Capt. Samuel Lockwood at War

Samuel Lockwood (1737–1807, gravestone shown here courtesy of Find a Grave) of Greenwich, Connecticut, became a second lieutenant in the Continental Army in April 1775.

That fall, he joined Gen. Richard Montgomery’s invasion of Canada. On 5 November Lockwood’s commanders made him an assistant engineer with the rank of captain. The Continental Congress never recognized that rank but later voted to pay Lockwood a year’s salary as an engineer.

Lt. Lockwood’s specialty was really maneuvers on the water. He reconnoitered ahead of the army by boat during the march north and helped to capture eleven Crown vessels and Gen. Richard Prescott at Sorel.

The Battle of Québec didn’t work out so well for Lockwood, however. He was wounded, captured, and not released on parole until late in 1776.

As soon as Lockwood was formally exchanged in early 1777, the Congress commissioned him as a captain in Col. John Lamb’s artillery regiment. He served two years, resigning in 1779.

Capt. Lockwood was then done with the Continental Army, but he wasn’t done with the war. He remained active in his state’s military. In 1779 he commanded an armed vessel on Long Island Sound, attacking British ships in the Oyster Bay harbor in November.

On 17 Jan 1780, Capt. Samuel Lockwood led “forty volunteers from Greenwich” alongside Capt. Samuel Keeler and an equal number of Connecticut militiamen on a raid into New York. Their target was the home in Morrisania of Lt. Col. Isaac Hetfield, Loyalist commander of the Westchester County militia.

Gen. William Heath reported to New York’s Gov. (and Gen.) George Clinton about the Lockwood and Keeler raid a few days later:

they arrived at the place a little after one the next morning, attacked the picket, killed 3 and drove the others in, march’d to the House where Hatfield was, who, with his men took to the chambers [i.e., bedrooms] and kept up a fire down stairs and out at the windows; the militia behaved with great Bravery, call’d to Hatfield to Surrender or they would Set fire to the House…

TOMORROW: The view from inside Hatfield’s house.

“After the Destruction of Captn. Chambers’s Tea”

Everyone agreed that during the New York Tea Party of 22 Apr 1774 and associated demonstrations, the rest of the city was peaceful. Lt. Gov. Cadwallader Colden told the absent governor, William Tryon, “the Quarter where I reside, and the greatest Part of the Town were perfectly Quiet.”

For the Whigs, that showed how the New York community was normally peaceful and under control; right-thinking locals destroyed the eighteen chests of offensive tea and did no other damage. For their opponents, the fact that only a small fraction of New Yorkers got involved showed how the movement wasn’t really popular.

That split reflected the ongoing battle for public opinion. The Whig committee that orchestrated the tea destruction was playing to several audiences. They wanted to show the government and mercantile community in London, and the East India Company, that their city was adamantly opposed to paying the new tea tax. They wanted to warn merchants and sea captains like James Chambers against trying to evade that boycott.

They also wanted to show the Whigs of Boston and Philadelphia and other North American ports, who had already dealt with tea shipments, that they were just as strongly opposed. As Hugh Gaine’s New-York Gazette concluded its 25 April report:

Thus, to the great Mortification of the Secret and open enemies of America, and the joy of all the friends of liberty and human nature, the union of these Colonies is maintained in a contest of the utmost importance to their safety and felicity.

In addition, the Whigs wanted to assure the city’s riled-up populace, who actually started destroying the tea before the self-appointed leaders wanted, that their committee was looking out for the public interest.

Of course, not everyone supported the tea destruction. The first newspaper attack on the action appeared in James Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer on 28 April. In highly emphasized language a correspondent demanded:

What is the Committee of Observation? By whom were they appointed? and what authority had they to order Capt. Chambers, or any body else, to attend them at Mr. [Samuel] Francis’s, or any other place whatsoever? Who says, and upon what authority does he say, that the sense of the city was asked, relatively, either to the sending away Capt. [Benjamin] Lockyer, or the destruction of the tea on board the London? Has not every London Captain brought tea, under the same circumstances? And, if so, what were the Apostates that informed against the unfortunate man, who was threatened with DEATH for obeying the laws of his country? . . .

