“The honor of this enterprise belongs to Joseph Wheaton”

Yesterday I shared part of a letter Joseph Wheaton wrote in 1818 about how men from Machias, Maine, captured H.M.S. Margaretta early in the Revolutionary War.

In 1824, Charles W. Goldsborough quoted that letter in The United States Naval Chronicle. Many other chroniclers drew on it to describe the fight, sometimes said (by people not from Fairhaven) to be the first naval battle of the war.

In The Pictorial Field-book of the Revolution (1852), Benson J. Lossing said in a footnote:

The honor of this enterprise belongs to Joseph Wheaton, a native of New York, then residing at Machias. He was an energetic young man of twenty years. He proposed the expedition, but modestly named [Jeremiah] O’Brien for commander. He was active in the whole affair, and in person seized the colors of the Margaretta.

However, in a 1975 article for Maine History titled “The Historiography of The Margaretta Affair, Or, How Not To Let the Facts Interfere With a Good Story,” Edwin A. Churchill grouped Wheaton’s description of events with other unsupported or untenable tales. Churchill referred to “the self-centered bragging of Joseph Wheaton” and said his memory was “notoriously bad.”

Churchill’s main targets were two big errors that he said “traditionalist” authors kept making in their accounts of the Margaretta affair. It wasn’t sparked by conflict over a Liberty Pole, he insisted, and Benjamin Foster’s ship didn’t run aground before the fight. Wheaton wrote nothing about a pole, but he left Foster out of his account entirely. 

I won’t continue to quote Wheaton’s account, which you can read in full here, thanks to Maine Memory. Nor will I try to pick apart its details, much as I like doing that. Other people, closer to Machias geographically and emotionally, can handle that task.

Instead, I’ll consider how Joseph Wheaton’s account of the Margaretta capture fits, or doesn’t fit, with his status in March 1776: in the family of a royal appointee evacuating Boston with the British military.

It’s possible that Joseph Wheaton did take part in the attack on the Royal Navy sloop in 1775, despite (or because of) how that would have angered his father, a local Customs officer and Loyalist. He wouldn’t have been the only Revolutionary veteran to muddle details of events forty years before and put himself and his friends at the center of an event. He definitely did join the Continental Army a couple of years later.  

On the other hand, coming from a Loyalist family gave Joseph Wheaton a strong incentive to play up his Patriot credentials. In 1776 Massachusetts authorities even confined him as a suspected Loyalist. Telling the story of helping to capture the Margaretta let Wheaton claim that he’d fought for what became the U.S. from (nearly) the start of the war.

And Wheaton told that story a lot.

TOMORROW: Over the decades.

Flagging a Call for Presentations at the 2026 HistoryFest in Westfield

In the summer and fall of 1774, New England towns competed to put up Liberty Poles, the taller the better.

On 28 July, Ephraim Potter and Edward Lawrence brought such a flagpole into Deerfield, though they didn’t have time to set it up that day. Young Dr. Elihu Ashley estimated that it was “about fifty feet.”

Dr. Ashley got a good look at that pole because that evening he sawed through it with the help of some friends.

The next day, Ashley wrote in his diary, the talk of the town was “nothing but Liberty, and ye Poles being Sawd.” Soon “ye Liberty Pole was set up and also a Tory Pole as they in their infinite wisdom are pleased to call it.” I wonder if together those poles measured fifty feet.

On 30 July, an anonymous public letter was posted in town. It declared Potter, Lawrence, and their comrades to be “a pack of ignorant villains.” Also, whoever wielded the saw was “some Malicious Person, Inimical to his Country”—though that was meant ironically, since it’s now thought the anonymous letter came from Dr. Ashley. It went on:

Where are things going, that so sensible people as you know the Town of Deerfield are, should suffer these Rascals to carry matters on so. I cannot help feeling, and very sensibly, when I think what the Consequences of these things will be & have no reason to think but that they will issue in blood…

Today Deerfield’s Liberty Pole is commemorated in a stone marker and in a flagpole in Historic Deerfield, as I photographed it above last year. (It was flying a version of the Taunton flag.)

That’s just one Revolutionary story from the Connecticut River valley, also called the Pioneer Valley.

On 11 April, the Pioneer Valley History Network and the Westfield State University History & Philosophy Department will host their 2026 HistoryFest in Westfield. Like History Camp Boston, this is a chance for local chroniclers and researchers to share their work with other people curious about history.

The organizers say:

Our Homespun History Conference thrives on the stories, ideas, and passions of people who care deeply about the history of the Pioneer Valley, Massachusetts, and the many ways history connects to museums, historical societies, and community life today. Whether your focus is local history, material culture, public history practice, education, preservation, or an untold story waiting to be shared, we invite you to submit a proposal to present.

That process starts with their invitation to propose a session through this form.

The organizers say they aren’t necessarily looking for formal “experts” but for:

• Fascinating stories and fresh perspectives
• Practical or thought-provoking workshop topics
• Case studies, community projects, or works-in-progress

For people with questions, they have scheduled some brief Zoom information sessions at different times of the day on 3, 13, and 19 February. For more details, click on the proposal link above.

The Triumph of the Barnstable Crowd

As recounted yesterday, on 27 Sept 1774 a reported 1,500 people surrounded the courthouse in Barnstable, refusing to let the county court session begin.

The local justices kept assuring the crowd that they, too, were concerned about the Massachusetts Government Act and other Coercive Acts, but they felt they should sit to hear local cases.

The committee chosen by the crowd, led by Dr. Nathaniel Freeman, told the justices that wasn’t satisfactory. That day apparently ended in a stalemate with the courthouse still closed.

The committee drafted a promise for each justice to sign, promising not to act under the new laws, even if that meant losing their governmental appointment. Then the crowd decided that sheriffs, deputies, and anyone else holding a royal commission do the same.

Feeling even more expansive, the crowd went on to demand that a local who had threatened (jokingly, he said) to cut down Barnstable’s Liberty Pole promise never to do that. That man made himself scarce.

Finally, the crowd voted to ask James Otis, Sr., a longtime member of the Massachusetts Council under the previous constitution, to go to Salem in case Gov. Thomas Gage went through with his initial plan to convene the Massachusetts General Court there.

On 28 September, 250 years ago today, several justices and other royal appointees signed the crowd’s promises. Otis promised to go to Salem. The crowd marched back to the courthouse, drums sounding. There they resolved to provide arms for their defense, not to buy any imported goods, and “endeavor to suppress mobs and riots” (as well as “common peddlers”).

In 1830, Barnstable County built a new, larger courthouse. The 1763 building was eventually sold to a Baptist church that expanded and remodeled it, as shown above. Then in 1972 it became the headquarters of Tales of Cape Cod. But somewhere within that building is the courthouse at the center of a political protest in 1774. 

