Looking Back on a Fun Month

I didn’t start this year planning to delve into the mystery of who told Dr. Joseph Warren about the British march to Concord.

After all, there’s so much of the Saga of the Brazen Head still to tell.

But I was intrigued by this essay at the American Revolution Institute about one of its recent acquisitions, an engraving titled “The Hero returned from Boston.”

That essay discussed the possibility that Warren’s informant was Margaret Gage, wife of the British commander. It also dismissed that idea as unlikely and unsupported. I wrote much the same years back, and didn’t think I had anything new to find out or share.

In its original form, however, that essay quoted a statement about the Gages I hadn’t seen before. That produced a jolting mix of emotions:

• A relevant source I’ve missed? How exciting!
• A relevant source I’ve missed? How embarrassing!

So a month ago I had to look into that source. I found it was actually an early-twentieth-century historian misquoted on a British website. (Phew!)

My posting about that prompted the director of the American Revolution Institute, Jack Warren, to revise the essay and to share thoughts in the comments of my posting on why that 1911 historian was so open to the idea of Mrs. Gage betraying her husband’s secrets.

Jack’s comments in turn prompted me to review all the evidence authors have used to point to Margaret Gage, starting in 1788, plus the milestones in the publication of that idea. To my surprise, I saw that for over a century almost every author who brought up that idea did so only to argue against it. So then I had to consider how the evidence came to appear stronger the further we were removed from the eighteenth century.

During that review I also came across a source that didn’t mention Margaret Gage, though it’s been used to bolster a case against her: the Rev. Jeremy Belknap’s diary from late 1775. And I was lucky enough to realize it could link to another source I discussed a couple of years ago, memories of tales told by Josiah Waters around 1800. If both those sources are reliable, they tell us exactly who Dr. Warren got information from and how: the completely overlooked knife-maker William Jasper.

All that, as I suggested above, was a pleasant surprise. It was the result of an intriguing artifact and essay, fortuitous timing, errors to be corrected (including my own), input from commenters, a new approach to the evidence, and the proliferation of digitized sources. 

And a bonus: This week Bob Gross alerted me that the Loyalists Commission claims are available digitized on Ancestry.com, so now I can go explore exactly what Thomas Beaman’s family said about him and a lot more. 

“He collected many facts, for a history”

Another reason I suspect Josiah Waters, Jr., was the “Mr. Waters” who told the Rev. Jeremy Belknap about the Boston Patriots’ intelligence on the march to Concord is that it fits with what people tell us about Waters’s later behavior.

Waters was really interested in preserving military lore. By the mid-1780s he was colonel of the Boston militia regiment. He also served as treasurer of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, and one of the first books about that organization’s members says:

He collected many facts, for a history, but never published them. The manuscript is lost. The older members used to speak of it as containing important facts, as well as anecdotes of members, now preserved in the imperfect recollection of survivors.

Specifically, we know that Waters was passing on stories about the beginning of the Revolutionary War before he died in 1804.

In fact, we have another account of how Dr. Joseph Warren learned about the British army mission that came ultimately from this Josiah Waters. It was published in the New England Historic and Genealogical Register in 1853, and I shared it back in 2020.

That account was transmitted orally through a couple of people before being written down: from Col. Waters to Joseph Curtis to Catherine Curtis and into the journal. As a result, some details got muddled—most notably, the name of William Dawes (Waters’s first cousin) morphed into Ebenezer Dorr.

Putting that account together with what Belknap wrote down in 1775 shows how the two complement each other. Here are the passages about the best-placed informant.

Belknap, 1775:

Mr. Waters informed me, that the design of the regular troops, when they marched out of Boston the night of April 18, was discovered to Dr Warren by a person kept in pay for that purpose. . . . [After gathering early indications something was afoot] Dr. Warren…applied to the person who had been retained, and got intelligence of their whole design; which was to seize [Samuel] Adams and [John] Hancock, who were at Lexington, and burn the stores at Concord.

