Independence Booth in the New Nation

Toward the end of 1778, when Independence Booth was two years old, her parents had a little girl named Hannah. She was their ninth and last child; mother Mary Booth was then forty-five years old.

It looks like Joseph Booth was home for the rest of the Revolutionary War, though his neighbors in Enfield, Connecticut, would continue to call him “Captain Booth” as a courtesy for the rest of his life.

Independence Booth grew up in Enfield and married a man named Danforth Charles in 1802. He appears to have been born in Brimfield, Massachusetts, in 1779. Their first child was a boy named Henry, born in September 1803 but dying thirteen months later. In 1805 they had another boy, whom they also named Henry.

In late 1806, the couple conceived a third child. But in January 1807, Danforth Charles died. Independence gave birth in June to a girl she named Hannah. The widow still had her parents and most of her siblings nearby for support, though Mary and Joseph Booth died in 1809 and 1810, respectively.

In 1817 Independence Charles was listed as an inhabitant of Springfield, Massachusetts, when she married Lewis Barber of Ludlow there. That marriage was newsworthy enough to be reported in the Franklin Herald of Greenfield. Three years later, the Enfield church dismissed “Widow Independence Charles” to the congregation at Ludlow; she and her children had probably already made the move.

In 1828 Independence (Booth Charles) Barber died in Ludlow, survived by her third husband and her two children, then in their twenties. Courtesy of Revolution Happened Here, her gravestone in that town appears above, showing her birthdate as 4 July 1776. She had lived to see the fiftieth anniversary of the independence she was named after. Notably, the gravestone also includes her original surname.

The following year, daughter Hannah Charles married Elisha Taylor Parsons, a man from Enfield who had settled in Ludlow as a schoolteacher. He would become locally prominent as a deacon and town officeholder. Later Hannah’s older brother Henry married a woman named Nancy Parsons; I can’t confirm her family tie to Hannah’s husband. Both of Independence’s children had children of their own, passing on the story of how she was (almost) born on the 4th of July.

“Independence Booth was Born”

The New England troops that enlisted in their colonies’ armies in the spring of 1775, and then became the Continental Army in June, agreed to serve until the end of the year.

Some Connecticut troops in fact believed the end of their stint was in mid-December and tried to leave camp then, prompting a confrontation between those men and regiments from other colonies obeying the commands of Gen. George Washington to keep everyone in camp. (I discussed that episode back here.)

Washington also wrote to the New England governors asking them to order some militia regiments to the Boston siege lines to maintain numbers until new Continental recruits and re-enlistees started to arrive in mid-winter. Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull activated Col. Erastus Wolcott and his regiment from December to February.

French and Indian War veteran Joseph Booth of Enfield was a junior officer in Wolcott’s regiment. A few weeks before Booth set out for Massachusetts, he and his wife, Mary, conceived their eighth child. Around the time Booth returned home, Mary’s pregnancy began to show. The baby, a little girl, arrived in July.

By then Booth was commissioned in another state regiment, under Col. Comfort Sage, to serve in the expected New York campaign. I like to think that Joseph Booth’s fellow militia officers arranged for him to stay in Enfield until the baby came. But it’s also possible that Mary Booth was home with only her other children (the oldest still only twelve), relatives, and neighbors.

In the little notebook Joseph Booth kept for his occasional diary, accounts, and memoranda, he recorded the arrival of his new daughter this way:

Independence Booth was Born Sunday July 14th: about 4 oclok in the Morning and in the year 1776 which was 10 Days after the united Colonies were Declard. to be Independent Stats by the Continantel Congress

The timeline of events works out this way.

• 4 July 1776: The Second Continental Congress declared independence.
• 12 July: Declaration of Independence published in New London’s Connecticut Gazette.
• 14 July: The Booths’ baby girl was born.
• 15 July: Declaration of Independence published in Hartford’s Connecticut Courant.
• 21 July: The baby was baptized Independence.
• 29 July: That christening was reported in the Connecticut Courant.

The Booth family genealogies I cited yesterday give different dates for Independence Booth’s birth, and neither matches what her father wrote in his notebook. J. H. Booth said she was born on 17 July. Charles Edwin Booth gave the date of 4 July, based on Enfield records, while acknowledging what her father wrote.

Basically, it appears that Independence Booth, her family, and her neighbors eventually decided to believe she was born on Independence Day. Even though news of the Declaration wouldn’t have reached central Connecticut by 4 July, that’s the date that appears on her gravestone.

TOMORROW: Independence Booth grows up.

In memory of Capt. Joseph Booth

A tweet from Emily Sneff sent me on the track of an item that appeared in the Connecticut Courant of Hartford on 29 July 1776:

Last Sunday a Child was baptised by the Rev. Mr. [Joseph] Perry of East Windsor, by the Name of INDEPENDENCE.

That news item was reprinted in the New-England Chronicle.

The Courant appeared on Mondays, so “Last Sunday” probably meant not the day before but a week before then: 21 July.

That single sentence still left a lot of questions. Who was the couple who chose to name their child Independence? Was that a boy’s name or a girl’s name? What happened to that child later in life?

So I went looking for Independence. And I found two different babies baptized Independence in central Connecticut in the summer of 1776, with the possibility of still more. Here’s one story.

Joseph Booth (1736–1810) of Enfield, Connecticut, served in the colonial forces during the French and Indian War when he was in his early twenties. Booth’s diary recording that experience and a miscellany of later events, from family milestones to sermon topics to household accounts, has been digitized by the Connecticut Historical Society.

In 1762 Joseph Booth married Mary Hale (1733–1809), born in Glastonbury. They had their first child a year later, “Mary Hale junr.” as Joseph noted in his diary. Booth recorded another child every two or three years after that: David, Annis, Lydia, another Joseph, Peter, Eliphalet… All of the Booth babies survived infancy and lived into the nineteenth century.

That brings us up to the outbreak of war. Heitman’s Historical Register lists a Joseph Booth serving as an ensign in Erastus Wolcott’s Connecticut state regiment from December 1775 to February 1776 and a captain in Comfort Sage’s state regiment from June to December 1776.

One Booth family genealogy, Genealogical Records of Some of the Descendants of Robert Boothe, of Saco, Maine, 1642 by J. H. Booth (1877), quotes a commission signed by Gov. Jonathan Trumbull on 20 June 1776 naming Joseph Booth as a captain. Another, One Branch of the Booth Family Showing the Lines of Connection with One Hundred Massachusetts Bay Colonists by Charles Edwin Booth (1910), states that commission was issued on 21 Mar 1777.

I can’t sort all that out. It’s possible these commissions refer to multiple men. There might have been separate commissions in the Connecticut militia and the state’s short-term forces. And the family chroniclers did make some errors.

All sources agree, however, that Joseph Booth served in the American military early in the Revolutionary War, reaching the rank of captain. Wolcott’s regiment was on the siege lines at Boston in the first months of 1776, and Sage’s was at the Battle of White Plains. But Booth, reaching the age of forty in 1776 and being the father of several young children, was on missions that took him away from Enfield for a few months at most, not years.

TOMORROW: The child Independence was born.