Fort Plain Museum’s 2024 Conference in the Mohawk Valley, 14–16 June

The Fort Plain Museum’s Revolutionary War Conference 250 in the Mohawk Valley will take place this year on 14–16 June in Johnstown, New York. Registration is open.

The scheduled speakers are:

• James Kirby Martin and guest host Mark Edward Lender having a fireside chat about the American Revolutionary War, its Sestercentennial, and their legacies as historians
• Nancy Bradeen Spannaus, “Alexander Hamilton’s War for American Economic Independence Through Two Documents” (supported by the Alexander Hamilton Awareness Society)
• Gary Ecelbarger, “‘This Happy Opportunity’: George Washington and the Battle of Germantown”
• Shirley L. Green, “Revolutionary Blacks: Discovering the Frank Brothers, Freeborn Men of Color, Soldiers of Independence”
• Mark Edward Lender, “‘Liberty or Death!’: Some Revolutionary Statistics and Existential Warfare”
• Shawn David McGhee, “No Longer Subjects of the British King: The Political Transformation of Royal Subjects to Republican Citizens, 1774-1776”
• James Kirby Martin, “The Marquis de Lafayette Visits the Mohawk Valley, Again and Again”
• Kristofer Ray, “The Cherokees, the Six Nations and Indian Diplomacy circa 1763-1776”
• Matthew E. Reardon, “The Traitor’s Homecoming: Benedict Arnold’s Raid on New London, September 4-13, 1781”
• John L. Smith, “The Unexpected Abigail Adams: A Woman ‘Not Apt to Be Intimidated’” (supported by the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation)
• Bruce M. Venter, “Albany and the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765”
• Glenn F. Williams, “No Other Motive Than the True Interest of This Country: Dunmore’s War 1774”
• Chris Leonard, Schenectady City Historian, “Storehouse Schenectady: Depot and Transportation Center for the Northern War”
• David Moyer, “Recent Archaeology Discoveries on the Site of Revolutionary War Fort Plain”

There will also be a bus tour of Revolutionary sites in the area with the theme of “1774: The Rising Tide.” In that year Schenectady saw a violent Liberty Pole riot while the British Indian agent Sir William Johnson passed away in July.

For more information, visit this page.

More 2023 Patriots’ Day Events

The Patriots’ Day 2023 events in Minute Man National Historical Park are just one set of commemorations coming up in the area.

They’re just the easiest to keep track of since there’s a government agency to do so.

Many other events are organized at the town level by historical societies or reenacting groups. Some organizations proudly maintain traditions tied to particular days, regardless of when the holiday falls. And some sites have programs for school vacation week as well.

This is a varied sample of other Patriots’ Day–related events this month.

Saturday, 8 April, 10:30 A.M.
Bedford Parade and Pole Capping
Wilson Park, Bedford

I think the Liberty Cap on a Liberty Pole was a symbol that developed during the Federalist–Jeffersonian rivalry of the 1790s. Liberty Poles in the early 1770s featured variations on the British flag. But this is a beloved local commemoration.

Saturday, 15 April, 1:00 to 3:00 P.M.
A Visit with Paul Revere
Paul Revere House, Boston

Michael Lepage portray’s the house’s most famous owner welcoming visitors. Included in regular admission.

Sunday, 16 April, 2:00 to 3:30 P.M.
Lincoln Salute: Festival of 18th-Century Fife & Drum Music
Pierce Park, 17 Weston Road, Lincoln

The Lincoln Minute Men host the fife and drum groups who come for the next day’s parades in outdoor musical performances. Bring a picnic basket, blanket, and lawn chairs. (The picture above comes from a Lincoln Salute so many years ago this drummer is probably practicing law now.)

Monday, 17 April, all day
Lexington Patriots’ Day Events
Various sites around town

Events include Revere’s midnight arrival at the Hancock-Clarke House, the alarm from the belfry, the fight on Lexington common (starting at 5:30 A.M.), the regathering of the local company (8:30 A.M.), and battle demonstrations in Tower Park (4:00 P.M.). The historical society’s Buckman Tavern, Munroe Tavern, and Hancock-Clarke House will be open for tours, and the film “First Shot” will be shown at the Depot.

Monday, 17 April, 9:00 A.M. to noon
Patriots’ Day Parade in Boston
From City Hall Plaza to “The Prado” on Hanover Street

The description says, “After a flag-raising ceremony at City Hall, the parade stops at King’s Chapel Burying Ground to lay a wreath on the tomb of Major William Dawes [actually that’s the grave of his father; the rider’s remains are at Forest Hills], who was a member of the Ancient & Honorable Artillery Company of the Massachusetts Militia [this company wasn’t part of the official militia in 1775], and continues to Granary Burying Ground to lay a wreath at the grave of Paul Revere.”

Monday, 17 April, 9:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M.
William Dawes’ Ride
From Eliot Square in Roxbury to Lexington Green

A mounted Royal Lancer portraying Dawes is expected to visit Brookline’s Devotion School about 10:00 A.M., Hill Memorial Church in Allston about 10:30 A.M., Cambridge about 11:00 A.M., and Arlington Town Hall around noon.

Wednesday, 19 April, 11:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M.
Mix & Mingle with Rachel Revere
Paul Revere House, Boston

Judith Kalaora of History at Play portrays the silversmith’s second wife. Included in regular admission.

Thursday, 20 April, 1:00 to 3:00 P.M.
Patriot Fife & Drum
Paul Revere House, Boston

David Vose & Sue Walko play and discuss period music for everyone visiting the museum.

Tuesday, 25 April, 7:30 P.M.
A. Michael Ruderman on “The Battle of Menotomy”
Masonic Temple, 19 Academy Street, Arlington

The Arlington Historical Society’s provocative description says: “Battle Green was an accident. Concord Bridge, a skirmish. But in the most brutal and deadly warfare of April 19, 1775, nearly 6,000 combatants fought hand to hand and house to house, the length and breadth of Menotomy.”

Some Say the Tea Will End in Fire

Today’s the 247th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, which is impressive, though not quite at Sestercentennial level.

Earlier this month a student working on a History Day project asked me why the Sons of Liberty tossed the East India Company tea overboard instead of burning it.

I wrote back about the radicals’ goal to keep the tea from being brought on shore because then the tea tax could be legally collected, but also their need to preserve all property besides the tea from harm. Fire was too risky an element to add to the event.

That exchange got me thinking about whether the destruction of the tea by water in Boston harbor and the detailed press coverage of it established a template for when other groups of radicals wanted to destroy tea. People also threw tea into the ocean at:

• Boston in March 1774.
• New York in April 1774, as recounted starting here.
• Chestertown, Maryland, in May 1774.
• Charleston, South Carolina, in November 1774.

