“Necessary that the regiments be immediately settled”

Many accounts of George Washington’s arrival in Cambridge in 1775 say that he converted the ragtag New England militia into the Continental Army.

That’s a misconception. It’s common enough that I might have expressed that understanding myself when I first wrote about the beginning of the war. But it misses an important development that I now see more clearly, and see as more important.

The New England colonies had already formed armies in the spring of 1775. Militia companies were designed to respond to emergencies, such as the Lexington Alarm. When an emergency was over, men expected to go home. Enlisting in an army meant a man agreed to serve for a defined time.

That was a different legal relationship between a government and its citizens, and for New Englanders military service was all about that maintaining that covenant. As Fred Anderson has written, British army officers (who were used to enlisting for life and commanding men who had done the same) and later Gen. Washington ran into trouble because they didn’t share that outlook.

On 19 April and shortly afterward, about 20,000 militia men mobilized, ending up in camps ringing the peninsula of Boston. But with all the regulars back inside the town, the immediate emergency had passed. Some men wanted to go home.

Two days later, Gen. Artemas Ward wrote to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress:

My situation is such that, if I have not enlisting orders immediately, I shall be left all alone: it is impossible to keep the men here, excepting something be done. I therefore pray that the plan may be completed and handed to me this morning, that you, gentlemen of the Congress, issue orders for enlisting men.

The committee of safety responded with a proposal to sign up “out of the Massachusetts forces, eight thousand effective men,” to serve for seven months.

Two days later, on 23 April, the full congress went further with two votes:

Resolved, unanimously, that it is necessary for the defence of the colony, that an army of 30,000 men be immediately raised and established.

Resolved, That 13,600 men be raised immediately by this province.

The rest were expected to come from the neighboring colonies.

That Massachusetts army would have fewer men per company and fewer companies per regiment than the Massachusetts militia. The Patriot authorities expected some men to go home and hoped to keep units as cohesive as possible.

In the following weeks, there must have been a lot of discussion within the ranks. Some companies enlisted nearly en masse under their familiar officers. Other men chose to go home to their wives, children, and farms. Some went home and came back. To fill holes, there was some shuffling of officers’ ranks and which companies belonged to which regiments (i.e., reported to which colonels).

Ward and his top officers were worried enough about the war to recommend a formal militia call on 9 May so there would be enough armed men to protect Roxbury and Dorchester. Ten days later the general wrote to Dr. Joseph Warren as president of the congress:

It appears to me absolutely necessary that the regiments be immediately settled, the officers commissioned, the soldiers mustered and paid agreeable to what has been proposed by the Congress—if we would save our Country.

That day the provincial congress approved its first Massachusetts army commission, to Col. Samuel Gerrish.

Gradually more pieces were put into place. Ward was sworn in as an army general, not just a militia general, the next day. By the end of the month, what Patriot newspapers started calling “the Grand American Army” had about 16,000 men from four colonies.

To be sure, not all those forces were formally enrolled yet. In Moses Little’s regiment from Essex County, Moses Sleeper had signed on as a corporal on 9 May. But the committee of safety didn’t approve paperwork for the whole regiment until 26 June, the last regimental commission of the spring. By then some of Col. Little’s companies had already fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

For more about the process of creating this provincial army, see Mike Cecere’s article “The Army of Observation Forms: Spring 1775 in Massachusetts” at the Journal of the American Revolution.

COMING UP: Taking the oath.

“Alarmed that the Regulars were advancing towards Our Entrencment”

Among the presentations at this Saturday’s commemoration of Gen. George Washington’s arrival in Cambridge is a talk by Longfellow House archivist Kate Hanson Plass on the diary of Moses Sleeper.

Hanson Plass and her team have recently shared the diary online: transcription with annotations and illustrations, plus a link to page images on Archive.org.

The introduction explains:

In the museum collection of the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site is a diary written by a soldier who participated in the early days of the American Revolution. No one knows how the diary got to the house, though it seems likely that a collector in the Longfellow family acquired it for its Revolutionary War connection in the early 20th century.

The book itself is small (5” by 8”), pocket size; its cover and the first and last three pages are missing. There is no indication of the identity of the writer of the diary; at first reading it seems to be anonymous. Using clues inside the diary – references to family members and locations of military service – the author has been established as Corporal Moses Sleeper of Newburyport, Massachusetts, who served for 19 months in Colonel Moses Little’s Regiment (later the 12th Continental Regiment).

Sleeper and Sgt. Paul Lunt of the same regiment obviously shared their diaries since many of their entries are the same. They weren’t keeping private, personal notes but making a record of their military service for people back home and in the future.

