“To raise immediately Two Thousand Effective Men in this Province”

I’ve now traced the establishment of the Massachusetts army, the Connecticut army, and the Rhode Island army, all signed up to fight until the end of 1775.

So let’s turn to look at the formation of the New Hampshire army.

Unlike Connecticut and Rhode Island, New Hampshire had a royal governor appointed by the Crown: John Wentworth. Starting in early 1774, the provincial legislature would meet for a few days before taking some resistance action. Gov. Wentworth would then dissolve the body or prorogue the session.

New Hampshire towns elected delegates to two provincial congresses beyond the governor’s control, on 21 July 1774 and 24 Feb 1775. Those gatherings had a simple brief: to choose representatives at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

Local militia companies took over Fort William and Mary in December 1774—arguably the first military confrontation of the war. Gov. Wentworth remained in New Hampshire as events slipped well out of his control.

Then came the news of the fighting at Lexington. Some New Hampshire militia companies headed toward Boston. On 21 April, a third provincial congress met at Exeter, choosing John Wentworth (a different John Wentworth, naturally) to preside.

This congress was ready for much broader action. It voted to:

• ask Col. Nathaniel Folsom to take command of the New Hampshire troops who had gone into Massachusetts.
• send a committee to meet with the Massachusetts Provincial Congress about how many soldiers were needed.

Meanwhile, Gov. Wentworth convened an official assembly on 4 May. That legislature elected the other John Wentworth as speaker, as usual. But it was clear that power had shifted. The colony’s leaders wanted to address the war and no longer wanted to answer to the governor.

A fourth New Hampshire Provincial Congress assembled on 17 May. Three days later, those delegates resolved “to raise immediately Two Thousand Effective Men in this Province, including officers & those of this Province, already in the service.” The body chose to follow Massachusetts’s “Establishment of officers and soldiers” and to apply “to the Continental Congress for their advice & assistance respecting means & ways”—i.e., paying for all this.

On 22 May, the provincial congress appointed two “muster Masters for the present,” to “Regularly Muster all the men inlisted in the several Compys. in the Regiment commanded by Coll. [John] Stark.” These were the militia companies who had already joined the siege lines. The next day, the congress again named Col. Folsom “to take the general command.”

Together those acts in the middle of May 1775 are treated as the official establishment of New Hampshire’s army. Thus, by law the New England troops around Boston were no longer militia companies.

But there were still some wrinkles to iron out.

TOMORROW: Nathaniel Folsom at war.

Tales of the Cochran Family

The 8 Sept 1845 Exeter News-Letter followed up the tale of James Cochran’s captivity and return with remarks about his son—though it got that man’s name wrong.

The 8 November Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics reprinted the first paragraph of that account, correctly naming the man as John Cochran:

He led a sea-faring life in his younger days, and sailed out of Portsmouth a number of years, as a ship-master, with brilliant success. A short period before the war of the Revolution broke out, he was appointed to the command of the fort in Portsmouth harbor. The day after the battle of Lexington, he and his family were made prisoners of war by a company of volunteers under the command of John Sullivan, afterwards the distinguished Major General Sullivan of the Revolution, President of New-Hampshire, &c. Captain Cochran and his family were generously liberated on parole of honor.

That paragraph, flattering to both Cochran and Sullivan, now came with the endorsement of one of John and Sarah Cochran’s daughters, who had moved back to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

It was, however, wrong. The move on Fort William and Mary led by John Sullivan (shown above) happened four months before the Battle of Lexington and Concord, not the day after. And to read John Cochran’s own accounts from December 1774, it was much less friendly than this retelling describes.

The Portsmouth Journal didn’t name the Cochran daughter or state her age, so we don’t know if she was old enough to recall these events herself or had heard about them from her parents and older siblings.

She provided some new anecdotes:

Not far from this time Gov. J[ohn]. Wentworth took refuge in the Fort, and Captain Cochran attended him to Boston. In his absence the only occupants of the fort were Mrs. Cochran, a man and a maid servants [sic], and four children.

At this time all vessels passing out of the harbor, had to show their pass at the Fort. An English man-of-war one day came down the river, bound out. Mrs. C. directed the man to hail the ship. No respect was paid to him. Mrs. C. then directed him to discharge one of the cannon. The terrified man said, “Ma’am I have but one eye, and can’t see the touch-hole.” Taking the match, the heroic lady applied it herself; the Frigate immediately hove too [sic], and showing that all was right, was permitted to proceed.

For this discharge of duty to his Majesty’s Government, she received a handsome reward.

Again, the timing of this event seems off. Sarah Cochran appears to have been on the family farm rather than at the fort when Gov. Wentworth departed in August 1775. The New Hampshire Patriots would hardly have let her take charge of the guns, and there was little gunpowder left anyway. If something like this story happened, it was probably earlier, under royal rule.

The daughter’s account continued:

It was thought by some of the enemies of Gov. Wentworth that he was still secreted at the fort, after he had left for Boston. A party one day entered the house in the Fort, (the same house recently occupied by Capt. Dimmick), and asked permission of Mrs. Cochran to search the rooms for the Governor.

After looking up stairs in vain, they asked for a light to examine the cellar. “O yes,” said a little daughter of Mrs. C. “I will light you.” She held the candle until they were in a part of the cellar from which she well knew they could not retreat without striking their heads against low beams, when the roguish girl blew the light out.

