On the Trail of Capt. William Browne

In the HUB History podcast episode “Drinker, Draftsman, Soldier, Spy,” Jake Sconyers quotes my remark on how difficult it is to track Capt. William Browne of the 52nd Regiment before 1775 because there were so many men named William Brown(e).

He also quoted a portion of Ens. Henry DeBerniere’s report on his spy missions with Capt. Browne that I’d read many times but hadn’t tumbled to how it’s helpful with that precise challenge.

One of my favorite moments in that narrative is when Browne, DeBerniere, and their manservant have reached Jonathan Brewer’s tavern in Waltham.

a little out of this town [Watertown] we went into a tavern, a Mr. Brewer’s, a whig, we called for dinner, which was brought in by a black woman, at first she was very civil, but afterwards began to eye us very attentively; she then went out and a little after returned, when we observed to her that it was a very fine country, upon which she answered so it is, and we have got brave fellows to defend it, and if you go up any higher you find it so,—

This disconcerted us a good deal, and we imagined she knew us from our papers which we took out before her, as the General had told us to pass for surveyors; however, we resolved not to sleep there that night, as we had intended, accordingly we paid our bill which amounted to two pounds odd shillings, but in [sic] was old tenor.

After we had left the house we enquired of John, our servant, what she had said, he told us that she knew Capt. Brown very well, that she had seen him five years before at Boston, and knew him to be an officer, and that she was sure I was one also, and told John that he was a regular—he denied it; but she said she knew our errant was to take a plan of the country; that she had seen the river and road through Charlestown on the paper; she also advised him to tell us not to go any higher, for if we did we should meet with very bad usage

That waitress didn’t just recognize Brown—she recognized him from “five years before at Boston.” That was in 1770, and there were only two British army regiments in Boston then: the 29th and the 14th. That narrows the field considerably.

Sure enough, the officers of the 14th included Lt. William Browne. On 12 July 1771, the War Office announced that “Lieut. William Brown, of the 14th regiment of Foot,” had purchased the rank of captain in the 52nd in the place of Archibald Williams. In the 14th, Ens. William Napier moved up to lieutenant’s rank.

One implication of that fact is that Gen. Thomas Gage might have chosen Capt. Browne to scout the countryside in 1775 because that officer was more familiar with Massachusetts than most of his colleagues, having spent about two years in Boston and on Castle Island back in 1768–1770.

Of course, that had the drawback of more people in Massachusetts being familiar with Browne, as the woman in Waltham showed.

For earlier information on Lt. Browne I hunted down the Army List for 1767. And I found this list of lieutenants in the 14th Regiment of Foot:

Goddammit!

Two men named William Browne became lieutenants in the 14th Regiment four days apart in June 1766. One of them had joined the army in 1762, the other at some unknown time. They were both still lieutenants in the 14th at the start of 1771. 

And during the same period when one or both of these lieutenants were serving in Boston:

• William Browne of Salem was moving up in the imperial bureaucracy.
• William Burnet Brown of Salem supported John Robinson in his fight with James Otis, Jr.
• William Brown the weaver sued the army for trying to kick his family out of the Manufactory building.

And there were probably others.

TOMORROW: Capt. Browne’s own voice?

“They ordered out both their Regiments to fire on Each other”

In his 24 Sept 1775 intelligence report, Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., didn’t just describe dissatisfied enlisted men in the Continental Army.

He also wrote about the disputes among officers in the forces besieging Boston.

One paragraph of Church’s letter described a conflict that I haven’t found mentioned anywhere else:

A Quarrell happened between Col. Bruer and Col. Patterson, at length they got so high, that they ordered out both their Regiments to fire on Each other, but were Quelled by a third that was ordered to fire on them both in case they did not disperce which they did,

“Col. Patterson” was John Paterson (1744–1808, shown here) from Lenox by way of Connecticut. His regiment was assigned to Gen. William Heath’s brigade and thus stationed near the center of the lines.

Identifying “Col. Bruer” is less certain because the Continental Army had two colonels with the surname Brewer: Jonathan of Waltham and David of Palmer. They were in fact brothers, born in Framingham.

Col. Jonathan Brewer’s regiment was part of Gen. Nathanael Greene’s brigade, centered on Cambridge and Charlestown. Col. David Brewer’s regiment was assigned to Gen. John Thomas’s brigade, thus in Roxbury. I don’t know which was closer to Paterson’s position.

I suspect Paterson quarreled with David Brewer, who in October was cashiered for paying his teen-aged son as a lieutenant while the boy was back on the farm and other petty matters. The court-martial record said this Col. Brewer acted “contrary to the repeated remonstrances of the Officers of the regiment,” so it makes sense for another colonel to criticize him as well.

