The Death of Luther Blanchard

As I described yesterday, Luther Blanchard was an eighteen-year-old fifer when the Revolutionary War broke out. He was wounded in the fighting at the North Bridge in Concord—but not badly enough to keep him from continuing to march with the Acton militia company throughout the day.

Furthermore, Luther Blanchard was well enough to enlist on 24 April as a private in the company of Capt. William Smith of Lincoln, assigned to Col. John Nixon’s regiment. That regiment was in the thick of the fight at Bunker Hill in June. Luther was listed as a corporal in his company on 1 August. On 30 September, he was “reported dead.” His older brother Calvin returned from Col. Benedict Arnold’s expedition against Québec months later to learn that Luther had died.

Nineteenth-century historians provided contradictory timelines for Luther Blanchard’s death. Samuel Adams Drake’s Middlesex County history of 1879 stated:

Though the wound that day appeared slight, and only briefly detained him from his company, it became the cause of his death soon after.

D. Hamilton Hurd’s Middlesex County history of 1890 stated exactly how soon, citing a Blanchard descendant as its source:

He followed on in the pursuit of the British on their retreat to Boston, fifing with all the vigor of his manly strength, which grew less as the excitement of the day began to tell upon his wasted forces. The wound, which he did not think serious at first, grew worse as he proceeded, and on reaching Cambridge he was obliged to be taken to a hospital, where he died.

Finally, according to Lucie Caroline Hager’s Boxborough: A New England Town and Its People (1891):

The wound appeared slight, but he died three days later in consequence of it. His body was brought to Littleton and laid in the old cemetery there. Today the spot is unmarked and unknown.

But clearly Luther Blanchard didn’t die in April 1775. He was not only alive in August but healthy enough to be a corporal. Unfortunately, neither Continental Army records nor the published vital records of Littleton offer any more information.

In 1895, the Blanchard family erected a memorial which said: “Luther was the first man hit by a British bullet at the old North Bridge, and died in the service of his country a few months later.” (The monument shown above courtesy of Find a Grave appears to be a later one.)

In a small book about Luther and Calvin Blanchard published in 1899 by a descendant, writer Alfred Sereno Hudson argued that the wound at the North Bridge had indeed been fatal:

Calvin Blanchard always stated in unequivocal terms that his brother Luther died from the effects of that wound; and, repeatedly, did his son Simon state what he had so often heard from his father’s lips about his uncle Luther.

The family also understood that Luther died in a building of Harvard College. Hudson says that the college buildings were used as a hospital, but in fact by the fall of 1775 they were used only as barracks. The hospitals were kept a distance from the bulk of the men. Of course, one doesn’t have to be a hospital to die, and people from rural Massachusetts might think of all Cambridge as Harvard.

Curiously, the family’s 1895 memorial inscription doesn’t say that Luther Blanchard died of his original wound. It simply said he died while in the army. There was a dysentery epidemic in 1775 which killed many soldiers and civilians. Overall more Revolutionary War soldiers died in camp than in battle. So while it’s possible Luther’s April wound was indeed the cause of his death, it may be more likely that he died of an unrelated disease and his family came to blame the old wound.

In any event, the teen-aged fifer at the North Bridge did not live to see twenty.

Luther Blanchard, Fifer

Yesterday I wrote about the Acton Minutemen marching toward Concord’s North Bridge, reportedly to the tune later codified as “The White Cockade.” The fifer in that unit was Luther Blanchard, son of Simon and Sarah Blanchard, born 4 June 1756 and therefore eighteen years old.

Luther was also one of the first people wounded during the North Bridge skirmish. In A History of the Fight at Concord (1827), Ezra Ripley wrote:

In a minute or two, the Americans being in quick motion, and within ten or fifteen rods of the bridge, a single gun was fired by a British soldier, which marked its way, passing under Col. [John] Robinson’s arm, slightly wounding the side of Luther Blanchard, a fifer in the Acton company. This gun was instantly followed by a volley, which killed Capt. [Isaac] Davis and Mr. [Abner] Hosmer, both of the same company.

Eight years later, Lemuel Shattuck added in a footnote in A History of the Town of Concord:

Luther Blanchard went to Mrs. [Rebeckah] Barrett’s, who, after examining his wound, mournfully remarked, “A little more and you’d been killed.”