Curtis, 1853:

The Americans obtained this news, through an individual by the name of Jasper, an Englishman, a gunsmith by trade, whose shop was in Hatter’s Square; he worked for the British, but was friendly to the rebels; a sergeant major quartered in his family and made a confidant of him, telling him all their plans. Jasper repeated the same to Col. Waters, who made it known to the Committee of Safety.

Looking at those sources together, I think it’s likely that the Boston Patriots’ paid informant was William Jasper (d. 1786), a maker of cutlery and surgical instruments from Britain. I gathered all the information I could find about Jasper here.

If these two accounts are basically reliable, Jasper rented rooms to a British sergeant major, who trusted him because of his British birth and his work repairing army weapons. But Jasper was also funneling information to Waters and Dr. Warren in exchange for money.

As I understand it, the British army didn’t formalize the duties of a sergeant major until the late 1790s. But it was already the designation of a senior sergeant with more authority than any other enlisted man in that unit. A sergeant major wouldn’t have been privy to Gen. Thomas Gage’s whole plan. But by late on the afternoon of 18 April he may well have been aware of some crucial variables:

• The troops would leave Boston by water instead of over the Neck, indicating a destination to the northwest rather than, say, Worcester.
• The troops were preparing to travel farther and stay out longer than the training marches of previous weeks.

The man may even have known about those mounted officers sent out as far as Lincoln on 18 April.

With solid but incomplete information, Warren dispatched Dawes and Paul Revere, as well as an anonymous and unsuccessful rider out of Charlestown, out to Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock. Patriots in Concord were already on alert, hiding most of the military supplies stored there. Those mounted officers tipped off Patriots in Cambridge and Lexington. And the result was war.

Josiah Waters, “very serviceable in this line”

Josiah Waters (1721–1784) was a painter by training who became a respected merchant in pre-Revolutionary Boston.

Waters joined the Old South congregation at age twenty. He was elected to several town offices, including constable, fence viewer, clerk of the market, and finally warden, one of the most prestigious. In 1747 he joined the Ancient & Honorable Artillery Company and filled many roles in that organization.

Also in 1747, Josiah and his wife Abigail had a son, Josiah, Jr. He grew up to work with his father in the firm of “Josiah Waters and Son” on Ann Street. In fact, it’s difficult to distinguish the two, but fortunately they seem to have acted as a unit, so that task isn’t so important. Josiah, Jr., also became a member of Old South and the Ancient & Honorables, and in 1770 he joined the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons.

In 1768, Josiah Waters invested in land in Maine, buying out partners to become the main proprietor of the Massabesick Plantation. That area included the modern towns of Alfred, Sanford, and what the family would modestly name Waterboro. The Maine Historical Society has digitized the Waters account book and map.

As of 1770, Josiah Waters, Sr., was a captain in the Boston militia regiment. By 1772, Josiah, Jr., was his lieutenant. (I told you they came as a unit.) According to Mills and Hicks’s British and American Register for the Year 1775, as war approached Capt. Waters’s brother-in-law Thomas Dawes was the regiment’s major, and the adjutant, or administrative officer, was their nephew William Dawes, Jr.

When war broke out in April 1775, it looks like the elder Waters quickly got his family out of town and followed by the 22nd. Then as a gentleman volunteer he took on the job of laying out the fort in Roxbury that was to keep the British army from marching over the Neck. In his memoirs Gen. William Heath listed Capt. Waters among the men “very serviceable in this line.” And of course Josiah, Jr., helped his father with those fortifications.

In October, Gen. George Washington and the Continental Congress started organizing an army for the coming year, with revamping the artillery regiment a big priority. John Adams was a fan of the Waters family. On 21 October, he sent James Warren a letter introducing a couple of Pennsylvanians visiting Massachusetts:

I could wish them as well as other Strangers introduced to H[enry]. Knox and young Josiah Waters, if they are any where about the Camp. These young Fellows if I am not mistaken would give strangers no contemptible Idea of the military Knowledge of Massachusetts in the sublimest Chapters of the Art of War.

Earlier in the same month he wrote to Gen. John Thomas asking about Josiah, Sr.’s work as a military engineer, among other men.

