“Observing the Rebels landed on Noddles Island”

On 14 May 1775 the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s committee of safety, aware that the British military was buying or confiscating sheep and cattle pastured on the Boston harbor islands, passed this resolution:

as the opinion of this committee, that all the live stock be taken from Noddle’s island, Hog island, Snake island, and from that part of Chelsea near the sea coast, and be driven back; and that the execution of this business be committed to the committees of correspondence and selectmen of the towns of Medford, Malden, Chelsea and Lynn, and that they be supplied with such a number of men as they shall need, from the regiment now at Medford.

That strong opinion apparently didn’t have the effect the committee wanted. It was, after all, recommending that other people undertake a difficult task that wouldn’t normally fall within their responsibilities.

So ten days later the committee resolved:

That it be recommended to Congress, immediately, to take such order respecting the removal of the sheep and hay from Noddle’s Island as they may judge proper, together with the stock on the adjacent islands.

The next day, 25 May, Gen. Thomas Gage wrote to Adm. Samuel Graves (shown above):

I have this moment received Information that the Rebels [intend] this Night to destroy, and carry off all the Stock & on Noddles Island, for no reason but because the owners having sold them for the Kings Use: I therefore give you this Intelligence that you may please to order the guard boats to be particularly Attentive and to take such Other Measures as you may think Necessary for this night.

According to Lt. John Barker, some British troops went onto Noddle’s Island that day “to bring off some hay.” But that was about it.

On the morning of 27 May, about 600 provincial soldiers under Col. John Nixon and Col. John Stark moved from Chelsea onto Hog Island. They began to round up livestock, most likely owned by Oliver Wendell, and set fire to hay and other crops.

In the afternoon, part of that provincial force crossed to Noddle’s Island, burning some structures. The smoke from the fires alerted British commanders. Capt. John Robinson of H.M.S. Preston sent an alert to Adm. Graves, who later wrote:

Upon observing the Rebels landed on Noddles Island, I ordered the Diana to sail immediately between it and the Main[land], and get up as high as possible to prevent their Escape, and I also directed a party of Marines to be landed for the same purpose.

That started the second significant fight of the siege of Boston, which local historians later named the Battle of Chelsea Creek. Rather than recounting the two-day action blow by blow, I recommend Craig J. Brown, Victor T. Mastone, and Christopher V. Maio’s article in the New England Quarterly from 2013 and HUB History’s recent podcast.

On Saturday, 24 May, Chelsea will commemorate the Sestercentennial of the Battle of Chelsea Creek. There will be military drills, artillery demonstrations, and other events at Port Park. The Governor Bellingham Cary House Museum will have an open house. There’s also a boat tour, but that’s sold out (and the Battle of Chelsea Creek wasn’t really a good event for sailing vessels, anyway).

On that same day, East Boston will commemorate the Sestercentennial of the Battle of Chelsea Creek at Condor Street Urban Wild with two battle reenactments at 11:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M., a boat tour, a walking tour, military music, games, crafts, and the usual activities of modern public festivals.

After the anniversary passes, I’ll discuss a couple of the outcomes of that fighting.

“Drive them British from that bridge”

As I discussed yesterday, the militia companies from the western side of Sudbury were better equipped than those on the east side. Under Lt. Col. Ezekiel How, Capt. Aaron Haynes, and Capt. John Nixon, they responded first when the alarm arrived on 19 Apr 1775.

Among those west Sudbury men was Josiah Haynes, a farmer born in 1696. He had served as a selectman and became a deacon in 1733. At age seventy-eight, Haynes no longer required to do militia duty—he was getting too old for that stuff. Nevertheless, on the morning of 19 April he turned out with his neighbors.

According to Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 history of Concord, the two companies “received orders from a person stationed at the entrance of the town for the purpose of a guide, to proceed to the north instead of the south bridge.” That Concord man was later identified as Stephen Barrett (1750-1824), son of Col. James Barrett, commander of a Middlesex County militia regiment.

J. H. Temple’s 1887 History of Framingham said that the first order for Capt. Nixon’s Sudbury minutemen was to halt within sight of the South Bridge. At mid-morning British regulars showed up to hold that choke point as others searched designated properties in town.

Some Sudbury men wanted to attack those soldiers. Deacon Haynes reportedly told the captain, “If you don’t go and drive them British from that bridge, I shall call you a coward!” Nixon replied, “I should rather be called a coward by you, than called to account by my superior officer, for disobedience of orders.” Eventually orders arrived for the Sudbury men to march on the North Bridge by a roundabout route that took them past the Barrett farm.