In Charleston, the initial shipment of East India Company tea in December 1773 had been confiscated and warehoused under an agreement between the local Whigs and government authorities. But the radicals destroyed a second shipment by water. Did they have the same practical reasons for doing that as the Bostonians, or were they consciously imitating that Bostonians?

Back in 1765, the Loyall Nine, the Boston crowds, and the Boston printers established the way to protest the Stamp Act: effigies with signage to ensure their message was clear, a procession, a bit of house-mobbing, and a bonfire after dark—followed by a detailed report in the newspaper. That’s what happened in Boston on 14 August, and then with local variations in Newport, in New Haven, in Halifax, in Virginia’s Westmoreland County, on St. Kitts, in New York City, and so on.

We can see the same pattern emerge with Liberty Poles. At New York, a very tall pole flying a British flag had become a bone of contention between British soldiers and locals who put up that banner in a show of being more committed to the British constitution than whoever was running Parliament. In 1774 that model inspired New England towns to erect their own flagpole, and then to compete in the newspapers over who put up the tallest poles or adorned their flags with more stirring mottos.

Those specific forms of protest were memes—a coinage I’m using in its original and more interesting sense, as an idea or cultural practice that spreads from one person or group to another like a gene or an germ. Was tossing tea into the nearest deep water that sort of idea? Certainly the image of that action has become an emblem of the American Revolution since the 1830s, commemorated and adapted for other causes.

Flames also destroyed tea, though, as that student had noted. Three days before the Boston Tea Party, the people of Lexington burned tea on their town common. They weren’t trying to prevent the new East India Company tea from being landed; they were promoting a wider tea boycott. They also had a much smaller amount of tea and more open space than the Bostonians, so fire made more sense than tossing the tea into Vine Brook.

Even after the destruction of the tea in Boston harbor was widely reported, smaller New England towns continued to follow the Lexington model—or to build the bonfire simply because it was easier. I can think of public or semi-public tea burnings at:

• Marshfield on 19 Dec 1773.
• Princeton, New Jersey, in January 1774.
• Provincetown in January 1774, along with men disguised as Indians in “black face.”
• Lyme, Connecticut, on 16 Mar 1774. 
• Salem, sometime in 1774.
• Greenwich, New Jersey, on 22 Dec 1774.

In Annapolis, Maryland, a ship and its cargo of tea were burned together on 19 Oct 1774, as shown above, combining fire and water. And in September 1774, people in York, Maine, disguised as Indians took away some tea but apparently returned it after that symbolic destruction was complete and it was safe to go back to drinking it.

Thus, I conclude that while tossing tea into the water became a meme in pre-Revolutionary America, people didn’t feel the need to follow that model in every detail. If a harbor was handy, they used that to destroy the tea. If they needed to hide their identities, they adopted Indian disguises—whether or not they actually destroyed tea. But if a bonfire was legally safe and easy, flames it was.

Halifax Reacts to the Occupation of Boston

In 1768 the royal governor of Nova Scotia, which included modern-day New Brunswick, was Lord William Campbell, shown here.

According to Emily P. Weaver’s 1904 paper “Nova Scotia and New England During the Revolution,” as of 1766 the royal government counted only 9,789 subjects in the whole province. This page from Statistics Canada gives the number 11,779. Either way, that was considerably smaller than Boston on its own.

That number didn’t include the soldiers stationed in the province or the crews of the Royal Navy ships that stopped at Halifax. Those men, and their families, were seen as transient. With such a small local population, however, they shaped the society greatly. Though Halifax had seen some anti-Stamp Act protests, it stayed close to the royal authorities through the Revolutionary turmoil. The Nova Scotia legislature ignored Massachusetts’s Circular Letter, for example.

On 25 June 1768, Gen. Thomas Gage sent important orders to the highest-ranking army officer in Halifax, Lt. Col. William Dalrymple of the 14th Regiment. Dalrymple was to consolidate all forces in the province and prepare them to sail to Boston. Gage wrote:

There is now at Halifax, one entire Regiment, and five Companies of another, and if you have Time to put the Orders in execution, which are transmitted to you, concerning the withdrawing the Troops from Louisbourg, St: Johns Island, and Fort Frederick, before any Requisition is made for the Aid of the King’s Forces; you will then have under your Command, and ready for immediate Service, a number of Troops equal to two Regiments, and three Companys.

You will embark therefore, if your Assistance is required, with the Whole, or any Part of those Troops, as Governor [Francis] Bernard shall demand, and if the Governor should be of Opinion, that it wou’d be requisite you should bring Artillery with you, the Detachment of the Royal Regiment of Artillery at Halifax, will be embarked at the same time, with such a Number of Pieces of Artillery, as they shall be Able to manage.

You will pay no Regard, in effecting this Service, to the leaving Halifax without Troops: it will be sufficient, that you leave there one Company, or a Detachment equal to a Company.

Gov. Bernard managed to slip out of demanding troops as Gage wanted him to do. Thus, he could claim to the Massachusetts Council that the decision to station soldiers in Boston came entirely from the Secretary of State in London, Lord Hillsborough, and he was merely following orders.

On 13 October, 250 years ago today, the Boston Whigs shared their understanding of how Halifax had experienced that redeployment:

A private letter from Halifax contains some particulars relative to the Boston expedition, not known before, viz. “That in consequence of orders received Sept. 11th, from this place, all the workmen in the King’s yard, necessary to equip the ships, were set to work on Sunday; a strict embargo laid, and guard vessels sent to the mouth of the harbour to prevent intelligence being sent, and more caution used than when fixing out for the Louisbourgh expedition; the embargo so strict, that an open shallop going a mackerel catching, was stopt and sent back to town; and that the troops embarked in as great hurry as was ever known in time of war.[”]—

What a tragi-commick scene is here presented! and how must it be viewed by European politicians?—

Another letter mentions, that as Halifax must sink without the support of troops and ships of war, some of their patriots were about erecting a liberty pole, and employing some boys to sing the Liberty Song through the streets, in hopes it may procure the return of those ships and forces or a larger number from Britain, in order to quell such disturbances.

If anyone from Halifax made such a remark, it was a joke. But the local economy really did depend on supplying the army and navy. On 12 September, the day after Dalrymple received his orders to sail, Lord William Campbell wrote to Hillsborough asking him to send those regiments back north as soon as possible. The royal governor warned that Nova Scotia’s “chief dependence was the circulating cash spent by the troops.”

