.

I recently wrote a short script about Maverick’s death, which forced me to reconcile the three overlapping but different accounts of what he was doing before the shooting.

First, keg-maker Jonathan Carey provided a few details at the trial of the British soldiers:

Did you know young Maverick, who was killed by the firing in King street, on the 5th of March?

Yes, very well.

Did you see him that night?

He was at my house that night at supper with some young lads, and when the bells rung, as we all thought for fire, he run out in order to go to it.

Maverick wasn’t one of Carey’s apprentices, however. He worked for ivory carver and dentist Isaac Greenwood, and bunked with Greenwood’s son John.

In a 1922 publication of John Greenwood’s memoir, editor Isaac Greenwood (yes relation) included what is apparently that family’s memory of how Maverick went to his death:

Isaac Greenwood, Jr., the elder brother of John..., was a witness of the massacre, being then in his twelfth year.

Attracted by the ringing of bells, indicating a fire, Maverick and Greenwood were proceeding along hand in hand when, in King Street, Samuel left his companion and joined in the popular tumult about some soldiers at the custom-house. In the volley which ensued Maverick fell just as he was throwing up his arms and shouting, “Fire away, you d—— lobster-backs!”

The word “lobsterbacks” might well be an anachronism, and a sign that details of this tale had changed before it was written down, but its core can easily fit with Carey’s testimony from 1770.

Finally, William H. Sumner felt he was doing a great service to history when he put into his A History of East Boston an account of Maverick’s death that he’d heard from a son of Joseph Mountfort (1750-1838):

He, with Samuel Maverick, Peter C. Brooks, Samuel and Thomas Carey, were playing marbles in the house of Mr. Carey, at the head of Gardner’s wharf, near Cross street, at the time the bells rang the alarm, and were thereby attracted to State street before the British troops fired.

Here they observed that a tumult had arisen between some men and boys and the soldiers. Angry words were being exchanged, and missiles of various kinds were thrown. Some one threw pieces of ice, when the soldiers, exasperated by the boldness and taunts of their rebel opponents, discharged their guns at the crowd.

Young Maverick cried out to his relative Mountfort, “Joe! I am shot!” and ran down Exchange street, then called Royal Exchange lane, to Dock square, where he fell to the ground, and was conveyed to his mother’s house. He died the next morning. At that time the widow [Mary] Maverick kept a genteel boarding-house in Union street, at the corner of Salt lane.

It is not a little singular, that Mr. Mountfort’s name does not appear among the witnesses examined at the trial. . . . Yet, there can be no doubt as to the authenticity of Mr. Mountfort’s narrative. The writer has it from his son, Judge Napoleon B. Mountfort, of New York [1800-1883], who is well informed on the subject.

As Hiller B. Zobel pointed out in The Boston Massacre, Peter Chardon Brooks was only three years old and living in Medford in 1770. So he was very unlikely to have been playing marbles with the seventeen-year-old Maverick on the 5th of March.

Sumner got the impression that Joseph Mountfort was a “relative” of Samuel Maverick. I believe that became true only later, when Mountfort married Maverick’s first cousin Mary Gyles.

The Mountfort family seems to have been earnest in putting their ancestor on the scene of patriotic events. His name doesn’t appear on the earliest and most reliable list of men involved in the Boston Tea Party, but it surfaces in Samuel A. Drake’s Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston (1876). Mountfort did not, however, make the roll in Francis S. Drake’s Tea Leaves (1884).

Nonetheless, the Mountfort family tradition does seem accurate in putting Maverick at the Carey house. I’m just not convinced that Mountfort was really there, too. This may be what I call a “grandmother’s tale”—a historical tale that older relatives embroider for children as a private entertainment or special lesson, yet is so vivid that the children grow up believing that every detail is true, that their relatives were in the thick of history, and that the tale should go into history books.

Curiously, the editor of John Greenwood’s memoir theorized that Greenwood and Mountfort encountered each other as prisoners of war, with Mountfort (remembered by the Greenwood family as “Mumford”) spilling hot soup on Greenwood. It was a small world.