Gen. Thomas didn’t have good things to say, however. He wrote back to Adams that Waters

I Apprehend has no great Understanding, in Either [gunnery or fortifications], any further than Executing or overseeing works, when Trased out, and by my Observations, we have Several Officers that are Equal or exceed him…

Likewise, by 2 November Gen. Washington was writing candidly to Gov. Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut:

I sincerely wish this Camp could furnish a good Engineer—The Commisary Genl [i.e., the governor’s son, Joseph Trumbull] can inform you how excedingly deficient the Army is of Gentlemen skilled in that branch of business; and that most of the works which have been thrown up for the defence of our several Encampments have been planned by a few of the principal Officers of this Army, assisted by Mr Knox a Gentleman of Worcester

Washington was impressed by Knox, whom he helped to maneuver into the artillery command, but not by Josiah Waters, father or son.

By that fall of 1775 it probably became clear to the Waterses that they hadn’t won over the commander-in-chief. They were unlikely to get appointments in the new army being organized for 1776, at least at the ranks they wanted. But they still had the respect of some New Englanders like Heath and Adams. They took on a new assignment helping to fortify New London, Connecticut. Based on how the state calculated the older man’s pay, he started that work on 25 November. Josiah, Jr., was his assistant, of course.

Before heading south, I posit, Josiah, Jr., traveled north to take stock of the family property in Maine. The Massabesick Plantation sat on the western side of that district. Just over the border in New Hampshire was the town of Dover. And the minister of Dover was the Rev. Jeremy Belknap.

I thus think the “Mr. Waters” who talked to Belknap on 25 October about how the war had started was Josiah Waters, Jr. (1747-1805). We know from Belknap’s later correspondence, preserved at and published by the Massachusetts Historical Society, that the two men were friends in the 1780s and ’90s. Waters collected orders for Belknap’s history of New Hampshire, for example. (By then everyone knew Waters as “Colonel Waters” for his highest militia rank.)

If Josiah Waters, Jr., told Belknap about how the Boston Patriots had learned of Gen. Thomas Gage’s plans, he wasn’t speaking as just some random guy in Dover. He came from Boston, where he had close connections with the town’s militia establishment. Even beyond that, his first cousin, William Dawes, was a key figure in both smuggling artillery out of occupied Boston and Dr. Joseph Warren’s alarm system.

The account Belknap wrote down in October 1775 is looking more reliable.

TOMORROW: More details from Mr. Waters?

Citizens at Boston’s Civic Festival of 1793

I’m jumping around among multiple series here [whatever happened to the Saga of the Brazen Head?], but there’s no better date than 14 July to return to Boston’s celebration of republican France in 1793.

At the start of the month I quoted a suggestion in the 21 Jan 1793 Boston Gazette that the selectmen find a new name for the short street in central Boston called “Royal Exchange Lane.” The word “royal” was just so pre-Revolutionary.

That proposal appeared in the midst of reports on Bostonians preparing for a big “Civic Feast” celebrating how France had become a republic. The deposition of King Louis XVI meant that Americans could be grateful to the French nation for being a crucial ally in the war for independence without the awkwardness of supporting a despot far less constitutionally fettered than George III.

Boston’s civic holiday took place on Thursday, 24 January. That day’s Independent Chronicle reported one some of the events:

A large number of citizens will dine at Fanuiel [sic] Hall; notwithstanding which tables plentiously provided, will be laid in State Street; and whoever chooses may partake freely.

At the Stump of Liberty-Tree, an entertainment is providing for a large number of citizens, who usually have celebrated propitious events at that spot.

The Citizen Soldiers of the Independent Fusiliers, will dine at BRYANT’s Liberty Hall, Equality-Lane, (late Royal Exchange Lane.)

It looks like innholder John Bryant decided to rename the street his establishment stood on “Equality Lane” to reflect the new political ethos, even in advance of action by the selectmen.

