“The only one now living of those who acted as aids-de-camp to General Howe”

Thomas Hyde Page (1746–1821) graduated top in his class from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1769, winning a gold medal from the king.

Page became a lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers and arrived in Boston in the spring of 1775. During the Battle of Bunker Hill he served as one of Gen. William Howe’s aides.

Richard Frothingham quoted the 11 Jan 1776 London Chronicle as saying:

A few days ago arrived in town, from Boston, Lieutenant Page, of his majesty’s corps of engineers, on account of the wounds he received the 17th of June, in the action of Charlestown. This gentleman is the only one now living of those who acted as aids-de-camp to General Howe, so great was the slaughter of officers that day. He particularly distinguished himself in the storming of the redoubt, for which he received General Howe’s thanks.

Page was back in London because he had been wounded in the leg, badly enough to require some sort of amputation.

Capt. John Montresor wrote to Page from Philadelphia on 17 June 1778 noting the “disagreeable memory” of the date. “I hope you are able to saunter without a stick.”

In his journal, however, Montresor grumped about his lack of a pension and wrote, “Page served Eleven days and was then wounded and return’d home and had ten shillings per diem settled for life.” (Of course, Montresor still had both his legs.)

Page continued to work on various engineering projects for the British military. Promotion was slow in that branch of the service, but between 1781 and 1783 he became a captain. That summer he received a double honor: he was elected to the Royal Society and knighted. A couple of years later he shifted to the invalid corps.

In 1790, Lt. Col. John Small, who had been Gen. Robert Pigot’s brigade major, wrote to Page:

The interesting position we were placed in side by side at the memorable Battle of Bunker’s Hill will never be forgotten, and will ever excite the most anxious emotions in the breast of the fellow campaigner who has now the honor of addressing you; who witnessed in the most trying moments, your innate worth, your professional Intrepidity and skill, and was most seriously affected when at your side he saw you ffall from a very dangerous wound, receiv’d when displaying your exertions in the ffield, when your cool and manly example, and sound judicious advice, contributed much to acquire success and victory.

I wish I had more of that letter to understand who was asking what favor.

Using surveys by Montresor and others, Page published very good maps of Boston harbor and the town of Boston. His 1793 “Plan of the Action at Bunkers Hill” is still the most useful source on the topography of the Charlestown peninsula in 1775—though it’s also notable in switching the labels of Bunker’s Hill and Breed’s Hill.

Most of Page’s engineering work involved drainage, harbors, canals, and other civil projects rather than fortifications. James Northcote’s portrait of Page above shows him “holding a Plan of Fort Landguard and seen in the distance.” Page didn’t build that fort, but he engineered its tricky well. (Once apparently at Boston, that painting is now on display at the Tyntesfield estate in North Somerset.)

Sir Thomas Hyde Page remained active all around Great Britain for decades and finally retired to Boulogne, France, where he died.

“When the stakes are as significant as life and liberty”

Earlier this week the president of Yale, Marie McInnis, offered inspiration to the graduating class from a work by much earlier graduate.

Here’s an article from the university:

A Yale-trained art historian, McInnis turned to an artwork from the Yale University Art Gallery collection for answers, focusing on John Trumbull’s celebrated painting “The Battle of Bunker’s Hill.” The canvas marks that moment, 250 years ago in June, when a band of American rebels stood their ground on a hillside in Charlestown, then just north of Boston, against the might of the British military.

In Trumbull’s painting, the scene unfolds beneath acrid plumes of smoke as British forces breach the revolutionaries’ lines. Joseph Warren, an American major general, lies mortally wounded in the arms of a comrade. A redcoat tries to bayonet the fallen general — but British Major John Small has stepped in to stop him.

“In that moment, one man preserves the dignity of a dying foe with an unexpected gesture of compassion amid chaos,” McInnis said. “One man, taming the passions of war, chooses mercy. Chooses to see the man who was his friend, instead of the general of an opposing force.”