On the Lines in Charlestown

Yesterday’s posting quoted four accounts of the brief panic inside Boston—inside Faneuil Hall, to be exact—at news of a Continental Army raid on Charlestown Neck on 8 Jan 1776. Here are two recollections from men who were involved in that event as teenaged soldiers, one on the American side and one on the British.

First, Continental fife-major John Greenwood (1760-1819) wrote that the raid was “planned by old [Israel] Putnam,” (shown here) with the immediate goal of setting fire to a few houses remaining in that part of Charlestown, “inhabited by a parcel of stragglers, such as sutlers, mechanics, and camp women.”

Greenwood added that the attack a larger secondary goal:

The reason for this frolic being undertaken was that, as General Washington had many spies in Boston and could ascertain everything the British were about, he had learned that on the very evening in question they were about to enact a new play in derision of the Yankees, called the “Blockade of Boston.” . . .

one of the actors was representing a Yankee sentinel, rigged out like a tailor with his paper measures hanging over his shoulders and his large shears sticking out of his pocket, etc., resting or leaning upon his gun and conversing with a countryman who had a newspaper. . . . My father and mother were in the house (Faneuil Hall) at the time and witnessed the scene.

On the other side of the Charlestown siege lines from young Greenwood was nearly-as-young Lt. Martin Hunter (1757-1847). He eventually became a general and a knight. In his memoir he recalled:

A farce called “The Blockade of Boston,” written, I believe, by General [John] Burgoyne, was acted. The enemy knew the night it was to be performed, and made an attack on the mill at Charlestown at the very hour that the farce began.

I happened to be on duty in the redoubt at Charlestown that night. The enemy came along the mill-dam, and surprised a sergeant’s guard that was posted at the mill. Some shots were fired, and we all immediately turned out and manned the works. A shot was fired by one of our advanced sentries, and instantly the firing commenced in the redoubt, and it was a considerable time before it could be stopped. Not a man of the enemy was within three miles of us, and the party that came along the mill-dam had effected their object and carried off the sergeant’s guard.

However, our firing caused a general alarm at Boston, and all the troops got under arms. An orderly sergeant that was standing outside the playhouse door heard the firing, and immediately ran into the playhouse, got upon the stage, and cried “Turn out! Turn out! They are hard at it, hammer and tongs.”

The whole audience thought that the sergeant was acting a part in the farce, and that he did it so well that there was a general clap, and such a noise that he could not be heard for a considerable time.

When the clapping was over he again cried, “What the deuce are you all about? If you won’t believe me, by Jasus you need only go to the door, and there you will see and hear both!”

If it was the intention of the enemy to put a stop to the farce for that night they certainly succeeded, as all the officers immediately left the playhouse and joined their regiments.

Hunter’s description of the reaction inside Faneuil Hall was at best secondhand, but it shows how even British officers were struck by this incident.

Open Wide

A couple of years ago, a celebrated writer turned to me at a military reenactment and said, “The fife is really the dental drill of musical instruments, isn’t it?”

He was speaking metaphorically, and from a more informed appreciation for music than mine. (He’s written a couple of books on the topic.) But, oddly enough, there is a close connection between music and dentistry in Revolutionary Boston.

Exhibit 1 is John Greenwood (1760-1819), whose memoir I’ve quoted several times on Boston 1775. As described in this posting, Greenwood started playing the fife around age nine or ten, enlisting in the provincial forces before the Battle of Bunker Hill. After the war he became a dentist in New York. Greenwood’s manuscript of music, dated 1785, is now at the New-York Historical Society.

Exhibit 2 is Josiah Flagg. The father of that name (1738-95) was a silversmith and engraver who started publishing psalm books and putting on concerts in Boston in the 1760s and 1770s. His namesake son (1763-1816) created America’s first known chair designed for dentistry—shown above, and now on display at Temple University. Grandson Josiah Foster Flagg (1788-1853) also managed a dental school.

Exhibit 3 is Paul Revere, a childhood friend of the elder Flagg. Of course, we know Revere best as a silversmith and carrier of important messages. But he also engraved many images for printers, including Flagg’s 1764 psalm collection and the frontispiece for William Billings’s first collection of original songs. Indeed, the Music Publishers’ Association has named its engraving awards after Revere. When his other businesses were slow, Revere advertised that he cleaned teeth and made dentures. What would qualify a silversmith to do all those things? Basically, Revere was good at scraping.