As she anticipated, they began to bruise themselves, and they swore pretty roundly.—The miss from the stairs in an elevated tone cried out, “Have you got him?” This arch inquiry only served to divide their curses between the impediments to their progress and the “little Tory.”

Was this “little daughter” the same one telling the story or an older sister of the narrator? Was this an anecdote from the militia raids on the fort in December 1774 or truly a search for the departed governor months later?

The Portsmouth Journal then returned to the text from the Exeter News-Letter, adding only one parenthetical correction:

Captain John Cochran, (who was a cousin, and not the father, as has been stated, of Lord Admiral Cochran) immediately joined the British in Boston; and, as it was believed, being influenced by the double motive of gratitude towards a government that had generously noticed and promoted him to offices of honor, trust, and emolument, and for the sake of retaining a valuable stipend from the Crown, remained with the British army during the war. It is due to his honor to state, however, that he was never known to take an active part in the conflict.

At the close of the war, he returned to St. Johns’, New-Brunswick, lived in the style of a gentleman the remainder of his days, and died at the age of 55.

John Cochran’s sister and then his daughter, both living in America, apparently didn’t want people to think he was too fervent in his loyalty to the Crown. Therefore, they insisted he was “never known to have taken an active part in the conflict.”

That’s a direct contradiction to what Sarah Cochran told the Loyalists Commission back in 1787. She described her husband as working for both the British army and the Royal Navy, including in the invasion of Rhode Island, and Abijah Willard backed her up.

The stories offered to American readers in 1845 didn’t say anything about Patriots taking the Cochrans’ property, or the years of separation on opposite sides of the war, or the journey of Sarah Cochran and her chldren to New York.

The tale of Sarah Cochran forcing a British warship to “hove to” and show a pass may also have been shaped to appeal to American readers. Though she reportedly “received a handsome reward” from the Crown for that action, that anecdote depicted a woman in America bossing around a frigate.

Sarah Cochran had told the Loyalists Commission about her husband’s debilitating strokes. Again, a fellow refugee in New Brunswick confirmed that. But John Cochran’s sister, followed by his daughter, didn’t mention his health at all, instead emphasizing how he had “lived in the style of a gentleman.”

Much of the Portsmouth Journal’s article went into Lorenzo Sabine’s compendium of stories on American Loyalists. It was thus an early source on the Patriot raids on Fort William and Mary, but not a very reliable one.

“No Civil Authority as yet Established”

John and Sarah Cochran and their family arrived in Saint John, New Brunswick, in July 1783, as I recounted yesterday.

Unlike Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the Loyalists from Boston found refuge in the spring of 1776, Saint John was a small port without a lot of resources.

In fact, it wasn‘t even Saint John until 1785, when the Crown united the settlements of Parrtown and Carleton on opposite sides of the harbor into Canada’s first incorporated city.

The influx of Loyalists made that possible but also brought troubles as those people had to figure out how and where to live.

By 14 December, John Cochran had recovered enough from his second stroke to write to his old patron, John Wentworth:

there is no Civil Authority as yet Established to prevent any One from doing what he thinks best in his Owne eyes. Upon the whole they appear at present to be in a State of Anarchy and will Continue so untill there is the Civil law put in force.

I pity the Officers of the discharged Regmts. They are more liable to be insulted than any others. Among the whole there is nothing but Murmering and discontent on Account they were promised land but as yet they have not been able to obtain any excepting a few who has Purchased and there does not appear any likelyhood of their Getting any Except it is the disbanded Regiments.

David Bell quoted that letter in Early Loyalist Saint John: The Origin of New Brunswick Politics, 1783-1786.

Ultimately, the Cochrans were among the families who received a land grant. They settled at what Sarah called “Mahogany.” I believe that was on or near Mahogany Island, now called Manawagonish Island. It appears in the picture above as “Meogenes Island.”

In 1787 Sarah went back to Saint John to testify to the Loyalists Commission on her husband’s behalf. Because of his strokes, she explained, “he could hardly be understood” by strangers and “His memory is gone.” A local apothecary, the Boston native Adino Paddock, Jr., confirmed that condition.

Abijah Willard endorsed John’s loyalty, as did letters from former governor Wentworth and Gen. Sir William Howe. It looks like the commission did grant John Cochran a pension in exchange for his losses and his service in the Revolution, but I don’t know the details.

John Cochran died in 1790, about sixty years old. According to Loyalist Trails, the household goods in his estate were valued at £134 and included a cribbage board and a “Baggammon” table. The family was doing their best to maintain a genteel life on the edge of the empire.

TOMORROW: Leaving New Hampshire.

“Best to remove farther off in the country”

On 3 Feb 1787, Sarah Cochran appeared before the Loyalists Commission in Saint John, New Brunswick.

She described how her husband John “went to Boston with Govr. [John] Wentworth” in late August 1775, as recounted here.

At the time, she and at least some of her children were living on the family farm in Londonderry. According to the Loyalist leader Abijah Willard, another commission witness, the Cochrans’ “Land was in a very good part of the Town, near the meeting house.“

(The picture here shows the First Parish Meetinghouse in Derry, New Hampshire, which might be the building Willard referred to. The oldest part of this church dates to 1769. It’s been significantly enlarged, and the impressive tower went up in 1822.)

Sarah Cochran testified that around October:

about 2 months after he went, she was ordered to quit the Premises, which she did & was moving her goods, on which a Mob rose & took every thing she had, calling them ye goods of a Tory. She got part back, but lost to amount of £150 lawful.