“Through the Multitude, to the End of Murray’s Wharf”

On the night of 22 Apr 1774, New Yorkers emptied eighteen chests of tea belonging to Capt. James Chambers into the harbor while hundreds of people watched. This eventually became known as the New York Tea Party.

According to diarist William Smith, the crowd then carried the empty wooden chests to the Merchants Coffee House (shown here) and built a bonfire in the street. This blaze both celebrated the merchants’ unity and warned those gentlemen not to break the boycott as Chambers had.

The city’s activists had already summoned the public to the waterfront on Saturday morning to see off Benjamin Lockyer, captain of a ship carrying 698 chests of tea waiting outside the harbor near Sandy Hook. Again, that demonstration was supposed to both thank Lockyer for agreeing to sail that tea back to London and to make sure he understood how unwelcome it was.

On Saturday morning, the 25 April New-York Gazette reported, all the ships in the harbor flew the British flag, and “a large flag was hoisted on the Liberty Pole.” At 8:00 all the church bells rang. Then:

About 9, the greatest Number of People were collected at and near the Coffee-House, that was ever known in this City. At a Quarter past Nine the Committee came out of the Coffee-House with Captain Lockyer, upon which the Band of Musick attending, played, God save the King.

Immediately there was a Call for Captain Chambers,—where is he? where is he? Capt. Lockyer must not go till we find Capt. Chambers to send him with the Tea Ship.

This produced Marks of Fear in Capt. Lockyer, who imagining some Mischief was intended him; but upon Assurances being given him to the contrary, he appeared composed.

The Committee, with the Musick, conducted him through the Multitude, to the End of Murray’s Wharf, where he was put on board the Pilot Boat, and wished a safe Passage; upon which the Multitude gave loud Huzza’s, and many Guns were fired, expressive of their Joy at his Departure.

Lt. Gov. Cadwallader Colden added in a letter that Chambers “thought it was best to go off himself next Day with Captain Lockyer.”

For a while, some of Lockyer’s crew didn’t want to make that voyage. The Whigs’ committee of observation reported:

that the sailors of the Tea Ship, being unwilling to proceed with her to London, made a raft of spars and boards, in order to quit the ship with the tide of flood, but were observed by the Captain, and being aided by the Committee, who offered their assistance to him, they desisted from their project.

The merchants’ committee didn’t want ordinary sailors to get too independent, after all.

At 10:00 A.M. on Sunday the Nancy finally weighed anchor and headed back out to sea, still carrying the 698 chests of East India Company tea loaded the preceding fall. The committee’s sloop followed the ship for three leagues to be sure it was leaving and then turned back to New York.

TOMORROW: Fallout from the New York Tea Party.

New York’s Sons of Liberty at the Fraunces Tavern

Today the Fraunces Tavern Museum in New York City opens its new exhibition, “Fear & Force: New York City’s Sons of Liberty.” This display will remain on view in the Mesick Gallery for the next two years.

The museum’s announcement says:

On display in the Museum’s largest gallery, the exhibition will immerse visitors in New York City in the late 18th century, when the Sons of Liberty first began to make a name for themselves as an organized group who opposed British rule through violent resistance prior to the outbreak of the American Revolution.

The exhibition will take visitors through a timeline that chronicles key players and stories behind some of the most dramatic events that ignited the spark of revolution in the 13 colonies, from the staging of New York’s very own “tea party,” to tarring and feathering Loyalists.

The New York Tea Party took place on 22 Apr 1774, four months after the famous Boston Tea Party and one month after the less famous second Boston Tea Party. But I can see why this site wants to highlight the New York event, and I’ll say more about it tomorrow.

As for “tarring and feathering Loyalists,” New Yorkers actually carried out that public punishment on Customs employees or informers before Bostonians did, though folks in some of the smaller ports along Massachusetts’s north shore had established the tradition even earlier.

New York’s Sons of Liberty definitely originated Liberty Poles. They showed their patriotism by flying a British flag—while also tussling with British soldiers quartered nearby. The soldiers resented what they probably saw as hypocrisy or effrontery, and that produced a series of brawls, attempts to fell the locals’ flagpole, and erections of even larger flagpoles. Because when it came to Liberty Poles, size mattered.

In March 1770 the Sons of Liberty John Lamb and William Cunningham reportedly bought land for New York’s biggest Liberty Pole yet. Five years later when the war broke out, Lamb became a Continental Army artillery officer while Cunningham became provost, or head of prisoners, for the British army. I’d love to know more about Cunningham’s career in New York before 1775. Will this exhibit have something to say?

Among the artifacts to be displayed in the Fraunces Tavern’s largest room are “an iron fence fragment from the tearing down of the King George III statue in Bowling Green Park” in 1776 after the reading of the Declaration of Independence. A few months later, the royal forces took the city, and the Sons of Liberty had to go into hiding for more than six years. Perhaps a future Fraunces Tavern Museum exhibit will look at the New York City as the center of Loyalism during most of the war.

“A special Court for the Trial of a certain Criminal”

Yesterday I quoted two reports of anti-Stamp Act protests from the 30 Aug 1765 New-London Gazette. Here’s yet another, from the town of Lebanon, Connecticut, datelined 27 August:

Yesterday was held in this Town, a special Court for the Trial of a certain Criminal, late A[gen]t for this Colony: He made his Appearance at the Bar of said Court, in the Person of his VIRTUAL Representative, and was denied none of the just RIGHTS of Englishmen, being allowed the sacred Privilege of Trial by his Peers, &c.—

After a full Hearing, he was sentenced to be taken from the tribunal of Justice, placed in a Cart, with a Halter about his Neck, carried in Procession thro’ the Streets of the Town, to expose him to just Ignominy and Contempt, and then to be drawn to the place of Execution, and hanged by the Neck ’till dead, and afterwards to be committed to the Flames, that if possible he might be purified by Fire; which Sentence was immediately Executed amidst a vast concourse of Spectators exulting in the Prospect of Liberty.

On the right Hand of the Prisoner stood the grand Seducer of Mankind [i.e., you know who], offering him a Purse and hissing this Proposal, Accept this Offer and Inslave your Country and 400l. per Annum, shall be your Reward. His injured Country, represented by a Lady dressed in Sable, with Chains rattling at her Feet, was placed on the other Side, thus pleading with her base, unnatural Child.—My Son! remember that I have treated you with the utmost Tenderness, and bestow’d on you my highest Honours, pity your Country, and put not on me those Chains: to which he ungrateful, degenerate Son replied, in a Label proceeding from his Mouth, Perish my Country, so that I get that Reward: upon the utterance of which, such indignant Wrath swell’d in the Bosom of this venerable Matron, that her Power of Speech fail’d; yet the Sentiments of her Heart appeared glowing in Capital Characters upon her Breast, in the following Words:

“———Heaven crush those Vipers,
Who, singled out by a Community,
To guard her Rights, shall for a grasp of Ore,
Or Paltry Office, sell them to the Foe.”

