“He Lieut. Thos. Hawkshaw did affirm this to be the Fact & Truth”

On 23 Apr 1775, Lt. Thomas Hawkshaw of the 5th Regiment was lying near death.

He’d been shot through the throat during the Battle of Lexington and Concord. He’d lost a lot of blood, not only from that wound but from supposedly therapeutic bleeding. He was suffering spasms of pain. He had trouble swallowing pain relief, much less solid foods.

And his commander-in-chief, Gen. Thomas Gage, had just intercepted a letter from justice Edmund Quincy to the Patriot leader John Hancock saying Hawkshaw had been heard saying that British troops had fired first and started the war.

Hawkshaw’s regimental commander, Lt. Col. William Walcott, and other officers came to speak to him. They went away with this document, now in Gage’s papers. It said:

Boston, 23d. April 1775

Lieut. Thos. Hawkshaw of the 5th: Regt. of Foot, declares in the most solemn Manner to Lt. Col. Walcott, in the Presence of Capt. Smith & Lieut. Ben. Baker All of the same Regimt.,

That, he, Lieut. Thos. Harkshaw, never did say to any Person whatsoever, that, the King’s Troops gave the first Fire upon the People of this Country in the Affair which happened between the said Troops & the said Country People on Wednesday last the 19th. April;

that, so far from knowing or believing that the Troops were the first who fired, he, Lieut. Thos. Harkshaw, knows & believes that the Country People did fire first upon His Majesty’s Troops, & that he Lieut. Thos. Hawkshaw did affirm this to be the Fact & Truth to Lt: Col. [Francis] Smith of the 10th: Regt. of Foot who commanded the Grenadiers & Light Companies, upon the Spot, and that he, Lt. Thos. Harkshaw, did again upon his being brought into Boston, make the same Declaration to Capt. [John] Gore of the 5th. Regt. of Foot, That, to the best of his Knowledge & Belief, the Country People fired first upon His Majesty’s Troops.

Thomas Hawkshaw
Lieut 5th Regt. Foot

Wm: Walcott, Lt: Col. 5th. Foot.
John Smith Capt: 5th. Foot
Ben Baker, Lt. & Adjt. 5th. Foot

The regiment contained lieutenants named Benjamin Baker and Thomas Baker, so they used first names to sort out those men. The handwriting of the document looks like Walcott’s.

The detail about Hawkshaw telling Lt. Col. Smith (shown above) that the provincials in Lexington had fired first suggests the lieutenant was on or near the common during that shooting while Smith was still back with the grenadiers.

However, the document doesn’t add any detail about what Hawkshaw actually heard or saw there, and Gage was collecting such detail from other officers at this time. That makes me think Hawkshaw had passed on what he’d heard from other officers. (If Hawkshaw turns out to have been a light-infantry officer, then that’s off.)

In any event, from his sickbed Lt. Hawkshaw was insisting that he’d consistently blamed the provincials for shooting first.

TOMORROW: Corroborating witnesses.

From “Loyall Nine” to “Sons of Liberty”

We have a reasonably good idea of who eight of Boston’s “Loyall Nine” were:

• John Avery, Jr., distiller and merchant
• Thomas Chase, distiller
• Thomas Crafts, Jr., painter
• John Smith, brazier
• Stephen Cleverly, brazier
• Henry Bass, jeweler
• George Trott, jeweler
• Benjamin Edes, printer

In addition, the ship masters Henry Wells and Joseph Field were also lumped in with this group by different contemporaries.

Within months after they started organizing anti–Stamp Act protests, the group appears to have adopted another name. Back during Parliament’s debate over that law, opponent Isaac Barré called American colonists “Sons of Liberty,” as reported to this side of the Atlantic by Jared Ingersoll. By the fall the “Loyall Nine” started using that phrase.

The handbills that Bass described the group printing in his December 1765 letter said: ”The True-born Sons of Liberty, are desired to meet under LIBERTY-TREE, at XII o’Clock, THIS DAY…” Evidently any man could merit that label by coming out to resist the new tax from London. In early 1766 the phrase also started to appear in newspapers in other ports.

But the group also used that term for themselves. In January 1766 John Adams called them “the Sons of Liberty.” On 15 February, Crafts wrote to Adams that “the Sons of Liberty Desired your Company at Boston Next Wensday.” Those are clearly references to a specific group, not to everyone taking a certain political stand.

It looks like the more general use won out. By August 1769, “An Alphabetical List of the Sons of Liberty who din’d at Liberty Tree [Tavern], Dorchester” included 300 names. Clearly those Sons of Liberty weren’t just the “Loyall Nine”—though all eight men listed above were there.

Nonetheless, because of some unsubstantiated claims and portrayals in popular culture, the belief persists that the Sons of Liberty was an identifiable group of activists, not a mass movement, as I’ve written before. Because of that squishiness, I tend not to use the term. But of course it’s strongly associated with the Revolution.

TOMORROW: Back to the bowl.