Unfortunately for us, Sarah didn’t recount where she went. Possibly she took refuge with her own family, or even with other members of the Cochran clan who were siding with the rebels.

We know Sarah didn’t follow her husband into Boston that fall, or to Halifax and then New York the following year. Instead, the next sign of her appears in the 29 May 1777 Independent Chronicle of Boston, publishing an “Extract of a letter from John Cochran, on Long-Island, to his wife in New-Hampshire, intercepted with others sent by the late Governor Winthrop to his sister”:

My Dear,

I would willingly advise, but know not how or what to advise you to at this distance. I shall leave it intirely to your judgment what you think best to be done in these unhappy days, for I am so puzzled about giving my advice what to do, that I am almost crasy.

However, I think upon the whole, it would be best to remove farther off in the country, as I am afraid you will suffer where you are, before it will be in my power to protect you, as there will be nothing but destruction of property without any reserve. In that case, I would have you send off the most valuable effects you have left to some place, if you know of any.

I shall either hope to find you at the Isle Shoals, or up at Londonderry—If you intend to tarry where you are, I pray for God’s sake that there be no CLERGYMAN in the house; if their is, your life is not worth a farthing as the whole race of that tribe will be spilt.

If you see any prospect of the affairs being given up without bloodshed, I had rather find you at Hampton than any where else…

I don’t know why Cochran was so anxious about his wife giving refuge to a minister. It’s possible that the family was Presbyterian and feared their ministers would be suspected of disloyalty by New England Congregationalists.

In June 1779 the New Hampshire legislature moved to confiscate the property of men away from the state and “residing with the enemys thereof.” Its new law listed individual names starting with former governor Wentworth, Surveyor General Samuel Holland, and one-time Stamp Act administrator George Meserve. The fourth name was John Cochran.

TOMORROW: Serving the Crown.

The Cochrans of New Hampshire

The Cochran family came to New England from northern Ireland. They settled in towns named to attract such migrants: Belfast in what would be Maine and Londonderry in New Hampshire.

At least that’s according to a family history recorded in Lorenzo Sabine’s American Loyalists, based on the account of a daughter of John and Sarah Cochran living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1845.

However, some details of that account don’t match what contemporaneous documents tell us about the confrontations over Fort William and Mary in 1774 and 1775. That daughter might have been too young to grasp the details and chronology.

It’s also not clear how the daughter (never named, alas) came to be in Portsmouth when her parents had moved with four of their children to New Brunswick, Canada, in 1783.

Multiple Cochran households settled in the region in the early 1700s. Leonard A. Morrison’s History of Windham in New Hampshire (1883) has an extensive genealogy for one family, but focuses on descendants that remained in the U.S. of A. The Cochrans I’m interested in may have been related, and they certainly used the same common given names, but I have no hope of sorting them all out.

The best I can say is that it looks like John’s father James was born in Ireland about 1710 and made the trip across the Atlantic. John was born in America in 1730. He went to sea for some years. The New-Hampshire Gazette reported a captain of his name in charge of the Berwick in 1762, the Onondaga in 1763, and the Londonderry in 1769 and 1770.

John Cochran then returned to the family farm in Londonderry. His wife Sarah and their children lived there—possibly as part of an extended clan. They ultimately held deeds for well over a hundred acres of land.

In 1770 John accepted the post of commander of Fort William and Mary from Gov. John Wentworth, which took him back to the sea—or at least to an island in Portsmouth harbor. On St. John’s Day in 1771 and 1774, Brother Cochran hosted a Freemasons’ dinner at the fort.

As I recounted here, John and Sarah were in the fort on the afternoon of 14 Dec 1774 when John Langdon led in a militia force that took away all but one barrel of gunpowder.

James Cochran joined his son at the fort, perhaps brought by news of that confrontation. He was still there the next night when John Sullivan, recently returned from the First Continental Congress, showed up with more militiamen to collect artillery pieces and ordnance.

According to Gov. Wentworth, the older Cochran laid into Sullivan:

The honest, brave old Man stop’d him short, call’d him and his numerous party perjur’d Traitors & Cowards, That his Son the Capt. Shou’d fight them two at a time thro their whole multitude, or that He would with his own hands put him to death in their presence, Which the Son readily assented to, but none among them wou’d take up the challenge, relying on and availing themselves of their numbers to do a mischief which they never wou’d have effected by Bravery.

Sullivan had been struggling all day to figure out how to handle this event, pushed by more radical militiamen while trying not to go too far in defying the king. He probably didn’t care to hear James Cochran’s opinion.

But the New Hampshire forces left the Cochrans alone. John continued to command the fort, soon protected and probably rearmed by the Royal Navy. Sarah and their children, and probably James, continued to farm in Londonderry, even as war began down in Massachusetts.

On 23 Aug 1775, as I said yesterday, Gov. Wentworth and John Cochran sailed away from Fort William and Mary for Boston. That left Sarah and the children behind. And the environment had changed.

TOMORROW: Cochrans on the move.

The Last of the Last Royal Governor of New Hampshire

As evening fell on 14 Dec 1774, New Hampshire militiamen finished their (first) raid on Fort William and Mary.

They loaded over a hundred barrels of gunpowder into a flat-bottomed boat. Just before embarking, they released John Cochran, commander of the fort, and his wife Sarah from confinement in their house.