The long, detailed report on the “CIVIC FESTIVAL!” in the 26 January Columbian Centinel showed how people were adopting that new name. That newspaper said the fusilier company “dined together at Citizen BRYANT’s, in Equality-lane.” Likewise, it referred to the nearby Dock Square as “Liberty-Square.”

Innkeeper Bryant wasn’t the only celebrant to receive the republican title “Citizen.” The newspaper reported that “citizen S[amuel]. Adams,” then lieutenant governor, presided over the feast in Faneuil Hall alongside “Citizen Letombe”—French consul Philippe André-Joseph de Létombe, who had started serving under the king and would remain in office through to the emperor. “Citizen [Josiah?] Waters” was marshal of the parade and oversaw the decorations. “Citizen [Samuel] Bradlee” commanded the company of artillery.

“Citizen Joseph Croswell, of Plymouth” provided the words of a hymn “To Liberty” while “Citizen [John] Woart” hosted another gathering at the Green Dragon Tavern where mechanics sang “God Save Great Washington.” Likewise, “Citizen Charles Jarvis,” soon to be one of Boston’s leading Jeffersonians, proposed a toast to President George Washington.

Most striking of all to me, this same page of the Columbian Centinel included a letter to the editor that proudly began “Citizen Russell.” Benjamin Russell (shown above in later life) and his newspaper would soon be pillars of the Federalist Party in New England. Yet in January 1793 they were going gaga over Revolutionary France.

Indeed, another news item on this page of the Centinel warned “24 Frenchmen” in Boston who had signed “A Protest against the French revolution” that they should be “upon their guard, in attempts of this nature,” and maintain “a respectful silence.” Nobody, not even Frenchmen, were supposed to criticize France as it finally became a republic.

COMING UP: Party poopers.

Some Out of Town Jasper

As I quoted yesterday, in 1853 a story surfaced saying that Josiah Waters, Jr., had delivered intelligence about the impending British army march on 18 Apr 1775.

This story is significant in predating Henry W. Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which romanticized the event and focused people’s attention on Revere over all the other people involved in the Lexington Alarm.

It also came with a provenance: from Waters himself to Joseph Curtis to his relation Catherine Curtis to the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Though that story might have evolved along that path of transmission, it’s always good to know that path.

Waters reportedly credited his knowledge of the British military plans to “Jasper, an Englishman, a gunsmith by trade, whose shop was in Hatter’s Square.” This man “worked for the British,” gaining their trust. He rented space to the family of a sergeant major who ended up “telling him all their plans.” Or at least the plans that a sergeant major would be privy to.

Of course I went looking for traces of a gunsmith named Jasper working in pre-Revolutionary Boston. I didn’t find any. But I did find a man named Jasper who came from Britain and worked with metal, so he could have repaired gunlocks along with other things.

William Jasper moved from Britain to North America soon after the end of the French and Indian War. The first sign of him is this advertisement from the 29 Aug 1763 New-York Gazette.

WILLIAM JASPER, cutler, Just arrived from England, is now settled in New York, near the Fly, Queen-Street, near the Burling’s and Beekman’s Slip next Door to Mr. Murray’s, takes this Method to acquaint the publick, That he makes all kinds of Surgeons instruments, and grinds and cleans them; makes Razors, Pen knives, scissars, and all kinds of Edge Tools, which he also grinds; and makes Cutlery in general; makes Buckles of the best Block-Tin, wrought and plain Men’s Gold and Silver Ware; Pinking-Irons of all Sorts; Sadlers Tools; Fret-Saws; Hatters knives; likewise draws Teeth with great Ease and Safety, being accustomed to it for many Years. He likewise has brought over a Quantity of Copper and Tin Hard-Ware. All Persons that please to favour him with their Custom, may depend upon being served in the best and cheapest Manner.

A cutler, according to Dr. Samuel Johnson, was “one who makes or sells knives.” Jasper made all sorts of bladed tools, from surgeon’s scalpels to fret saws, and he also offered some dentistry.

In 1768 William Jasper was in Boston, marrying Anne Newman on 29 June 1768. This couple appears on the list of marriage intentions read in all the pulpits, and it’s not clear to me where they actually wed. I also can’t find records of the couple having children, though there’s a mention of them having done so.