On the other hand, back in the spring Jonathan Brewer got a reputation for arguing with other officers about recruiting. So it’s possible Paterson harbored some hard feelings from that.

Cols. John Paterson and Jonathan Brewer reenlisted in 1776. Brewer, who had been wounded at Bunker Hill, shifted to the Massachusetts regiment of artificers later that year. Paterson (shown above) went on to become a major general.

Another conflict Church was happy to report on:

They begin to try Colonels and Captains for bad behaviour at Bunkers Hill battle, three Colonels have been Cashired and several Captains for their Cowerdice—and could the Army in General have their will General [Artemas] Ward wou’d go for one, for he never so much as gave one Written order that day.

There was indeed a short series of courts-martial in late 1775 removing officers from the army, either for misbehavior at Bunker Hill or for similar failings. (Sometimes, it seems, an officer’s behavior in that battle wasn’t bad enough on its own but left the man with no more chances to screw up.)

Gen. Artemas Ward definitely had his detractors. But he had exercised control during the Bunker Hill battle, sending spoken orders to the commanders on the Charlestown peninsula and to the other sections of the siege lines, which he also had to maintain.

TOMORROW: Dr. Church’s secrets and tales.

Dots on the Ensign’s Map

Yesterday I started to discuss a hand-drawn map from the Library of Congress that Ed Redmond has identified as likely coming from British army spy Ens. Henry DeBeniere weeks before the march to Concord.

That map marks several individual homes. Some of those are places where DeBerniere and his fellow scout, Capt. William Brown, visited on their two treks into the Massachusetts countryside in early 1775.

Others aren’t mentioned in the officers’ report but were the estates of Loyalists, and therefore potential safe houses or places for troops to camp.

Here’s a list of all those marked properties:

“Hatch’s”: Nathaniel Hatch of Dorchester, Loyalist.

“Davis’s”: This site is a bit of a mystery. My best guess is that this is Dr. Jonathan Davies, who bought half of the old Auchmuty estate in the 1750s. Unlike almost all the other homeowners named on the map, Davies wasn’t a Loyalist. Another possibility is that this is the house of Aaron Davis, which ended up on the front lines of the siege.

“Auchmuty’s”: Robert Auchmuty of Roxbury, attorney and Vice Admiralty Court judge, Loyalist.

“Hollowel’s”: Benjamin Hallowell, Jr., in Jamaica Plain, Commissioner of Customs.

“Comm. Loring”: Joshua Loring, Sr., in Jamaica Plain, Loyalist. His mansion remains as the Loring-Greenough House.

“Mr. Fanuil”: Benjamin Faneuil, merchant, Loyalist.

“Mr. Greenleaf”: I’m guessing this home was managed by Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf, who normally lived in Boston. In 1765 his daughter Hannah married John Apthorp, who inherited his father’s Little Cambridge mansion. John and Hannah Apthorp sailed to Charleston, South Carolina, for his health in late 1772, but their ship was lost at sea. Sheriff Greenleaf became the guardian for their young children, and thus probably the custodian of the Apthorp property. Sheriff Greenleaf was seen as a stalwart of the royal government before the war, but he remained in Boston after the siege.

“Brewers”: Jonathan Brewer’s tavern on the Watertown-Waltham line. Unlike the other people named on the map, Brewer was a Whig, as DeBerniere wrote in his report. But the officers did make a memorable stop there, so it was worth mapping.

“Major Goldthwaits”: Joseph Goldthwait of Weston, Loyalist.

“Colonl: Jone’s”: Isaac Jones of Weston, a Loyalist before the war and a supporter of the Continental Army during it. Brown and DeBerniere used his Golden Ball Tavern as a base, and it’s still standing.

“Doctor Russell”: Dr. Charles Russell of Lincoln, Loyalist. His house survives in altered form as the Codman House.

“Nineteen Mile Tavern”: This establishment appears to be in Sudbury, but I haven’t found any mention of such a place. The most famous surviving tavern in Sudbury is the Wayside Inn, but this appears to have been closer to the center of town.

TOMORROW: The map’s proposition.

The Ensign’s Map of a Road to Concord

In 2016, Ed Redmond of the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division shared an interesting discovery about an item in that collection.

Redmond wrote:

Several years ago, I stumbled across an unsigned manuscript map with the supplied title of “Roxbury to Concord. Roads & distances, &c.”

This unique map was acquired by the Library of Congress in 1867 as a part of the Peter Force Collection, which includes more than 750 Revolutionary era printed and manuscript maps transferred to the Geography and Map Division. . . .