I wish the printers of public chronicles would be cautious of disgracing their papers, by publishing party relations. While they adhere to matters of fact, ’tis all well; but when they expand their columns to either patriot or ministerial minions, without any known evidence,— nay, contrary to the truth of fact,—they must not, they cannot, they shall not hope to escape the animadversions of a lover of Constitutional Liberty; but a sworn foe to Coblers and Taylors, so long as they take upon their everlasting and unmeasurable shoulders, the power of directing the loyal and sensible inhabitants of the CITY and PROVINCE of NEW-YORK.

According to Lt. Gov. Colden, the radical Whigs actually lost the ensuing political struggle. On 7 Sept 1774, he wrote to the governor:

After the Destruction of Captn. Chambers’s Tea, and some other violent Proceedings of the pretended Patriots, the principal Inhabitants began to be apprehensive and resolved to attend the Meetings of the Inhabitants when called together by Hand Bills.

The Consequence has been that [John Morin] Scott, [Alexander] McDougall, [Isaac] Sears & [John] Lamb are all in disgrace, and the People are now directed by more moderate Men. I hope that the giving [of] any new offence to Parliament will be guarded against.

New York City remained in a delicate balance between factions. In the summer of 1775 it simultaneously welcomed both Gov. Tryon and Gen. George Washington. In 1776 New Yorkers celebrated the Declaration of Independence by tearing down George III’s statue, and then half a year later the city, retaken by the British military, became the center of Loyalism for the rest of the war.

TOMORROW: What happened to Capt. James Chambers?

New York’s Sons of Liberty at the Fraunces Tavern

Today the Fraunces Tavern Museum in New York City opens its new exhibition, “Fear & Force: New York City’s Sons of Liberty.” This display will remain on view in the Mesick Gallery for the next two years.

The museum’s announcement says:

On display in the Museum’s largest gallery, the exhibition will immerse visitors in New York City in the late 18th century, when the Sons of Liberty first began to make a name for themselves as an organized group who opposed British rule through violent resistance prior to the outbreak of the American Revolution.

The exhibition will take visitors through a timeline that chronicles key players and stories behind some of the most dramatic events that ignited the spark of revolution in the 13 colonies, from the staging of New York’s very own “tea party,” to tarring and feathering Loyalists.

The New York Tea Party took place on 22 Apr 1774, four months after the famous Boston Tea Party and one month after the less famous second Boston Tea Party. But I can see why this site wants to highlight the New York event, and I’ll say more about it tomorrow.

As for “tarring and feathering Loyalists,” New Yorkers actually carried out that public punishment on Customs employees or informers before Bostonians did, though folks in some of the smaller ports along Massachusetts’s north shore had established the tradition even earlier.

New York’s Sons of Liberty definitely originated Liberty Poles. They showed their patriotism by flying a British flag—while also tussling with British soldiers quartered nearby. The soldiers resented what they probably saw as hypocrisy or effrontery, and that produced a series of brawls, attempts to fell the locals’ flagpole, and erections of even larger flagpoles. Because when it came to Liberty Poles, size mattered.

In March 1770 the Sons of Liberty John Lamb and William Cunningham reportedly bought land for New York’s biggest Liberty Pole yet. Five years later when the war broke out, Lamb became a Continental Army artillery officer while Cunningham became provost, or head of prisoners, for the British army. I’d love to know more about Cunningham’s career in New York before 1775. Will this exhibit have something to say?

Among the artifacts to be displayed in the Fraunces Tavern’s largest room are “an iron fence fragment from the tearing down of the King George III statue in Bowling Green Park” in 1776 after the reading of the Declaration of Independence. A few months later, the royal forces took the city, and the Sons of Liberty had to go into hiding for more than six years. Perhaps a future Fraunces Tavern Museum exhibit will look at the New York City as the center of Loyalism during most of the war.

Through the Roof at the Fraunces Tavern Museum, 23 Feb.

On Thursday, 23 February, I’ll make my New York debut with a talk about The Road to Concord at the Fraunces Tavern Museum in lower Manhattan.

I’ll speak about the race for artillery in Massachusetts in the late summer and fall of 1774, which spread to the other New England colonies in December and finally brought on war in April 1775.

Doors will open at 6:00 P.M., and the presentation will start at 6:30. Admission is $5 for museum members, $10 for others.