The Fife as a Cause of Travels and Disasters

I spent yesterday afternoon at the Lexington Fife & Drum Muster (shown above during the “F Troop” congregation of members from all the units present, led somewhat casually by members of the host group). So it seemed appropriate to share John Greenwood’s memoir of becoming a fifer, and what that led him into.

About this period [1770] I commenced learning to play upon the fife, and, trifling as it may seem to mention the circumstance, it was, I believe, the sole cause of my travels and disasters.

I was so fond of hearing the fife and drum played by the British that somehow or other I got possession of an old split fife, and having made it sound by puttying up the crack, learned to play several tunes on its sufficiently well to be fifer in the militia company of Captain Gay. This was before the war some years, for I think I must have been about nine or ten years old. The flag of the company was English; so were they all then.

The captain must have been coppersmith Martin Gay (1726-1809). Gay’s politics are interesting because he was obviously torn. In December 1770, he hosted a spinning-bee, generally a Whig activity. But in 1774 he affirmed his loyalty to the Crown, and left Boston with the British troops in 1776. Then he returned to Massachusetts in the late 1780s, rejoined his old meeting-house, and eventually died at home.

But back to young John Greenwood:

At the age of thirteen I was sent eastward to a place called Falmouth (Portland), 150 miles from Boston, to live with my father’s only brother, whom I was named after. . . .

My uncle was lieutenant of an independent [militia] company (the Cadets), and of course I was engaged to play the fife while they were learning to march, a pistareen an evening for my services keeping me in pocket-money. Being thus early thrown into the society of men and having, as it were, imbibed the ardor of a military spirit; being moreover the only boy who knew how to play the fife in the place, I was much caressed by them.

Moving on! In April 1775, word of the Battle of Lexington and Concord reached Maine. John, who turned fifteen on 17 May, decided to return to Boston to see his parents, whom he was already missing. He left secretly early one Sunday morning when his uncle and everyone else was in meeting.

As I traveled through the different towns the people were preparing to march toward Boston to fight, and as I had my fife with me—yes, and I was armed likewise with a sword—I was greatly caressed by them. Stopping at the taverns where there was a muster, out came my fife and I played them a tune or two; they used to ask me where I came from and where I was going to, and when I told them I was going to fight for my country, they were astonished such a little boy, and alone, should have such courage. Thus by the help of my fife I lived, as it were, on what it usually called free-quarters nearly upon the entire route.

John managed to reach the Charles River, only to find that there was no way into besieged Boston. Charlestown was still intact; it wouldn’t be burned down until the Battle of Bunker Hill. But there were no families around.

Charlestown was at the time generally deserted by the inhabitants, and the houses were, with few exceptions, empty; so, not knowing what to do nor where to go and without a penny in my pockets, if I remember rightly, I entered a very large tavern that was filled with all descriptions of people.

Here I saw three or four persons whom I knew, and, my fife sticking in the front of my coat, they asked me, after many questions, to play them a tune. I complied forthwith, but although the fife is somewhat of a noisy instrument to pay upon, it could hardly be heard for the din and confusion around.

After I had rattled off several tunes, there was one Hardy Pierce who, with Enoch Howard and three or four others, invited me to go up to Cambridge to their quarters, as they called it. When there they tried to persuade me to enlist as a fifer, telling me it was only for eight months, and that I would receive eight dollars a month and be found in provisions; moreover, they calculated to quickly drive the British from Boston, when I would have an opportunity of seeing my parents.

Thus John Greenwood became fifer for Capt. T. T. Bliss’s company.

George Washington's Teeth, Close Up

In 1798, George Washington ordered what was probably his last set of false teeth. Here they are, courtesy of the American Dental Association.

The dentist who supplied these choppers was John Greenwood, who has appeared on Boston 1775 as a ten-year-old boy waiting up nights for a visit with the ghost of his roommate Samuel Maverick, killed in the Boston Massacre; and as a fifteen-year-old soldier during the Battle of Bunker Hill. I love being able to trace people through their lives like that.

The Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore has an online display on the correspondence between Greenwood and Washington from 1791 to 1799. Those pages also include an image of a different set of lower dentures.

Greenwood sent his client this professional advice in 28 Dec 1798:

I send you inclosed two setts of teeth, one fixed on the Old Barrs in part, and the sett you sent me from philadelphia which when I received was very black. Occasioned either by your soaking them in port wine, or by your drinking it. Port wine being sower, takes of all the polish and All Acids has a tendency to soften every kind of teeth and bone. Acid is used in coloring every kind of Ivory. Therefore it is very pernicious to the teeth.

Greenwood’s father Isaac was an ivory craftsman, so he knew what he was talking about.

I advise you to Either take them out after dinner and put them in clean water and put in another sett, or clean them with a brush and some chalk scraped fine, it will Absorbe the Acids which collects from the mouth and preserve them longer.

I have found another and better way of using the Sealing wax, when a hole is eaten in the teeth by acid, etc.—first observe, then dry the teeth, then take a piece of Wax and cut into as small pieces as you think will fill up the hole. Then, take a large nail or any other piece of Iron and heat it hot into the fire, Then put your piece of wax into the hole and melt it by means of introducing the point of the nail to it. I have tried it, and found it to Consoladate, and do better than the other way and if done proper it will resist the saliva. It will be handyer for you to take hold of the Nail with small plyers, than with a tongs thus, the wax must be very small not bigger than this [dot].

If your teeth grows black, take some chalk and a Pine or Cedar stick, it will rub of[f]. If you whant your teeth more yellower soake them in Broath or pot liquor, but not in tea or acid. Porter is a good thing to coulor them and will not hurt but preserve them but it must not be in the least pricked.

You will find I have Altered the upper teeth you sent me from philadelphia leaveing the enamel on the teeth dont preserve them any longer than if it was of, it only holds the color better, but to preserve them they must be very often Changed and cleaned for whatever attacks them, must be repelled, as often or it will gain ground and destroy the works.

the two setts I repaired is done on a different plan than when they are done when made entirely new, for the teeth are screwed on the barrs, instead of haveing the barrs cast red hot on them, which is the reason I believe the[y] destroy or dissolve so soone near to the barrs. Sir, after hopeing you will not be Obliged to be troubled very sune in the same way, I subscribe myself,

Your very humble servant,
John Greenwood

The additional charge is fiveteen dollars

P.S. I expect next Spring to move my family into Connecticut State. If I do, I will rite, and let you know, whether I give up my present business or not. I will as long as I live, do anything in this way for you or in any other way in my power—if you require it.

Washington wrote back, “I shall always prefer your services to those of any other in the line of your present profession.”

Who Took Over Dr. Baker's Dental Practice?

After John Baker left Boston for colonies to the south, as described in yesterday’s posting, other “surgeon dentists” arrived from Europe, but none seem to have stayed long. Rather, a couple of locals adopted his methods.

During his time in Boston, Baker taught some of his techniques to Isaac Greenwood (1730-1803), a craftsman living on Salem Street next to what’s now called Old North Church. Greenwood made umbrellas and tools, and was an “ivory-turner”—hence the affinity for tooth repair. His apprentice Samuel Maverick was the youngest fatality of the Boston Massacre.

Greenwood in turn passed his knowledge to his sons William P. (1756-1851), Isaac, Jr. (1758-past 1806), and John (1760-1819), who advertised their dental services in Boston, Salem, Providence, Savannah, New York, and other towns in the early republic. Like Baker, they often had to travel to find enough clients to support themselves.

John Greenwood is known in dental history for inventing a treadle-powered drill, reportedly inspired by his mother’s spinning-wheel (though he was probably also familiar with his father’s lathes). At the age of fifteen, John had enlisted in the American army as a fifer, and I’ve quoted some passages from his memoir The Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood of Boston and New York, 1775-1783 here on Boston 1775.

