The Death of Daniel Thompson

Yesterday I quoted Maj. Loammi Baldwin’s diary noting the death of Woburn militiaman Daniel Thompson on 19 Apr 1775.

The published Woburn vital records say Daniel Thompson was born on 9 Mar 1734, making him forty-one years old at the Battle of Lexington and Concord (unless that’s an unlabeled Old Style date). He and his wife Phebe had three children, born 1761–1765.

According to a family history, The Memorial of James Thompson, of Charlestown, Mass., 1630-1642, and Woburn (1887), this was the story of Thompson’s death:

He was a man of ardent temperament, full of activity and enterprise. Previous to the Revolutionary war he was one of the guards of the royal governor [most likely the horse guard], and yet, in the troubles which preceded that event, he ever zealously espoused the cause of his native country.

On the morning of the 19th of April, 1775, hearing of the march of the British toward Concord, he mounted his horse and hurried to the north village, a mile distant, for the purpose of rousing his friends to oppose the march of the enemy. There is a tradition that of all the men he met only one hesitated, and when that one asked him if he were not too hasty and likely to expose himself to great danger, he instantly replied, “No! I tell you our tyrants are on their march to destroy our stores, and if no one else opposes them to-day, I will!” Immediately hurrying away to the scene of action, he boldly took his position and poured his fire into the ranks of the British.

On the retreat of the enemy, he took a station near the road. Stepping behind a barn to load, and then advancing round the corner of the building, he fired diagonally through the platoons of the enemy, so as to make every shot effectual.

A grenadier, who watched his movements, was so enraged that he ran around the corner of the barn and shot him dead on the spot, while he was in the act of reloading his gun. Tradition says that a well directed ball from another Woburn gun prevented the grenadier from ever rejoining his comrades.

I’m skeptical about that quotation, though the aggressive attitude seems to fit with going too close to the road and being cut down by a flanker. Abram English Brown’s Beneath Old Roof Trees (1896) added the comforting claim that one of Daniel Thompson’s own brothers killed that grenadier and brought his firelock back home to Woburn.

More certainly, we know that Thompson died within the borders of Lincoln. His body was brought back to Woburn. On 21 April there was a joint funeral with Asahel Porter, detained by the regulars in the early hours of the 19th and killed in the shooting on Lexington common.

Thompson’s gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find a Grave. It says:

Here lies Buried the Body of
Mr. DANIEL THOMPSON who was
slain in Concord Battle on ye. 19th.
of April 1775. Aged 40 Years.

Here Passenger confin’d reduc’d to dust,
lies what was once Religious wise & Just.
The cause he engaged did animate him high,
Namely Religion and dear Liberty.
Steady and warm in Liberties defence,
True to his Country, Loyal to his Prince.
Though in his Breast a Thirst for glory fir’d,
Courageous in his country’s cause expired.
Although he’s gone his name Embalmed shall be,
and had in Everlasting Memory.

The phrase about “Loyal to his Prince” suggests the Thompson family erected this stone in 1775 when most Americans still professed allegiance to King George III and saw themselves as fighting corrupt British ministers rather than the whole British constitutional system. If the Thompson family had had to wait another year for the stonecarving, the elegy would surely have praised Thompson’s loyalty to his country but not to his “Prince.”

Daniel and Phebe Thompson’s daughter, born in 1762 and also named Phebe, married Josiah Pierce in 1787 and settled in Maine. Josiah was a younger half-brother of Benjamin Thompson, who by then had moved from Woburn to Europe on his way to becoming Count Rumford.

“A ball came thru the Meeting house near my head”

Yesterday we left Maj. Loammi Baldwin and his Woburn militiamen skedaddling east from Brooks Hill in Concord with the withdrawing British column on their tail.

Baldwin’s account in his diary, as transcribed in this copy with line breaks for easier reading, continues:

we came to Tanner Brooks at Lincoln Bridge & then we concluded to scatter & make use of the trees & walls for to defend us & attack them—We did so & pursued on flanking them—(Mr Daniel Thompson was killed & others[)]. till we came to Lexington. I had several good shots—

“Tanner Brooks” referred to the tannery owned by the Brooks family. Analysts of the battle say the Woburn companies engaged the British troops somewhere around the Hartwell Tavern within the borders of Lincoln.

The Enemy marched very fast & left many dead & wounded and a few tired I proceeded on till coming between the meeting house and Mr Buckmans Tavern with a Prisoner before me when the Cannon begun to play the Balls flew near me I judged not more than 2 yards off.

I immediately retreated back behind the Meeting house and had not been there 10 seconds before a ball came thru the Meeting house near my head.

I retreated back towards the meadow North of the Meeting house & lay & heard the ball in the air & saw them strike the ground I judged about 15 or 20 was fired but not one man killed with them. They were fired from the crook in the road by Easterbrooks—

The picture above, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, shows a “small cannon ball, said to have been found on the side of the road near Lexington” at some point. The webpage for this artifact says: “It is made of lead and was the type of projectile fired from a smooth-bored cannon.”

In The Road to Concord I argue that the presence of cannon in Concord, and particularly the brass cannon of the Boston militia train, was crucial to Gen. Thomas Gage’s decision to order an expedition there.

But the provincials moved most of those cannon further west in the days before that march. They probably weren’t all equipped for use, anyway. On the British side, the expedition under Lt. Col. Francis Smith marched with no artillery for maximum speed.

But Col. Percy’s reinforcement column did come out with field-pieces, and those were the cannon that Loammi Baldwin and his Woburnites ran into. By deploying heavy weapons for the first time that day, Percy was able to make time for the combined British forces to regroup in Lexington, tend their wounded, and set off for Boston.

As for Maj. Baldwin, his diary stops as quoted above. The transcripts don’t resume until May, when he was an officer in the provincial army. Baldwin probably decided that having marched into Concord and back, fired “several good shots,” and taken a prisoner, his unit had done their dangerous duty for the day. He and his men may have followed the British column east for some more miles, but they stayed out of cannon range.

“Soon heard that the regulars had fired upon Lexington People”

For Loammi Baldwin of Woburn, 18 Apr 1775 was not a good day.

As he wrote in his diary, “My Brother Ruel departed this life after a short illness of 5 or 6 days, Pleurisy fever.” Loammi was there, along with his parents.

Reuel Baldwin was twenty-seven years old. He left his wife Keziah and three young children—Reuel, Ruth, and James—with another child on the way, eventually named Josiah.

The next day, Loammi Baldwin had to muster as a major in the Middlesex County militia. An officer in a horse troop, Baldwin rode instead of marched.

I don’t know if Loammi Baldwin’s diary still exists, but there are two handwritten transcripts of select dates in the Harvard libraries, and much of his entry on 19 Apr 1775 was published in the first volume of D. Hamilton Hurd’s History of Middlesex County in 1890.

There’s an old joke that a man with a watch always knows what time it is, but a man with two watches never does. Likewise, with one transcript we’d feel confident about what Baldwin originally wrote, but with three there are some reasons for doubt about the details.