Stephen Barrett’s father was on horseback with the Concord companies, which had withdrawn as the British column arrived and massed on the far side of the North Bridge on Punkatasset Hill. Barrett was also the principal custodian of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s artillery and other supplies in town. [See The Road to Concord for more details.]

Stephen’s mother, Rebeckah, was at the family home, watching British soldiers search the place for those weapons. Thanks to hard work by the Barretts and their neighbors in recent days, all of that ordnance had been hauled away and hidden. The regulars found only some carriage wheels, which they set about burning.

The Sudbury companies passed within sight of the Barrett farm while the British were at work. Lt. Col. How reportedly looked at the scene and said, “If any blood has been shed, not one of the rascals shall escape.” Shattuck wrote that he rode on alone to find out for sure, “disguising himself”—which might just have meant leaving his weapons behind so he looked like an ordinary farmer.

According to an 1875 account in Harper’s Magazine, How went all the way to Barrett’s farm and even talked with some of the British officers. Stephen Barrett also returned home around this time. Soldiers realized he was a Barrett and put him under arrest. Rebeckah Barrett intervened, pointing out that Stephen was her son, not her husband.

How rejoined the Sudbury men and they moved on, avoiding a clash with British troops for the second time that morning. But as they neared Punkatasset Hill, the provincials and the regulars started trading shots. The Sudbury companies hurried forward and joined in pushing the regulars away from the North Bridge before withdrawing again.

All the provincial companies that had arrived in Concord moved east, skirting the town center and taking positions to attack the British soldiers as soon as they left the populated area. That was the real start of the battle. The Sudbury militiamen joined in that fight, following the regulars east.

Somewhere in Lexington, old Deacon Haynes was shot and died. Here is his gravestone in Sudbury, courtesy of Find-a-Grave.

The inscription reads:

In Memory of
DEACON JOSIAH HAYNES
who died
in Freedoms Cause ye
19th of April, 1775.
In the 79th
Year of his Age.

Come listen all unto this call
Which God doth make today
For You must die as well as I
And pass from hence away

A Snapshot of the Sudbury Militia in Spring 1775

I’m cleverly using yesterday’s break for event announcements to segue away from Lexington on 19 Apr 1775 and on to Concord. Or, actually, to Sudbury.

Ezekiel How (1720-1796) was a veteran of the Seven Years’ War and a lieutenant colonel in the Middlesex County militia based in Sudbury. He was also the proprietor of a tavern that eventually grew into Longfellow’s Wayside Inn, shown here during a reenactment.

On 27 March, How made out a report about the readiness of the militia companies in his town. According to Alfred Sereno Hudson’s History of Sudbury, the innkeeper listed:

Capt. Moses Stone’s Company — 92 men of them, 18 no guns, at Least one third part ye. firelocks unfit for Sarvis others wais un a quipt.

Capt. Aaron Hayns Company — 60 men well provided With Arms the most of them Provided with Bayonets or hatchets a boute one quarter Part with Catrige Boxes.

Capt. Joseph Smith’s Company consisting of 75 able Bodied men forty well a quipt twenty Promis to find and a quip themselves Emedetly fifteen no guns and other wais un a quipt

The Troop [of horse] Capt. Isaac Locer — 21 Besides what are on the minit Role well a quipt

The “minit Role” covered two more companies under the command of Capt. John Nixon and Capt. Nathaniel Cudworth. Those men were well equipped and engaged in extra training. In addition, there was an “Alarm list” of older men under Jabez Puffer not required to train but expected to turn out in an emergency.

The militia companies were organized by region. Haynes and Nixon commanded men from the west side of Sudbury, Smith and Cudworth men from the east side (which split off in 1780 and eventually became Wayland), and Stone men from the “Lanham District” in the south.

According to Lt. Col. How, about half of the men in Stone’s and Smith’s companies weren’t equipped for fighting. Stone had the largest company at 92, but 20% of those men had “no guns” and “at Least one third” of the remainder had guns “unfit for Sarvis.” Of Smith’s men, a little more than half were “well a quipt” with another quarter promising to get right on that task.

Less than three weeks after How’s report, people in Sudbury heard that British soldiers were headed to the neighboring town of Concord. And it’s no surprise that Capt. Haynes’s well equipped company, along with Capt. Nixon’s minutemen, responded faster than their closer but more poorly armed neighbors to the east.

All the Sudbury militia and minute companies, and the troop of horse, eventually did go into action on 19 April. But only Haynes and Nixon’s men, along with Lt. Col. How, arrived in time for the fight at the North Bridge.

TOMORROW: The West Sudbury men arrive at the South Bridge.

