Lydia Barnard: “She Captured a Redcoat”?

The first printed version of the legend of Lydia Barnard of Watertown grabbing a British soldier off a horse on 19 Apr 1775 struck me as entirely dubious. The second, said to be taken down in her own words, is more credible. At least two more versions appear to have been published by William Barnes Dorman around the turn of the last century; I suspect he was related to Benjamin S. Barnes, source of the second account, but I can’t prove that.

Dorman’s articles were titled “She Captured a Redcoat.” One appeared in the Magazine of the Daughters of the Revolution in October 1893, and the other in the Boston Herald and then Watertown’s Military History.

According to both of Dorman’s articles, Lydia Barnard noticed that the soldier had empty holes in his cartridge box—i.e., he’d been shooting his gun. Since he might have been shooting at her brothers, she gave him a good shaking until he surrendered.

One of Dorman’s articles quotes Lydia Spofford (her name after her third marriage) as recalling, “He begged like a Trooper for his life”; the other, “that she never saw a man that she thought she could not have handled.”

The Barnes version says that the soldier had stolen the horse from a Patriot named Col. Stedman, who got it back. One Dorman version says that the horse wasn’t Dorman’s, but British officers had taken his own the night before, so he got this one in recompense. Curiously, given that there was a war on, Dorman said the saddle “was thrown on the potato heap in the cellar.”

There are still holes and cracks in this tale. The earliest version said Lydia Barnard was a widow; her family account says her husband was still alive, and indeed Watertown records refer to him as late as January 1775. But he must have died before she remarried the next year.

The Barnes account says she claimed to have five brothers in the fight; The Hastings Memorial lists only four brothers—but she could have counted brothers-in-law as well.

(Incidentally, The Hastings Memorial says one of those brothers, Josiah Warren, “was Captain of Artillery in the Battle of Bunker Hill”; he was actually a lieutenant in Col. Thomas Gardner’s regiment, which performed better than the artillery.)

Nevertheless, this story seems to have come down only through Lydia Warren Barnard Wood Spofford’s descendants and their neighbors in Boxford. I’ve found no mention of it in earlier histories during the century between the battle and that town’s history. Its author was clearly wrong in claiming this soldier was the first prisoner of the Revolution; the Americans had captured other redcoats to the west, starting with some who lagged behind in Lexington, apparently taking the opportunity to exit the British army.

I’m generally skeptical of tales grandmothers and other relatives tell their grandchildren with no supporting evidence. Such caregivers might tell stories as moral lessons, not expecting them to be taken as history, but grandchildren are always such a trusting audience. So while I’m not ready to dismiss Lydia Spofford’s tale outright, I’m far from accepting it as authentic.

But I wouldn’t want to tell her that!

Lydia Barnard: “a woman of strong mind and massive physique”

Yesterday I continued this year’s exploration of the stories of the Battle of Lexington and Concord with the story of Lydia Barnard (born Lydia Warren and died Lydia Spofford), as first set down in an 1880 history of Boxford, Massachusetts.

Another version of this tale appeared in Jeremiah and Aphia Tenney Spofford’s 1888 genealogy of the family. This book calls Lydia Spofford “a woman of strong mind and massive physique,” and quotes what it says is her own account of 19 Apr 1775, “transcribed by her grandson, Benjamin S. Barnes, of Boxford”:

The day of the battle of Lexington, I was living in Watertown. The able-bodied men had all gone to the battle, leaving only women, children, and a few old men, at home, anxiously awaiting the result. Toward night several women came running to my house, crying, “Mrs. Barnard, the Regulars are coming!”

I looked up the street, and saw a redcoat riding toward us on a horse. He came up and inquired if that was the road to Boston. I stepped to his side, took the horse by the head with one hand, and the soldier by the collar with the other, saying, “You villain; you’ve been killing our folks, and deserve death yourself” (my husband and five brothers had gone to the fight). I pulled him to the ground, while he begged piteously for his life.

I then gave him up to some old men, who took him to the tavern and kept him till the proper authorities had him exchanged for one of our men. It was asserted that he was wounded, and was trying to find his way to Boston, having stolen the horse from the roadside, where it had been tied by its owner, Col. Stedman, of Cambridge, who had ridden him to Lexington that morning, whither he had gone to fight for his country. He was made glad, a few days after, by the recovery of his valuable horse.

I don’t know of any colonel named Stedman in Cambridge, but Capt. Ebenezer Stedman (1709-1785) was a selectman and important Patriot activist in that town. Local historian Lucius Paige wrote: “He kept a tavern many years on the southerly side of Mount Auburn Street, about midway between Brighton and Dunster streets.” We know from contemporaneous notes that Stedman sent express riders up to Woburn between midnight and dawn on 19 Apr 1775, so he got word of the British march early. Still, he was in his late sixties that day, and might have left the actual riding and fighting to younger men.

This version of the tale offers an explanation of how a Watertown woman could have grabbed a redcoat when the main British column never passed through that town: this particular soldier was separated from the rest, and lost. He also seems to have been wounded, and not carrying a gun—easy prey for “a woman of strong mind and massive physique.”

TOMORROW: Apparently, yet more details of Lydia Spofford’s tale.

Lydia Barnard: “a woman of strong mind and body”

Sidney Perley’s History of Boxford (1880) includes this ungraceful sentence in a footnote:

When the British drove the General Court from Boston in 1775, Mr. [Aaron] Wood and some of the representatives boarded with Mrs. Lydia Barnard,—daughter of Phineas and Grace (Hastings) Warren of Waltham, Mass., and widow of David Barnard—(who was born Jan. 18, 1745), in Watertown, where, it will be remembered, many of the members of the General Court took refuge.

Already we’ve veered off the historical track. The royal authorities didn’t “drive the General Court from Boston in 1775.” Gov. Thomas Gage had used his constitutional power to dissolve the legislature in mid-1774 while it was meeting in Salem. The towns elected a shadow legislature called the Massachusetts Provincial Congress late that year, and Aaron Wood was the first representative from Boxford, though he didn’t attend all the later sessions.

In mid-1775, after the war had begun, Massachusetts towns decided they could resume electing a General Court. The legislature then met in Watertown, and Wood was once against a Boxford representative. And, since his wife died on 15 June 1775, he was also available.

Perley’s footnote continues:

Mr. Wood fell in love with his buxom hostess, married [on 8 May 1776 in Cambridge], and brought her to Boxford. After the death of Mr. Wood, who died childless, she married Benjamin Spofford of Boxford, Nov. 14, 1792. She was a woman of strong mind and body, weighing over two hundred pounds, and died Sept. 6, 1839, aged ninety-five years [actually ninety-four].

When the British retreated after the battle of Lexington, they passed by her house. One of the privates stole a horse, and was making his retreat in better style. He said something to Mrs. Barnard that was not acceptable to her patriotic mind, and she pulled him from his horse, and took him prisoner; and, it is said, this was the first prisoner taken during the Revolution.

But the British column didn’t withdraw from Concord through Watertown, so they couldn’t have “passed by” the Barnard house.

TOMORROW: Lydia Spofford’s own story?