But the most direct pitch to Bostonians who had come to rely on John Baker’s dental techniques appeared in the Boston Evening-Post on 5 Sept 1768:

Whereas many Persons are so unfortunate as to lose their Fore Teeth by accident, or otherways, to their great Detriment, not only in Looks, but Speaking, both in public and private:—

This is to inform all such, that they may have them replaced with false Ones, that look as well as the Natural, and answer the End of Speaking, to all Intents, by PAUL REVERE, Goldsmith, near the Head of Dr. Clarke’s Wharf, Boston.——

All Persons who have had false Teeth fix’d by Mr. John Baker, Surgeon Dentist, and they have got loose (as they will in Time) may have them fastened by the abovesaid Revere, who learnt the method of fixing them from Mr. Baker.

Revere turned to dentistry when his goldsmithing business had fallen off due to economic doldrums and boycotts. Because he focused on building false teeth and cleaning teeth, he could apply his existing skills in metalwork and, well, scraping. Jayne Triber’s biography A True Republican notes that Revere stopped advertising his dental services in 1770, after he began to earn more from other tasks—including engraving “cane heads” for ivory-turner and fellow dentist Isaac Greenwood.

TOMORROW: Pulling teeth in colonial Boston.

Boston boys and their ghosts

On the first anniversary of the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere displayed a picture of Christopher “Seider’s pale ghost” in a window of his new home in the North End. Gentlemen orating about the Massacre invoked the ghosts of the five people killed at that event. But for many young Bostonians, ghosts weren’t just metaphors, but quite real.

“The people of New England at that time pretty generally believed in hobgoblins and spirits, that is the children at least did,” North End boy John Greenwood (born 1760) later wrote in his memoir. Greenwood discussed this belief in the context of the region’s old Puritan tales:

While I was at school the [political] troubles commenced, and I recollect very well of hearing the superstitious accounts which were circulated around: people were certain a war was about to take place, for a great blazing comet had appeared and armies of soldiery had been seen fighting in the clouds overhead; and it was said that the day of judgment was at hand, when the moon would turn into blood and the world be set on fire. These dismal stories became so often repeated that the boys thought nothing of them, considering that such events must come in the course of nature. For my part, all I wished was that a church which stood by the side of my father’s garden would fall on me at the time these terrible things happened, and crush me to death at once, so as to be out of pain quick.

Benjamin Russell (born 1761) certainly believed in ghosts one memorable night before the Revolutionary War, as he later told his printing colleague Joseph T. Buckingham:

It was a part of my duty as an assistant in the domestic affairs of the family, to have the care of the cow. One evening, after it was quite dark, I was driving the cow to her pasturage,—the common. Passing by the burial-ground, adjoining the Stone Chapel, I saw several lights that appeared to be springing from the earth, among the graves and immediately sinking again to the ground, or expiring. . . . I left the cow to find her way to the common, or wherever else she pleased, and ran home.

Russell’s father led him back to the graveyard and showed him that the lights came from “a sexton, up to his shoulders in a grave, throwing out, as he proceeded in digging, bones and fragments of rotten coffins. The phosphorus in the decaying wood, blended with the peculiar state of the atmosphere, presented the appearance that had completely unstrung my nerves.”

As for Greenwood, he actually hoped to see one particular ghost in 1770:

I remember what is called the ‘Boston Massacre,’ when the British troops fired upon the inhabitants and killed seven [actually five] of them, one of whom was my father’s apprentice, a lad eighteen years of age, named Samuel Maverick. I was his bedfellow, and after his death I used to go to bed in the dark on purpose to see his spirit, for I was so fond of him and he of me that I was sure it would not hurt me.

Battle of Bunker Hill: two boys' views

The British and New England armies fought the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775. It was the first pitched battle of the Revolutionary War, and one of the most costly battles for the British army of the entire era. The Massachusetts Historical Society has an excellent online exhibit about the battle. Here are memories of the event from two teenaged boys who were caught up in it on opposite sides.

Martin Hunter was a seventeen-year-old lieutenant in the 52nd Regiment of the British army. Eventually he became a general and governor of New Brunswick. His memories of Bunker Hill are oddly concerned with trivia:

It was very extraordinary, but that morning, the 17th of June, the 52nd had received an entire new set of arms, and were trying them at marks, when they received orders to march immediately to Charlestown Ferry, with one day’s provisions. I may add that, singularly enough, not a firelock had missed fire. . . .