But first they told Cochran to “go and take care of the Powder they had left.” As he reported that evening to Gov. John Wentworth (shown here), the raiders had left “one barrel.”

The royal governor lost most of his authority that day. He couldn’t even get men to row him out to the fort on his official barge.

Wentworth soon knew the identities of many of the raiders, but he didn’t foresee prosecuting them. “No jail would hold them long, and no jury would find them guilty,” he wrote. The most he could do was fire them from their appointed positions.

H.M.S. Canceaux and H.M.S. Scarborough arrived in Portsmouth harbor over the next week, preventing further attacks. The result was a stalemate, with the Patriots leaving Gov. Wentworth alone as long as they could proceed with their plans.

Those activists had already called a province-wide meeting in July 1774 to send delegates to the First Continental Congress. They did that again in January 1775 for the Second Continental Congress. Another meeting in late April endorsed the New Hampshire militia companies already heading toward Boston.

Gov. Wentworth convened the official New Hampshire legislature on 4 May 1775, then prorogued it. He tried to make peace between Capt. Andrew Barkley on the Scarborough, who was seizing supplies and sailors from ships, and the Patriot militiamen, now fortifying Portsmouth harbor against attack from the water.

On 13 June, Wentworth offered shelter to John Fenton, a retired British army captain and a New Hampshire militia colonel. A crowd gathered outside his mansion, pointing a cannon at the front door. Fenton gave himself up. The governor and his wife fled out the back, carrying their infant son.

The Wentworths took refuge at Fort William and Mary, still commanded by John Cochran. The governor reported, “This fort although containing upward of sixty pieces of Cannon is without men or ammunition,” but it was protected by the Scarborough.

Wentworth continued to try to exercise gubernatorial authority, sending messages to the provincial assembly as if he were in his mansion nearby rather than on an island in the harbor. The legislature ignored him and his declarations that their session was adjourned.

Soon it became clear that there was no point in staying in New Hampshire. Capt. John Linzee and H.M.S. Falcon arrived to carry away the fort’s remaining cannon and keep them out of rebel hands. On 23 August the Wentworths boarded a warship to sail to besieged Boston.

With Gov. Wentworth went John Cochran, commander of Fort William and Mary.

Cochran’s wife Sarah and their children weren’t in the fort that summer, however. They were on the family farm in Londonderry.

TOMORROW: A Loyalist family’s troubles.

“Beset on all sides by upwards of four hundred men”

In 1770, New Hampshire governor John Wentworth appointed John Cochran (1730–1807) the official commander of Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth harbor. This was a more permanent responsibility than a militia rank, though less than the regular army.

According to an article in Loyalist Trails, Cochran was a sea captain who had settled on a farm in Londonderry, New Hampshire, with his wife Sarah and their children.

Both John and Sarah Cochran were on the fortified island on 14 Dec 1774, 250 years ago today. The evening before, Gov. Wentworth had sent a warning that local Patriots might try to take possession of the fort or its military supplies.

The Cochrans noticed an unusual number of visitors that day—men saying they’d just dropped by the island to chat, even though they’re never done that before. The couple became suspicious, and Sarah brought John his pistols.

More men arrived, kept outside by the fort’s guns. Future Continental Congress delegate John Langdon and sea captain Robert White convinced Cochran to let them in for a conversation.

Those two men told the commander they wanted to remove all the gunpowder from the fort. Cochran asked if they had authorization from the royal governor. Langdon reportedly replied that he “forgot to bring his Orders, but the Powder they were determined to have at all Events.”

In the evening Cochran wrote a quick report to Gov. Wentworth about what had happened next:

I received your Excellency’s favour of yesterday, and in obedience thereto kept a strict watch all night, and added two men to my usual number, being all I could get.

Nothing material occurred till this day one o’clock, when I was informed there was a number of people coming to take possession of the Fort, upon which, having only five effective men with me, I prepared to make the best defence I could, and pointed some Guns to those places where I expected they would enter.

About three o’clock the Fort was beset on all sides by upwards of four hundred men. I told them, on their peril, not to enter; They replied they would. I immediately ordered three four pounders to be fired on them, and then the small arms, and before we could be ready to fire again, we were stormed on all quarters, and they immediately secured both me and my men, and kept us prisoners about one hour and a half, during which time they broke open the Powder House, and took all the powder away, except one barrel, and having put it into boats and sent it off, they released me from my confinement.

To which can only add, that I did all in my power to defend the Fort, but all my efforts could not avail against so great a number.

Wentworth later interviewed witnesses, gathered depositions, and compiled a longer account. Those documents weren’t published until the 1970s. They contained more dramatic details, such as where the fort’s cannon shot had ended up: one four-pound ball “went thro a warehouse,” another “pass’d thro a Sloop,” and the third “lodg’d in an House in Kittery,” Maine.

As the attackers stormed in, Cochran found himself pushed back against a wall, his musket broken, jabbing at assailants with his bayonet. A Portsmouth sailor named Thomas Pickering jumped onto the captain’s shoulders and grabbed him by the neck. Finally the “Multitude” marched Cochran off to his house to retrieve the key to the powderhouse.

Instead, they found Sarah Cochran, who had herself “snatch’d a bayonet” and tried to rescue her husband. The crowd overpowered her and locked the couple (and perhaps their children) in the house while some went to break open the powder supply.