Which awful prophetic and parental Curse presently took Place: for as soon as this Representative was exhibited sufficiently to excite mass Abhorrence and Detestation of his Crimes, being protected by a strong Guard, from the rage of the Populace thro’ the whole Procession; and after hanging till he was dead, was cut down and delivered into the Power of his false Friend and Seducer, who according to his usual Practice, chang’d from a Tempter to a Tormentor; plunging his Prisoner headlong into a huge pyramid of Fire, and followed him immediately himself, with his mighty Paws barring fast the Gates of this suitable Habitation: Mean while the Heavens resounded with Acclamations and loud Huzzas: Nor did a weeping Eye or relenting Heart hinder or allay any Demonstration of Joy, which an ardent Love of Liberty could inspire in the Breasts of her most virtuous Sons.

The lines of verse ascribed to mother England came from the play Mahomet, the Impostor, written by Voltaire and adapted by the Rev. James Miller for British audiences. Voltaire wrote that play as an attack on religious zealots; its original title is Le Fanatisme. Ironically, rural New Englanders were rather fond of religious zealotry.

It’s striking how within a short time all these rural towns shared the same understanding of how to protest the Stamp Act, based on the Boston August 14 model:

• hang the colony’s stamp agent in effigy with a small devil tempting him and some poetic labels.
• parade that pageantry around town.
• throw it in a bonfire after dark. 

Though there was an old British tradition of effigies and bonfires, especially on the Fifth of November, this particular political ritual seems to have gone from novelty to norm in less than two weeks.

Connecticut town leaders appear to have tried to distinguish their towns not by inventing new forms of protest but by how cleverly they could compose labels and describe the usual event for the newspapers. The printer of the New-London Gazette, Timothy Green, evidently thought his own town’s (expanded) report didn’t include enough poetry to match up to others, so he added: “As we would not chuse to be tho’t wholly out of Fashion, we affix the following from Addison’s Cato.” It reminds me of the competition among rural New England towns to erect the tallest Liberty Pole in 1774-75.

Meanwhile, Jared Ingersoll, the colony’s royally appointed stamp-tax collector, was taking steps to calm the populace.

COMING UP: Ingersoll’s public letter to the good people of Connecticut.

Reuben Brown, the Link Between Lexington and Concord

Reuben Brown was born in Sudbury in 1748. In 1770, soon after coming of age, he moved to Concord and established himself as a saddler. Three years later, on 12 May 1773, he married a girl from his old town, Mary (Polly) How. Their daughter Hepzibath arrived four months later on 15 September, and their second daughter Sally on 9 Mar 1775.

Also in early 1775, according to Concord historian Lemuel Shattuck, Brown made “cartouch-boxes, holsters, belts, and other articles of saddlery” for local militiamen. The town’s Liberty Pole stood in a field behind his shop.

But those weren’t Brown’s most significant contributions to the Battle of Lexington and Concord. He had a unique perspective on the action, as described in his highly wrought obituary in the 3 Oct 1832 The New England Farmer (reprinted from the Boston Courier):

Died at Concord, Mass. on the 25th ult. [i.e., of last month] Mr Reuben Brown, a rare specimen of that hardy, industrious, intelligent and fearless yeomanry which, fifty years ago, was the glory of the Commonwealth and the bulwark of the Union.

Mr Brown, who was a native of Sudbury and a grandson of the first minister of that ancient settlement, removed to Concord about the year 1771, and was of course just in season to witness the earliest scenes of the great Drama of the Age. He did witness them literally, indeed, for on the eventful morning of the 19th of April, long before day-break, he was on his way, alone, at the request of some of the Concord authorities, to reconnoitre the advance of the British to Lexington.

He reached the “Common” just as they were seen marching up the Boston road. He advised the American officers, who were wholly unprepared to meet an enemy, to withdraw; but they declined, chiefly from the firm belief, which their men shared with them, that the British would never think of firing upon them at all events.

Mr Brown waited to see the issue of the meeting—the blood of the first martyrs of American liberty—and he then returned rapidly to Concord and reported progress.

His work had now but commenced. His shop was closed—a large saddler’s establishment in which he had already fitted out several companies of cavalry and infantry—and then his house—standing on the main road in the village—and his wife with her infant children instructed to manage for herself in the woods north of the town, with many other females and infirm people of the place—

Mr. Brown then mounted his horse again, it being now about day-break, and commenced the task of alarming the neighboring country. And his efforts will need no comment when we say that he rode that day about 120 miles in the performance of this noble duty. The result of the exertions in which no single man probably bore so active a part as himself, is well known to all readers of a history which “the world has by heart.” On many other occasions he was equally efficient, though he did not happen to be at any time engaged in fighting the enemy in the field. Two of his brothers were at Bunker Hill.

Universally respected by his fellow citizens for his sound judgment, his energy, his industry, his public spirit, his cordial benevolence, and, above all, for that staunch old fashioned honesty which knew no shadow of turning—his gray hairs were crowned with the praise of a Patriot, and his death with the peace of a Christian. He came to his grave at the venerable age of 84.

Brown was thus the communication link between Lexington and Concord at the start of the fight. His report that the British troops were willing to shoot warned his own neighbors to be cautious about confronting those soldiers, putting off the confrontation in Concord for a few hours until more militia units arrived.

Reportedly, before leaving town the regulars took a chaise from Brown’s shop, perhaps to transport a wounded man. That man might well have been Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould—at least, men in Cambridge later took control of both Gould and Brown’s chaise. Reuben Brown also had a connection to another prisoner, Lt. Isaac Potter of the Marines: the provincials held him for a while in Brown’s house.

Here is an old photograph of that house from the collection of the Boston Public Library. Brown’s account books from a couple of decades later are at the Concord library.

Firm on this Basis Liberty Shall Stand

“About this image you want to include in your history textbook—we see potential problems with it.”

“Really? The rights are clear. It comes from the masthead of John Holt’s New York Journal in late 1774. And the Continental Congress adopted it about the same time.”

“Okay, but we have questions about how high-school students will…interpret it.”

“There’s a lot of symbolism in there—I think that’s a plus. There’s the rejoined ‘Join, or Die’ serpent as an icon of unity, and the Magna Carta, and the Liberty Pole—”

“Yes, the Liberty Pole.”

“With the Liberty Cap on top.”

“That’s the part we think might present problems for teachers.”

“Oh, and the hands—those represent the twelve colonies at the First Continental Congress. They’re making the pole stand up straight.”

“You’re not helping your case here.”