Here’s how Maj. Baldwin described his experience of the start of the war according to this transcript, with line breaks added to make reading a little easier:

April 19. Wednesday

This morning a little before break of day we was allarmed by Mr. Ledman [probably Ebenezer Stedman] Express from Cambridge—Informd us that the Regulars were upon the move for Concord—

we musterd as fast as possible—The Town turned out extraordinary & proceeded towards Lexington & Rode along a little before main body and when I was nigh Jacob Reeds I heard a great firing proceeded on soon heard that the regulars had fired upon Lexington People & killed a large Number of them

we proceeded on as fast as possible and came to Lexington and saw about 8 or 10 dead & Numbers wounded was informed that the Regulars rushed upon our Lexington men and hollowed damn you Disperse Rebels & fired upon the Lexington Company

we proceeded to Concord by way of Lincoln meeting house come to Concord ascended the hill & pitched & refreshed ourselves a little

about [blank] o’clock the People under my command & also some others came running of the East end of the hill while I was at a house refreshing myself & we proceeded down the road & could see behind us the regulars following

A transcript with a more modern handwriting but more alternative spellings and the name “Stedman” starts at seq. 15 in this document. I can’t tell if this is more accurate to what Baldwin originally wrote. Fortunately, none of the discrepancies so far seriously affect his meaning.

TOMORROW: Cannon fire.

“Go down to the ferry ways so as to see Charls”

Even after the siege of Boston began, the nearby ferries continued to operate, at least intermittently. Those boats offered ways to transmit information or goods, sometimes illicitly.

There was a ferry between Boston’s North End and Charlestown, operated by a man named Enoch Hopkins (d. 1778). On 15 June 1775, a Boston magistrate named William Stoddard wrote to James Littlefield in Watertown:

Your letter and the last, dated the 13th instant, by Mr. Hopkins, I have received. I waited on the Admiral [Samuel Graves] this morning, and have got you a fishing pass for your boat and three men, to come in and out of this harbour, which I now send you. You will carefully observe the pass; you must observe to go a fishing from Salem, before you come up here, and then you may come in and go out. I hope you will not meet with any obstruction at Salem; not forgetting, if in your power, to bring up veal, green peas, fresh butter, asparagus, and fresh salmon.

Mr. Miles went away yesterday in the afternoon, by water, in order to come to you, and we suppose he is with you before this. I hope you have received a cloak, with a bag of brown sugar, I sent over yesterday by Mr. Hopkins’s son. I have paid some of the ferrymen, and I shall pay them all for their trouble, when I have done with them. Do not pay them any thing; if you have, let me know; keep that to yourself. . . .

I wish you would send me last Monday’s newspaper, and this day’s paper. I shall be much obliged to you, if you can, before you go for Salem, send me some fresh butter, and half a bushel of green peas. I now send you two dollars in this letter, and an osnaburgh bag, by Mr. Hopkins’s son, to put the peas in. What other charges you are at I will settle with you hereafter.

On 28 July, Joseph Reed, Gen. George Washington’s military secretary, wrote about getting a secret message into Boston via “a Waterman” operating north of Boston, possibly Hopkins. And at some point during the siege, a Boston shopkeeper warned Gen. Thomas Gage that ferrymen named Hopkins and Goodwin were “as bad Rebels as any”:

I have seen them bring men over in Disguise—and they are up in Town every Oppertunity they have gathering what Intelegence they can and when they return communicate it to the Rebels the other side, and they again to the Rebel Officers.

This may be the same Enoch Hopkins who with his wife and seven children arrived in Concord as war refugees in November, as Katie Turner Getty has written about.

The British army took the Charlestown peninsula two days after the Stoddard letter above. That meant the ferry across the Charles River was fully within royal territory, and the Mystic River now defined the siege line. There were two ferries crossing the Mystic to Charlestown, one from Malden called the Penny Ferry and one from Chelsea called the Winnisimmet Ferry (spelled variously, of course).

On 6 August, British army raiders burnt the Penny Ferry landing house in Malden, and it was never rebuilt.

At Chelsea, Lt. Col. Loammi Baldwin was in charge, stationed at the ferry landing. On 28 July he became part of Reed’s chain of men sending information into Boston, and in return he sent headquarters several reports about people coming over the Winnisimmet Ferry.

As I quoted yesterday, in the summer of 1775 Dr. Benjamin Church discussed using the Winnisimmet Ferry as a conduit for information and what he really wanted, money:

If I am to Continue in your Service Major be so good to send me out a little Cash, Charly the ferry Man if you can trust him may give it me—Slyly—by heavens Major I shou’d loose my life if it was known by these people.

I attempted some time ago to write you, over Chalsey ferry but the Committy would not let me go down to the ferry ways so as to see Charls. After that I did not try but went to Newport and from thence wrote.

Clearly the local Patriot authorities (“the Committy”) understood that people might use that ferry for nefarious purposes and didn’t let Church, or probably anyone, go there alone. 

I’ve tried to identify this ferryman named “Charly” or “Charls” (or, presumably, Charles) without success. While the men granted the right to run a ferry sometimes show up in the records, Charly may well have been an employee instead.

Stymied by that route, Church instead sent information through Newport, and ultimately that led to his arrest.

TOMORROW: Church’s report on the Arnold expedition.

A Suitable Suitor for the Widow Lavoisier?

On a very bad day in May 1794, Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze Lavoisier lost both her husband and her father to the guillotine.

Within a couple of years, however, more moderate French governments were restoring her property and clearing those men’s names.

Lavoisier kept busy editing her late husband Antoine’s scientific papers into an authoritative collection. She also wrote a denunciation of one of the officials who had sent her relatives to their execution, though she didn’t publish that under her name.

Multiple men proposed marriage to the wealthy, intelligent widow, including Pierre du Pont, who in 1799 emigrated to the U.S. of A. with his family, and Sir Charles Blagden, secretary of the Royal Society. However, it would take an exceptionally talented and determined man to win Mme. Lavoisier’s hand.

One candidate arrived in Paris in 1801. He had spent eleven years, from 1785 to 1796, as a minister of all trades for Prince Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria and Count Palatine. While in Munich he had reorganized the state’s army, reformed its poorhouses, invented a cheap but nourishing soup, designed public parks, developed a way to calculate a substance’s specific heat, and made other breakthroughs in thermodynamics (refuting some of Antoine Lavoisier’s ideas). For such services and feats the prince had named him Reichsgraf von Rumford, or Imperial Count Rumford.

Before that job in Germany, the count had served as an officer in the British army, commanding Loyalist cavalrymen on Long Island in the last years of the American War. Before that, he was secretary to Lord George Germain, Britain’s Colonial Secretary and the chief architect of the empire’s military policy from 1775 to 1782. Those activities had won him a British knighthood.

And before attaching himself to Germain, the count had been a young man from Woburn, Massachusetts, who through brains, hard study, ambition, a lucky marriage, and minimal scruples had transformed himself into a New Hampshire country gentleman with a wealthy wife by the time he turned twenty years old. Yes, it was our old friend Benjamin Thompson (shown above in 1783).