TOMORROW: What happened to the Cochrans?

“For the Continuance of general Peace” in New Hampshire

Gov. Thomas Gage didn’t follow the tradition of his New England-born predecessor, Thomas Hutchinson, by proclaiming a Thanksgiving holiday toward the end of 1774.

Perhaps he didn’t grasp the local significance of that holiday. Perhaps, with barracks to be finished, he couldn’t afford to give people a day off work. Or perhaps he just didn’t feel thankful.

Gov. John Wentworth did declare a Thanksgiving in New Hampshire, issuing this proclamation at the start of the month for a holiday on 24 November.

Back in 2008, I wrote a couple of posts about how the Massachusetts Provincial Congress declared 15 December as a Thanksgiving Day, and how people responded in army-occupied Boston and in Newport.

Colonel Fenton’s “confidential and verbal message” for Samuel Adams

In 1865 William V. Wells published a biography of his great-grandfather: The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams. It’s both a highly laudatory, one-sided portrait of Adams and a necessary source for any subsequent scholars.

Among the stories Wells told is one about an attempt by Gov. Thomas Gage to bribe Adams in the summer of 1774:

Gage was perhaps privately instructed in England to make the attempt, if an opportunity should offer. The occasion seemed to present itself after the dissolution of the Assembly in June of this year, for thenceforth Adams was deprived of his stipend as its Clerk; and this, added to the distress which the closing of the harbor had entailed upon the town, left him with scarcely the means of feeding his little family.

“By Colonel Fenton, who commanded one of the newly arrived regiments, the Governor sent a confidential and verbal message. The officer, after the customary salutations, stated the object of his visit. He said that an adjustment of the existing disputes was very desirable, as well as important to the interests of both. That he was authorized by Governor Gage to assure him that he had been empowered to confer upon him such benefits as would be satisfactory, upon the condition that he would engage to cease in his opposition to the measures of government, and that it was the advice of Governor Gage to him not to incur the further displeasure of his Majesty; that his conduct had been such as made him liable to the penalties of an act of Henry the Eighth, by which persons could be sent to England for trial, and, by changing his course, he would not only receive great personal advantages, but would thereby make his peace with the King.

[“]Adams listened with apparent interest to this recital, until the messenger had concluded. Then rising, he replied, glowing with indignation: ‘Sir, I trust I have long since made my peace with the King of kings. No personal consideration shall induce me to abandon the righteous cause of my country. Tell Governor Gage it is the advice of Samuel Adams to him no longer to insult the feelings of an exasperated people.’”

The passage in quotation marks was credited as “Narration by Mrs. Hannah Wells in 1818.” Hannah (Adams) Wells (1756-1821) was the politician’s last surviving child. Since her grandson William V. Wells wasn’t born until 1826, either she wrote down the story in this form or an intervening relative passed it along orally.

In one respect, at least, details got mangled. “Colonel Fenton” wasn’t an active British army officer who “commanded one of the newly arrived regiments.” John Fenton (d. 1785) was an army captain, born in Ireland, who retired at the end of the French and Indian War. In 1755 he had married Elizabeth Temple, a daughter of Robert Temple of Medford. Though officially a Customs officer at Albany, New York, in the 1760s, Fenton stayed in the Boston area and did little government work.

In 1772 Fenton received a large grant of land in Plymouth, New Hampshire, from Gov. John Wentworth. He moved there and started to promote a settlement. Wentworth granted him several civic and militia titles, so in April 1774 John Adams wrote of him as “Collonell Judge, Clerk, Captain Fenton.”

In that letter Adams relayed news from Fenton to Robert Treat Paine: “He says that the spirit runs like wild Fire, to the very Extremities of N. H[amp]shire and that their Government is as determined, as ours”—presumably to oppose whatever Parliament was planning in response to the Boston Tea Party.

The new Massachusetts governor, Gen. Gage, arrived the next month with the Boston Port Bill. By June Gage had shut down the Massachusetts legislature and the work of its clerk, Samuel Adams. (The house’s last act was to choose a delegation to the First Continental Congress. Since Adams was one of the delegates, he still had plenty to keep him busy.)

Fenton’s correspondence with John Adams suggests that he, though allied with the Crown, still had enough links to the Massachusetts Whigs to sound out Samuel Adams about toning it down a bit.

If indeed the conversation described in Wells’s biography ever happened. No one has found corroboration for it in Gage’s papers, other British documents, or contemporaneous New England sources.

TOMORROW: An earlier source?

“Our Civil and Religious Rights and Liberties”

In the last, posthumously published volume of his History of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson claimed that “the continuance of civil and religious liberties had constantly, perhaps without exception, been mentioned” in royal governors’ Thanksgiving proclamations.

Therefore, in using that language in his 1771 proclamation, Hutchinson said he was merely following tradition. So any objections to his phrasing had to be an artificial controversy.

But what does the historical record say? Gov. William Shirley’s Thanksgiving proclamation for 1754 [all these proclamation links lead to P.D.F. files] and Lt. Gov. Spencer Phips’s for 1756 do indeed include some variant of the phrase about civil and religious liberties.

Gov. Thomas Pownall (shown here), a favorite of the local Whigs, used such language consistently during his short administration:

• Declaring a Thanksgiving on 27 Oct 1757, “to continue to the People of this Province their civil and religious Rights and Privileges.”
• 23 Nov 1758, “to support Us in our Civil and Religious Rights and Liberties.”
• 29 Nov 1759, “to continue to us the Enjoyment of our civil and religious Rights and Liberties.”