Cpl. Sleeper’s surviving pages start right before the Bunker Hill battle, which his regiment wasn’t involved in. Here’s his terse account of those days:

Friday 16 our Men went to Charlestown and Intrenched on a hill beyond Bunker hill they fired from the Ships and Copps hill all the time.

Saturday 17 1775 the Regulars Came out upon the Back of Charlestown and Set fire to It & burnt It down & Came to our Entrenen[?] forced It with the Loss 896 of the Regulars and about 50 of ours The fire began at 3 o Clock and held till 6

Sund 18 we Entrinched on prospect hill alarmed that the Regulars were advancing towards Our Entrencment but found It to be false Returned to Quarters

Mondy 19 Wee killed Some of there Guard

T 20 Went upon Picquet

W 21 past musters

Thirsday 22 Received our month pay

You wouldn’t know from those entries that Capt. Benjamin Perkins’s company, including Cpl. Sleeper, went onto the Charlestown peninsula on 17 June and saw combat. I’ve quoted later recollections of the Bunker Hill fight from other men in that company: Lt. Joseph Whitmore and Pvt. Philip Johnson.

Sgt. Lunt’s description of the battle offered a little more detail:

Saturday, 17th. - The Regulars landed a number of troops, and we engaged them. They drove us off the hill, and burnt Charlestown. Dr. [Joseph] Warren was lost in the battle: the siege lasted about three hours. They killed about 50 of our men, wounded about 80: we killed of the king’s troops 896, - 92 officers, 104 sergeants.

Both Sleeper and Lunt listed an exact number of enemy casualties—a piece of intelligence it usually takes days or weeks to acquire. In Sleeper’s case, we can see that number was written right into the entry, not inserted later. That suggests these provincial soldiers didn’t write their diary entries on the evening after the battle but after time had passed, they had recovered, and they might have had less to do.

Two Robert Newmans in the North End

On 13 Mar 1806, the Independent Chronicle of Boston ran this death notice:

Mr. Robert Newman, aged 51. His funeral will be from his late dwelling-house, head of Battery-Wharf, north-end, this afternoon, at 4 o’clock; which the relations and friends are requested to attend.

This was not the same Robert Newman as the man who hung the lanterns in the Old North Church on 19 Apr 1775. That Newman’s death notice had appeared in the Independent Chronicle two years earlier on 28 May 1804:

On Saturday last, Mr. Robert Newman, aged 52—for many years sexton of the North Church. He put a period to his existence with a pistol.

Those two death notices show that there were two men named Robert Newman living in Boston’s North End at the same time. I don’t know if they were related, but they weren’t part of the same household.

Those two Robert Newmans have been thoroughly confused and conflated in local history. So I’m going to try to sort them out.

The Robert Newman who died in 1806 was born in or around 1755. He enlisted in Col. Moses Little’s regiment out of Ipswich in May 1775, as shown in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War. He served a few months that year. He may have also served short stints in 1778 and 1779 and then on the brigantine Pallas during the Penobscot expedition. This Newman married Esther Treadwell in Ipswich on 22 May 1778.

In September 1779 a group of men petitioned the Massachusetts Council to commission this Robert Newman as commander of a privateer ship: the Adventure out of Beverly. The 16 Mar 1780 Independent Chronicle ran a legal notice referring to “Robert Newman, commander of the armed schooner Adventure.” He turned twenty-five that year.

Robert Newman “at the North End” of Boston was appointed to administer a shipwright’s estate in 1785, according to the 26 September Boston Gazette. This was probably the mariner. He appears to have made a home in Boston while maintaining his family up on the North Shore.

In July 1790 a child of Robert Newman died in Ipswich of “fits.” On 13 Aug 1797, a four-month-old child of Robert and Esther Newman died in Newbury. One week later, four children of Robert Newman were baptized in that town at once: Robert, Sally, Thomas, and William.

The 25 Mar 1800 Newburyport Herald reported that “Mrs. Newman, consort, of Capt. Robert Newman,” had died. Newbury vital records confirm her name was Esther, and she was forty-three years old. Six years later the captain himself died in Boston.

Meanwhile, the other Robert Newman was working as the sexton of Christ Church, better known now as Old North. In addition to hanging the lanterns in April 1775, he has also appeared on Boston 1775 charging visitors to see the bodies of British officers killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In May 1786 the selectmen of Boston designated twelve men as “Undertakers” and set the prices for burial, tolling a bell, alerting mourners, and “Extraordinary cases, such as putting the bodies into tar’d sheets.” Most if not all those men were sextons, and among them was Robert Newman.