Thompson had left his wife and infant daughter Sally in New Hampshire when he ducked behind British lines in the fall of 1775, worried that he’d be outed as one of Gen. Thomas Gage’s spies. (Remarkably, Americans didn’t tumble to this aspect of Thompson’s career until the 1920s.) In the 1780s Thompson resumed correspondence with some of his American connections, including his mother and his friend Loammi Baldwin, but he was adamant they not tell his wife where he was.

In 1789 Thompson had a second daughter with the Countess Baumgarten, also mistress of Prince Carl Theodore. The count also had a long sexual relationship and friendship with Countess Baumgarten’s sister, Countess Nogarola. In the 1790s Rumford had an affair with Lady Palmerston while Viscount Palmerston had an affair with Emma, Lady Hamilton, later the love of Lord Horatio Nelson. In other words, Count Rumford had entered an aristocratic circle that wasn’t really committed to the traditions of marriage.

Even Count Rumford’s presence in France raised some eyebrows. After all, he was a former British army officer, still on half-pay, and Britain and France were technically at war. The armies of Revolutionary France had also invaded Carl Theodore’s territory twice while Rumford worked for the prince. But First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte was busy consolidating his victories with peace treaties. Starting in March 1802, everyone was supposed to be friendly.

Count Rumford met Marie Anne Lavoisier in Paris on 19 Nov 1801. In the spring of 1802 he made a brief visit back to Britain, then traveled to Bavaria with Sir Charles Blagden. There the new Elector offered him government jobs. On 30 November the count sent a letter to his daughter Sarah in New Hampshire that she summarized like this:

he alludes to his love concern; says he has got into full employment at Munich, but would rather be in Paris; and the certain lady would rather have him there.

In 1803, Mme. Lavoisier joined the count in Munich.

TOMORROW: To marry or not to marry?

The Court Martial of Lt. Col. Abijah Brown

In October 1775, for the second time in a half a year, Patriot authorities met to formally judge the behavior of Waltham’s Lt. Col. Abijah Brown.

The first time was in late May, when a committee of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress assessed reports that Brown was badmouthing that body because he didn’t like the orders he had received.

The second time, the judges were Continental Army officers assembled for a court martial, and Brown faced the charge of “endeavouring to defraud the Continent, in mustering two Soldiers, whom he at the same time employed in working upon his farm.”

That board’s judgement, as reported in Gen. George Washington’s general orders for 7 October, was:

The Court having duly considered the evidence, are of opinion, that Lieut. Col. Brown is not guilty of any fraud, in endeavouring to have Harrington and Clarke muster’d, in the manner he did: But the Court are of opinion, that Col. Brown is guilty of employing Harrington for fourteen days, and Clarke for eighteen days, out of Camp, upon his own business; yet are inclined to think it was done rather thro’ Ignorance, than a fraudulent intent, and therefore adjudge that he be fin’d Four Pounds, lawful money, for the said offence.

Brown appears to have deployed the George Costanza “Was that wrong?” defense. And once again, the official verdict was that Brown had done what he was accused of doing but didn’t deserve serious punishment.

The commander-in-chief felt he had to abide by that verdict, but he made clear that he wasn’t pleased:

The General orders Lt Col. Brown to be released, as soon as he has paid his fine to Dr [Isaac] Foster, Director of the hospital, who will apply it to the use of the sick, in the General hospital, under his care—

The General hopes, the Stigma fixed on Lieut. Colonel Brown by the above sentence, will be a sufficient warning to all Officers, not to be guilty of the like offence, especially as the General is confident, no General Court martial will, for the future, admit a plea of Ignorance, in excuse of so atrocious a crime.

For the adjutant general, Horatio Gates, the outcome of this court martial showed the need for wider reform:

Much regulation is wanted in the Continental Articles of War, as in many Instances they have been found to give too Discretionary a power to the Members who compose Genl Courts Martial, a very Flagrant instance having happen’d lately in the trial of Lieut. Colo. Abijah Brown.

At the time, Washington, Gates, and other commanders were busy reorganizing the Continental Army for the new year and trying to convince men to reenlist. Col. Benjamin Rugggles Woodbridge evidently indicated that he would not return in 1776. But that didn’t open a position in his regiment for Lt. Col. Brown.

Instead, on 3 November a council of war ranked Brown as sixth in seniority among the lieutenant colonels but then assigned him to a regiment under Loammi Baldwin (shown above), still a lieutenant colonel himself but to be commissioned on 1 January as the most junior colonel in the new army.

Brown ultimately declined to reenlist. Gen. Washington and his headquarters staff probably weren’t sad to see him go.

TOMORROW: One more march.

“Brisk Firing” along the Rivers in 1775

When we last peeked in on Malden during the siege of Boston, a British raiding party from Charlestown had crossed the Mystic River and burned the building at the Penny Ferry landing.

The Continental Army officer assigned to that spot, Capt. Eleazer Lindsey, was no help. Reports differ about whether he had gone home or took just that moment to go home in a hurry.

The British floating battery remained in the Mystic River, threatening those parts of the American siege lines.

A week later, on 13 Aug 1775, there was another exchange of fire. It started when some British boats came to resupply the floating battery. Capt. William T. Miller of Rhode Island, stationed on Prospect Hill, told his wife there were “2 Boats that were armed from Bunkers hill.” The historian Richard Frothingham later stated there were “two barges and two sail boats, on their way from Boston.”

Men guarding Malden’s ferry landing opened fire. Capt. Miller wrote that the British boats “were Drove back by the brisk firing of Some field pieces from Malden this day which Caused them in a Very great Hurry to Retreat and Run ashore on Bunkers hill Shore.”

Those small cannon might have been the two that had arrived in April from Newburyport. If so, the men firing them appear to have been a local guard rather than men from Lindsey’s company. In addition, Lt. Col. Loammi Baldwin’s soldiers at Winnisimmet in Chelsea fired on the British boats.

There were no known casualties on either side. The Continentals were quite pleased with their performance in comparison to the previous week, though presumably the redcoats would have gone back to their lines anyway.

Both Lindsey and Baldwin reported to Col. Samuel Gerrish of Newbury. His regiment was spread out over several spots along the northern wing of the siege lines. When a group of officers from the regiment sent a petition to Gen. George Washington complaining that they hadn’t been paid, they signed from the “Camps at Chelsea, Malden, Medford, and Sewells Point” near what is now the B. U. Bridge.

Gen. William Heath’s memoir records a similar British attack on that Brookline fortification a couple of weeks earlier, on 31 July:

A little before one o’clock, A.M. a British floating-battery came up the river, within 300 yards of Sewall’s Point, and fired a number of shot at the American works, on both sides of the river.

Some of the works on the Cambridge side survive as Fort Washington Park. The picture above, a detail from Henry Pelham’s map of the siege, shows the area in 1775. (Pelham’s map has north on the right.)

That attack might have been the occasion when Col. Gerrish chose not to shoot back at the British but instead told his men to hunker down behind their walls. Reportedly he said, “the rascals can do us no harm, and it would be a mere waste of powder, to fire at them with our 4 pounders.” That was the wrong attitude for an officer already under criticism for how he had behaved at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

COMING UP: Washington’s “pretty good Slam” among the officers.

“Two floating batteries came up Mystic River”

Back in June, we left the town of Malden worrying in mid-1775 about being attacked by British forces out of Charlestown, across the Mystic River.