The Fraunces Tavern has its own link to the struggle over artillery—an event in New York in August 1775. Until then, the royal authorities and radical Patriots had coexisted on the island, with the city government anxious to tamp down any hostilities.

On 25 June, for example, both Continental general George Washington and royal governor William Tryon received excited public welcomes. They came onto Manhattan Island from different sides, and their audiences represented the different political sides.

But in August, Gov. Tryon and the city’s remaining redcoats went aboard H.M.S. Asia, a sixty-four gun warship in the harbor. That left the city in the hands of the Patriots. The merchant John Lamb had been a Whig leader before the war. In mid-1775 he secured a military commission from the New York Provincial Congress—and military weapons from a British army storehouse.

I’ll quote from Isaac Q. Leake’s biography of Lamb:

…a resolve having been passed by the Continental Congress, to provide cannon for the armament of the forts ordered to be constructed in the Highlands, the Provincial Congress deemed this sufficient warrant to direct the removal of the cannon from the battery in the city [at the southern tip of Manhattan].

Captain Lamb was ordered to this service, and on the 23d August, with his company, assisted by a part of a corps of independents of the command of Col. [John] Lasher, and a body of the citizens, proceeded in the evening to execute the order of the Congress.

Some intimation must have been given to Captain [George] Vandeput, the commander of the Asia (a line of battle-ship stationed off the Battery), of the intended movement; for upon the arrival of the military, they found a barge and crew, lying on their oars, close under the Fort. A detachment of observation was accordingly stationed on the parapet, to watch the proceedings of the enemy, with orders to return the fire if attacked. As soon as the artillery was in motion, a false fire [signal rocket] was signaled from the boat; and immediately afterwards, a musket was discharged at the citizens, who returned it with a volley.

The barge retreated to the ship, with several killed and wounded, and when out of the range of fire from the Asia, three guns from the ship were discharged in quick succession. The drums on the Battery beat to arms, and were answered by a broadside from the Asia, of round and grape; and the fire was rapidly repeated for some time.

Meanwhile the cannon were moved off with great deliberation; and all that were mounted, twenty-one pieces, were safely carried away. Three men were wounded on the Battery; and some damage was done to the houses near the Fort, and at Whitehall.

One of those houses was the Sign of the Queen’s Head, an inn operated by Samuel Fraunces. The cannon ball that crashed through the roof of Fraunces’s tavern was preserved as late as 1894, but then disappeared before 1900. I don’t expect to see it.

Ebenezer Stevens Exhibit in New York

The New-York Historical Society is featuring what I expect is a small but thorough exhibit on Ebenezer Stevens, a lieutenant colonel in the Continental artillery.

Stevens was a Boston mechanic who participated in the Tea Party, carefully avoiding the view of his brother-in-law Alexander Hodgdon, a mate aboard one of the ships. Sometime in the next few months Stevens and John Crane, a fellow carpenter and Tea Party veteran, moved to Rhode Island—perhaps because Boston’s economy was squeezed by the Boston Port Bill, perhaps because they feared arrest.

In December the Rhode Island assembly voted to form an artillery unit. As I’ll discuss in a talk for the Newport Historical Society late this year, the commanders of that unit were men from Boston, including Crane and Stevens. They returned to Massachusetts at the start of the siege.

At first Stevens served as one of Col. Crane’s subordinate officers, but he had further ambitions. He led a separate Provisional Artillery Battalion in the Saratoga campaign. Finally, he switched to Col. John Lamb’s artillery regiment to become a lieutenant colonel.

After the war, Stevens settled in New York and raised his family there while building a mercantile business. His descendants included the novelist Edith Wharton. And his papers and souvenirs of military service went to the New-York Historical Society. This exhibit includes “Stevens’ Society of Cincinnati badge and officer’s tailcoat.”

The Ebenezer Stevens display will be up through 2 October. That means it coincides with some other exhibits of interest at the N.Y.H.S.:

• Summer of Hamilton through August.
• Battle of Brooklyn, starting 23 September.
• Mo Willems’s Pigeon, Knuffle Bunny, and Elephant and Piggie.

The Father of the Bill of Rights

If we Google “Father of the Bill of Rights,” the name that pops up more than any other is George Mason of Virginia.