The Curtis story said Jasper the gunsmith had a shop “in Hatter’s Square,” which was also known as Creek Lane and later Creek Square. It was near the center of town, literally on the Mill Creek that defined the edge of the North End. I can’t situate William Jasper the cutler there, but he must have rented a shop somewhere.

Weapons collectors have found William Jasper’s name on a couple of blades possibly made during the war. Above is his maker’s stamp on a spontoon head from the late 1700s. In For Liberty I Live, Al Benting described a halberd inscribed with Jasper’s name. I don’t see any sign that he made guns, though perhaps he repaired them.

There was also a William Jasper among the American prisoners of war taken on the Boston-based privateer Rising States on 15 Apr 1777 and housed in Forton Prison in Britain. I have no idea what happened to that man and thus whether he could be the cutler. But the surname Jasper was rare in Massachusetts.

The next time William Jasper appeared in a newspaper was this notice in the 8 Aug 1782 Continental Journal:

TO THE PUBLIC.

JASPER, Surgeon Instrument Maker in Boston, has lately invented and compleated an Instrument for drawing Teeth perpendicular, which was never done before, for which if he can have a patentee from Congress, it shall be universally known, if not, let it die in oblivion.

I see no indication that the Confederation Congress considered granting Jasper a patent for this new dental instrument. There was no statutory process for the national government to grant patents until 1790, and the Congress had a lot of other business to handle in 1782.

Finally, the Continental Journal of 23 Nov 1786 reported that “Mr. William Jasper, Cutler,” had died in Boston. Anna Jasper administered William’s estate, relying on two men to complete the paperwork since she couldn’t sign her name. William Jasper’s property, evaluated at £24.6.6, included metal-working tools, some old books and pictures, and household utensils, but no real estate. Probate judge Oliver Wendell signed off on the administration, which included a general mention of children.

On 10 Apr 1791 a woman named Nancy Jasper married Joseph Jones in the Rev. Thomas Baldwin’s Second Baptist Meeting-house. Was this the widow Anne Jasper? Or a daughter of the 1768 marriage? The next year, on 25 Mar 1792, another Baptist minister, the Rev. Samuel Stillman, married Mary Jasper to John Dumaresque Dyer. Was this a daughter of the cutler William Jasper? If the family had been Baptist before the war, that would explain why there are no records of the children being baptized soon after birth, as there usually are for Congregationalist and Anglican families.

Thus, the sparse record of William Jasper’s life in America shows that he could have been Josiah Curtis’s informant in April 1775 but is far from confirmation of that story.

Did Josiah Waters Obtain the News of the British March?

Some accounts of the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775 credit Josiah Waters of Boston with helping to provide intelligence about the British army’s plans to Dr. Joseph Warren. How did Waters enter the historical picture?

Waters’s role seems to have been first mentioned in print in 1853, when the New England Historical and Genealogical Register published an article titled “Revolutionary Incidents,” based on the recollections of Joseph Curtis, then 86 years old.

Curtis spoke of “Col. Josiah Waters of Boston, a staunch whig, and who afterwards acted as engineer in directing the building of the forts of Roxbury.” The article summed up the story this way:

The Americans obtained this news, through an individual by the name of Jasper, an Englishman, a gunsmith by trade, whose shop was in Hatter’s Square; he worked for the British, but was friendly to the rebels; a sergeant major quartered in his family and made a confidant of him, telling him all their plans. Jasper repeated the same to Col. Waters, who made it known to the Committee of Safety. The Colonel has often told this story, years after, to his then young friend, Joseph Curtis, who is still living.

There were two men named Josiah Waters in pre-Revolutionary Boston, father and son. The father was born in 1721, became a militia captain by 1770, and died in 1784.

Josiah Waters, Jr., was born to that man and his wife Abigail in 1747. After the war he became active in the Massachusetts militia, rising to the rank of colonel and collecting “many facts, for a history,” before dying in 1805. So when Joseph Curtis referred to “The Colonel,” he meant the younger man. Curtis was in his thirties when Col. Waters died, so he had plenty of time to hear that veteran’s stories.