The town had ended up with two cannon from Newburyport. Locals built earthworks near the landing of the Penny Ferry from Charlestown and strengthened the buildings there. (A comment on that June posting reminds us the ferry landing was near what’s now the Encore Casino in Everett.)

To guard that site, the Massachusetts army assigned a company of Malden men to their home town. Their leader was Capt. Naler Hatch (1731-1804), who had learned to command at sea. Locals remembered him as “a stout built man, rather rash in temper, and fiery in zeal.”

Deloraine Pendre Corey’s history of Malden says that on 23 July Christian Febiger, the Denmark-born adjutant of Col. Samuel Gerrish’s regiment in the Continental Amy, wrote of the situation at Malden:

Capt Hatch of Colo. [Thomas] Gardners Regiment is there with one Company & has to mount 20 men on Guard every Day without Officers, three Relieves is 20 men privates mounting every Day & then they have no Sentries on the River which by the Description and the Situation of the place wants at least 4 Centries every Night.

Gerrish moved Capt. Eleazer Lindsey and his company from Winnisimmet in Chelsea to strengthen that spot in Malden. Lindsey was a 59-year-old veteran of the last war from Lynn. His men had signed up from several Essex County towns.

On Sunday, 6 August, the British finally came. Lt. Benjamin Craft of Manchester, stationed at Winter Hill, wrote in his diary:

Just after [morning] meeting two floating batteries came up Mystic River and fired several shots on Malden side, and landed a number of regulars, which set fire to a house near Peny ferrys which burnt to ashes.

One Capt. Lyndsly who was stationed there, fled with his company, and got before the women and children in his flight.

We were all alarmed, and immediately manned our lines, and our people went down to Temple’s Point with one field piece, and fired several shot, at the regulars, which made them claw off as soon as possible. Gen. Gage, this is like the rest of your Sabbath day enterprises.

“Temple’s Point” was no doubt part of Robert Temple’s farm in what is now Somerville.

Katie Turner Getty described this fight in detail from the perspective of Lt. Col. Loammi Baldwin, then stationed in Chelsea, for the Journal of the American Revolution. Baldwin reported directly to Gen. George Washington:

I proceeded to Malding as quick as possable found that Capt. Lindsey was gone home, & his Company dispersd, all but a few with the Lieut. was down at the House that was Burnt[.] I went to him and enquired into the matter who Informd me that the Capt. was gone Home & near one half the Company was fled & where they were gone he could not tell, I ordred him to Rally his Company & Guard his Post which he Seem’d willing & ready to preform as far as Lay in his Power.

It appears that the lieutenant was Daniel Galeucia (also spelled Gallusia and Galushe, 1740-1825). In an odd twist, he was married to Capt. Lindsey’s daughter.

By this time the British were back over in Charlestown, parading on shore in triumph. Inside Boston, though, selectman Timothy Newell noted in his diary “several Soldiers brought over here wounded.”

COMING UP: More fighting and a court-martial or two.

An Archive about Commemorating Bunker Hill

The Raab Collection is offering for sale an archive of documents collected by the Bunker-Hill Memorial Association as it built the monument in Charlestown and commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

The Raab Collection webpage says the collection was “assembled in the 1870s” and refers to “George Washington Warren’s binding.” Warren (1813-1883) wrote The History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association in 1877, having been a mayor of Charlestown.

Most of the documents appear to be about promoting and planning the Bunker Hill Monument, even including budget estimates. That stone tower was the project of the generation that came after the Revolutionaries, in many cases literally. The leading voice was William Tudor, Jr., son of the first Judge Advocate General of the Continental Army. The engineer was Loammi Baldwin, Jr., son of the officer who oversaw the northern edge of Boston harbor during the siege.

The association also organized the commemoration of 1825. The Marquis de Lafayette came to Boston to help lay the tower’s cornerstone. Daniel Webster delivered an oration, just as he would nearly two decades later when the stone obelisk was finally finished. Both men are represented in the archive. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison couldn’t come, but they sent letters included here.

The volume includes some first-person accounts of the battle, such as a short statement by Robert Steele about his experience as a provincial drummer:

I Robert Steele of Dedham in the County of Norfolk… Listed 17 days before Bunker Hill fight in Col [Ephraim] Doolittle’s Regiment. After Major Mores [Willard Moore] was wounded, I was ordered down the hill to get some run [rum] to dress his wounds with Benjamin Blood. When we got to the shop the man was down cellar to keep out of the way of the shots which were fired from the gun boats that lay in the river. He asked who was there we told him our errand he then said take whatever you want. We delivered some rum and ran back as soon a possible but before we had time to reach spot they were retreating.

I quoted a longer telling from Steele back here. Note that that letter rendered his companion’s name as Benjamin Ballard, not Benjamin Blood; Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors agrees with the former. The picture of Steele’s letter in the archive show he was also asking for money since he’d lost his pension for not being poor enough.

I’d be pleasantly surprised if there are detailed new accounts from veterans in this collection. Warren’s history and the Raab Collection would no doubt highlight those. Rather, it’s about the effort to memorialize the event.

At least one collection of such accounts did come out the semicentennial event as historians swarmed over the old soldiers who attended. I’ll discuss what happened to that archive in this year’s run of postings on the history and memory of Bunker Hill.

Samuel Gerrish “unworthy an Officer”

As I described yesterday, Col. Samuel Gerrish of Newbury was the first infantry officer to receive a Massachusetts commission in May 1775, but then ran out his string with a series of embarrassing actions and lack of action.

On 17 August, the Continental Army court-martialed Gerrish on the charge “That he behaved unworthy an Officer.” With Gen. Nathanael Greene presiding, a panel of officers found him guilty and ordered him “to be cashiered, and render’d incapable of any employment in the American Army.” Gen. George Washington approved that sentence on 19 August.

Washington’s private letters show that he was pleased with that outcome and, whatever incident was behind the formal charge, linked it to Gerrish’s behavior at Bunker Hill. To his overseer Lund Washington the commander wrote:

The People of this Government have obtained a Character which they by no means deserved—their Officers generally speaking are the most indifferent kind of People I ever saw. I have already broke one Colo. and five Captain’s for Cowardice, & for drawing more Pay & Provision’s than they had Men in their Companies. . . .

in short they are by no means such Troops, in any respect, as you are led to believe of them from the Accts which are published, but I need not make myself Enemies among them, by this declaration, although it is consistent with truth. I daresay the Men would fight very well (if properly Officered) although they are an exceeding dirty & nasty people. had they been properly conducted at Bunkers Hill (on the 17th of June) or those that were there properly supported, the Regulars would have met with a shameful defeat; & a much more considerable loss than they did. . .

it was for their behaviour on that occasion that the above Officers were broke, for I never spared one that was accused of Cowardice but brot ’em to immediate Tryal.

Likewise he told Richard Henry Lee that he “Broke one Colo. and two Captains for Cowardly behaviour in the action on Bunker’s Hill.” Gen. William Heath later told John Adams that Gerrish’s fault had been “Backwardness in Duty on the 17th. of June.”

