Pickering on the Beginning of the Siege

Earlier this week the Journal of the American Revolution made the first publication of a 21 Apr 1775 letter by Timothy Pickering, colonel of the Essex County militia. The letter now belongs to the Harlan Crow Library in Dallas.

The title of library curator Samuel Fore’s article emphasizes Pickering as an “Eyewitness to the British Retreat from Lexington.” However, the letter doesn’t say anything about the events of 19 April (including Pickering’s own actions, which were controversial for decades).

Rather, on 21 April Pickering wrote about how the siege of Boston was taking shape. Or at least about the situation on the northern wing of the siege; he didn’t mention what was going on in Roxbury at all. Instead, he told a colleague from Essex County:

The regulars were entrenching on the first hill beyond Charlestown neck; also on a point of ground (as well as I could learn) in Cambridge river, just as it opens to the Bay. For what purposes I cannot tell, but conjecture to prevent the provincials entering Boston by the way of Charlestown, or by boats going down Cambridge river. The provincials, perhaps three or four thousand men, were scattered about Cambridge common too much at random.

Lack of discipline by the common soldier was a fairly constant theme in Pickering’s military writings.

As a regimental commander, Pickering was invited to a council of war in Cambridge headed by Gen. Artemas Ward and Gen. William Heath, with Dr. Joseph Warren sitting in. Characteristically, Pickering voiced his opinions, including on whether the Massachusetts troops should attack the British positions:

I ventured to declare my opinion “That we ought to act only on the defensive; but some thought that now was the time to strike, & that now the day might be our own, & end the dispute. I could not think so: for besides the scanty portion of ammunition we at present could come at, our men were not sufficiently prepared for action; they were not disciplined even for an irregular engagement; few, very few, have had experience; & the officers in general have neither instructed themselves nor men how to act: The confusions of yesterday, testified by every officer I could talk with, fully justify these assertions. . . .

Another & what appeared to me an important reason for acting only on the defensive was this. The attack is universally said by our people to have been begun by the King’s troops: This may serve to justify a return of fire from us; and tho by pursuing them we seemed to act offensively, yet that was a natural consequence of the first attack, & might be excused: but to attack the troops, while they remained, as now, quiet in the trenches, would be deemed a much more atrocious act, & fatally prevent an accommodation, which notwithstanding yesterday’s skirmish, did not appear wholly impracticable.[”]

That reinforces Pickering’s reputation for wanting to find an “accommodation” with the royal government when other Massachusetts Patriots were ready to push harder. People groused that his attitude had kept the Essex County troops from engaging with the British column on 19 April.

Another question the Massachusetts commanders faced was whether to maintain maximum forces around Boston or send some militia units back home to defend their coastal towns from possible attack by the Royal Navy. Pickering didn’t want to leave Salem undefended:

I told them the seaports were so greatly exposed it appeared to me & others not expedient that any of the militia should leave them, & therefore, after consulting with the chief officers present I had directed and advised the Salem, Beverly, and Manchester militia to return. This was rather contrary to the previous desire of the Council of War, (composed of the General & field officers above mentioned;) but afterwards it appeared that they also judged it expedient, by directing the Ipswich companies to return:

That shows us how loose Gen. Ward’s authority was. The previous day’s council of war had agreed to keep troops at the siege lines, but Pickering had already sent some of his men home.

Toward the end of his letter, Pickering wrote: “I have also just heard by a man from Boston, that Earl Percy is badly if not dangerously wounded.” That rumor was false. Lt. Col. Francis Smith had been wounded, though not badly, but Col. Percy was unhurt.

“Unfolding Histories” at the Cape Ann Museum

The Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester is hosting its first major archival exhibition, showcasing notable documents from its collection and those of seven other local institutions.

“Unfolding Histories: Cape Ann before 1900” is organized around ten themes: Native American history, education, religion, African-American history, literary imagination, charity and welfare, women’s history, temperance, warfare, and transportation. The museum says:

Organized thematically, Unfolding Histories lets the documents tell the stories of Cape Ann, thereby highlighting often neglected experiences and perspectives. This archival record richly depicts the political and social structures of our nation before its founding, through its early years and on up to 1900, and provides windows into the working and cultural life of a place that would become a haven for artists and writers.

The Boston Globe reported, “The show consists of some 80 items: letters, books, maps (one of them executed by no less than Samuel de Champlain), official documents, photographs, diaries, Native American artifacts, even stereopticon cards.”

The Cape Ann Museum’s Twitter feed has been sharing items from the exhibit under the hashtag #unfoldinghistories. Highlights from the Revolutionary era include:

• this note about the outbreak of war inserted into Gloucester’s town records.
• a love letter from 1776.
• a handwritten certificate of emancipation in 1777 (shown above).
• taxation to support a Continental soldier in 1782.
• records of payment for housing a black mother and child in 1783 (the same year the Massachusetts courts made slavery unenforceable).

The exhibit was curated by Gloucester resident Molly O’Hagan Hardy, who is also director for Digital and Book History Initiatives at the American Antiquarian Society. The other organizations lending documents for the exhibit are the Annisquam Historical Society, Essex Historical Society and Shipbuilding Museum, Essex Town Hall, Gloucester City Hall, Gloucester Lyceum & Sawyer Free Library, Manchester Historical Museum, Sargent House Museum, and Sandy Bay Historical Society.

“Unfolding Histories” will be on display until 9 September.

Dating the Forster Flag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legends of the Forster Flag

Tomorrow the Doyle New York auction house will offer the Forster Flag, a banner that family tradition dates to the Revolutionary War. The estimated price is $1-3,000,000.

As Barbara Owens of Spicer Art Conservation explains in an interesting technical analysis, this silk banner shows signs of having been refashioned with a new canton on its red field.

The original canton probably displayed either the British Union Ensign or the English St. George’s cross. The remade canton has thirteen short white stripes, six on one side and seven on the other. Some of those stripes are pieced together from two scraps, so whoever sewed the new design really worked on it.

This flag came down in the family of Samuel Forster of Manchester, Massachusetts, who was lieutenant of that coastal town’s militia company in 1775. It was first mentioned in print by a local newspaper during the Centennial, though it may have been on display earlier at the Massachusetts State House.

There are two family legends attached to this flag, and I find both highly dubious.

One holds that the flag in its original form “was captured from the British on April 19, 1775.” Flag experts have discarded that idea because there are no records of any British unit losing a regimental flag that day, and because the surviving banner doesn’t match known examples of regimental colors in shape or size or stitching.

Furthermore, Forster’s militia company didn’t actually do any fighting during the Battle of Lexington and Concord. That wasn’t their fault; they were marching south from Manchester. Like the other Essex County companies, they arrived too late to meet the British troops. As the Doyle website says, “The Manchester Militia Company marched as far as Medford on that first day, and was then ordered to remain there for three days in anticipation of further fighting near Cambridge.”

So for this to have started as a British regimental flag, the Massachusetts soldiers who captured it would have had to hand their trophy over to another company that hadn’t come close to the action. I really don’t think that would have happened.

TOMORROW: The other legend.