Lt. Col. Abijah Brown in the Fight

After Lt. Col. Abijah Brown and his Waltham company reported to the Massachusetts army at Cambridge in late May 1775, there was a question of what regiment they should belong to.

As of 19 April, Brown was a major in Thomas Gardner’s Middlesex County militia regiment. But the militia wasn’t the same as the newly forming, enlisted-through-December Massachusetts army. Gardner already had his top officers: Lt. Col. William Bond and Maj. Michael Jackson. They were officially commissioned on 2 June.

Brown ended up as lieutenant colonel in Col. Benjamin Ruggles Woodbridge’s regiment, drawn otherwise from western Massachusetts and still getting organized. Woodbridge (1739-1819, shown here) was a wealthy bachelor physician from South Hadley. He needed companies to fill an entire regiment and justify his rank as colonel, and Brown needed a regiment where he could be lieutenant colonel.

It took until 21 June before the committee of safety thought Woodbridge’s eight companies were ready for a commission. As of 29 July Gen. George Washington still deemed that regiment to be among the four “most deficient” in the Continental Army.

Brown was officially listed as joining Woodbridge’s regiment on 17 June. That became an issue months later when he came to collect his pay. According to the Continental Army records, he had worked only six and a half months in 1775, but Massachusetts records show the committee of safety had set him to work a month earlier than that, and he probably showed up in Cambridge on 21 May.

Brown pressed his case to the Massachusetts General Court, which on 31 Aug 1776 resolved:

That there be paid out of the publick Treasury to Colonel Abijah Brown, nine pounds, for twenty seven days’ service as Lieutenant-Colonel in Colonel Woodbridge’s Regiment, it appearing he was made up in the muster-roll of said Regiment so much short of the time he was in cervice.

This is an example of Brown’s persistence in seeking what he wanted.

Though not yet official, Woodbridge’s regiment fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June. As it crossed the peninsula into Charlestown, the companies split up and rushed forward to different parts of the line. There are few sources about what Woodbridge’s men did on that day, but they were definitely in the fight.

At the end of September, Col. Woodbridge’s regiment was stationed “at west side of Prospect Hill on the road leading from Charlestown River to Monotomy.”

How well was Lt. Col. Brown getting along with his regimental commander? Gen. Washington’s general orders for 29 Sept 1775 include this item:

A Court of enquiry to sit this afternoon at three ’OClock to examine into the Complaint of Lt Col. Abijah Brown of the 25th Regt against Col. Ruggles Woodbridge—Col. [John] Glover president, Col. [Ebenezer] Bridge, Major [Daniel] Wood, Major [William Raymond] Lee and Major [John] Durgee [Durkee], members.

Unfortunately, that record doesn’t say what Brown’s “Complaint” was. Since Col. Woodbridge remained in the army for the rest of the year, even sitting on other court-martial boards, the court appears to have ruled in his favor.

That proceeding was followed by another reported on 7 October:

Lieut. Col. Abijah Brown tried at a late General Court martial, whereof Col. [Daniel] Hitchcock was presdt—for “endeavouring to defraud the Continent, in mustering two Soldiers, whom he at the same time employed in working upon his farm”

TOMORROW: The verdict, and the generals’ opinion of the verdict.

Capt.-Lt. Kemper Confronts “unofficer and ungentlemanlike behavior”

Yesterday I mentioned Maria Sophia Kemper, daughter of German immigrants to New Jersey. Her brother Daniel became Assistant Clothier-General to the Continental Army, and her brother Jacob joined the officer corps.

Jacob Kemper served in Col. John Crane’s artillery regiment, eventually becoming a captain-lieutenant. That regiment was linked to Massachusetts.

Toward the end of 1782 Capt.-Lt. Kemper got into a dispute with Lt. Henry Abraham Williams of Col. John Lamb’s artillery regiment, which was rooted in New York. The commander-in-chief’s papers tell the story:

At the General Court Martial of which Colonel Michael Jackson is president Lieutenant Henry Williams of the 2d regiment of Artillery was tried, charged with unofficer and ungentlemanlike behavior on the evening of the 6th of October 1782

• First for asserting a falsehood tending to promote dissention between the 2d & 3d regiments of Artillery, by saying that We the 2d regiment of Artillery to a man (addressing himself to Captn Lieutenant Kemper) do dispise you and your regiment, or any thing you can say in behalf of it—
• 2dly For stripping to buffet with Captn Lt Kemper, and afterwards drawing a sword on him when unarmed—
• 3dly For writing a challenge for Captn Lieutenant Kemper & leaving it in the Bar room of a public Tavern unsealed.