In highlighting Small’s intervention, McInnis said, Trumbull invites viewers to recognize a frequently overlooked kind of courage: The ability to show compassion to a bitter adversary.

“Compassion, as I suspect Major Small understood, is not the absence of conviction. It is not weakness,” she said. “And it is certainly not retreat. It is, in fact, an act of radical strength in its rarest form. It is the idea that even in our most consequential disagreements — that even when the stakes are as significant as life and liberty — we must find ways to recognize our common humanity.”

And displaying compassion does not mean avoiding conflict or denying differences, McInnis said.

“In a vibrant, pluralistic society, disagreement is inevitable, indeed welcomed,” she said in her speech, titled “Overcoming divides and embracing our shared humanity.”

“But what I would like to impress on you today is that compassion can coexist with our most deeply held beliefs.”

Here’s the full text of President McInnis’s speech.

Historically, I have to point out that Trumbull constructed his scene to convey just such a message. According to Alexander Garden, Maj. Small himself said that the artist “paid me the compliment of trying to save the life of Warren; but the fact is, that life had fled before I saw his remains.”

Also, Trumbull produced multiple copies of this scene with subtle differences. The image shown above from Yale is one of his preliminary studies. The university also owns a finished, full-color version, as do the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Wadsworth Athenaeum. (Notably, the colors aren’t the same on those two canvases, particularly in the flags Trumbull inserted into the scene.)

A Closer Look at the Gages

The main thrust of the American Revolution Institute blog posting I pointed to yesterday concerns the subject of the engraving titled “The Hero returned from Boston.”

This print says it was published in London on 7 Sept 1776 by Thomas Hart. Hart didn’t exist, the image bears signs of having been produced in Augsburg, and there’s probably no way to confirm the date.

Regardless, someone went to the trouble of engraving this picture of a woman, her gown flowing and one breast bared, kissing a gentleman holding a sword. Which meant someone believed there would be public demand for such a print. And it all had something to do with Boston around 1776.

The blog post posits:

The man in the print bears a casual resemblance to General Thomas Gage as portrayed by John Singleton Copley in 1768. Gage had commissioned the portrait and when it was complete, sent it home to England. “The Generals Picture was received at home with universal applause,” one of Gage’s aides [John Small] reported to Copley in 1770, “and Looked on by real good Judges as a Masterly performance. It is placed in one of the Capital Apartments of Lord Gage’s house in Arlington Street.”

Gage then commissioned a portrait of his wife, Margaret. Copley painted her in an unusual pose and garments, probably evoking her family roots in eastern Europe. The blog post elaborates:

Part of the attraction of turquerie was that it was sexually suggestive without being lewd. In Copley’s portrait Mrs. Gage is not wearing a corset and reclines in her loose fitting clothes. Copley called it “beyond Compare the best Lady’s portrait I ever Drew.” Proud of the portrait, the Gages packed it off to London, where it created a mild sensation when it was displayed.

In January 1773, Benjamin West told Copley: “the portrait of Mrs Gage as a picture has received every praise from the lovers of arts. her Friends did not think the likeness so favourable as they could wish, but Honour’d it as a pice of art.”

Thus, people in London had seen and discussed the Gages’ portraits. They had seen the Gages themselves in 1774, when the general assured King George III that he could bring Massachusetts back under control. They had followed the news from Boston as the conflict got worse. They had seen Gov. Gage return defeated after the outbreak of war and the costly Battle of Bunker Hill, his wife preceding him by a few weeks.

I find that interpretation of “The Hero returned from Boston” as a lampoon of the Gages convincing. In addition to the points in the blog post, the man in the print grips his sword the same way Copley’s general grips his cane. The engraver didn’t show Gage in uniform, but that might have been a satirical step too far, and Gage no longer had a military command, anyway.