According to Swett, judge advocate general William Tudor later said that Gerrish “was treated far too severely.” (At the time, however, Tudor’s main complaint to his mentor John Adams was that the courts-martial were unfair to him because of all the work he had to do.)

Samuel Gerrish went back to Newbury. Loammi Baldwin took over the leadership of the regiment. However, not everyone had lost respect for Gerrish since his town elected him to the Massachusetts General Court the next year.

Samuel Gerrish, First Officer of the Massachusetts Army

Last month I wrote about how the Massachusetts Provincial Congress finally started commissioning infantry officers for its army (as opposed to its militia) on 19 May 1775.

The first colonel to receive a commission was Samuel Gerrish (c. 1729–1795) of Newbury. I thought it would be interesting to look at what happened to him.

First of all, according to historian Richard Frothingham, Gerrish’s regiment wasn’t as complete as the congress had been led to believe; “there were difficulties in relation to six of the companies, which were investigated June 2.” Five of the companies originally listed under Gerrish’s name asked to serve under another Newbury colonel, Moses Little. It took another twenty days before eight companies were fully commissioned under Gerrish.

During that spring the regiment was spread out along the north side of Boston harbor with three companies at Chelsea, three in east Cambridge, and two at Sewall’s Point, the finger of Brookline land in front of the Charles and Muddy Rivers. On 16 June the officers of the regiment met at Chelsea and assigned jobs: Loammi Baldwin to be lieutenant-colonel, Richard Dodge major, Christian Febiger adjutant, and so on. This was the New England way, electing from below rather than the colonel appointing from above.

One day after that meeting, of course, came the Battle of Bunker Hill. In 1870 the Quincy family presented to the Massachusetts Historical Society one sheet of what had been a two-page letter describing the fight. Whoever wrote that account took particular notice of Col. Gerrish’s behavior, referring to him by his rank from the French & Indian War:

Major Gerrish was ordered also to Charlestown with a reinforcement, but he no sooner came in sight of the enemy than a tremor seiz’d him & he began to bellow, “Retreat! retreat! or you’l all be cutt off!” which so confus’d & scar’d our men, that they retreated most precipitately, & our soldiery now sware vengeance against him & determine not to be under his commd.

The historian Samuel Swett later wrote that Gerrish “was unwieldy from excessive corpulence”; on reaching Bunker’s Hill above the fighting, “he declared that he was completely exhausted, and lay prostrate on the ground.” Col. Israel Putnam roared at all the men stalled on that hill, hitting some with his sword, but they refused to go farther down and eventually retreated.

There was plenty of blame to go around after that battle. Other Massachusetts officers hadn’t even taken their troops onto the peninsula as Gerrish had. Swett wrote, “A complaint was lodged against him with [Gen. Artemas] Ward immediately after the battle, who refused to notice it on account of the unorganized state of the army.”

Not that Col. Gerrish was helping alleviate that disorganization. On 7 July the new commander-in-chief’s secretary, Joseph Reed, wrote to him to ask a second time for a return of all the men in the regiment. “The Express [to the Continental Congress] has been detain’d some time thro’ this Inattention,” Reed chided, “The Forces raised in Connecticut, New Hampshire & Rhode Island having sent in their Returns very complete.”

Gerrish finally reported having 258 men in his regiment. Even after that, there were administrative problems. In August eight officers at Sewall’s Point wrote to headquarters to complain that most of them had “been here in actual Service, since the Beginning of the Campaign, and been to a vast Deal of Expense, and not receiv’d one farthing of our pay.”

In early August, British floating batteries made some attacks on American positions near the water. One fired on Sewall’s Point. Instead of shooting back at that boat, Gerrish told his men to put out any lights and hunker down behind their fortifications. He was reported to have said, “the rascals can do us no harm, and it would be a mere waste of powder, to fire at them with our 4 pounders.” Technically, Gerrish might have been right. The British shots caused no casualties. But the colonel had used up any benefit of the doubt about his behavior in battle.

TOMORROW: Washington weighs in.

More Woes for Cyrus Baldwin

Guest blogger Chris Hurley finishes up his look at the merchant Cyrus Baldwin.

This series so far has revolved around one incident: how Cyrus Baldwin’s 26 pounds of (technically non-odious) Bohea tea was stolen from his brother’s cart near Winter Hill on 4 Jan 1774 and dumped in the river by some who “tho’t it an Insult to be sent through their Town.” The Charlestown Committee of Correspondence refused to involve themselves in the matter.

Baldwin continued to have difficulties as the war approached. His 24 Oct 1774 ad in the Boston Gazette carried a postscript assuring people he was “neither Addresser, Protester, nor Roman Catholick”—suggesting some were saying he was a Loyalist or worse. A 6 Mar 1775 ad in the same newspaper saw him distressed, selling his English and Scotch goods at “50 per cent from the Sterling Cost.”

On 2 May 1776, after the siege of Boston, Baldwin’s ad in the New-England Chronicle indicates that his Boston shop had been looted by the evacuating British troops (and Crean Brush likely). It said that “he once more requests all those who are indebted to him on note, book or otherwise to make speedy payment to him at Woburn, where”—being the indefatigable merchant he was—he was selling sugar, rum, coffee, and “sundry other articles.”

But those setbacks were nothing compared to what Cyrus Baldwin suffered back at Winter Hill in 1784. That was still a sparsely settled stretch on the road between Charlestown and Medford, all but unavoidable if one was traveling to Woburn. Boston’s Continental Journal of 29 July reported:

Mr. Cyrus Baldwin of Woburn, crossing Winter Hill, was attacked by three foot pads who robbed him of his watch and money and, after abusing him very much, made off.

Boston’s Independent Ledger for 26 July had more detail. In addition to robbing Baldwin of 14 shillings and his pinchbeck watch—which this article described very thoroughly—the criminals had beaten Baldwin badly:

during the greatest part of the time they were stripping him, one of the villians was dealing very heavy blows with a club on the left side of his head, and cut his scalp in several places: ’tis hoped they will not prove mortal

The wounds did not prove mortal. And in a stroke of good luck for justice, the theives were apprehended after a subsequent unsuccessful attack on another man. The Continental Journal stated:

At the house where they were concealed was found the watch, purse, pocket-book, &c. of which Mr. Baldwin was robbed.

This time, unlike 1774, the law prosecuted the attack on Winter Hill. The 23 Nov 1784 Connecticut Courant of Hartford reported:

Boston, November 15. Thursday next Barrack and Sullivan, who robbed Mr. Cyrus Baldwin on Winter-hill, and who attempted to rob Major John Swan on Boston neck, as lately mentioned, are to be executed at Cambridge—

(The 27 July Salem Gazette and other Massachusetts papers had reported the second victim was James Swan, shown above.)

The 24 November Massachusetts Spy confirmed the sentence was carried out:

On Thursday last were executed at Cambridge, pursuant to their sentence,…Richard Barrack and John Sullivan for highway-robbery.

Six years later, Cyrus Baldwin died of drowning in Dunstable; that day, 5 Nov 1790, was his fiftieth birthday.