Charlestown was set on fire by the frigate, and before the action began the whole town was burning. In the steeple of the church several people were seen, while the body of the church was in one entire blaze; and as they could not get out, they were seen from Boston to fall with the steeple. . . .

Lord Rawdon, now Earl of Moira, was lieutenant in the 5th Regiment; he received a shot through a cat-skin cap that he wore that day, and desired me to observe how narrowly he had escaped being shot through the head. He, with many other officers, asked me to go and look for a surgeon for Major Williams; but though a very young soldier, I had sense enough to know that I was much safer close under the works than I could be at a few yards from it, as the enemy could not depress their arms sufficiently to do any execution to those that were close under, and to have gone to the rear to look for a surgeon would have been almost certain death; indeed, the Major was not a very great favourite, as he had obliged me to sell a pony that I had bought for seven and sixpence.

John Greenwood was a Boston boy, fifteen years old, who had enlisted in the provincial army as a fifer. On the day of Bunker Hill, he had just been reunited with his mother after months apart, but then lost her in the confusion of Charlestown's evacuation.

Not finding my mother at Mr. Grout’s on my return, and not knowing where she was, I let the horse go, saddle and all, to find the way home the best way it could, and down I went toward the battle to find the company I belonged to, then about two miles off. As I passed through Cambridge common I saw a number of wounded who had been brought from the field of conflict. Everywhere the greatest terror and confusion seemed to prevail, and as I ran along the road leading to Bunker Hill it was filled with chairs and wagons, bearing the wounded and dead, while groups of men were employed in assisting others, not badly injured, to walk. Never having beheld such a sight before, I felt very much frightened, and would have given the world if I had not enlisted as a soldier; I could positively feel my hair stand on end. Just as I came near the place a negro man, wounded in the back of his neck, passed me and, his collar being open and he not having anything on except his shirt and trousers, I saw the wound quite plainly and the blood running down his back. I asked him if it hurt much as he did not seem to mind it; he said no, that he was only going to get a plaster put on it, and meant to return. You cannot conceive what encouragement this immediately gave me; I began to feel brave and like a soldier from that moment, and fear never troubled me afterward during the whole war.

As good luck would have it I found the company I belonged to stationed on the road in sight of the battle, with two field-pieces, it having been joined to the regiment commanded by Colonel John Patterson from Stockbridge (afterward the 12th Massachusetts Bay Regiment). Captain Bliss, who had given me permission the day before to go a distance of more than twenty miles, was astonished to see me, and asked how I had returned so soon. I thought I might as well appear brave as not and make myself to be thought so by others, so I told him that, having heard cannon firing early in the morning, I considered it my duty to be with my fellow-soldiers; that I had run all the way back for that purpose, and intended to go into the battle to find them—which I certainly would have done, as big a coward as I was on setting out to join my companions. The cause of my fears then was, I presume, being alone, for I cannot say that I ever felt so afterward. I was much caressed by my captain and the company, who regarded me as a brave little fellow.

As my father lived near the ferry [in Boston] my brothers were at this point and, the river being only half a mile wide, saw the whole battle. The wounded were brought over in the boats belonging to the men-of-war, and they were obliged to bail the blood out of them like water, while those very boats carried back fresh troops who stood ready to reinforce those engaged. My brother told me that the wives, or women, of the British soldiers were at the ferry encouraging them, saying: "D—— the Yankee rebels, my brave British boys; give it to them!" He observed likewise that the soldiers looked as pale as death when they got into the boats, for they could plainly see their brother redcoats mowed down like grass by the Yankees, the whole scene being directly before their eyes. The Americans were all chiefly marksmen, and loading their guns each with a ball and five buck-shot, reserved their fire until the English troops had advanced within pistol range. I was told the enemy fell like grass when mowed, and while they were filling up their ranks to advance again the Yankees gave them the second fire with the same effect, two or three dropping at the discharge or every gun.