At first Gov. Francis Bernard adhered to that tradition:

• 27 Sept 1760, for war victories “whereby the future Security of our Civil and Religious Liberties is put into our own Hands.”
• 27 Nov 1760, mentioning “general liberties, as well religious as civil.”

But in 1761, coinciding with the ascension of George III, the writs of assistance case, and the emergence of political opposition under James Otis, Jr., Bernard stopped including language about Massachusetts’s liberties.

No such phrase appeared in the governor’s Thanksgiving proclamations for 3 Dec 1761; 7 Oct 1762, celebrating war victories; 9 Dec 1762; 11 Aug 1763, for peace; 8 Dec 1763; 29 Nov 1764; 5 Dec 1765; 24 July 1766, for the repeal of the Stamp Act; 27 Nov 1766; 3 Dec 1767; and 1 Dec 1768. In August 1769, Bernard left the province.

The responsibility of declaring Thanksgivings thus fell to Lt. Gov. Hutchinson. For the holidays on 16 Nov 1769 and 6 Dec 1770, he stuck to Bernard’s model, not mentioning “liberties.”

Thus, contrary to what Hutchinson the historian wrote, in 1771 Hutchinson the governor didn’t simply use language that “had constantly, perhaps without exception,” appeared in Thanksgiving proclamations. He returned to a tradition that had last prevailed over a decade before—a decade in which a lot had changed in Massachusetts politics.

(Incidentally, Gov. John Wentworth of New Hampshire had included phrases like “the Continuance of our Civil and Ecclesiastical Privileges” in his Thanksgiving proclamations since 1767. But the political conflict wasn’t so deep there.)

TOMORROW: The Whig reaction.

Bergman on Zilberstein’s A Temperate Empire

Last month James Bergman reviewed Anya Zilberstein’s A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America, published in 2016 by Oxford University Press, for the H-Net.

European settlers found the climate of North America to be more extreme than what they had known at home (often while sticking to a smaller range of latitudes). Winters were colder, summers hotter. But, many declared, the New World was becoming more healthy by the decade!

Here are some extracts from the review:

Zilberstein’s book comes amid what she calls a “spate” of efforts to situate the early modern colonial project in the climate of the Little Ice Age, and indeed, such studies as Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis and work by Dagomar Degroot and Sam White have taken climate from a historical backdrop, a condition merely to be overcome, to a historical actor in its own right. The atmosphere, these works effectively argue, should not just be used for atmosphere.

Zilberstein’s contribution to this literature is to situate these efforts in the scientific debates among elites about natural history. She finds that these debates were inextricable from the colonial project. Boundaries between biogeographic regions were often conflated with political boundaries. Networks of correspondence about natural history were often bound up in political and cultural connections between elites on both sides of the Atlantic. And settler colonialism was often “naturalized” by describing the way different racial bodies were suited to different climatic regions (p. 95).

Zilberstein focuses on the American Northeast, an area that would now encompass New England and Nova Scotia, but whose boundaries were much more fluid and contested in the eighteenth century. This focus permits a rich treatment of the archival material she has amassed, which includes promotional material, government documents, correspondence between elites, and treatises on the environments of the different colonies. From these texts emerge an extremely open-ended and heavily debated understanding of the climate of different regions. This revolved around several different questions: Where was the “temperate” zone? Who could settle there? And were the climates of the American colonies becoming more “temperate”?

Zilberstein traces the substantial instability of the basis for these questions, beginning with the question: what did it mean for a climate to be “temperate,” anyway? Before the seventeenth century, this zone tended to center around the Mediterranean. With the northward movement of political power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came a northward movement of that zone to center around England and France. With the settlement of New England and the endurance of its harsh winters came a new valuation of a temperate climate among the colonial elites. The cold climates of Vermont and New Hampshire were not “stupefying,” as some commentators believed. They provided “vigor,” according to local colonial elites writing to skeptics across the Atlantic (pp. 34, 38).

Likewise, John Wentworth, the governor of Nova Scotia, countered attacks by abolitionists that relocating escaped Jamaican slaves (maroons) in Nova Scotia was cruel—prevailing views on race held that African bodies were suited to different climates than white bodies—by stating that, in fact, the climate was temperate enough for all bodies. This was, in fact, part of Wentworth’s campaign to convert his colony from one of English garrisons and absentee landowners to one of “useful and loyal settlers” (p. 117). . . .

Climate change was part of discussions about agricultural improvement and settlement, but the reverse was also true: the perception of climate change depended on the ambitions of the settlers. . . . Studies by twentieth- and twenty-first-century historical geographers, for instance, have found that the climate was, in fact, not getting “more temperate,” but getting colder (p. 2). This is especially important to note, as it allows her to point out that the perception of climate, and climate change, has historically been bound up in the logic of “improvement.” To understand current perceptions of climate change, Zilberstein argues, we need to recognize this, as it has become that much more urgent, with the current consensus on climate change, that those sensibilities be reversed.

“Improvement” in this case meant not (just?) creating better conditions but getting use out of resources.

Web Exhibit about the Raids on Fort William & Mary

At the same time that Rhode Island’s preparations for war included moving cannon from Newport to Providence, where they would be beyond reach of the Royal Navy, the New Hampshire militia was taking similar but more dramatic action.