Samuel Thompson of Woburn wrote in his diary two days afterward: “Cyrus Baldwin, Esquire’s, corpse brought to Woburn.” In all the news items and advertisements examined for this story, I never saw Cyrus Baldwin honored with the sobriquet “Esquire” until his death. But that was how the Herald of Freedom reported him on 9 November:

Died]—at Dunstable, the 4th inst. CYRUS BALDWIN, Esq. formerly of Boston.—His funeral will be this afternoon, at two o’clock, from the house of his brother Loammi Baldwin, Esq. at Woburn—where the friends and acquantence of the deceased are desired to attend.

And thus ends the luckless story of Cyrus Baldwin. Thanks for sharing his ups and (mostly) downs, Chris Hurley!

Cyrus Baldwin Can’t Get No Satisfaction

Chris Hurley continues the story of Woburn’s own Baldwin brothers and their unsellable tea.

The story to date: Three weeks after the dumping of the tea in Boston harbor, Cyrus Baldwin, merchant of Boston, and his brother Loammi, gentleman farmer of Woburn, tried to smuggle safely transport tea through Charlestown. A shady “Committee of Suspicion” confiscated and destroyed the tea. In a letter now in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Cyrus sought redress from the Charlestown Committee of Correspondence.

His letter wasn’t the only one. Four of the five members of Woburn’s Committee of Correspondence also wrote to their counterpart committee in Charlestown, all on behalf of their fifth member—Loammi Baldwin (shown here). After a bit of circumlocution framed in patriotic rhetoric, their letter starts to get specific:

Som* violent measures we know have been rendered necessary, in order to make a proper Stand against those incroachments that have been made upon our Liberties—But the measures that we would now draw your attention to, we look upon as violent, unjust, & cruel.

The Woburn writers then relate the attack on Loammi Baldwin’s ox-cart and teamster, and the confiscation of Cyrus Baldwin’s tea, but pointedly omit Cyrus Baldwin’s name and sibling relationship to Loammi. In fact, they attempt to distance Loammi, themselves, and Woburn as a whole from the tea itself.

[Loammi Baldwin’s] Team was stopped on the King’s highway, in sd Town; his Teamster abused—his Cart robed of several articles, belonging to him, And at the same time about 26 lbs of Tea, not belonging to him, nor any man in this Town—but only to be conveyed for a Gentleman, by his favour, to some distant place.

Ah, so the tea may not have been bound for Woburn after all. It could have been going anywhere. The letter tries to play off the privileged status of the gentility as exempt from interference by commoners. The Woburn letter ends framing their desire for compensation to the Baldwin’s as being one with the cause of liberty, declaring:

We Trust you will by no means encourage or connive at such Conduct as this, which is so dishonorary and predudicial to the Cause in which we are engaged—but will use your influence to detect & punish the aggressors—and will indeavour that proper compensation be made to the Sufferers.

Charlestown replied—first to the Woburn committee, then to Cyrus—with polite “get lost” letters. Here are excerpts from the Charlestown committee’s copies of those two letters:

We conceive, when the Town appointed us to this honorable Trust, they expected that we should attend to such Grievances of a publick Nature only as there was no legal Remedy for. . . . We can no Means suppose ourselves authorized to interfere in private Matters, where the legal Remedy is plainly pointed out. As to the Fact refer’d to in your letter, this is the first authentick Intelligence we have had of it, a Rumour has prevailed, that something of that kind had taken Place.

They then cast doubt on the honesty of Loammi’s teamster and chided Loammi:

It is generaly doubted whether the Teamster was ever assaulted or not. Nay if he was assaulted there is no reason to suppose any of the Inhabitants of this Town were concerned in it.

But this we dare affirm, that either the Teamster Who relates the Matter, or the Persons who are said to have attacked him, were guilty of an infamous Falsehood, in declaring that they were employed in this Business by Charlestown. . . . We are extremly sorry, that Mr. Baldwin at this trying Time after the Body of the People at Boston had resolved “that the Use of Tea was improper & pernicious” should become a Carrier of that detested Article.

Concluding with:

We can take no Notice of this Matter. Whenever the Committee of Correspondence for the Town of Woburn have any thing to communicate to us, which falls within our Province, we will chearfully attend to it. ———— And with sincere Attachement to the Cause of Liberty, your humble Servants

And be sure not to let the door hit you on the way out, Woburn.

What about that asterisk in Woburn’s letter, shown in the first quoted passage above? It led to a footnote which read simply, “Ed. Andrus.” Edmund Andros had been deposed as governor of the Dominion of New England in a popular rebellion in 1689. Interesting that Woburn went back as far as that as an illustration of necessary “violent measures.” I take that as a signal that in early 1774 the town was ready to support another insurrection, if called for. But obviously the Charlestown committee thought that destroying a barrel of tea was acceptable as well.

TOMORROW: More woes for Cyrus Baldwin.

"This side Winter Hill": Cyrus Baldwin Tells his Story

Yesterday guest blogger Chris Hurley promised untold details about the dumping of a barrel of tea in Charlestown in January 1774. That incident was reported in Massachusetts newspapers with no names attached. This posting picks up the story.

From the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, a letter from Cyrus Baldwin to the Charlestown Committee of Correspondence:

Boston Jany 25 1774

Gentn.

On the 4th Instant I was sending a quantity of Goods to my brother Mr Loammi Baldwin at Woburn & pack’d a bag containing 26 lb. Bohea Tea into a Barrel not for secrecy but for safety of conveyance. In the evening the Team was stoped just on this side Winter hill and the driver interogated by three or four men who called themselves a Commitee of Suspiscion for Charlestown: what goods he had & whether any Tea? To which he answered generally that he knew nothing what goods were in the Cart. Upon which they insisted upon probing, & abused and drove off the Teamster, broke open the cask that contained the Tea, carry'd off the bag with the Tea—& some other articles are missing.

Cyrus Baldwin’s property had been stolen. But because his property was tea, who would be sympathetic to his complaint?

I cannot harbour the least suspicion that any Gentlemen of Charlestown, much less any of the respectable Committe of Correspondance were knowing to or any way incouraging such high handed Villany, yet as they assumed the character of a Committee from the Town of Charlestown I think it my incumbant duty to the Inhabitants of Charlestown to inform you of the above particulars, not doubting but you will properly resent such Wickedness perpetuated in the name of the Town, & if it is in your power, promise me satisfaction for my loss.

Why ask the Charlestown Committee for redress? Why not go to the Law?

I think it not proper or advisable to make a public stir about it just at present, least the Enemies to the good cause which we have imbarked in should triumph in our Divisions. But unless a speedy & intire stop be put to such attacks upon private property we shall fall into a greater Evil than we are endeavouring to avoid.

All which is submitted to your wisdom and confidence.

Your most respectfull and obediant Humble Serv't,
Cyrus Baldwin.

I shall inteem it a favour you'd return an answer as soon as convenience will permitt.

The Charlestown Committee did answer quickly.

TOMORROW: Cyrus Baldwin can’t get no satisfaction.

Tea Merchant Cyrus Baldwin Has Too Much Tea

Longtime Boston 1775 readers might recognize the name “Chris the Woburnite” in the comments, usually attached to choice observations and  stories from that old Middlesex County town. 