“In 1775 the engraver John Norman updated this symbol for America’s first architecture book. He dedicated it to Hancock and ‘all the MEMBERS’ of Congress.”

“Really, you should just stop talking.”

Samuel “Rat-trap” Adams’s Revolution

According to Samuel “Rat-trap” Adams, the wire-worker and former town crier, he:

• was six years old when the Stamp Act protests occurred, eleven in the year of the Boston Massacre, fourteen during the Tea Party, and sixteen in the first year of the war.
• helped the Sons of Liberty, reportedly by guarding the door when they had their meetings along with other boys.
• somehow served the Continental side during the Revolutionary War.
• conducted a prisoner from Worcester to Boston Jail during the Shays Rebellion.
• Ended up with a large striped banner that had been flown from a pole beside Liberty Tree when Boston’s Sons of Liberty had their meetings, which has since become known as the “Sons of Liberty flag.”

It’s good to know more now about this Samuel Adams’s life in the early 1800s, when he was a prominent character in Boston, but there’s still a frustrating dearth of information and evidence about his Revolutionary activity. I’d love to have a first-hand account of what it was like to be a teenager during the years leading up to the break with Britain. But the scraps Adams left simply offer more questions.

Liberty Tree was felled late in the summer of 1775, during the siege of Boston. That means this Samuel Adams’s connection to the tree has to date from his teens, well before he came of age. By what means did he become the keeper of the Sons of Liberty’s flag?

All signs point to Adams having grown up in the North End. Liberty Tree was far down in the South End. Rivalry between North End and South End gangs turned violent on most Pope Nights. So how easy would it have been for Adams to guard a door down on Essex Street?

Almost all the reports of a flag on the pole at Liberty Tree, mostly from the late 1760s, describe it as an ordinary British or “Union flag.” A Customs report said it was a “red flag,” which could have meant a red banner with the Union canton. No one described a flag with five red and four white stripes, which would have begged for interpretation.

When the Sons of Liberty raised their flag on their tall flagpole, sticking out above a tall elm tree, they were calling for a public meeting. They wanted masses of people. Often those gatherings were outdoors at the tree. The flag was not associated with closed-door strategy sessions that might need guarding.

Recent examination of the “Sons of Liberty flag” has found that it’s made from machine-woven cloth, which was rare in the 1760s and not made in America. Since a big part of the Boston Sons of Liberty tactics was to promote a boycott of goods imported from Britain, would they have chosen a rare British cloth for their banner?

Some descendants of this Samuel Adams said that he was the private of that name that Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors lists as serving in Capt. Josiah Harris’s company, Col. William Bond’s regiment, in late 1775. All we know about that Samuel Adams is that he joined up in Charlestown, like many of the regiment’s other men. But Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors has more than three pages of listings of men named Samuel Adams.

“Rat-trap” Adams lived long enough to apply for a federal pension based on Revolutionary service. We know he sought money from the state. But no Samuel Adams of Suffolk County appears on the lists of federal pensioners, and no one seems to have found an application from him describing his military experiences. So did he not serve long enough to qualify under any of the pension laws?

All told, Samuel Adams’s Revolution, how he came to possess the “Sons of Liberty flag,” and the origin of that flag remain shrouded in mystery. He and the banner definitely appeared at Boston historical commemorations and political rallies in the mid-1800s. They thus symbolize the radical reformers’ claim on the city’s Revolutionary heritage, along with every other political grouping. But “Rat-trap” Adams hasn’t convinced me we can say more than that.

Samuel Adams the Wire-worker

In two postings on the Bostonian Society’s blog, Kathryn Griffith just profiled Samuel Adams the wire-worker, source of the striped cloth in the society’s collection that’s become known as the “Liberty Tree Flag.”

Harris wrote about this man:

Samuel Adams was born in 1759, reportedly in the North End, to a book-binder named Benjamin Adams and his wife Abigail. Samuel had an older brother, Abraham, who became a leather-dresser and a well-respected citizen. Samuel married Catharine Fenno in Boston in 1781. They had 8 children together, including a son named for Benjamin Franklin, and a daughter, also Catharine, who married William Fenno, and through whose descendents the flag passed to John Fernald.

Adams moved around quite a bit according to the Boston city directories and the advertisements he placed in newspapers. He had several occupations during his lifetime; in fact it seems he came late to wire-working. In the 1790s Adams owned a wharf at the end of Cross Street from which he sold various goods. In the early 1800s he became the town crier, and printed a number of interesting advertisements announcing things he had found throughout the town. As a wire worker, his business was known as the Sign of the Flying Man and Fender Manufactory, and his advertisements included beautiful designs of his work. His work in wire also earned him the nickname, “Rat-Trap Adams,” by which he was known affectionately (or not, depending on the source).

Because Adams was a minor public figure, his nineteenth-century life is fairly well documented. Indeed, his death in 1855 was reported across the country. One California newspaper ran this notice:

Death of a Veteran Citizen.—Mr. Samuel Adams, one of the oldest inhabitants of Boston, died at his residence on the 21st March, at the advanced age of about 96 years. The Traveller says: “He was a witness, and no doubt sometimes a participant, in the many exciting street scenes which occurred in Boston previous to the actual commencement of hostilities. He had in his possession as a relic of those glorious days, a flag which was hoisted on the liberty pole near Essex street, and which has of late been frequently displayed in this city. Mr. Adams was a mechanic—a wire worker by trade, and followed his business until within a few years. In religious matters he was an atheist, and in olden times a close attendant upon all town meetings and public gatherings, where his rather ultra democratic sentiments caused his opponents to taunt him with being a ‘French Jacobin.’”

Unfortunately, this Samuel Adams’s eighteenth-century activities, and his connection to Liberty Tree, are much less certain.

TOMORROW: Young Samuel Adams.

Dating the Forster Flag

Today Doyle New York auctions the Forster Flag, an unusual banner said to date from the Revolutionary War (shown here before its recent conservation).

As I discussed yesterday, the family that owned the flag in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century passed down lore that it had been captured from British troops on 19 Apr 1775, but that doesn’t seem plausible.

A rival, contradictory claim is Lt. Samuel Forster and his Manchester militia company marched under this flag on that day. That means it would have had to be remade with its thirteen stripes  in 1774 or early 1775.

In 2002 The Flag Bulletin ran an analysis (P.D.F. download) accepting that story and concluding that this was “the first American flag ever made.” (Of course, the author of that article was Dr. Whitney Smith, who had bought the flag from Forster’s descendants for the Flag Heritage Foundation. The foundation is now selling the flag to create an endowment to benefit the Whitney Smith Flag Research Center Collection at the University of Texas.)

I find the idea of this being a pre-war flag to be as dubious as the story about it being captured.