On 14 June 1794 the Centinel reported that the next day Mrs. Abigail Sumner’s funeral would take place “from the house of Mr. Robert Newman, Salem Street.” That looks like part of his work as an undertaker since I can’t find any family connection.

The sexton had married Rebecca Knox in 1772, but divorced her for having an affair with “one John Skinner.” On 5 Feb 1791 the Columbian Centinel reported the death of “Mrs. Rebecca Newman, formerly the wife of Mr. Robert Newman, aged 41.” The sexton had already married again, to Mary Hammond, who would bear more of his children and settle his estate. This Robert Newman took his own life in 1804.

TOMORROW: The Freemasonry connection.

The Difficult Career of the Rev. John Cleaveland, Jr.

John Cleaveland was born in the part of Ipswich that’s now Essex in 1750. He was the son and namesake of the town minister.

John, Jr., apparently grew up expecting to study at Yale, where his father had graduated five years before his birth. But that didn’t work out.

Mortimer Blake’s A Centurial History of the Mendon Association of Congregational Ministers (1853) said Cleaveland had a younger brother and “the father being unable to support both in college, decided to treat both alike, and give them the best education he could.”

However, Yale’s library catalogue says there were three younger brothers, two becoming doctors and one dying young, as well as three sisters. And John Cleaveland, Jr., was “debarred by his health from completing his education” at that college.

For whatever reason, the younger John Cleaveland never graduated from Yale. Indeed, he may never have entered. In 1773 he married a woman named Abigail Adams in his father’s home town of Canterbury, Connecticut. Two years later John joined Col. Moses Little’s regiment of the Continental Army, for which his father was chaplain.

After the war, John, Jr., studied theology on his own. Finally in 1785, at the age of thirty-five, he was ordained in Stoneham. His tenure there was peaceful until June 1793, when Abigail Cleaveland died.

Or more precisely, the Rev. Mr. Cleaveland’s tenure was peaceful until January 1794, when he married Elizabeth Evans, his young housekeeper. Even in a society that wanted ministers to be married, some people thought six months was too soon. What’s more, there were doubts about the new Mrs. Cleaveland’s faith. “She was not pious,” Blake wrote. “This marriage with a non-professor, troubled some pious minds at Stoneham.”

Most important church members stood by their pastor. Their opponents therefore resorted to unorthodox means of showing their disapproval. According to William B. Stevens’s 1891 History of Stoneham:

At one time they nailed up the door of the minister’s pew, at another, covered the seat and chairs and the seat of the pulpit with tar. Not content with these indignities against the pastor, some one vented the general spite by inflicting an injury upon his horse, probably by cutting off his tail.

The church stood by him, but the town voted to lock and fasten up the meeting-house against him, so that for a time public worship was held at the house of Deacon Edward Bucknam. They refused to raise his salary, requested him to relinquish his ministry and leave the town, declined to furnish any reason, and rejected his proposition to call a council…

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

Samuel Gerrish, First Officer of the Massachusetts Army

Last month I wrote about how the Massachusetts Provincial Congress finally started commissioning infantry officers for its army (as opposed to its militia) on 19 May 1775.

The first colonel to receive a commission was Samuel Gerrish (c. 1729–1795) of Newbury. I thought it would be interesting to look at what happened to him.

First of all, according to historian Richard Frothingham, Gerrish’s regiment wasn’t as complete as the congress had been led to believe; “there were difficulties in relation to six of the companies, which were investigated June 2.” Five of the companies originally listed under Gerrish’s name asked to serve under another Newbury colonel, Moses Little. It took another twenty days before eight companies were fully commissioned under Gerrish.

During that spring the regiment was spread out along the north side of Boston harbor with three companies at Chelsea, three in east Cambridge, and two at Sewall’s Point, the finger of Brookline land in front of the Charles and Muddy Rivers. On 16 June the officers of the regiment met at Chelsea and assigned jobs: Loammi Baldwin to be lieutenant-colonel, Richard Dodge major, Christian Febiger adjutant, and so on. This was the New England way, electing from below rather than the colonel appointing from above.

One day after that meeting, of course, came the Battle of Bunker Hill. In 1870 the Quincy family presented to the Massachusetts Historical Society one sheet of what had been a two-page letter describing the fight. Whoever wrote that account took particular notice of Col. Gerrish’s behavior, referring to him by his rank from the French & Indian War:

Major Gerrish was ordered also to Charlestown with a reinforcement, but he no sooner came in sight of the enemy than a tremor seiz’d him & he began to bellow, “Retreat! retreat! or you’l all be cutt off!” which so confus’d & scar’d our men, that they retreated most precipitately, & our soldiery now sware vengeance against him & determine not to be under his commd.

