The Mifflins’ Marriage

Yesterday, when we looked in on the Brattle House in Cambridge in August 1775, Continental Army quartermaster general Thomas Mifflin had taken it as his home and office during the siege of Boston.

Three women were already living there: the widow Katherine Wendell, daughter of the house’s Loyalist legal owner; her thirteen-year-old daughter, Martha-Fitch Wendell; and their eighteen-year-old guest, Abigail Collins of Rhode Island.

After a visit to the house in August, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband in Philadelphia with a hint for Mifflin’s wife Sarah:

tell her I do not know whether her Husband is safe here. . . . You hear nothing from the Ladies, but about Major Mifflins easy address, politeness, complasance &c. &c.

Sarah Mifflin set out for Cambridge in the next month.

The Mifflins lived together in the Brattle house over the winter. They hosted Dr. John and Mary Morgan, another Philadelphia couple. They held dinner parties. In fact, it looks like the Mifflins entertained visiting officials in genteel style while dinner at Gen. George Washington’s headquarters down the street was more of a “pot-luck” military affair.

So did that togetherness fend off any rifts in the Mifflins’ marriage? Not for long. By the end of the war, Thomas Mifflin was known for his sexual affairs. After Mifflin was elected governor of Pennsylvania in 1790, Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote:

This man was known to be of a very immoral character. He had lived in a state of adultery with many women during the life of his wife, and had children by some of them, whom he educated in his own family. It is said his wife died last summer of a broken heart in consequence of this conduct towards her.

Rush had other reasons to dislike the man, but everyone seems to agree that Mifflin led a “dissipated” later life while also serving as his state’s highest official.

However, the Brattle House was a happier rendezvous for other couples. Abigail Collins met her future husband, Dr. John Warren, when he was working down the street at the army hospital. Martha-Fitch Wendell later married a tutor from Harvard College nearby. And her mother, by keeping on the good side of both military and local officials, kept the estate from being confiscated as the property of a Loyalist.

I’ll have stories of other women in other mansions along Brattle Street in my “Women of Tory Row” walking tour on Saturday afternoon, part of this year’s Cambridge Discovery Day.

“Women of Tory Row” Tour, 20 Sept.

Saturday, 20 September, is this year’s Cambridge Discovery Day. The city’s historical commission has organized a series of walking tours, exhibits, and lectures, most of them free.

I’m leading a tour of Brattle Street called “The Women of Tory Row.” We’ll start at 3:00 at the Tory Row historical marker on the corner of Brattle and Mason Streets. That means we won’t see the Brattle House, now part of the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, so I’ll talk about the ladies in that house now.

William Brattle was a militia general who triggered the “Powder Alarm” of 1-2 September 1774. As soon as he realized his neighbors knew he’d told Gen. Thomas Gage about gunpowder in the county powderhouse, and that those neighbors saw his action as a betrayal, Brattle fled into Boston.

Brattle’s widowed daughter, Katherine Wendell, remained in Cambridge, and remained determined to keep the family property from being damaged or confiscated. Her method, according to descendants, was to obtain “the favor of men in power civil and military.”

During the siege of Boston, when Cambridge housed thousands of Continental soldiers, Mrs. Wendell hosted two teen-aged girls in that house:

• Her daughter, Martha-Fitch Wendell (1762-1835).
• Abigail Collins (1757-1832), daughter of a Rhode Island Patriot and an Avery from Boston.

Collins’s son later described them as “two young ladies whose personal qualities rendered them the centre of attraction among the officers of the army.” Not least because there probably weren’t any other upper-class young women around.

By August, Thomas Mifflin of Pennsylvania had accepted the post of quartermaster-general of the army and chose the Brattle house to be his home and office. I suspect Mrs. Wendell moved herself and the girls into back rooms, accommodating the quartermaster to curry his favor and make sure people understood that she still claimed the house.

That month, Abigail Adams sent her husband in Philadelphia a word to pass on to Mifflin’s wife Sarah (shown with him above): “tell her I do not know whether her Husband is safe here. Belona and Cupid have a contest about[.] You hear nothing from the Ladies, but about Major Mifflins easy address, politeness, complasance &c. &c.”

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?