Looking Back on the Bloody Flux of 1775

In a time of pandemic, one’s thoughts turn naturally toward outbreaks of the past.

In April 1942, Dr. Ernest Caulfield presented a paper on “Some Common Diseases of Colonial Children” to the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. It can be read here.

Caulfield wrote about the seven diseases now known as measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, mumps, chicken pox, and dysentery. (Some of those names were used in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but people had other terms as well.)

Today an American can encounter most of those diseases only through the vaccinations that prevent them. But dysentery is carried by the shigella bacteria spread through feces, so caring for a sick person without being able to be sanitary leaves one vulnerable to infection.

A few years back, Boston 1775 friend Judy Cataldo noticed a pattern of deaths in late 1775 in Needham, which led her to evidence of a dysentery epidemic behind the Continental siege lines. Caulfield found a hint of that in the printed newspapers, but only a hint:

It was characteristic of dysentery years for the disease to break out in the southern and middle colonies before it broke out in New England. But also contributing greatly to the magnitude of the New England epidemic were the British troops in Boston and the American troops in Cambridge.

The first reports of the disease appeared in the newspapers during July: “We hear the camp distemper rages in the regular army in Boston, as also among the distressed inhabitants who are confined in that town by order of Tom. Gage, in open violation of his most solemn engagement. It is to be hoped he will meet the fate of Pharoah of old, whose example he so exactly follows.” In August a letter sent through the lines mentioned that two members of the Cotton family and two of the Wiswall family were dead of the flux. It was also learned that three thousand British troops were sick.

Apparently by the end of August the disease had appeared in many inland towns, for there was published on the front page of the Massachusetts Spy a whole column of medical news entitled “A Cure for the Bloody Flux.”

It looks like the Patriot printers were happy to share news of an epidemic within British-held Boston, down the details of which families were sick. But they didn’t report in the same way on the epidemic in New England towns. Isaiah Thomas provided some medical advice in his Spy but not statistics on local deaths.

Similarly, we now know, during the First World War the fighting countries censured news of an epidemic affecting their populations. Only neutral Spain reported deaths accurately, so we ended up giving that disease the unfair name of the Spanish influenza.

For evidence of the full scope of the dysentery epidemic of 1775, one has to look at church records, graveyards, and doctors’ diaries. Both Caulfield and Cataldo wrote about waves of deaths, especially among young children, in the early years of the war. “Altogether it was one of the most fatal periods for children in colonial history,” Caulfield stated.

Last month Judy Cataldo spoke with the hosts of the Hub History podcast about that 1775 epidemic, deadly yet overshadowed by the war. Here’s the link to that episode, with extracts from the diary of Abigail Adams as she reacted to deaths around her.

And here’s Judy’s website with more resources. Among those is a link to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage about stopping shigella. The section on prevention says, “The best defense against shigellosis is thorough, frequent handwashing…”

“Jury went out after noon and did not agree all night”

On 20 Apr 1770, Benjamin Lynde, acting chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court, wrote in his diary:

Fair. Richardson and Wilmot’s tryal, begun morn. and Jury went out after noon and did not agree all night.

As recounted yesterday, Lynde indeed presided over the trial of former Customs employees Ebenezer Richardson and George Wilmot for murder.

The jury actually started deliberating about 11:00 P.M. Per the rules of the time, they were shut into a room of the courthouse and not given any food or drink or allowed to sleep. That was to encourage them to reach a verdict. (And of course it saved the government money.)

Those jurors had been drawn from Suffolk County outside of Boston, on the assumption that Bostonians might be biased. We have their names, and I wish I knew which towns they came from in order to nail down their identifications. I’m going to assume they’re the most prominent men of those names from Suffolk County outside Boston since a man had to be at a certain economic level to be on the jury list. (And because it’s easier to search where the light is best.)

The foreman was Jonathan Deming. A man of that name lived in the part of Needham that eventually became Wellesley. He was born in Boston in 1723, possibly son of a sea captain from Wethersfield, Connecticut, who later retired to the country. From his twenties Deming filled various town offices in Needham. In November 1768, Boston ministers published his intention to marry Elizabeth Clark, but that doesn’t appear to have worked out since in November of 1770 Deming went to Charlestown and married Esther Edes. He was in his late forties, but she was sixteen years younger, and they had three children over the next few years. Jonathan died in 1791 and Esther in 1792.

Apparently Deming and all the other jurors quickly agreed that Wilmot was innocent of the charge of murder. Most also agreed that Richardson was guilty. There were two holdouts from a quick unanimous verdict, Deming later testified:

Mr. Lothrop was satisfied as to Fact, but not Law. Mr. Clap not so fully satisfied as to Law.

Thomas Lothrop was from Hingham, the portion that became Cohasset in 1770. He had been born in 1738. After his father died and his mother remarried, he went to live with a rich uncle who left him an estate. Lothrop served in the French and Indian War, becoming a lieutenant, and in town government his neighbors chose him to be clerk, moderator, selectman, and eventually representative to the Massachusetts General Court. He married Ruth Nichols in 1760; they moved into a big house “near the cold spring” and raised twelve children.

Notably, as Massachusetts’s conflict with Britain heated up, Lothrop was active on Cohasset’s committee of correspondence and committee of inspection. He was also a militia officer, rising to lieutenant colonel in the 2nd Suffolk regiment during the war. Lothrop lived until 1813.