The historian Samuel Swett later wrote that Gerrish “was unwieldy from excessive corpulence”; on reaching Bunker’s Hill above the fighting, “he declared that he was completely exhausted, and lay prostrate on the ground.” Col. Israel Putnam roared at all the men stalled on that hill, hitting some with his sword, but they refused to go farther down and eventually retreated.

There was plenty of blame to go around after that battle. Other Massachusetts officers hadn’t even taken their troops onto the peninsula as Gerrish had. Swett wrote, “A complaint was lodged against him with [Gen. Artemas] Ward immediately after the battle, who refused to notice it on account of the unorganized state of the army.”

Not that Col. Gerrish was helping alleviate that disorganization. On 7 July the new commander-in-chief’s secretary, Joseph Reed, wrote to him to ask a second time for a return of all the men in the regiment. “The Express [to the Continental Congress] has been detain’d some time thro’ this Inattention,” Reed chided, “The Forces raised in Connecticut, New Hampshire & Rhode Island having sent in their Returns very complete.”

Gerrish finally reported having 258 men in his regiment. Even after that, there were administrative problems. In August eight officers at Sewall’s Point wrote to headquarters to complain that most of them had “been here in actual Service, since the Beginning of the Campaign, and been to a vast Deal of Expense, and not receiv’d one farthing of our pay.”

In early August, British floating batteries made some attacks on American positions near the water. One fired on Sewall’s Point. Instead of shooting back at that boat, Gerrish told his men to put out any lights and hunker down behind their fortifications. He was reported to have said, “the rascals can do us no harm, and it would be a mere waste of powder, to fire at them with our 4 pounders.” Technically, Gerrish might have been right. The British shots caused no casualties. But the colonel had used up any benefit of the doubt about his behavior in battle.

TOMORROW: Washington weighs in.

Francis Merrifield’s Bible

Earlier this spring the Bonhams auction house offered for sale a Bible printed in Edinburgh in 1755. What made this particular Bible so notable were the handwritten inscriptions:

[On the reverse of the title page] Cambridge, Jun 17 1775. I desire to bless God for his Kind aperince in delivering me and sparing my life in the late battle fought on Bunker’s Hill. I desire to devote this spared life to His glory and honour. In witness my hand, Francis Merrifield.

[Inside the inside back cover] 1775. Cambridge, June 17th. A batel fought on bunkers hill, on Saterday in the afternoon, which lasted an hour and a quarter, two men were wounded, and
------------
the number of my gun, one hundred eighty three, 183, the seventeenth Rigement, 17.

Francis Merrifield (1735-1814) was a corporal in Capt. Nathaniel Wade’s company in April, a sergeant in August. That unit was part of Col. Moses Little’s regiment, raised in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Merrifield was a veteran, having been part of an expedition to Canada in 1758; by one accounting, he was the oldest man in his company.

According to local historians, in later life Merrifield “used to describe the battle [of Bunker Hill] and the approach of the regulars. ‘When they got so near we could fairly see them, they looked too handsome to be fired at, but we had to do it.’”

Bonhams added, “The specification of his flintlock’s number clearly indicates that, next to this Bible itself, it was Merrifield's most treasured possession.” Perhaps, but Merrifield might just have wanted to get that property back. He had to loan a gun to Nathaniel Lakeman of Capt. Abraham Dodge’s company, probably at the end of 1775 when he left the army. That fall some of the regiment’s officers had told the commander-in-chief “we Shall be able to Serve the common Cause better out of the Army the ensuing Compaign than in it.”

With the Bible is a printed description, perhaps from the Sunday School Times. It quotes three verses said to be written somewhere inside:

O for a strong and lasting faith
To credit what the Almighty saith;
To embrace the message of his Son,
And call the joys of heaven my own.

My spirit looks to God alone;
My strength and refuge is his throne.
In all my fears, in all my straits,
My soul on His salvation waits.

Nothing but glory can suffice
The appetite of grace;
I wait, I long with restless eyes,
Longing to see thy face.

As witness my hand,
Francis Merrifield.

Some of those lines appear in different hymns by the Rev. Lowell Mason (1792-1872) while others date from the eighteenth or even seventeenth centuries. Merrifield, a deacon, seems therefore to have written down verses which meant the most to him.

Francis Merrifield’s Bible was bought by the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia for a total price of $161,000. It will be on display when that museum opens next year.