This website from the University of New Hampshire library preserves an exhibit on the militia raids on Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth’s harbor on 14-15 Dec 1774. The exhibit is largely based on chemistry professor Charles Lathrop Parsons’s The Capture of Fort William and Mary, published in 1903. It provides a good overview of this lesser-known event.

There are still some glitches in the online exhibit. The link labeled “The Gunpowder at Bunker Hill” leads instead to a letter from the governor; I haven’t found a webpage on powder. The webpage titled “Gentleman in Boston writing to a Mr. Rivitigton of New York” actually refers to James Rivington, printer of the Loyalist New York Gazetteer. That letter, as transcribed in American Archives, clearly did not endorse what had gone on in Portsmouth starting the night of 14 December:

With difficulty a number of men were persuaded to convene, who proceeded to the Fort, which is situated at New-Castle, an Island about two miles from the Town, and being there joined by a number of the inhabitants of said New-Castle, amounted to near four hundred men; they invested the Fort, and being refused admittance by the Commander of it [John Cochran], who had only five men with him, and who discharged several guns at them, scaled the walls, and soon overpowered and pinioned the Commander; they then struck the King’s colours, with three cheers, broke open the Powder House, and carried off one hundred and three barrels of Powder, leaving only one behind.

Previous to this expresses had been sent out to alarm the country; accordingly, a large body of men marched the next day from Durham, headed by two Generals; Major [John] Sullivan, one of the worthy Delegates, who represented that Province in the Continental Congress, and the Parson of the Parish [John Adams], who having been long-accustomed to apply himself more to the cure of the bodies than the souls of his parishioners, had forgotten that the weapons of his warfare ought to be spiritual, and not carnal, and therefore marched down to supply himself with the latter, from the King’s Fort, and assisted in robbing him of his warlike stores.

After being drawn up on the parade, they chose a Committee, consisting of those persons who had been most active in the riot of the preceding day, with Major Sullivan and some others, to wait on the Governour [John Wentworth], and know of him whether any of the King’s Ships or Troops were expected. The Governour, after expressing to them his great concern for the consequences of taking the Powder from the Fort, of which they pretended to disapprove and to be ignorant of, assured them that he knew of neither Troops or Ships coming into the Province, and ordered the Major, as a Magistrate, to go and disperse the people.

When the Committee returned to the body, and reported what the Governour had told them, they voted that it was satisfactory, and that they would return home. But, by the eloquent harangue of their Demosthenes [i.e., Sullivan], they were first prevailed upon to vote that they took part with, and approved of, the measures of those who had taken the Powder.

Matters appeared then to subside, and it was thought every man had peaceably returned to his own home, instead of this Major Sullivan, with about seventy of his clients, concealed themselves till the evening, and then went to the Fort, and brought off in Gondolas all the small arms, with fifteen 4-pounders, and one 9-pounder, and a quantity of twelve and four and twenty pound shot, which they conveyed, to Durham, &c.

Two opposing military forces facing off against each other (albeit one comprising only six men). The royal troops firing muskets and cannon, and the colonial militia storming a fortification and capturing the men inside (albeit with no killed or wounded on either side). Territory, gunpowder, and ordnance changing hands. The end of royal government in New Hampshire as Wentworth sought shelter and then departed for Boston. One might even think that a war had begun.

The Rev. John Adams, minister at Durham from 1748 to 1778, suffered from what we’d now call bipolar disorder, according to the description of the Rev. John Eliot:

For he was in his best days, and when he was not exposed to peculiar trials of his ministry, very much the sport of his feelings. Sometimes he was so depressed as to seem like a being mingling with the dust, and suddenly would mount up to heaven with a bolder wing than any of his contemporaries.

Local tradition says that he allowed some of the gunpowder from Fort William and Mary to be hidden under his pulpit. It probably seemed like a good idea at that moment.

A New Look at Benjamin Thompson

This week HistoryTube.org announced [trademark symbol and all]: “A portrait of Benjamin Thompson, one of the most prominent scientists of the late 18th century, will be exhibited in the new American Revolution Museum at Yorktown® galleries to help tell the story of Loyalists.”

The announcement included a biography of Thompson that I thought could benefit from some translation. It said:

In the 1770s he lived in Concord (earlier called Rumford), New Hampshire, and became an officer in the 2nd Provincial Regiment.

After Thompson at age nineteen married a rich widow, Gov. John Wentworth made him a major in the New Hampshire militia.

He developed close associations with prominent British officers, incurring the wrath of citizens opposed to British rule.

He enticed deserters from the British army to his farm, worked them very hard, and alerted the royal authorities to come collect them when they started to miss army life (probably just before he had promised to pay them). He had an affair in February 1775 with Patriot printer Isaiah Thomas’s wife. By May, Thompson was sending Gen. Thomas Gage spy reports written in invisible ink.

Thompson made the decision to leave America and had a successful career as a scientist and inventor in Britain and on the Continent, known principally for his work in thermodynamics.

Thompson slipped behind the British lines soon after Dr. Benjamin Church was detected as a spy. In November 1775 he wrote a detailed report on the American army for Gen. William Howe, then sailed for England. Thompson worked his way into the household and office of Lord George Germain, possibly through sexual favors, and by 1780 was a top bureaucrat in the British government. He returned to America as a British army officer very late in the war, then went back to Europe for good.