In April 1775, Massachusetts militiamen still presented themselves as British subjects fighting for British rights and the British constitution against a corrupt ministry in London. American Patriots didn’t break with George III and Britain until the first half of 1776.

Before the war American Whigs flew the British flag as part of their protests to make the claim that they were being more patriotic than their opponents. Boston’s Sons of Liberty raised a “Union flag,” probably one with a red field and the British Ensign as its canton, at Liberty Tree. When Whigs in Taunton hoisted a flag on their Liberty Pole in 1774, it had a British canton and the motto “Liberty and Union” sewn to its red field. There are many prewar reports of American protesters marching under British Union flags but none describing flags with thirteen stripes.

That’s because American Patriots weren’t making a fetish of the number thirteen in April 1775. That spring, only twelve colonies were participating in the Continental Congress. (Georgia hadn’t sent any delegates.) Furthermore, that Congress was hoping that Canada and perhaps Nova Scotia and the Floridas would add to their continental alliance. Only at the end of 1775 did the Congress authorize a naval flag with thirteen stripes—and those stripes still appeared under the British Union canton.

So do I think the Forster Flag’s Revolutionary history is a myth? Not at all. I think its current form clearly dates from the Revolutionary War. But it was created after the first year of that war, perhaps after independence. It’s an artifact of Americans rethinking how they presented themselves, moving from British or English subjects, as symbolized by the original canton, into citizens of a new thirteen-member alliance.

Just how to symbolize that continental alliance was still being worked out in the first years of the war. This banner’s scheme of six strips on one side and seven on the other clearly didn’t work. Eventually the Congress decided on a new national emblem. Maybe this cloth is so well preserved because Forster’s company didn’t fly it for long in either its British or American forms.

As the war receded into memory, Americans stopped telling stories about the gradual 1775-76 transition away from thinking of themselves as British. The story of a British flag owned and flown by Americans being changed into an early American banner became a heroic story of capturing a British regimental banner, or a premature tale of marching as Americans on April 19th. But this flag’s stitching, read properly in context, tells its own story of a significant national transition during the war.

William Cunningham, Son of Liberty

Historians of British prison reform and genealogists seem to be doing a good job at filling in the details of William Cunningham’s life after he served as provost martial (or marshal) for the Crown forces throughout the war. Which leaves his life before the war as the big mystery.

The Loyalist judge Thomas Jones (1731-1792) used his exile in Britain in the 1780s to write a History of New York During the Revolutionary War. In it he called Cunningham “a Son of Liberty who had become disaffected.” That manuscript was published by the New-York Historical Society in 1879.

In the meantime, Henry B. Dawson’s Reminiscences of the City of New York (1855) also described Cunningham as a Son of Liberty before becoming a Crown supporter by 1775. In narrating the brawls between royal soldiers and New Yorkers over the Liberty Pole in early 1770, Ferdinand S. Bartram’s Retrographs (1888) said:

Two members of the Sons of Liberty, John Lamb and William Cunningham, the latter afterward known as the notorious Marshal Cunningham of the Revolution, were appointed to purchase a plot of land, which they selected, adjoining the common, where, upon the 6th [Mar 1770], the pole was raised in the presence of about four thousand spectators. It was of immense proportions, banded with iron hoops and braced with rods, imbedded in the earth between rocks, and secured with masonry. Thus was the fifth pole raised by the Liberty Boys.

Unfortunately, those books don’t cite any documentary sources for their statements about Cunningham.

Exactly five years after that fifth pole was erected, on 6 Mar 1775, Cunningham and a man named John Hill got into a fight with Patriots near Liberty Pole. The crowd roughed up both men badly. Newspapers published conflicting stories of what happened, depending on which side of the political divide they stood. The only thing clear was that Cunningham was now on the side of the Crown.

Indeed, the royal government was soon employing Cunningham, if it didn’t already. Authorities sent him to arrest the Patriot activist Isaac Sears the next month, and a crowd assaulted Cunningham again.

When the war broke out, Cunningham and Hill took off for Boston. Hill was eventually an assistant to Crean Brush, a Loyalist given a job by the military authorities. Cunningham became provost martial and held that position again in New York, Philadelphia during the winter of 1777-78, and New York until the end of the war. I’ve found a hint of romance between Hill’s daughter Mary and Cunningham’s son Ralph, but I’ll save that gossip for later.

I don’t know the historical sources in New York, and perhaps there’s more documentation of Cunningham’s life before the war. We do know that the 1792 “Dying Confession” ascribed to him is unreliable. But was he born in America or an immigrant (which seems more likely)? What caused him to join the Sons of Liberty in 1770 and to turn against them by 1775?

(The sketch above is Pierre Eugène du Simitière’s sketch of one of New York’s Liberty Poles in 1770, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Alfred F. Young, a Giant of a Historian

The historian Alfred F. Young died yesterday at the age of 87. He was the author of significant books about the American Revolution, with particular attention to people from Massachusetts:

• The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution.
• Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier.
• Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution.

Perhaps even more important, Al Young edited or coedited some landmark collections of essays and the catalog for a permanent exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society:

• The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism.
• Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism.
• Whose American Revolution Was It?: Historians Interpret the Founding.
• We the People: Voices and Images of the New Nation.
• Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation.

In all his books, Al focused on ordinary people rather than political and military leaders from the elite. He studied men like Ebenezer Mackintosh and events like Pope Night (well, he used the term “Pope’s Day”). Appropriate for a man given the middle name “Fabian,” as in Fabian socialism—and as in Gen. George Washington’s Fabian strategy for patiently winning the war.

Al was also a friend and a mentor. I’m not an academic, and I had no institutional affiliation when I attended my first Omohundro Institute conference on early American history. Al welcomed me and introduced me around. On Sunday morning, as many attendees left early, we had hours of one-on-one conversation about his upcoming work on Deborah Sampson and my research on kids.

Al was always eager to make connections, to bring new folks into the conversation. Though he felt that some of the dominant “consensus” school of American Revolutionary history missed important points by focusing on the top, he didn’t spend his time complaining about those omissions. Instead, as a speaker and writer Al emphasized the good work he saw people doing and tried to ensure more people heard about it.

I helped Al with computer research for his book Liberty Pole, collecting and analyzing newspaper reports about Liberty Trees and Liberty Poles in pre-Revolutionary America. Did they have the same meaning, or were they independent symbols? Earlier this fall I sent Al my experience of a visit to the Boston Tea Party Museum as he planned a new essay.