The Men of Drury’s Company

Looking for documents about African-Americans in the New England ranks before Gen. George Washington’s arrival, I checked the new Harvard database of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Petitions. As I noted before, it contains many documents that don’t touch directly on slavery.

I found this petition to Gen. Artemas Ward signed on 5 June 1775 by more than two dozen men serving under Capt. Thomas Drury (1735-1790) of Framingham. They wrote:

the Subscribers, Soldiers in the Compy. Commanded by Capt. Drury, Humbly showeth—

that your Petitioners With the utmost Concern find themselves Shifted Out of Col. [John] Nixons Regt. into that of Col. [Thomas] Gardners, Contrary to Our Inclination and Repugnant to the promise made us at Our Inlisting

We theirfore Begg that your Excellency Would be Pleased to Continue us in the Regiment We Engaged to serve in—and not to be Removed for the Future Only to Serve the Malevolent Disposition of Our Captain.

New England soldiers viewed their enlistments as contracts to serve under particular officers. It appears that Capt. Drury had promised to serve under both Nixon and Gardner, but he was listed higher on the seniority list in Gardner’s regiment, so that’s the assignment he preferred.

Twenty-eight men didn’t want to make the switch. Maybe they trusted Col. Nixon, who was from their home town of Framingham, more than Col. Gardner from Cambridge. Those men were bold enough not only to go over Drury’s head but also to criticize his “Malevolent Disposition.”

In his Patriots of Color study, George Quintal identified three of the soldiers who signed this petition as men of color: later war records identify Blaney Grusha and Peter Salem as “Negro” and Joseph Paugenit as “Indian.” However, on this document there’s no indication that those soldiers were racially distinct from the other signers. (Salem and Grusha both signed with their marks, but none of the men had genteel, practiced signatures.)

In addition, Quintal’s study identified two more black men in the same company—Cato Hart and Jeffrey Hemenway. They didn’t sign this petition.

In fact, the Committee of Safety found that the company was split. On 14 June it determined:

A number of men belonging to the company of Capt. Drury, having petitioned that they might be permitted to join, some, the regiment commanded by Col. Gardner, and others, the regiment commanded by Col. Nixon; and the committee having considered their several requests, Voted, as the opinion of this committee, that said company be joined to such regiment as it shall appear the major part of said company are in favor of, when called upon for that purpose.

Three days later, Nixon’s and Gardner’s regiments both fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill. Both colonels were wounded, and Gardner died on 3 July. I don’t know if Drury’s men ever got around to voting, but the company remained in Nixon’s regiment.

Meanwhile, a new commander-in-chief arrived, and in his first report back to the Continental Congress he complained about “the Number of Boys, Deserters, & Negroes which have been listed in the Troops of this Province.” On Thursday I’ll talk about how Washington came to think differently.

The Death of Luther Blanchard

As I described yesterday, Luther Blanchard was an eighteen-year-old fifer when the Revolutionary War broke out. He was wounded in the fighting at the North Bridge in Concord—but not badly enough to keep him from continuing to march with the Acton militia company throughout the day.

Furthermore, Luther Blanchard was well enough to enlist on 24 April as a private in the company of Capt. William Smith of Lincoln, assigned to Col. John Nixon’s regiment. That regiment was in the thick of the fight at Bunker Hill in June. Luther was listed as a corporal in his company on 1 August. On 30 September, he was “reported dead.” His older brother Calvin returned from Col. Benedict Arnold’s expedition against Québec months later to learn that Luther had died.

Nineteenth-century historians provided contradictory timelines for Luther Blanchard’s death. Samuel Adams Drake’s Middlesex County history of 1879 stated:

Though the wound that day appeared slight, and only briefly detained him from his company, it became the cause of his death soon after.

D. Hamilton Hurd’s Middlesex County history of 1890 stated exactly how soon, citing a Blanchard descendant as its source:

He followed on in the pursuit of the British on their retreat to Boston, fifing with all the vigor of his manly strength, which grew less as the excitement of the day began to tell upon his wasted forces. The wound, which he did not think serious at first, grew worse as he proceeded, and on reaching Cambridge he was obliged to be taken to a hospital, where he died.

Finally, according to Lucie Caroline Hager’s Boxborough: A New England Town and Its People (1891):

The wound appeared slight, but he died three days later in consequence of it. His body was brought to Littleton and laid in the old cemetery there. Today the spot is unmarked and unknown.

But clearly Luther Blanchard didn’t die in April 1775. He was not only alive in August but healthy enough to be a corporal. Unfortunately, neither Continental Army records nor the published vital records of Littleton offer any more information.