Thompson was indeed an inventive scientist, as well as a capable and visionary administrator in Bavaria. He co-founded the Royal Institute in London. He and his one legitimate child, Sarah Thompson, left some substantial bequests to American institutions, causing them to be remembered well—until Thompson’s early spy reports were identified in the 1920s.

I don’t know if this portrait had previously been linked to Rumford; I don’t recall ever seeing it before. The HistoryTube.org article concludes:

The 18- by 24-inch oil-on-canvas painting by an unknown artist dates to 1785, a fact revealed during conservation. The portrait was acquired by the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation specifically for the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, which will replace the Yorktown Victory Center by late 2016.

Rumford was a brilliant, fascinating figure, but I hope no one visiting this new museum takes him to be a typical American Loyalist, or typical in any way.

“Rumford was decidedly attached to the cause”

While looking up something else, I came across this statement of how New England scholars viewed Benjamin Thompson in the 1800s. It appeared as a footnote to Dr. Jacob Bigelow’s inaugural address as Rumford Professor at Harvard, as published in the North-American Review in 1817:

Count Rumford was decidedly attached to the cause of American liberty, and earnestly sought for a commission in the service of Congress. He was present at the battle of Lexington, and afterwards remained sometime with the army at Cambridge.

His expectations of promotion were disappointed, in consequence of suspicions arising from his former intercourse with Governor [John] Wentworth of New Hampshire, and some others attached to the British cause. These suspicions it was impossible to overcome, although he demanded a court of inquiry, and was honourably acquitted of all intentions inimical to the cause of his country. After remaining some time in fruitless hope with the American army, and seeing the post of his ambition filled by a rival candidate, he retired in disgust, and embarked for England in January, 1776.

While at Cambridge, he exerted himself in preserving the library and philosophical apparatus, when the Colleges were occupied as barracks by the soldiery.

So we can see how shocking it was in the early 1900s when Allen French studied Gen. Thomas Gage’s intelligence files and realized that Thompson had been spying for the British throughout 1775—all that time he’d supposedly been traveling around the American lines trying to help.

Though you’d think the facts that Thompson had become secretary to the London official overseeing the war and then led a troop of dragoons on Long Island would have been a good clue about his attachments well before 1817.

The Premiere of “Count Rumford”

Last night I attended the Woburn Historical Society’s premiere of its new video, “Count Rumford: Scholar, Soldier, Spy, Statesman and Scientist.” I was startled to arrive at Woburn High School and find every parking space filled. Must be because of the soccer game, I thought. But after I found an arguably legal space and made it to the auditorium, there were about 200 people waiting for the movie. Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, would have been pleased at the turnout.

The style of the film would look familiar to anyone who’s seen historical documentaries on TV in the past twenty years: pans and zooms of period portraits and edifying illustrations from the late 1800s, views of historic sites and statues, footage from reenactments (some showing men with anachronistic beards).

But the narration by writer-director Kathy Lucero reveals that this film is a home-town labor of love. We just don’t hear good Boston accents on the History Channel! (Especially when actors pretend to be Kennedys.)

The movie is a good example of how digital filmmaking lets dedicated people produce professional-looking work on specialized projects—as long as they’re willing to put in hours of work. It runs a little less than half an hour, plus an epilogue about the recent fix-up of the Rumford birthplace in north Woburn.

When the Rumford Historical Society was founded in the late 1800s to preserve that house, admiring Benjamin Thompson was relatively easy. True, he became a Loyalist who led a troop of British dragoons late in the Revolutionary War. But standard histories said he did so only after Americans had driven him away out of jealousy and misplaced suspicion.

Then in the early 1900s evidence came out that Thompson was sending secret reports to Gen. Thomas Gage during the same period he was assuring Patriots of his good intentions. He was, it appears, an important confederate of Dr. Benjamin Church (meaning this posting fits in “Dr. Church Week” after all). And the fading of Victorian prudery let more authors write openly of Rumford’s many affairs in Europe. The man was suddenly less admirable—though more interesting.

This video acknowledges Thompson’s less noble, opportunistic side—there’s even a quick roundup of those affairs. But it still gives him the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. For instance, it presents Thompson’s statement that in 1774 he helped some deserters get back to the British army simply out of kindness after they decided they were working too hard in the New Hampshire countryside.

The movie doesn’t say that on 2 Nov 1774 Gov. John Wentworth stated in a letter of introduction to Gen. Gage that Thompson:

has been active in persuading Soldiers deserted from His Majesty’s Regiments at Boston, to return to their duty, and thinks he had a prospect of further success.

Or that Thompson himself wrote the next month that he was employing a soldier named William Bowdidge to find more deserters and persuade them to return to the ranks.

Because this “Count Rumford” video is an effort at public history, particularly for young students (there was a whole elementary class at the showing), it also keeps away from potentially confusing speculation about Thompson’s shadiest activities.

Thus, the four undocumented years between Thompson’s arrival in London and his appointment as an Under Secretary of State zip by in a few words. Biographers suspect that during that time he was busy ingratiating himself with Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State, through amorous favors for his wife, his daughter, and/or himself. Needless to say, that won’t be on the quiz.

Instead, “Count Rumford” celebrates Thompson’s scientific discoveries and energetic management of Bavaria in the decades after the Revolution. He was unquestionably the most important American-born scientist of his generation, and one of the most successful Yankees abroad ever. How he got some of those opportunities—well, we don’t have to know everything.