The last section of the blog post discusses the supposition that Margaret Gage sympathized with the rebels and even disclosed her husband’s plans to them. Ultimately the author discards that idea (citing some of my own writing on the subject). Along the way the essay acknowledges counterarguments, however, and this passage caught my eye:

A local guest at one of the Gage’s parties attended by British officers wrote in June 1775 that “Madam Gage presided with the social adroitness and tact of a lady of a high New Jersey family . . . Yet suspicion attended this lady as not being too loyal to her husband’s party and to the King. It was hinted that the Governor was uxorious, and had no secrets from his wife, who passed word to the spies swarming outside.”

I didn’t recognize that quotation. Had I missed a source so close to Gage? I had to track this “local guest” down. And here’s what I found.

That’s not a contemporaneous statement from someone who socialized with the Gages. Rather, the historian Henry Bentley Belcher wrote those words in The First American Civil War, published in 1911, summarizing how he perceived rumors and leaks swirling around the Gage household.

What’s the source of that misinterpretation? In 2016 Deborah Gage wrote on the website for Firle Castle, the Gage family seat:

It has long been rumoured that Margaret provided Dr. [Joseph] Warren with the information that the British troops would be moving out the evening of April 19th, 1774 bound for Lexington and Concord, for example as cited in this letter written by Dr. Belcher in June 1775 ‘Entertainment at Providence House, where Madam Gage presided with the social adroitness and tact of a lady of a high New Jersey family, were crowded with uniformed men from both fleet and camp. Yet suspicion attended this lady as not being too loyal to her husband’s party and to the King. It was hinted that the Governor was uxorious, and had no secrets from his wife, who passed word to the spies swarming outside. At any rate whatever was designed in Boston was, it is alleged, known within an hour or two at Medford, at Roxbury, at Cambridge, at Brookline and in every Boston tavern.’

That quotation introduced some big errors. The governor’s mansion, Province House, became “Providence House.” Dr. Henry Bentley became “Dr. Belcher.” And, most important, a statement by a historian in 1911 was put into the pen of someone in 1775.

The Myths of Lt. Col. James Abercrombie’s Death

Lt. Col. James Abercrombie (1732-1775) led the battalion of British grenadiers, detached from their regiments, at the Battle of Bunker Hill. He was mortally wounded, becoming the most senior British officer to die in the fight.

Not only did Abercrombie outrank all the other British dead, but he was known to be close to Gen. Thomas Gage and he was a Scotsman. Some combination of those factors meant that his death almost immediately began to accrete myths like barnacles on an underwater wreck.

Don Hagist wrote about Abercrombie at the Journal of the American Revolution, quoting from a letter the lieutenant colonel dictated to solidify the real story:

The grenadiers and light infantry were the first to land on Charleston Neck at a point out of American musketry range. Here they formed, the grenadiers into a line facing the rail-fence breastwork that extended from the redoubt down to the shore, the light infantry into a column for their advance along the beach to the right. Two regiments formed on the left facing the redoubt. While the grenadiers advanced with deliberate slowness as a distraction, the light infantry trotted along the beach. It was expected that the narrow beach would provide an avenue around the end of the breastwork. Unknown to the attackers, the Americans had constructed a barrier across the beach and manned it. . . .

It is not clearly exactly when the grenadiers became aware of the failure of the flanking movement, but they fatefully continued their advance towards the breastworks. Progress was perilously slow…because of a series of fences, brick kilns, enclosures and other obstructions. . . . The battered light infantry battalion, having withdrawn from the barricade on the beach, reformed into a line near their initial staging area. The shape of the coastline put them behind the advancing grenadier battalion. From this disadvantageous position they opened fire. The distance was too great to have any material effect on the enemy, but the impact on the grenadier battalion was disastrous.

This friendly fire incident is occasionally mentioned by historians, but the importance of it is largely overlooked. . . . In a letter dated three days after the battle, Abercrombie indicated that “our Light Infantry killed many of the Grends.” After ordering them to desist, the friendly fire abated for eight or ten minutes, but then the light infantry “gave me a plumper & killed two officers & 3 private.” He used the vernacular “plumper” to refer to a volley of lead. . . . Of particular importance was that the grenadiers’ commander, Abercrombie himself, was among the wounded.