In real life that’s Chris Hurley, Revolutionary reenactor and researcher. And he generously offered a series of “guest blogger” articles sharing a story of Woburn’s Baldwin family. So let’s get started.

There were three kinds of tea in Boston near the end of 1773, here listed in decreasing level of unacceptability to the Boston Whigs:

• Detested, new-duty British East India Company tea. Not available, due to premature steeping in the harbor.
• Old-duty British East India Company tea. Tolerated for years, despite (unenforced) non-use agreements.
• Smuggled (often Dutch) tea. Free of the taint of duty, but still tainted somewhat, by it being, well, tea.

At the very end of 1773, popular Whig sentiment simplified things by characterizing all tea as odious, which was bad news for Cyrus Baldwin, a Boston merchant of, among other things, tea. His advertisement in the 1 November Boston Gazette had proudly proclaimed in bold type: “Choice Souchong and Hyson Tea.”

Even though he was from a Whig-leaning family, Baldwin continued to advertise tea as the tea crisis deepened that fall. After all, he was not one of the hated new-duty consignees, and selling tea was his livelihood. Some Boston merchants had openly opposed the landing of the new-duty tea.

Some citizens in Boston accused those merchants of plotting to create scarcity, corner the tea market, and raise prices. They could have been talking about Cyrus Baldwin. He appears to have increased his stock of tea that season: when he advertised in the Boston Evening-Post on 20 December, he now included additional tea, some “Choice Bohea.”

In an attempt to render this offering acceptable, this new ad included a disclaimer: “The above Teas were imported before any of the East India Company’s tea arrived.” That continued to run into early January 1774.

Baldwin priced his tea at 18 shillings per pound. That was more than triple the price set on 29 December by the “principal dealers of teas in Boston”—those dealers being anxious to refute any charge of price gouging (as reported the 30 December Massachusetts Spy). But Baldwin’s 18s. price may have applied only to the high-class Hyson tea, and perhaps he priced his Bohea more reasonably.

In any event, those dealers also agreed not to sell any tea at all after 20 Jan 1774. Whether Cyrus Baldwin was then willingly in step with the association of tea dealers or not, his 20 January ad in the Massachusetts Spy no longer boasted tea.

But Cyrus Baldwin still had tea—too much tea. Even in early January 1774 he knew he couldn’t sell all the Bohea he had. What then to do with it? It did him little good in Boston. This valuable property could even have been in danger from the radical tea-burning element of the Patriot faction [Are you listening, Lexington and Charlestown?]. Where then to safely store it?

Luckily for Cyrus, he had a younger brother, Loammi, who lived on a farm in the nearby countryside town of Woburn. Loammi was a gentlemen of position there and on the town’s committee of correspondence, thus putting him beyond reproach. What better person to store the tea until it was marketable again? The brothers might also have been able to transport the tea to somewhere it could be readily sold. Loammi’s farm had at least one team of oxen and probably a number of wagons or carts. But first, could Cyrus get the tea out to Woburn?

TOMORROW: “Not intended to be smuggled”.

What Did Bostonians Start a Revolution for?

In An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, Nick Bunker posits a provocative parallel for Massachusetts in 1773, during the lead-up to the Tea Party: “Perhaps the closest equivalent in modern times was the end of the Communist regime in East Germany.” Having visited Leipzig and other G.D.R. cities as the Cold War dissolved into mist, Bunker suggests we view Boston through that lens.

Of course, he acknowledges, the British Crown had no equivalent of the Stasi or other elements of the totalitarian Soviet satellite. But in Bunker’s view both societies were aching to break through the flimsy oppression of an old regime: “The town of Boston needed to reinvent itself as the great industrial city it would eventually become after the War of 1812.”

Massachusetts, and New England as whole, indeed had a lot of advantages for an expanding republican economy. The region had the highest literacy rate of anywhere in the British Empire. As Bunker notes, the town was the size of a small British seaport that might support one newspaper, yet it had five or more papers each week in the years before the Revolutionary War, representing a spectrum of political ideas.

What’s more, New England’s relatively equal distribution of land, scarce labor, and town-meeting system let more men gain independent livings and participate in their government than anywhere else in the Empire. The leaders of the government in London didn’t believe in that system—they couldn’t imagine the region really ran that way, and they didn’t think it was a good idea anyway. In 1774 those ministers tried to roll back New England self-government, leading to the decisive countryside confrontations from summer 1774 through spring 1775.

On the other hand, the stultifying culture that might plausibly make Boston resemble Leipzig wasn’t anything that London government had created or supported. It was the system of New England’s own establishment, descendants of Puritans who disliked any form of faith but their own. Their laws didn’t just ban theater and stifle Christmas. They barred work from Saturday night to Monday morning, and blocked travel in Sundays between one town and another except in emergencies. For all of New England’s vaunted literacy, only the top households owned any non-religious reading material.

Since the start of the century Philadelphia had vaulted ahead of Boston in population and trade. Some of the reason was geographic: Philadelphia’s harbor was open for more of the year, and it wasn’t perched on a small peninsula. But most of the southern city’s advantages were cultural. It was more welcoming to immigrants and non-conformists. The most inventive Bostonian of the century, Benjamin Franklin, left for Philadelphia in his teens not because he lacked a place within New England society but because he didn’t like that place.

Bunker writes of the need for Boston to reinvent itself as an industrial center, “Even before the revolution, it contained men and women who understood this was so.” He doesn’t identify such individuals, however, and I’m hard pressed to think of any among the Revolutionaries. There’s no doubt that some benefited from the coming of industrialization: Paul Revere remade himself from a skilled craftsman into a manufacturer, and Loammi Baldwin of Woburn went from a farmer to a civil engineer overseeing the Middlesex Canal.

But almost to a man, Boston Patriots went into political activism and then the Revolutionary War not seeking to break free from their narrow society but to protect it from change. London’s new taxes were preventing a return to the town’s previous prosperity, they complained. When the political confrontation heated up, they demanded to go back to Massachusetts’s old charter, not to make reforms.

Samuel Adams certainly didn’t aim to lead a revolution that would open Boston to a Catholic church and competing theaters. Elias Hasket Derby (shown above) made a fortune in the post-war China Trade, but in April 1775 when he was pushing for his Salem militia company to march faster against the redcoats he would surely have been happy just to have the British Customs service roll back its enforcement to the 1750s level.

With Patriots like those, I think Bunker’s assessment that “Boston needed to reinvent itself as the great industrial city” is like saying that Tyrannosaurs needed to reinvent themselves as the light, maneuverable flyers they eventually evolved into. There’s no doubt now that birds descended from two-legged dinosaurs while Tyrannosaurs died out, but those dinosaurs weren’t spending their days trying to fly. Similarly, conservative New Englanders taking action against the Crown in the 1760s and 1770s were trying to preserve their way of life for themselves and their children, not to open up their society to the possibilities of industrial (or other) change. And yet that’s what they did.

TOMORROW: Reluctant revolutionaries?