According to General Gage’s Instructions printed by Boston publisher J[ohn]. Gill in 1779, General Thomas Gage, the commander of all British troops in North America at the time, ordered two British soldiers, Captain [William] Brown and Ensign [Henry] De Berniere, to discretely survey the roads in the vicinity of Boston.

“We set out from Boston on Thursday night, disguised like Gentlemen in brown clothes and reddish handkerchiefs round our necks; at the ferry of Charlestown we met a sentry of the 52nd regiment but Capt. Brown’s servant, whom we took along with us, bid him not to take any notice of us so that we passed unknown to Charlestown. From that we went to Cambridge, a pretty town with a college built of brick. We next went to Watertown and were not suspected. A little out of this town we went into a tavern, a Mr. [Jonathan] Brewer’s, a whig, [and] we called for dinner…”

All of the towns mentioned in the text, including “Brewers” tavern, appear on the manuscript map. The two British “surveyors” then sent their various large scale surveys back to Boston with their servant and returned separately to avoid being discovered as spies.

A few weeks later, on March 20, 1775, roughly one month before the events of April 18-19, 1775, Captain Brown and Ensign De Berniere received additional instructions from General Gage to survey the road to Concord:

“We went through Roxbury and Brookline, and came into the main road between the thirteen and fourteen mile-stones in the township of Weston; we went through part of the pass at the eleven mile-stone, took the Concord road, which is seven miles from the mainroad. The town of Concord lies between hills that command it entirely; there is a river runs through it, with two bridges over it.” . . .

Following their reconnaissance of Concord and vicinity the spies continued on [actually back] to Lexington:

“We dined at the house of a Mr. [Daniel] Bliss, a friend to government; [who] told us he could shew us another road, called the Lexington road. We set out and crossed the bridge in the town. The road continued very open and good for six miles, the next five a little inclosed, (there is one very bad place in this five miles) the road good to Lexington. You then come to Menotomy, Cambridge, and so to Charlestown…”

Once again, all of the towns mentioned in the text (with the exception of Lexington) appear on our map. Additionally, the distances between the towns are laid down on the map and correlate with the figures given in the text, even though the map is not drawn completely to scale.

All that said, this map does not show the road from Cambridge to Concord that the British expedition followed on 18-19 April. Though the officers reported returning from Concord on “the Lexington road [through] Menotomy, Cambridge, and so to Charlestown,” they didn’t add that route to this chart.

Did that affect the British expedition’s level of preparation in April 1775? 

TOMORROW: More on this map.

The Problem with Ens. Eliphalet Hastings

Yesterday I quoted Capt. Moses Harvey’s newspaper advertisement from November 1775, minutely describing five soldiers who had deserted from his Continental Army company.

Harvey surmised that those men had left for these feeble reasons:

They have been apt to make excuses for their running away, and intimate they took a dislike to one Eliphalet Hastings, who was put in Ensign over them, and found much fault with the continental allowance.

Of course, it’s a soldier’s prerogative to grumble about food and pay. But what was the problem with the new ensign?

Eliphalet Hastings (1734-1824) was a veteran soldier. He had enlisted early in the French and Indian War, a decision that didn’t turn out well. In January 1760 the Massachusetts legislature voted to pay him £8 because

in the Year 1757 being a Soldier in the pay of this Province, he was taken Prisoner by the Indians near Fort William Henry by whom he was sold to the French and carried to Quebeck from whence he was sent to France where he remained till October 1758 when he was sent to England; and did not return home till May 1759

Hastings’s descendants understood that he had also participated Gen. James Wolfe’s Québec campaign and even “assisted in carrying General Wolfe to the rear, when mortally wounded.” But the timing for that would be awfully tight.

In April 1775, Hastings had marched as a minuteman, then rose to sergeant as Massachusetts formed its army. According to his pension application, he

was in the battle of Bunkers hill, commanded a company in Col Jonathan Brewers Regt in the Massachusetts line, had twenty-nine killed and eleven wounded besides myself out of seventy nine in that action, had my right arms and collar bone shot to pieces

Col. Brewer’s regiment was stationed mostly between the provincial breastwork and the rail fence. It got pretty shot up, with Brewer (d. 1784) and Lt. Col. William Buckminster (1736-1786) both wounded. But a Massachusetts report in 1775 said that in all the regiment suffered twelve dead and twenty-two wounded, far less than the figures Hastings recalled for one company decades later.