In my own J.A.R. article about who really killed Maj. John Pitcairn, I quoted an 1880 Massachusetts local history which said Salem Poor shot Abercrombie “As that officer sprang on the redoubt.” That was how American sources described his death. But the lieutenant colonel had been taken out of action much earlier, before the final British push against the main provincial position. In addition, from 1775 the British press reported that Abercrombie was a victim of what we now call friendly fire—shot “supposed accidentally from some of his own soldiers.”

As with Pitcairn, Americans wanted to believe that their soldiers killed such an important officer at the climax of the battle. Therefore, Abercrombie was listed among the officers shot storming the redoubt on Breed’s Hill. And after both Peter Salem and Salem Poor got credit for killing Pitcairn, one American author decided that Salem Poor must have killed Abercrombie instead.

John Trumbull’s painting of the death of Dr. Joseph Warren reflects the American belief that Abercrombie should have died at the end of the battle and near the center of the action. The detail above portrays the lieutenant colonel lying dead at the redoubt as Maj. John Small steps over (on?) him. In the key that identified figures in the painting, Trumbull acknowledged that he didn’t know what Abercrombie actually looked like.

Another legend of Abercrombie’s death appeared in the 14 Oct 1775 Pennsylvania Ledger, quoting the Public Ledger of London:

A letter from an officer who was wounded at the late engagement at Boston, says, that when the troops were very near the trenches, the rebels called out to Col. Abercrombie, who was among the first of the troops, “Abercrombie, we won’t miss you.” However, the Colonel got into the trenches unhurt, and was run through the body. When he was dying, he told the officers about him, that if they took Gen. [Israel] Putnam prisoner, not to hang him as he was a brave fellow.

That story was reprinted in many American newspapers and, through Samuel Swett’s early history of the battle, many history books. It’s attached to inaccurate information—Abercrombie wasn’t “run through” but shot—and seems unlikely.

Lt. Col. Abercrombie didn’t die until 22 June. At first doctors didn’t think his wound would be fatal, but then infection set in. Back in 2014, I quoted a description of his death from the British press. The August 1775 Scots Magazine said the musket ball had pushed “a toothpick-case, which he had in his waistcoat pocket, along with it. . . . part of the toothpick being got so far, it baffled the art of the surgeons, and began to mortify.” Don’s article quotes the 17 Aug 1775 Edinburgh Advertiser saying something very similar except that the fatal foreign body was “part of the pen case…which he had in his side pocket.” I have no idea why those reports differed.

The Pennsylvania Ledger also quoted a speech that Abercrombie supposedly delivered two hours before his death:

My friends, we have fought in a bad cause, and therefore I have my reward, as the rest have had that have gone before me; had I fell in fighting against the enemy, I had died with honour, but posterity will brand us for massacreing our fellow subjects; therefore, my friends, sheath your swords till you have an enemy to engage with.

I’ve found this printed in the 27 July 1775 Middlesex Journal and Evening Advertiser, so it definitely circulated in Britain. It’s almost certainly propaganda from someone supporting the Americans, using Abercrombie’s good name to discourage men from joining the British military.

Moses Brown’s Malden Christmas

In December 1775, Moses Brown led a delegation of Quakers from Rhode Island up to the Boston siege lines to bring relief to the suffering poor.

Brown and his comrades went to Gen. George Washington in Cambridge and explained how they wanted to go into Boston with money they had collected. A siege is of course an attempt to deny resources to the enemy, so the commander-in-chief couldn’t have been enthused about this idea.

Quartermaster general Thomas Mifflin was even more negative, thinking that such charity would prove unpopular with the Massachusetts populace.