Benjamin Thompson: Worst Apprentice in the World, part 3

The teen-aged Benjamin Thompson was clearly excited to be working in Boston in 1769, not in his home town of Woburn or even the smaller port of Salem. He sketched his master Hopestill Capen’s building in his notebook, marking the shop where he worked and the dormer attic room where he lived.

Benjamin signed up for private lessons in French and “the Back-Sword” from a Scottish army veteran named Donald McAlpine, and drew fencers in his notebook. Then he ended up skipping half the French lessons.

Meanwhile, Benjamin was supposed to be working in Capen’s dry-goods shop. But according to an 1837 profile in The American Journal of Science and Arts:

Mr. Capen once told his [Benjamin’s] mother, that “he oftener found her son under the counter, with gimblets, knife, and saw, constructing some little machine, or looking over some book of science, than behind it, arranging the cloths or waiting upon customers.”

According to his home-town friend Loammi Baldwin, Benjamin was already working on a perpetual-motion machine, and that’s bound to take up all of one’s time.

By the spring of 1770, Benjamin Thompson was back at his mother’s house in Woburn, having shown he was thoroughly unsuited for work as an apprentice. But he was on his way to becoming Count Rumford, one of the greatest scientists of his age.

“Washington’s First Spy Ring” in Cambridge, 17 March

To finish off this week of postings about events at the mansion now officially called Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be speaking there on 17 March, to commemorate the British evacuation that ended the siege of Boston.

My talk will be titled “Washington’s First Spy Ring.” I’ll tell various stories about Gen. George Washington’s intelligence and counterintelligence efforts during his first months as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. Those tales include:

• intelligence reports passed on by Col. Loammi Baldwin in Chelsea.
• the discovery of Dr. Benjamin Church as a British spy.
• [for the first time anywhere!] the name and subsequent career of the deserter who brought Washington plans of the British fortifications in July 1775.

Depending on time and what I discover between now and then, I may also tackle such questions as: How did intelligence from New Hampshire lead to the Battle of Bunker Hill? Did Henry Knox’s military career rest on his untold activities as a spy? And why did one of the cipher experts who helped unmask Church take a horse from Washington’s stable?

My talk is scheduled to begin at 6:00 P.M. It’s free, but because of limited seating, the site asks people to make reservations by phone or through this webpage.

A Shock for Gen. Washington

If Gen. George Washington’s arrangement to receive intelligence about the British forces from the Rev. John Carnes had been secure, I wouldn’t be able to write much about it.

I wouldn’t be able to quote the 28 July 1775 letter from Washington’s secretary Joseph Reed laying out the communication network. I wouldn’t be able to cite Lt. Col. Loammi Baldwin’s notes from mid-August that reports were about to arrive from Carnes. I wouldn’t be able to document rumors circulating out of Cambridge that confirm news from “Parson Carnes” in Boston.

But the security for Washington’s first espionage effort was as full of holes as one of the sieves that steward Timothy Austin bought for the headquarters kitchen. The general took care not to write in his expense notebook the name of the man who had agreed “to go into the Town of Boston; to establish a secret correspondence for the purpose of conveying intelligence of the Enemy’s movements & designs.”

However, Reed put that man’s name into the letter to Baldwin, who did not need to know it. Baldwin’s only job in this network was to give a letter to a local man named Tewksbury, and to send any reply to headquarters as quickly as possible.

Furthermore, the wording of Reed’s letter suggests that he contacted Baldwin out of the blue simply because he was the American officer in command at Chelsea. There’s no hint of any preceding discussion in person about intelligence matters, either for Washington and Reed to evaluate Baldwin’s reliability and discretion, or for those officers to establish understandings so they wouldn’t have to put all their crucial information in writing.

Furthermore, Ezekiel Price’s diary makes clear that the intelligence John Carnes sent out of Boston spread quickly, with the man’s name still attached: “this morning a woman got out of Boston, who brought a letter from Parson Carnes…” British agents wouldn’t have needed to infiltrate the little American spy network to learn Carnes’s name. They could simply have kept their ears open. Indeed, on 26 August a Customs official at Newport sent “intelligence of much importance…from the Rebel Camp” to Gen. Thomas Gage.

And, as I noted yesterday, Dr. Benjamin Church had already inserted himself into the communications chain. It’s not certain he ever told his British handlers about Carnes, but the royal authorities did apparently learn that the man was writing to Washington and told him to leave Boston.

In early October 1775, Washington and Reed learned that Dr. Church had been sending secret messages to people inside Boston through a different route. That revelation came as a huge surprise to everyone in the American forces. The Massachusetts Whigs were shocked because they had worked closely with Church for years. Washington and Reed must have been shaken to realize that their trust in the doctor had left their agent Carnes completely vulnerable.

Back at the start of this series of postings, I quoted Washington papers editor John C. Fitzpatrick on how the general chided a later intelligence chief, Col. Benjamin Tallmadge, for mentioning an informer in a letter. But Washington and his staff weren’t nearly so careful in 1775. Washington apparently learned about the need for strict security from the nearly disastrous failure of his first spy network.

A Spy Network Doomed from the Start

When I said yesterday that the Washington-Carnes spy network had been infiltrated from the start, I wasn’t even talking about how one link in the communications chain, Lt. Col. Loammi Baldwin, was best friends with a secret British agent.

For years Baldwin had traded scientific knowledge with Benjamin Thompson, later known as Count Rumford (shown here). Thompson went over to the British on 13 Oct 1775, became Lord Germain’s favorite and secretary, and eventually commanded dragoons on Long Island near the end of the war.

Nevertheless, Baldwin continued to see Thompson as a friend. He probably influenced the early American portrayals of Rumford as a talented man who would gladly have worked for the cause of liberty if only his New Hampshire neighbors hadn’t been too suspicious to give him a chance.

Twentieth-century scholars found that in early May 1775 Thompson sent Gen. Thomas Gage a secret report about the New England army written in invisible ink. Thompson’s neighbors were right to be suspicious.

In his diary, Baldwin recorded that Thompson had visited him in Chelsea on 4 June, and went home to Woburn on 13 June. Sometime after 23 July Thompson sent Baldwin designs for epaulettes to distinguish the American sergeants and corporals, so the two friends were in touch that summer. Of course, Baldwin may never have told Thompson about the intelligence assignments he received at the end of that month.

But there’s clear documentary evidence of infiltration by another British agent. The letter that Joseph Reed sent to Baldwin to pass on to a Mr. Tewksbury to give to a waterman to deliver to the Rev. John Carnes inside Boston was written by Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr.

As a Massachusetts official in early 1775, Dr. Church gave inside information to Gen. Gage. By the summer he was medical director of the American army, and still sending messages to the royal authorities. In late July, maybe slightly before this letter, Church tried to send a letter into Boston through his mistress, who had contacts in Rhode Island.

Even if Reed and Gen. George Washington never told Church who their man inside Boston was, the doctor could have used his letter to expose that agent to his British army contacts, or done other mischief. Or he could simply have piggybacked on the Washington-Carnes communications chain; it seems to have worked better than his Rhode Island channel.

Given that situation, it’s not really a surprise that the British military detected Carnes corresponding with Gen. Washington, as the minister’s family recalled.

TOMORROW: In fact, the whole enterprise was riddled with security breaches.