“The purport was, Boston was in action…”

One important element of the “Powder Alarm” of 1774 was that although the British army operation ended peacefully on the morning of 1 September, reports of what happened kept spreading for days.

And as those reports spread, they grew more dire.

Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles recorded from an eyewitness that in Shrewsbury in the early morning hours of 2 September the rumor was “six men killed.”

Exaggerations like that brought thousands of Middlesex County militiamen into Cambridge that day. That event produced fear about more British military action, which apparently produced more rumors.

At noon on 3 September, Israel Putnam tried to rouse the militia around Pomfret, Connecticut, because of and with this news:

I have this minute had an express from Boston that the fight between Boston and Regulars [began] last night at sunset, the cannon began to and continued playing all night, and they beg for help

Early on 4 September, Titus Hosmer (shown above) in Middletown, Connecticut, was woken by the sheriff, who had received a letter from Putnam. Hosmer wrote:

The purport was, Boston was in action by the “troops sending out to seize all the powder in the country, especially at Framingham [sic] about 20 miles from Boston; which when discovered occasion’d the country people to collect and offer to rescue the powder [i.e., grab it back]. Six of the country people were shot dead at the very time, and many wounded—an Artillery planted at the Neck—the Ships were heard to fire all night of a Friday.

By noon that day, Hosmer heard a less drastic report via Hartford:

[William] Brattle at Cambridge, a high tory, had petitioned [Gen. Thomas] Gage for troops to protect him at his house, which Gage granted; a mob gathered and demand of Brattle to renounce his toryism or whatever you may term it; but after a short parley the troop fired, kill’d some right out, a large numr. wounded. No news from the town itself.

On Sunday, 4 September, the worst rumors reached Longmeadow, Massachusetts. The Rev. Stephen Williams heard that the Royal Navy was involved:

the Ships in ye Harbour—of Boston, & ye Army on ye Land Side were allso fireing upon ye Town so yt. it was like ye Town was Demolishd.

In Milford, Connecticut, young Joseph Plumb Martin heard the talk at church that Sunday afternoon and went to bed fearing redcoats would attack his family’s home before morning.

Of course, none of that happened. But it took a while for the real news to catch up.

TOMORROW: How the news reached the Continental Congress.

John Akley, Continental Drum Major

The next Akley brother, after Francis, Joseph, and Thomas, was John, baptized in September 1757.

In October 1764 John had just turned seven, and the Boston Overseers of the Poor sent him all the way out to Springfield.

Samuel and Lucy Williams promised to teach the boy to “Read Write & Cypher” and give him £13.6s.8d. when he came of age in 1779.

Before that date, war broke out. In April 1775, at the age of seventeen, John Akley marched with the town militia company. That unit got as far as Brookfield before the officers realized the emergency had passed and marched everyone home again. John served only three days that year.

In early 1776, however, John Akley enlisted in the Continental Army. In his pension application filed in May 1818 from Norwich, New York, he recalled that he had then lived in Longmeadow, a part of Springfield that didn’t formally become a town until 1783. Akley reported that he was a drummer and his first company commander was Capt. Silvanus Walker of Brookfield.

With that unit “he was in the battle at Trenton at the taking of the Hesians.” When his year was up, Akley recalled, he was discharged in Newtown, Pennsylvania. He then reenlisted for three years in the company of Capt. Asa Coburn of Sturbridge, regiment of Col. Icahbod Alden of Duxbury. Based on his experience, he was immediately made the drum major. He was nineteen.

During his second stretch, Akley stated, “he was in the Battle at the taking of Burgoin [Saratoga], and at Cherry Vally in the State of New York where the Col. was killed.” On 11 Nov 1778 Crown forces under Joseph Brant and Maj. Walter Butler attacked that settlement, catching Col. Alden and many other officers outside the fort. That defeat with civilian casualties became known to Americans as “the Cherry Valley Massacre.”

On 1 Feb 1780, John Akley was discharged from the regiment, now led by Col. John Brooks, at West Point. He went home and became close to Miriam Ward of West Springfield, then about sixteen years old.

In 1839 Miriam Akeley applied for a pension as John Akley’s widow. The law providing such pensions offered more money to women who had married soldiers while they were still in service. That might have influenced how Miriam Akeley described their nuptials on 29 Oct 1781:

John Akeley (or Ackley as the name is some times spelt) was at home on furlo and could not remain at home a sufficient time to be published according to the laws of Massachusetts, and that they went from West Springfield to Suffield in Connecticut and was there married (without being published) on the day where written by Rev. Mr. [Ebenezer] Gay Minister of said Suffield.

Suffield’s town clerk verified that marriage date. According to his widow, John Akley returned to the army in late 1781, then came home for good a year later.