It’s true that ExplorePAHistory says of Robert Whitehill, “it is not too much of an exaggeration to call him the father of the Bill of Rights.” That formulation reminds me of Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam’s argument that the basic meaning of the word “arguably” is “even I don’t really believe this.” It’s no surprise that Whitehill, like that website, was Pennsylvanian.

Mason is often credited as “Father of the [U.S.] Bill of Rights” because he:

• drafted one of its major precedents, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776.
• advocated adding clauses on individual and state rights to the Constitution during the drafting convention on 12 Sept 1787. (Massachusetts’s Elbridge Gerry proposed such a declaration and Mason seconded it.)
• refused to sign the final document after that proposal lost by a whopping 10-0. (Gerry refused, too, as did Luther Martin of Maryland.)
• published a pamphlet about how a Declaration of Rights should be part of the Constitution.
• proposed calling for a Declaration of Rights at the Virginia ratifying convention.
• sent those clauses to John Lamb in New York for that state’s convention.
• somehow also provided the model for the proposals from North Carolina and Rhode Island, too.
• was the author James Madison drew on when he made a formal proposal of amendments in the U.S. Congress on 8 June 1789.

All of which adds up to a mighty strong claim that Mason was the individual most responsible for those proposals.

TOMORROW: So what did Robert Whitehill do? And what does that have to do with that partly demolished tavern in central Pennsylvania?

Lt. Williams: “I am sorry to say I am Commanded by Mrs. Moodie”

Lt. Henry A. Williams didn’t just complain about the 2nd Artillery Regiment and Capt.-Lt. Jacob Kemper, as detailed yesterday. As Holly A. Mayer quotes him in Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution, Williams also had things to say about his own captain, Andrew Moodie, and the captain’s wife.

According to records of the St. Andrew’s Society of New York (a social and mutual-aid organization for Scottish immigrants), Moodie had been a gunner in the Royal Artillery. He married Margaret Galloway, and they had children from 1768 to 1786.

On 1 Aug 1781, having already asked for a transfer several weeks before, Lt. Williams wrote to Col. John Lamb:

I am sorry to say I am Commanded by Mrs. Moodie & not him as whatever She says is Intirely a law with him. . . .

the Other evening a Small debate happened between Capn. Moodie and me Concerning Cadets in hearing of her who [L]ays in next Marquee to me[;] we both parted friends and I went to my bed. [S]oon after He and Mrs. Moodie [had] High Words. . . .

Curiosity prompted me to listen to ye discourse which was this. that Capn. Moodie was not the Man he used to be or he would never take such discourse from me and advised him to make use of his pistols which he ought to have done Long before this. . . .

Since that he has been indeavouring in A Manner far below that of a Gentleman to Injure my Character. 

A couple of things strike me about this situation. One is that the Continental artillery officers seem to have been particularly sensitive about questions of their rank and genteel status—perhaps because a lot of them were strivers rising from the working class.

The second observation is that Lt. Williams managed to “debate” with his superior officer loud enough to be heard in the next tent, eavesdrop on a conversation between that captain and his wife, and complain twice about the captain to the head of the regiment—and still feel himself to be the injured party.

Capt.-Lt. Kemper Confronts “unofficer and ungentlemanlike behavior”

Yesterday I mentioned Maria Sophia Kemper, daughter of German immigrants to New Jersey. Her brother Daniel became Assistant Clothier-General to the Continental Army, and her brother Jacob joined the officer corps.

Jacob Kemper served in Col. John Crane’s artillery regiment, eventually becoming a captain-lieutenant. That regiment was linked to Massachusetts.

Toward the end of 1782 Capt.-Lt. Kemper got into a dispute with Lt. Henry Abraham Williams of Col. John Lamb’s artillery regiment, which was rooted in New York. The commander-in-chief’s papers tell the story:

At the General Court Martial of which Colonel Michael Jackson is president Lieutenant Henry Williams of the 2d regiment of Artillery was tried, charged with unofficer and ungentlemanlike behavior on the evening of the 6th of October 1782

• First for asserting a falsehood tending to promote dissention between the 2d & 3d regiments of Artillery, by saying that We the 2d regiment of Artillery to a man (addressing himself to Captn Lieutenant Kemper) do dispise you and your regiment, or any thing you can say in behalf of it—
• 2dly For stripping to buffet with Captn Lt Kemper, and afterwards drawing a sword on him when unarmed—
• 3dly For writing a challenge for Captn Lieutenant Kemper & leaving it in the Bar room of a public Tavern unsealed.