In late October Ray Raphael told me that Al had fallen ill. I’d just sent him some pages from my George Washington study that I thought he’d like, piecing together the life of a teen-aged girl who worked at the general’s Cambridge headquarters. I ended that letter this way:

Your advice, inspiration, and unflagging encouragement over the past several years have been a great strength for me. You welcomed me into the historical field when I made my first, uncredentialed steps into it, and you’ve given me the confidence to take on greater challenges. I know you’ve done the same for many other researchers, and I’m gratified to have been in that company. Thank you.

There’s no better introduction to Al’s work than The Shoemaker and the Tea Party. It combines an updated an expanded version of his award-winning William & Mary Quarterly paper about George R. T. Hewes with analysis of how we came to celebrate the Tea Party above all the other pre-Revolutionary political action in Boston.

Intelligence from Taunton

Last month the Taunton Daily Gazette reported on an effort by the city’s mayor to have the city—or at least its central area—be designated as some sort of National Park Service site:

Mayor Charles Crowley…said that Taunton is qualified because it has a “rich history” in its role as a bellwether for rebellion leading up to the Revolutionary War. He also discussed how Taunton’s industrial development was remarkable, especially when it came to silver.

Crowley started by detailing the totality of events that occurred in what he called the “theater” of downtown Taunton, including Church Green and the Taunton Green, where the Liberty and Union flag was raised. The flag was raised in 1774 by the revolutionary group the Sons of Liberty in the lead-up to the war against the British, according to historians.

Crowley said that the original pole that to hold up the flag in Taunton is missing, but the the Taunton green nonetheless served as a theater that hosted many of Americans founding fathers, including Benjamin Franklin. . . .

Crowley noted the Sons of Liberty of Taunton embodied American values by going against the grain, refusing to act like cowards like most of the subjects in the colonies. He said they displayed their bravery by raising the Liberty and Union flag, impressing their fellow revolutionaries in Boston.

So take that, all those cowards everyone else in the colonies—only Taunton raised the flag!

Except it wasn’t only Taunton. Towns everywhere in New England were hoisting flags on Liberty Poles that season. It was the thing to do in the fall of 1774.

A report about Taunton did indeed get noticed in Boston, in the 24 Oct 1774 Boston Evening-Post:

We have just received the following intelligence from Taunton—that on Friday last [i.e., 21 October] a Liberty Pole 112 feet long was raised there on which a vane, and a Union flag flying with the words Liberty and Union thereon.

That motto was unusual, but a Union flag on a tall pole was not. When Isaiah Thomas took note of Taunton’s Liberty Pole in the Massachusetts Spy, he also reported on poles erected in Concord, Middleborough, Barnstable, Granville, Vineyard Haven, and Hanover, Massachusetts. Already the 3 October Newport Mercury had reported that “most of the towns” in Connecticut had erected Liberty Poles, with heights ranging from 100 to 170 feet.

And how did the town’s “theater” host Benjamin Franklin? On 10 Nov 1775, Sally Paine wrote to her husband, the Taunton lawyer and Continental Congress delegate Robert Treat Paine:

I had the happiness of seeing Doctor Franklin on his return to Philadelphia. He was so kind as to call at our house for letters or anything else that I wanted to send you. He made but a short stay with us and we would have been glad for more of his company.

Franklin was simply doing a favor to a colleague (and taking the opportunity to visit a pleasant woman—always a favorite activity). “He made but a short stay” in Taunton.

As the article explains, to support a new park the N.P.S. wants a site to be of national influence and not to duplicate the stories told in other parks. (There are also important factors of feasibility, budgets, and congressional support.) Clearly Taunton’s citizens took part in the regional Revolutionary movement, but I don’t see it standing out greatly from other New England towns.

(The conjectural recreation of Taunton “Liberty and Union” flag above is available from Flags Unlimited. Thanks to Rob Velella at the American Literary Blog for his tip about this news story.)

The Myth of Provost William Cunningham

Boston selectman Timothy Newell took note of events large and small in his journal entry for 10 Oct 1775, but they had one theme in common: complaints about the British authorities’ treatment of locals.

A negro man belonging to [blank] wheeling a barrow load of [blank] in the Streets, the Provost came up to him and caned him to a great degree. The negro conscious of his innocence asked him why he did so—he was told it was for wheeling his barrow at the side of the street and not in the middle.

General [Thomas] Gage sailed this day for London and left several thousand Inhabitants in town who are suffering the want of Bread and every necessary of life.

Newell may have left out the name of the person who was keeping that black man in slavery because he didn’t know it. I’m pretty sure he left the contents of the wheelbarrow unnamed because it was full of dung. The town had a lot of horses, after all.

The “Provost,” or Provost Martial, was a man named William Cunningham. He worked for the British military administration in occupied Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, and made enemies among Americans wherever he went. Cunningham was in charge of prisoners of war, so it wasn’t hard for Continental sailors and soldiers to resent him. But several little episodes of unnecessary meanness like this one made him especially unpopular.

In early 1792 an article appeared in many American newspapers stating that Cunningham had been “executed in London, the 10th of August, 1791,” for financial crimes. The report then went on to quote the former Provost’s “life, confession, and last dying words,” a standard literary genre in those days of public executions. That document said Cunningham was born in Dublin in 1738, raised in a military family, and came to New York at the head of a shipload of Irish immigrants in 1774.

However, British historians later reported that there is no record of a William Cunningham being executed anywhere in Britain in 1791. The Old Bailey Proceedings of London criminal trials include no case against Cunningham. Revlist members Bart Reynolds and Bob Vogler found evidence that the man was still receiving a half-pay pension as a retired British army officer in 1792. A Philadelphian named John Binns reported meeting Cunningham in 1799 in Gloucester, England, where he was once again serving as a prison warden.

Furthermore, the New York historian Ferdinand S. Bartram wrote that Cunningham had been in New York well before 1770; he was part of the city’s Sons of Liberty movement, helping to buy land for the massive Liberty Pole. He broke from the Patriot movement by early 1775, when he got into a fight near that pole and was badly beaten. Then he left to join the British army administration in Boston.

In short, the “life, confession, and last dying words of captain William Cunningham” was a hoax, eagerly swallowed by resentful Americans but not credible in any detail. Even though its most basic statements can’t be confirmed, however, American authors have continued to rely on what that document said about Cunningham’s birth and background.

According to Binns, Cunningham had an American wife. A former prisoner remembered he had a brother who wasn’t so nasty. Contemporary British military records supplied by author Don Hagist say that he had at least one son, Capt. Ralph Cunningham, serving in the British army during the war. If anyone else has information to share about Provost Martial William Cunningham, I’d be delighted to hear it.

(It would be so much easier if William Cunningham were a less common name. The Provost Martial is not, for example, the Loyalist captain who became notorious in the southern theater of the war. Nor is he the Boston militia captain and painter.)