In consultation with Washington and members of the Massachusetts General Court, the Quakers decided they would meet some of their contacts at the siege lines and hand over the money. But Sheriff Joshua Loring and Maj. John Small came out and told them that the poor in Boston didn’t need money and the town had adequate food.

So the Quakers went off to hand out their money to the poor people they found in Marblehead, Salem, Lynn, Chelsea, and the smallpox hospital at Point Shirley.

Soon enough it was Christmas Day, as Brown described in his report on the journey:

We went to Malden and Lodged at —— where were the Select men upstairs on business and below a Noisey Company of Soldiers fidling and Danceing after supper.

David [Buffum] and I proposed to see the Select Men and Inform them of our Business went up stairs and I spoke to them of the Noise etc not being sufferable it was not only rong in itself but contrary to Every prospect of the present time and Even the Congress Discouraged it by Resolves.

They allowed it was not agreeable but thought as they were Soldiers it must be allowed. It was what they called a Christmas frolich and they had been up all the Night before, were principaly of the Riflemen.

As an eighteenth-century Quaker, Brown didn’t celebrate Christmas. Neither did most New Englanders. But these riflemen were from the Middle Colonies, many of them transplants from Britain, and they didn’t adhere to Puritan customs. And thus we discern the limits of Moses Brown’s charity.

Capt. Gabriel Maturin’s “impenetrable Secrecy”

In late 2012, The Magazine Antiques [yes, I know] published an article by Christopher Bryant about a John Singleton Copley portrait he had recently identified.

In 1768, Gen. Thomas Gage came to Boston to oversee the arrival of troops patrolling the town, and while he was there Copley painted him. Evidently the general and his wife liked the result enough that they wanted the artist to visit New York in 1771 and paint her as well. So Gage’s officers went to work to make that happen, Bryant wrote:

While Captain John Small flattered and cajoled Copley to come to New York, Captain Stephen Kemble, Gage’s aide-de-camp and brother-in-law, went about the practical business of securing sufficient portrait commissions so that “Mr. Copely might be at a certainty” in making the trip. After friends and colleagues had been canvassed, Kemble sent Copley in April 1771 what survives as the only known contemporary list of Copley’s sitters, in this case fifteen indi­viduals who “subscribed” for a total of sixteen portraits of stated sizes.

Given its origins, the list naturally reflected the Anglo-American colonial administration centered in New York. Margaret Kemble Gage’s name appears first, while fourth down was the name “Captain Maturin.” Captain Gabriel Maturin, after having distinguished himself in action with his regiment at the Battle of Quebec, had been from 1760 General Gage’s military secretary and as such the general’s closest aide and effectively his chief of staff. As the grandson of a French Huguenot refugee to Ireland, Ga­briel Maturin had the requisite command of the French language required by Gage when he was appointed military governor of Montreal, but it was Maturin’s tact, charm, and discretion that made him an indispensible member of Gage’s command right up until Maturin’s death in Boston at the eve of the American Revolution.

Maturin had accompanied Gen. Gage to Massachusetts in 1774 (the same year that Copley left for Europe, never to return). The captain died on 15 December of a “throat distemper” or “Peripnenmony.” John Rowe described the funeral procession on the 17th:

first part of the 4th Regiment Under Arms
then the Band of Musick
then the Clergy—then the Corps
then the Generall & his Family
then the 4th Regiment without Arms
then the Officers of the Army & afterwards the Gentlemen of the Town.

The next month, Maturin’s New York obituary praised him as a military secretary: “eminent Abilities, unshaken Integrity, and impenetrable Secrecy.” Gage might have needed the last. That death notice also said, “a most amiable Wife is left to deplore her unspeakable Loss, in the Bereavement of the most affectionate, polite, tender and indulgent Husband.”

That wife was presumably back in New York, since Rowe hadn’t mentioned her, and presumably had the Copley portrait. But what happened to them then?

TOMORROW: Mr. Livingston, I presume?

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.