Living Conditions in Cambridge in the Spring of 1775

The second chapter of my report Gen. George Washington’s Headquarters and Home—Cambridge, Massachusetts is titled “The Arrival of the Provincial Army on the Vassall Estate.”

As I described last week, the Loyalist planter John Vassall and his family left his Cambridge home in September 1774. They probably expected to return after Gen. Thomas Gage quelled the nascent rebellion in Massachusetts. Another Vassall family remained behind: Tony, Cuba, and some of their children, enslaved to John Vassall and his nearby aunt Penelope.

The first sections of that chapter lay out what I could find out about that African-American family, who took the surname Vassall. Tony and Cuba both petitioned the state for pensions in their old age based on their service to the estate. One son, Darby, lived long enough to appear as a living relic of the Revolution at Abolitionist rallies and to see the opening of the Civil War.

The next couple of sections describe life in Cambridge as provincial militiamen flooded into the town on 19 Apr 1775 and were replaced by a New England army by the end of that month. Gen. Artemas Ward took a house near Harvard as his headquarters, and it looks like all the empty mansions on Tory Row were pressed into service as barracks.

Pvt. Caleb Haskell of Newburyport recorded arriving in Cambridge on 12 May and taking “our quarters at Bolin’s (a tory) house”—John Borland’s, now in the middle of Harvard’s Adams House dormitory. Five days later, Pvt. Nathaniel Ober said his company was in “Judge [Joseph] Lees house at Cambridge,” now headquarters of the Cambridge Historical Society. On 15 May, records of the Committee of Safety mention “three companies at Mr. Vassal’s house.”

An unidentified soldier arriving from Norwich, Connecticut, sometime before late May wrote back home:

There is about 250 soldiers in this House, and we are not much crowded, but I wish they were out, all except our company. This building that we are in belonged to one of the Tories, but he has gone and left this building for us. It is the finest and largest building in town…

I can’t tell whether that was John Vassall’s mansion or another, but it gives a sense of the crowding. A January 1776 report suggested that the Continental Army put twenty soldiers to a room at Ralph Inman’s estate.

As for living conditions, teenaged fifer John Greenwood recalled, “we had to sleep in our clothes upon the bare floor. I do not recollect that I even had a blanket, but I remember well the stone which I had to lay my head upon.”

In late May, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress decided to clear the John Vassall house of soldiers so the Committee of Safety could use it. The committee was working out of the same house that Gen. Ward was using. I couldn’t find clear evidence that the Committee of Safety actually moved into the Vassall house, though. I wish I had.

On 22 June Col. John Glover marched his regiment from Marblehead to Cambridge, and Gen. George Washington later wrote that the Marbleheaders were in the Vassall house before he moved in. There’s also an order from Gen. Ward for Lt. Col. William Bond to “occupy one room, in the south-east corner of Col. Vassall’s house, upon the second floor, for the sick belonging to said regiment,” originally commanded by Col. Thomas Gardner. So it looks like soldiers were still being assigned to the Vassall house whenever the army needed space.

Committee of Safety records link two men to the larger estate. Joseph Smith was “keeper of John Vassal, Esq’s farm” on 27 May, and Seth Brown was “the keeper of the colony horses” in Vassall’s stables on 24 June. Of course men I wanted to trace would be named Smith and Brown, right?

But I’m inordinately proud that I was able to identify those two. Joseph Smith was a Cambridge farmer born in 1740; his brother Parsons (1743-1816) supplied milk to Washington’s headquarters. Seth Ingersoll Browne (1750-1809) was a refugee from Charlestown who later tended bar at the Punch Bowl Tavern in Roxbury.

TOMORROW: One Connecticut officer tries to find quarters for his regiment.

Teachers’ Workshop on the Siege of Boston

This week I’m working with the Massachusetts Historical Society and Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site on a workshop for history teachers. (The workshop is funded in large part by the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati.)

Our topic is the siege of Boston, but the participants’ real task is developing ways to use primary-source documents in classroom lessons. I’m just there to distract them with facts and complications. There will be twelve teachers, divided into three teams. One of my early tasks was to choose documents from the many that the M.H.S. has preserved and digitized for the teams to study.

To start with, we’ll all use Henry Pelham’s map of Boston during the siege. It’s also available through the Boston Public Library and the Library of Congress.

For the team looking at military strategy and confrontations:

• Pvt. Peter Brown’s letter on the Battle of Bunker Hill from the provincial side.
• Lt. John Waller’s letter on the same battle from the British side.
• Col. Henry Knox’s diary of his trek to bring cannon from Lake Ticonderoga to the siege lines.
• Gen. John Thomas’s letter about fortifying Dorchester Heights.

For the team looking at life in besieged Boston:

• Sarah Deming’s diary as a refugee who left the town.
• William Cheever’s diary as a young merchant who went into town to look after family property.
• Gen. William Howe’s proclamation on Loyalist militia companies.
• Gen. John Sullivan’s letter to John Adams about the British evacuation.

For the team studying life in the American camps:

• Pvt. Nathaniel Ober’s diary, May-September 1775.
• Gen. Artemas Ward’s orderly book, 3-8 July 1775.
• Abigail Adams’s letter on 10 Dec 1775 about visiting Cambridge and the prices of goods.
• Pvt. Obadiah Brown’s diary, January-March 1776.

Follow along at home!

TOMORROW: What’s missing?

Two Mysterious Frenchmen at the Siege of Boston

According to Lt. Col. Stephen Kemble of Gen. Thomas Gage’s military and marital family (shown here courtesy of Live Auctioneers), on 6 July 1775 a Frenchman came into Boston from the American lines.

He brought the news that another Frenchman, “one Dubue, is their [the enemy’s] Chief Engineer, as Gridley cannot Act from his Wound.” Col. Richard Gridley, head of the American artillery regiment, had been wounded at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Various volunteers, including Henry Knox and Rufus Putnam, were filling in.

[ADDENDUM: Continental Army private Nathaniel Ober wrote in his diary on 6 July: “This Day a french man Desarted from us and went to the Regelors.” So that’s confirmation but no additional information.]

Five days later, the Connecticut officer Samuel Blachley Webb wrote to Silas Deane, who was both one of his Continental Congress delegates and his stepfather:

a Frenchman, who came here in the character of a gentleman, was detected in stealing. The next day he deserted to the enemy; but he’s of no consequence, being simple, a foolish fellow.

That man might not have been reliable, but on 17 August Kemble stated:

The Capt. of the Man of War that Conveyed the Inhabitants to Salem returned, and brought with him Monsieur Dubuque, a French Man, who had been employed by the Rebels as an Engineer.

I can’t find any mention of this French engineer in American sources, however.

I do have accounts of a couple of minor French noblemen viewing the siege of Boston for a while before sailing to London. (One day I’ll trace their story.) But they weren’t named Dubuque—not that the engineer must have used his real name.

A man named Dubuque owned the Shirley-Eustis house sometime around 1800, but he was said to have come to America as a refugee from the French Revolution, not before. But you never know.