Both father and son were involved in building forts in Roxbury early in the siege of Boston. Gen. William Heath’s memoir mentioned “Capt. Josiah Waters of Boston” as an impromptu engineer, and in a 21 October 1775 letter John Adams referred to “young Josiah Waters” as another. In 1776 the Connecticut legislature appointed Josiah Waters as engineer for Fort Trumbull in New London with Josiah Waters, Jr., as his assistant. (However, Gen. John Thomas wrote that neither Waters had “great Understanding” of either fortifications or gunnery “any further than Executing or overseeing works, when Trased out.”)

I mentioned Abigail Waters, Josiah, Sr.’s wife (and Josiah, Jr.’s mother). She was a daughter of Deacon Thomas Dawes and thus an aunt of William Dawes, Jr. In 1773, as discussed here, Capt. Waters and Adjutant Dawes were both asking the Boston selectmen if they could use Faneuil Hall for militia training.

The fact that Josiah Waters, Jr., and William Dawes, Jr., were first cousins becomes significant in looking at another of the details Joseph Curtis recounted about the start of the war:

The intelligence, that the British intended to go out to Lexington, was conveyed over Boston Neck to Roxbury by Ebenezer Dorr, of Boston, a leather dresser, by trade, who was mounted on a slow jogging horse, with saddle bags behind him, and a large flapped hat upon his head, to resemble a countryman on a journey. Col. Josiah Waters…followed on foot, on the sidewalk at a short distance from him, until he saw him safely past all the sentinels.

There was a Roxbury farmer named Ebenezer Dorr, but no other source connects him to the 18 April alarm. Many sources, some contemporaneous, credit William Dawes, and Curtis probably just muddled that name. (After all, Yankees would drop the R in “Dorr.”) But it’s reasonable that Dawes’s cousin might have watched to make sure he got out of town safely.

Was Waters also a conduit of crucial information about the British march for Dr. Joseph Warren? There are multiple stories of Bostonians reporting on British military activity, and we know Warren didn’t rely on a single source. Waters may well have supplied helpful intelligence, but he wasn’t the only Bostonian to do so.

TOMORROW: What about this gunsmith named Jasper?

“Mr. Adjutant Daws & the Sergeants”

In Paul Revere’s Ride, David Hackett Fischer made an impressive case that Paul Revere had a social network among the Boston Whigs second only to Dr. Joseph Warren.

As I’ve delved into the sources myself, I came to see the data that went into that analysis as seriously flawed. Nonetheless, I think the conclusion about about the importance of those two men’s social networks is sound.

One of the main themes of my talk last weekend about William Dawes, Jr., was that he, too, enjoyed a broad and buzzing social network.

Dawes got off too a good start as first cousin to the builder Thomas Dawes (1731-1809), who hosted a political caucus in the early 1760s, later rose to be colonel of the Boston militia regiment, and eventually was a deacon at Old South.

In the early 1770s, William Dawes began to climb in Boston society by those same routes. He was elected to office in town meetings, starting as an “Informer of Deer”—basically a game warden. Provincial law required all towns to elect such deer-reeves. Boston was unlikely to have had many deer being hunted out of season, and I can’t tell if Dawes got this job as a sinecure or because as a leather-dresser he was actually in touch with deer poachers.

Dawes also rose within the militia, being designated as the regiment’s adjutant with the rank of lieutenant in 1772. (In The Road to Concord I said he was “junior adjutant” because I was misled by old typography and didn’t think through old prose with new knowledge. The “Junr.” was part of Dawes’s name, not his rank.) As adjutant, he helped organize the militia drills and therefore must have gotten to know all the officers and most of the men.

On 4 Nov 1772, for example, the selectmen of Boston (including John Hancock) met at Faneuil Hall to consider a request for the use of that building. According to the official town records:

Mr. Adjutant Dows, has desired on behalf of a milatary chore [i.e. corps] to have the use of Faneuil Hall three Monday Nights in a Month which was granted accordingly.