The Court after maturely considering the evidence for and against Lt Williams, and his Defence, are of opinion on the first charge, that Lt Williams did on the evening of the 6th of October last say that “We the 2d regiment of Artillery to a man—addressing himself to Captain Lt Kemper—do dispise you and your regiment, or any thing you can say in behalf of it[”] for which they think him very unjustifiable in breach of article 5th Section 18th of the Rules and Articles of war—

On the 2d Charge the Court are of opinion that Lt Williams did on the evening of the 6th of October last strip to buffet with Captain Lt Kemper, and did afterwards draw a sword on him when unarmed, for which Conduct they think him very unjustifiable, in breach of article 5th section 18th of the Rules and Articles of war—

The Court are also of opinion that the 3d Charge is not Supported—

The Court Sentence Lt Williams to be reprimanded in General orders and Suspended from Service for three months.

Gen. Washington confirmed the sentence and added, “Lieutenant Williams should have better understood the delacacy of an officers Character than to have suffered himself to have been betrayed into such improper conduct as he has been guilty of.”

At the end of the war, Capt.-Lt. Kemper joined the Society of the Cincinnati in New York. Lt. Williams did not.

William Cunningham, Son of Liberty

Historians of British prison reform and genealogists seem to be doing a good job at filling in the details of William Cunningham’s life after he served as provost martial (or marshal) for the Crown forces throughout the war. Which leaves his life before the war as the big mystery.

The Loyalist judge Thomas Jones (1731-1792) used his exile in Britain in the 1780s to write a History of New York During the Revolutionary War. In it he called Cunningham “a Son of Liberty who had become disaffected.” That manuscript was published by the New-York Historical Society in 1879.

In the meantime, Henry B. Dawson’s Reminiscences of the City of New York (1855) also described Cunningham as a Son of Liberty before becoming a Crown supporter by 1775. In narrating the brawls between royal soldiers and New Yorkers over the Liberty Pole in early 1770, Ferdinand S. Bartram’s Retrographs (1888) said:

Two members of the Sons of Liberty, John Lamb and William Cunningham, the latter afterward known as the notorious Marshal Cunningham of the Revolution, were appointed to purchase a plot of land, which they selected, adjoining the common, where, upon the 6th [Mar 1770], the pole was raised in the presence of about four thousand spectators. It was of immense proportions, banded with iron hoops and braced with rods, imbedded in the earth between rocks, and secured with masonry. Thus was the fifth pole raised by the Liberty Boys.

Unfortunately, those books don’t cite any documentary sources for their statements about Cunningham.

Exactly five years after that fifth pole was erected, on 6 Mar 1775, Cunningham and a man named John Hill got into a fight with Patriots near Liberty Pole. The crowd roughed up both men badly. Newspapers published conflicting stories of what happened, depending on which side of the political divide they stood. The only thing clear was that Cunningham was now on the side of the Crown.

Indeed, the royal government was soon employing Cunningham, if it didn’t already. Authorities sent him to arrest the Patriot activist Isaac Sears the next month, and a crowd assaulted Cunningham again.

When the war broke out, Cunningham and Hill took off for Boston. Hill was eventually an assistant to Crean Brush, a Loyalist given a job by the military authorities. Cunningham became provost martial and held that position again in New York, Philadelphia during the winter of 1777-78, and New York until the end of the war. I’ve found a hint of romance between Hill’s daughter Mary and Cunningham’s son Ralph, but I’ll save that gossip for later.

I don’t know the historical sources in New York, and perhaps there’s more documentation of Cunningham’s life before the war. We do know that the 1792 “Dying Confession” ascribed to him is unreliable. But was he born in America or an immigrant (which seems more likely)? What caused him to join the Sons of Liberty in 1770 and to turn against them by 1775?

(The sketch above is Pierre Eugène du Simitière’s sketch of one of New York’s Liberty Poles in 1770, courtesy of Wikipedia.)