“Yes,” said Blanchard, “and a little more and ’t wouldn’t have touched me;”—and immediately joined the pursuers.

Though Luther Blanchard marched with the Acton company (fifers got paid for musters), he lived in the neighboring town of Littleton, in an area that’s now part of Boxborough. Luther appears on Boxborough’s town seal, and every June it observes Fifer’s Day in his honor; this year’s celebration comes on 15 June.

COMING UP: What happened to Luther Blanchard?

The Questions of “The White Cockade”

In 1835, septuagenarian Charles Handley sat down with local historian Josiah Adams to relate his memory of the start of the Revolutionary War. Handley testified that on 19 Apr 1775 he was twelve years old and “lived at the tavern kept by Mrs. Brown, nearly a mile northwest of the North Bridge” in Concord. Usually when a child was “living with” someone outside the family, that meant he or she had been put out to work.

Handley recalled:

I saw Captain [Isaac] Davis’s company, as they came from Acton. I first saw them coming through the fields north of Barrett’s mill, and they kept the fields till they came to the road at Mrs. Brown’s tavern. They there took the back road leading to the bridge. They marched quite fast to the music of a fife and drum. I remember the tune, but am not sure of its name; think it was called the “White Cockade.”

Handley then whistled the tune he remembered, which Adams confirmed was “The White Cockade.”

That tune was definitely established by 1775. It was printed the next year in David Herd’s Scottish Songs and again in Campbell’s Reels (1778) and Aird’s Airs (1782). The first used the title “My Love Was Born in Aberdeen,” but the latter two included the music only. A Boston 1775 commenter reported that the melody appears in many handwritten American collections of fife tunes from the Revolution.

In 1790 Robert Burns (1759-1796, shown above) published the lyrics that gave the tune the name “The White Cockade.” For the first time in print the song was explicitly in favor of the Jacobite uprising of 1745. And that raises some questions.

D. Michael Ryan addressed some of those questions in an essay on “The White Cockade” and another article on martial music at the North Bridge. As he notes, authors around the time of the Centennial picked up Handley’s small detail and ran with it. They wrote that the Acton Minutemen had played “The White Cockade” while actually marching down on the British regulars at the North Bridge, though young Charles didn’t see that. Further writing said that “The White Cockade” was a favorite of Acton, or of Capt. Davis—again with no additional evidence besides Handley testimony. One local man later told a newspaper that his father, a veteran of the battle, described the same tune, but by then the historical accounts might have affected memories.

Even after peeling away the latter-day exaggerations, Ryan asks:

Still, we have to wonder why this Scottish tune would have been a “signature tune” of the Acton Minute Men, a “familiar air to the dwellers of the vicinity,” or a “favorite” of Captain Isaac Davis, particularly as there appears to be no local connection to the 1745 Jacobite uprising. It is true that the tune was one of rebellion, it was popular with military and civilian musicians and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, it was found in music books of the period, and it was a lively tune for marching. Yet with some 500 witnesses at the North Bridge, why would not one deem it appropriate at the time (especially among the King’s men) to comment about “The White Cockade,” unless its notes simply were not played?

Another question occurs to me. In 1775, the Massachusetts Patriots were eager to show that they were standing up for British liberties and traditions. They viewed their political opponents as breaking those traditions with new taxes, appointees, &c. They linked that opposition whenever they could to Jacobite and Scottish usurpation, which let them present themselves as defenders of true British liberty. Why would those same provincials choose a tune that was clearly associated with the Jacobite threat?

I suspect that the tune we now know as “The White Cockade” didn’t have such a clear political meaning until Burns published in 1790. It probably had several sets of lyrics and several names, including a Jacobite version or two. But in New England, musicians might well have known the tune without political connotations.

After the Stuart line petered out, Burns’s “The White Cockade” was no longer a political threat but a quaint relic, suitable for publication. Burns’s popularity soon made his words the best-known lyrics to that tune. Therefore, by the time Handley and Adams spoke in 1835, they knew the tune first and foremost as “The White Cockade.” Back in 1775, it may not have had such a specific meaning.