The Court after maturely considering the evidence for and against Lt Williams, and his Defence, are of opinion on the first charge, that Lt Williams did on the evening of the 6th of October last say that “We the 2d regiment of Artillery to a man—addressing himself to Captain Lt Kemper—do dispise you and your regiment, or any thing you can say in behalf of it[”] for which they think him very unjustifiable in breach of article 5th Section 18th of the Rules and Articles of war—

On the 2d Charge the Court are of opinion that Lt Williams did on the evening of the 6th of October last strip to buffet with Captain Lt Kemper, and did afterwards draw a sword on him when unarmed, for which Conduct they think him very unjustifiable, in breach of article 5th section 18th of the Rules and Articles of war—

The Court are also of opinion that the 3d Charge is not Supported—

The Court Sentence Lt Williams to be reprimanded in General orders and Suspended from Service for three months.

Gen. Washington confirmed the sentence and added, “Lieutenant Williams should have better understood the delacacy of an officers Character than to have suffered himself to have been betrayed into such improper conduct as he has been guilty of.”

At the end of the war, Capt.-Lt. Kemper joined the Society of the Cincinnati in New York. Lt. Williams did not.

James Hall, American Soldier

Yesterday I shared the first half of an essay by Dan Lacroix about stories told in Westford and Cavendish, Vermont, about a man named James Hall, said to have deserted from the British column on 19 Apr 1775 after being hit by a provincial musket ball and playing dead.

How reliable are those accounts? For example, did Sgt. Hall really try to shoot “Minuteman Wright of Westford” at Concord’s North Bridge? Did John Gray of Westford really steal his “military cap with its ostrich feathers”? And what might those details say about the underlying story, that James Hall wasn’t one of the British dead interred in Concord? Here’s more of Dan’s report:

Prior to Henry B. Atherton’s 1875 newspaper stories, the only Westford men reported to have been at the North Bridge at the time of the skirmish were Lt. Col. John Robinson, Sgt. Joshua Parker, the Rev. Joseph Thaxter, and Oliver Hildreth. The earliest any of the eight documented Wright men who served that day is said to have arrived at the bridge is as the skirmish was ending.

Moreover, even the Lowell Daily Courier article questions the existence of John Gray, a man who continues to elude proper documentation. It’s likely that Atherton gained his knowledge of Westford’s eighteenth-century residents by listening to the stories told by the descendents of the dozens of Westford veterans who emigrated to the Cavendish/Ludlow region of Vermont after the war. But was that oral history reliable?

Further details of James Hall’s life in America after 1775 are supported by vital records, as well as a family document found in a carton of the personal papers belonging to his grandson James Ashton [Under-Lyne] Hall (1816-1845) many years after his premature death. In this more straightforward telling of the story we find that following the grazing of his shoulder James Hall deserted when he found it “convenient.” He then returned to Westford with John Hildreth and spent the next year working for him and his brother Ephraim Hildreth, 3rd. For a time he moved to neighboring Chelmsford and took up the blacksmithing trade with Phineas Chamberlain (1745-1813), whose house still stands today (shown above and in this report).

By 1779 James had grown so fond of his adopted country and its ambitions for independence that he took up the call for nine months’ service in the Continental Army. His time was spent in the Hudson Highlands at West Point with Col. Michael Jackson’s 8th Massachusetts Regiment, part of it during the “winter of the deep snow.” For this service he later received a pension.

One of the many transcribed period documents in Wilson Waters’s History of Chelmsford provides a further example of James Hall’s support for the cause: we find him listed in 1781 along with Chamberlain, his blacksmith mentor, and a class of men who provided financial incentive for another man’s service in the army.

Soon after, the lure of freshly established communities in Vermont drew James and his blacksmithing trade to Cavendish with other Westford veterans. He returned in January of 1784 to marry Thankful Hildreth, and brought her back to Cavendish that same winter. During the 1790s they returned to Massachusetts, residing in Acton and Westford, before settling one final time in Vermont shortly before the turn of the century. In 1822, while living with his son James Whoral Hall in Reading, Vermont, this veteran died at the age of 69.

Like so many of his fellow revolutionary soldiers, James Hall’s weather-worn memorial stone proudly establishes him as “A Soldier of the Revolution.” Not surprisingly, there is no mention of his service to the King, though it very prominently declares his Lancashire birth, as well as the fact that he “Emigrated” from mother England in 1774.

So was Pvt. James Hall of the 4th Regiment one of the three British soldiers killed in the fire at the North Bridge and buried in Concord? Or did his comrades simply think that he was killed, allowing him to take up a new life as a New Englander? If James Hall wasn’t buried in Concord, who was? Or were there two James Halls in the British column, one who died and one who deserted? Very interesting questions. Thanks, Dan!