Dawes’s crowd used the hall through that winter. On 10 Mar 1773, another militia officer came to the selectmen with a competing request:

The Selectmen having heard Capt. Waters and Mr. Adjutant Dows relative to the Hall, it was determined that they should each have the Hall two Nights, in a Month. the Adjutant to have the first Monday Night.

I believe “Capt. Waters” was Josiah Waters, Sr. (1721-1784), listed with that rank in the militia in 1774. He was also William Dawes’s uncle by marriage.

A few weeks later, on 28 April, Waters was back at the selectmen’s office:

Capt. Waters attended, and desired the use of the Hall for his Company every Monday Evening, as Capt. Waters informs that Mr. Adjutant Daws & the Sergeants have done with it.

It would be nice to know how “Mr. Adjutant Daws & the Sergeants” used Faneuil Hall. Were they training themselves in the standard drill so they could train the men, training some of those men, or just socializing?

That winter the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company met in Faneuil Hall every first Wednesday evening before shifting to Fridays. Dawes was also a member of that organization from 1768, and he served as a sergeant in 1770. In 1772, however, he was fined a shilling for not appearing at a meeting. After the war, Dawes helped to revive the company by signing up a large class of new members, several related to him—more networking.

Since Dawes knew so many men in Boston, it makes sense that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s committee of safety went to him in early 1775 when they needed to connect with the militiamen hiding two brass cannon. Likewise, he made a good messenger for Dr. Warren. Col. John Hancock of the Company of Cadets must have recognized Adjutant Dawes in Lexington in the early morning of April 19, 1775, just as he recognized Paul Revere.

“Here are the cannon—Our cannon are coming”

Among the documents the Massachusetts Historical Society has made available in digital form is Sarah (Winslow) Deming’s letter detailing day by day her experience at the start of the Revolutionary War.

From a genteel family with relatives on both sides of the political divide, Deming was inside Boston when the fighting began on April 1775. And she wanted to get out. The letter is quite fraught with emotion about that, which may conceal the fact that her departure was in fact quite swift and early.

This is from Deming’s description of 20 April:

about 3 o’clock P.M. the Chaises return’d (for they both went to Jamaca plain wth Mr. Waters’s wife, children & maids he having first engag’d them, one of ’em being his brother Thomsons, which he Mr. Thomson offer’d to Mr. D.g while it was out, & promis’d we should have on its return). We set off immediately, Mr. D.g & I in one, Sally & Lucinda, with Jemmy Church to drive in the other.

Was “Mr. Waters” Josiah Waters? A father and son of that name helped to design the fortification at Roxbury. I see connections between them and a distiller named James Thompson, but I haven’t confirmed a familial relationship. Deming later reports that Waters got out of Boston on 21 April, with his parents having gone to Woburn and his own family headed to Providence.

Was “Jemmy Church” the eldest son of Dr. Benjamin Church, named James Miller Church? He was born in 1759 and worked as an assistant apothecary and surgeon’s mate during the siege. (There’s no evidence he knew of his father’s spying at this time.)

We were stop’d & enquir’d of wether we had any arms etc. by the First & Second [British army] centinals, but they treated us civilly, & did not search us. The third & last centinals did not chalenge us.—so we got safe thro’ ye lines. . . .

Which road will you take said Mr. Deming? Give the horse the rane; was my answer. The horse took thro’ Roxbury Street, ye way he had but a little before pass’d. When we were by the Gray-hown, a lad who came out of Boston wth us, & who generally kept by our side, tho’ sometimes before us, run up to our chaise wth a most joyful countenance & cry’d, Sir, Sir; Ma’m, here are the cannon—Our cannon are coming—just here upon the road, heres a man told me so, who has seen ’em. The matter of his joy was terror to me, I only said, to Lewis go home to your father, & let our horse go, so we parted.