Col. Brewer had already gotten into hot water for aggressive recruiting tactics in Middlesex and Worcester Counties. He in turn complained about other colonels, on 4 July petitioning the Massachusetts legislature about how

a number of men that enlisted in different Companies in my Regiment have, through the low artifice and cunning of several recruiting officers of different Regiments, re-enlisted into other Companies, being over-persuaded by such arguments as, that Colonel Brewer would not be commissioned, and that if they did not immediately join some other Regiment, they would be turned out of the service; others were tempted with a promise to have a dollar each to drink the recruiting officer’s health; others by intoxication of strong liquor; by which means a considerable number have deserted my Regiment, as will be made to appear by the returns therefrom, as also the different Companies and Regiments they are re-enlisted into.

Around the same date, on 1 July, Eliphalet Hastings was appointed an ensign in the company of Capt. Moses Harvey. I can’t tell which company Hastings had been a sergeant in—perhaps Capt. Edward Blake’s—but it wasn’t Harvey’s.

Capt. Harvey was a late addition to Brewer’s regiment, not listed among his officers in early June. He had also come late to the Battle of Bunker Hill. A soldier from that company named Moses Clark recalled, “I was on the march towards Bunkers Hill on the day that battle was fought we arrived there just after the battle ended, while our men were carrying away the wounded.”

Col. Brewer appears to have assigned Ens. Hastings to Capt. Harvey’s company, rewarding a wounded veteran and filling out that company’s ranks so he could have more soldiers under him. But that created a problem.

Moses Harvey had been born in Sunderland, in the part of town that became Montague in 1754, and he had recruited men from that area. Of the five soldiers in his deserter ad, three had enlisted in Sunderland: John Daby; Gideon Graves, born in that town in 1753; and John Guilson, born in Groton in 1750 and married to Graves’s sister in 1769. Simeon Smith came from Greenfield and Matthias Smith from Springfield, other towns in the Connecticut River Valley. Capt. Harvey knew them so well he could describe them in acute detail.

In contrast, Eliphalet Hastings lived in Waltham, on the eastern side of Middlesex County. Harvey’s men didn’t know him. By tradition, New England soldiers enlisted under neighbors they knew and trusted. They expected to elect their own officers instead of having someone assigned over them. So over the summer of 1775 those five men decided to head back home to western Massachusetts.

Capt. Harvey was lenient enough not to advertise for their return right away; he didn’t even report them as deserted until 27 September. But as November came around, there was new pressure from Gen. George Washington to recruit soldiers for the coming year. Harvey might have thought his own hopes to remain in the army depended on showing that he could maintain discipline in his company. So on 8 November he finally put his neighbors’ names and descriptions into the newspaper. Did he really expect them to return, or did he just want to make their lives in and around Sunderland a little less comfortable?

TOMORROW: What became of those deserters?

“Deserted from Col. Brewer’s regiment…”

On 9 Nov 1775 and again a week later, the New-England Chronicle ran this advertisement, which offers characterizations of Continental soldiers worthy of a Smollett novel:

Deserted from Col. [Jonathan] Brewer’s regiment, and Captain Harvey’s company, one Simeon Smith of Greenfield, a joiner by trade, a thin spar’d fellow, about 5 feet 4 inches high, had on blue coat and black vest, a metal button on his hat, black long hair, black eyes, his voice in the hermaphrodite fashion, the masculine rather predominant:

Likewise one Matthias Smith, a small smart fellow, a sadler by trade, grey headed, has a younger look in his face, is apt to say I swear! I swear! and between his words will spit smart; had on a green coat, and an old red great coat; he is a right gamester, although he wears something of a sober look:

Likewise one John Daby, a long hump shoulder’d fellow, a shoemaker by trade, drawls his words, and for comfortable says comfable, had a green coat, thick leather breeches, slim legs, lost some of his fore teeth:

Also one John Guilson, a man well known in Sunderland, wears a watch, midling stature, a cooper by trade, has a black beard, wears a light colour’d coat and jacket and has a surly look:

Likewise his brother in law, Gideon Graves, about a midling stature, somewhat stocky, his looks, jestures and words generally crabbed, had a sad red coat, a pale blue vest, dark brown thickset breeches, and had a large cutlass.---

They have been apt to make excuses for their running away, and intimate they took a dislike to one Eliphalet Hastings, who was put in Ensign over them, and found much fault with the continental allowance.

Whoever will take up said deserters and secure or bring hem into the camp, shall have two dollars reward for each, and all necessary charges paid by me,
MOSES HARVEY, Capt.
Prospect-Hill, Nov. 8, 1775.

P.S. Said deserters have been gone some time, and because I expected they would return, I have omitted advertising them.

According to Massachusetts records, John Gilson deserted on 14 July; Gideon Graves, Matthias Smith, and John Daby in early August, and Simeon Smith on 16 September. So Capt. Harvey (1723-1795) had indeed waited for months before advertising for them in November.

Not that he had to get so personal.

TOMORROW: What was the problem with Ens. Hastings?