In 1895, the Blanchard family erected a memorial which said: “Luther was the first man hit by a British bullet at the old North Bridge, and died in the service of his country a few months later.” (The monument shown above courtesy of Find a Grave appears to be a later one.)

In a small book about Luther and Calvin Blanchard published in 1899 by a descendant, writer Alfred Sereno Hudson argued that the wound at the North Bridge had indeed been fatal:

Calvin Blanchard always stated in unequivocal terms that his brother Luther died from the effects of that wound; and, repeatedly, did his son Simon state what he had so often heard from his father’s lips about his uncle Luther.

The family also understood that Luther died in a building of Harvard College. Hudson says that the college buildings were used as a hospital, but in fact by the fall of 1775 they were used only as barracks. The hospitals were kept a distance from the bulk of the men. Of course, one doesn’t have to be a hospital to die, and people from rural Massachusetts might think of all Cambridge as Harvard.

Curiously, the family’s 1895 memorial inscription doesn’t say that Luther Blanchard died of his original wound. It simply said he died while in the army. There was a dysentery epidemic in 1775 which killed many soldiers and civilians. Overall more Revolutionary War soldiers died in camp than in battle. So while it’s possible Luther’s April wound was indeed the cause of his death, it may be more likely that he died of an unrelated disease and his family came to blame the old wound.

In any event, the teen-aged fifer at the North Bridge did not live to see twenty.

Daniel Box, from Deserter to Brigade-Major

Maj. Daniel Box, chief administrative officer of a brigade of the Continental Army, was the chief accuser in the court-martial of Ens. Matthew Macumber in the fall of 1776.

In 1779 Gen. Nathanael Greene (shown here) wrote to Timothy Pickering that Box had also been useful in “exercising and forming companies independent companies previous to the commencement of the war.” But what does that mean?

Don Hagist of British Soldiers, American Revolution recently reported on the Revlist that Daniel Box appears as a sergeant on the muster rolls of His Majesty’s 43d Regiment of Foot from as early as December 1772 until 9 Dec 1774, when he deserted in Boston.

According to George Washington Greene’s biography of his grandfather, sometime in late 1774 Nathanael Greene went to Boston and “engaged a British deserter to go back with him as drill-master to the ‘[Kentish] Guards,’” the upper-class militia company he and his friends got chartered in October. G. W. Greene isn’t always reliable, but he appears to have guessed correctly that this man was Daniel Box.

After Gen. George Washington organized his army by brigades, on 15 Aug 1775 he appointed Box brigade-major for the Rhode Island and Massachusetts troops under Greene. Box threatened to resign a few months later, but was convinced to stay on. In August 1776, Washington announced that the Continental Congress had promoted Greene to major general, and that Box would continue in his role under a new brigadier, John Nixon.

Maj. Box’s personal history might help explain why he couldn’t exercise any authority over Ens. Macumber and his men in September. Box had no solid status within New England society. American officers knew that he was a deserter, and not a gentleman in England, so they might have held him in some contempt.

As for Box himself, he appears to have hit a glass ceiling within the British army, unable to advance beyond sergeant. Entering American society offered more opportunity to rise, even if it wasn’t always easy.

TOMORROW: Major Box and the Battle of Brooklyn.

“Not Cutting the Flesh”

While searching for examples of Continental soldiers losing feet to rolling cannon balls (none found so far), I came across some interesting examples of other curious cannon-ball injuries from volume 17 of the Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association.

According to this volume, Ephraim Abbott (1752-1778) was a volunteer at the Battle of Bennington on 16 Aug 1777. “A cannon ball wrenched his body, not cutting the flesh, and made him lame for life.” Or what few months were left of it.

Gen. John Nixon (1725-1815) was likewise bloodlessly wounded at the first battle of Saratoga on 19 Sept 1777. “A cannon ball passed so near his head as to permanently impair the eye and ear on one side.”

After the second battle of Saratoga, surgeon James Thacher described treating this even more curious injury:

A brave soldier received a musket ball in his forehead, between his eyebrows; observing that it did not penetrate the bone, it was imagined that the force of the ball being partly spent, it rebounded and fell out, but on close examination by the probe, the ball was detected, spread entirely flat on the bone under the skin, which I extracted with the forceps.

No one can doubt but he received his wound while facing the enemy, and it is fortunate for the brave fellow, that his skull proved too thick for the ball to penetrate.

Thacher’s journal entry for 24 Oct 1777 discusses other unusual wounds.

(Photo of the Saratoga Monument by Samantha Decker, via Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)