Nonetheless, John Akley mentioned no such additional year in the army in his 1818 pension application. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War records his last army service in February 1780.

Massachusetts also listed a man named John Ackley serving on board the Continental frigate Hague under Capt. John Manley in 1783. However, that’s probably another man of the same name. John Akley’s 1818 application didn’t mention fighting at sea, either.

Another wrinkle appears in Charles Martyn’s The William Ward Genealogy (1925). It states:

Miriam Ward married John Ackley of Brattleboro, Vt. They resided for a time in Brattleboro, then he disappeared and was never heard of again. She afterwards lived in Wethersfield, Conn.

That book lists two children for the couple, including Polly Ackley, who married a man named Flint in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Polly and John Flint appear in the Akleys’ pension file, so clearly it’s the same family.

According to the 1790 U.S. Census, “John Akeley” was then living in Guilford, Vermont, with one white boy and two white females—no doubt his son, wife, and daughter. That was close to Brattleboro. By 1800 that family may have moved to Hartford County, Connecticut, where a John Ackley and relatives appear on the census.

According to John Flint’s 1838 affidavit, he had known John Akley personally, Miriam Akley had lived at the Flint house in Wethersfield since about 1808, and John Akley was absent from that house “about eighteen or twenty years since.” Around that time, Polly Flint destroyed her father’s drum major warrant, “not supposing it to be of any value.”

Putting the dots together, that suggests John Akley left his extended family in Connecticut and went to central New York before 1818. He applied for a federal pension in Norwich that year. The government paid Akley that pension until he died on 1 Apr 1819.

Eventually word of John Akley’s death got back to his family in Connecticut, though Flint never knew the exact date, thinking it was in June 1820. Almost two decades later, the U.S. government approved a widow’s pension for Miriam Akeley. She was still signing for those payments (albeit with a mark) in 1848 at the age of eighty-five. Miriam Akeley finally died on 8 May 1850, and her gravestone, mentioning her long departed husband by name, appears above.

TOMORROW: An Akley artillerist.

“An Intimation of the Bombardment of Boston”

Today is the anniversary of the militia uprising in 1774 that Richard Frothingham dubbed the “Powder Alarm” in his biography of Dr. Joseph Warren.

On 2 Sept 1774 up to five thousand Massachusetts militiamen crowded into Cambridge, forcing every royal appointee in town to resign or apologize.

That event demonstrated the end of royal rule in the province outside of Boston, a few harbor islands, and (later) parts of Marshfield—places where the British military was stationed.

Those militiamen were reacting to the British army’s seizure of gunpowder and militia cannon on 1 September. Or, to be more accurate, many of them were reacting to exaggerated accounts of the previous day.

A traveling merchant named McNeil told the Rev. Ezra Stiles that in Shrewsbury he was woken in the middle of the night by “somebody violently rapping up the Landlord, telling the doleful Story that the Powder was taken, six men killed.”

From Hartford, Titus Hosmer informed Silas Deane that “[William] Brattle at Cambridge, a high tory, had petitioned [Gen. Thomas] Gage for troops to protect him at his house, which Gage granted; a mob gathered and demand of Brattle to renounce his toryism or whatever you may term it; but after a short parley the troop fired, kill’d some right out, a large number wounded.”

The Rev. Stephen Williams, minister of Longmeadow, and his congregation heard that “the [Royal Navy] Ships in ye Harbour—of Boston, & ye Army on ye Land Side were allso fireing upon ye Town so yt. it was like ye Town was Demolishd.” [For more of the Williams diary, visit the Longmeadow Library. Thanks to Ray Raphael for pointing me to that source.]

And one of my favorite responses came from young Joseph Plumb Martin, then thirteen years old and living in Milford, Connecticut:

In the afternoon, one Sabbath day [4 Sept 1774], while the people were assembled at meeting, word was brought that the British (regulars, as the good people then called them) were advancing from Boston, spreading death and desolation in their route in every direction. . . .

I went out of the house in the dusk of the evening, when I heard the sound of a carriage on the road, in the direction of Boston; I thought they were coming as sure as a gun; I shall be dead or a captive before to-morrow morning; however, I went to bed late in the evening, dreamed of “fire and sword,” I suppose; waked in the morning, found myself alive, and the house standing where it did the evening before.

The dire rumors traveled at least as far as Philadelphia, where John Adams wrote about “an Intimation of the Bombardment of Boston—a confused account, but an alarming one indeed.” More accurate stories about what had happened in Cambridge followed, but by the time they arrived people’s thinking about the royal government had started to change.

I devote the first two chapters of The Road to Concord to the gunpowder seizure and Powder Alarm of September 1774 because they’re so important to the political shifts in New England and the start of the Revolutionary War that started.