Lewis? Who’s Lewis? The name never appears before in the document, and never again. He doesn’t seem to be the “lad.” I suspect Lewis was a family servant, possibly enslaved. Lucinda, mentioned above, definitely was enslaved.

The “Gray-hown” was the former Greyhound tavern, owned by John Greaton, at the corner of modern Washington and Vernon Streets. It became a provincial checkpoint during the siege.

Of course, what really caught my eye was that unnamed lad’s excitement about “Our cannon.” That reflects the Patriots’ pleasure at having artillery to fight the British army. The same guns made Sarah Deming worry about the damage they could do to the people and houses in Boston.

It seems worth noting that while Deming described meeting “little parties, old, young, & middle aged, some with fife & drum,” as she proceeded through Roxbury, she never described actually seeing those cannon. I suspect it took longer to deploy them, fully equipped and mounted, than the Patriots had thought.

The Boston Regiment in late 1774

After last week's posting about war games on Boston Common, Alfred F. Young wrote to ask, “Do you have any idea of how many militia companies there were in Boston?” So I looked it up in Mills and Hicks’s British and American Register for the Year 1775.

These were the officers of the “BOSTON REGIMENT” when that little reference book was printed in late 1774:

Col. John Erving (shown here in a postcard from Smith College)
Lt. Col. John Leverett
Maj. Thomas Dawes
Captains
Richard Boynton (with the rank of major)
Jeremiah Stimpson
Josiah Waters
Martin Gay
Samuel Ridgway
Samuel Barrett
John Haskins
Ephraim May
David Spear
Andrew Symmes
Edward Procter
Job Wheelwright
Adjutant William Dawes, Jr. (with the rank of lieutenant)

There were twelve captains in all, one for each company. After each captain’s name the Register listed his lieutenant and ensign (the equivalent of a second lieutenant).

There’s a similar rundown of the Boston regiment’s officers as of 1 Apr 1772 in young printer John Boyle’s “Journal of Occurrences in Boston,” printed in volumes 84 and 85 of the New England Historical & Genealogical Register. A close look shows why Boyle was so pleased to record this information: he'd just been commissioned as an ensign in one company. (By late 1774, he was a lieutenant.)

Comparing the two lists show that the captains and all superior officers remained the same, but three lieutenants had been succeeded by men who had been ensigns and one by an entirely new name. Of the twelve ensigns in 1774, only five had held that rank in 1772.

Boston also had some specialized militia units, which Mills & Hicks listed in this order:

• The grenadier company, founded in 1772. Maj. Dawes of the main regiment was also captain of this company (which might have been why blacksmith Capt. Boynton got the brevet rank of major).
• The train, or artillery company, under Maj. Adino Paddock. According to an inside source, however, this company had basically dissolved in Sept 1774 when its cannons disappeared.
• The South Battery company, under Maj. Jeremiah Green, which staffed the fort overlooking the southern end of the wharfs; by late 1774, British army units were using that battery.
• The North Battery company, under Maj. Nathaniel Barber, still overseeing the smaller battery in the North End.

In addition, Boston was home to the Ancient & Honorable Artillery Company, then functioning as a private training organization for militia officers; the governor’s troop of horse-guards, fourteen strong and probably no more than ceremonial; and the Independent Company of Cadets, in flux after most members had resigned when Gen. Thomas Gage dismissed John Hancock from his role as company captain.

All told, that’s seventeen functioning companies, though the two battery companies might have needed fewer men than the rest. The 1765 census found 2,941 white men over the age of sixteen in Boston. The law exempted some of those men (sexagenarians, clergymen, etc.) from militia service, but the mystery for me is what informal customs militia officers followed in running the regiment.

Did Samuel Adams, whose hands shook with palsy, carry a musket alongside his neighbors? (Would you want to drill in front of him?) We know African-American men served in militia units outside of Boston. Did they also drill in the big town’s musters? How easy was it to skip militia training by paying a small fine or simply not showing up? How did the system deal with illnesses or absences for, say, going out on a fishing boat? In sum, the law said nearly every white male inhabitant between sixteen and sixty was supposed to turn out for militia training, but how many actually did?