Seth Clap was born in Dedham in 1722, two years before part of that old town broke off to become Walpole, where he lived the rest of his life. Clap married Mary Bullard in 1745 and they had ten children before she died. In February 1769 Clap married Elizabeth Weatherbee, and they got right to having more children, the first arriving in November. Ultimately they had six. Clap served Walpole in various ways: as a schoolteacher as a young man, as a town clerk in his fifties, and in 1758 by “making a place in the meeting-house to secure the town stock of ammunition.” He died in 1788.

There’s no sign that Lothrop or Clap supported the royal government in 1770. In other words, their reluctance to convict Ebenezer Richardson wasn’t due to their politics. They were sincerely concerned about whether he should be convicted of murder for shooting at a crowd attacking his house. Lothrop later said, “I did not fall in so soon as some, for I thought the time might be as well spent in Argument.” Clap agreed, “At first going out I was not so clear as afterwards.”

In the wee hours of 21 April, 250 years ago today, Deming and the rest of the jury worked at winning over those two men. Clap apparently noted that under British common law a man was not guilty of murder if he killed someone breaking into his house. But that was only at night, other jurors replied. Richardson had shot young Christopher Seider “in the Day,” and that won Clap over. Deming assured him that “the Court knew the Law.”

What finally moved Lothrop was his fellow jurors’ belief that “if the verdict was not agreeable to Law the Court would not receive it.” The judges had already made clear they believed Richardson did not commit murder. Thus, a man could vote to convict him of a capital crime and not feel that he was necessarily sending the man to his death.

After dawn, the twelve jurors finally agreed on a verdict. About half an hour later Deming announced their decision in the courtroom. Wilmot was free to go, but everyone really cared about the other defendant. As Judge Lynde wrote in his diary:

Fair; Jury agreed abo. 9; Richardson guilty.

Judge Peter Oliver later wrote of the Whig crowd: “the Courtroom resounded with Expressions of Pleasure; ’till, even one of the Faction, who had some of the Feelings of Humanity not quite erased, cried out, ‘for Shame, for Shame Gentlemen!’—This hushed the clamorous Joy.”

The judges then adjourned court until 29 May, when one of the first orders of business would be sentencing Ebenezer Richardson.

Abel Benson and Memory Creep

As I described yesterday, in the early 1900s chroniclers of Needham and Framingham began to credit “Nero, or Abel, Benson” as helping to spread the alarm on 19 Apr 1775 with blasts from his trumpet.

It would be unusual for contemporary witnesses to be confused between Nero and Abel. They were grandfather and grandson, one born about seventy years before 1775 and the other only eight. Even at night, it should have been possible to tell them apart.

Furthermore, other records tell us that Nero Benson died in Sudbury in 1757. Which pretty much eliminates him from participating in the uprising eighteen years later.

That’s why the tradition has come to focus on Abel Benson. As strange as it would be for the Framingham militia to rely on an eight-year-old boy, that was at least physically possible. But how strong is the evidence to support that story?

In fact, the evidence points the other way. Abel Benson lived until 1838, long enough to apply for a pension for Revolutionary War veterans. That process required applicants to testify about how they had served: when they enlisted, what battles they were in, who their commanding officers were, and any anecdotes that could add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Abel Benson filed a claim in April 1818. For a while he received a pension of $8 each month, but in 1820 the government cut him off. Framingham had granted him land as a bounty for enlisting, and that real estate meant he wasn’t poor enough. In 1823 Benson reapplied. It took six years, but the federal government started paying him a pension again. Abel Benson died at midnight on 15 Sept 1838. And on 2 October, his widow Rhoda applied to the government to continue that pension. She started to receive $80 per year in March 1843.

That means there were three times—1818, 1823, and 1838—when Abel or Rhoda Benson went to the government and described his military service. The length of that service affected his eligibility for a pension. The Bensons thus had a strong reason to note every time Abel had helped fight the war. But in none of those filings did the couple ever mention the Lexington alarm.

There’s no doubt that Abel Benson served in the Continental Army. He enlisted in early 1781, when he was fourteen. (The recruiting papers state he was sixteen.) His military records even offer a description: “5 ft. 2 in.; complexion, yellow; hair, black; eyes, black...reported a Negro.” (Abel’s mother was a woman of British descent originally named Sarah Perry.) Though listed as a trumpeter, he worked mainly as a “waiter,” or servant to an officer.

So how did the legend of Abel Benson begin? There may indeed have been a black trumpeter riding with the Framingham militiamen in April 1775 (although more than a century passed before it appears anyone wrote that detail down). When Austin Bacon followed up that family story in the early 1900s, he could have looked in William Barry’s 1847 History of Framingham, saw Nero Benson listed as an eighteenth-century military trumpeter, and inserted his name in his account.

Soon afterward, George Kuhn Clarke added Abel’s name as another possibility, seeing him listed as both a trumpeter and Revolutionary War veteran. Later authors spotted Nero Benson’s death record, leaving only Abel.

But Nero and Abel Benson weren’t necessarily the only African-Americans in Framingham who could play the trumpet—just the only ones named in published sources. Who inherited Nero Benson’s trumpet after he died in 1757? Who taught Abel to play the trumpet and other instruments as he grew up in the 1770s? Nero’s son William, Abel’s father, seems like a good candidate, and the region’s African-American community probably includes some others. A lot of life never came to the attention of the white chroniclers.

The story of Abel Benson thus strikes me as an example of “memory creep”—a tendency among people recounting history, whether family, local, or national, to take a little evidence and expand it to make a better story. And the legend of little Abel Benson blowing his horn is a better story. It’s just probably not the accurate story.

(The photo above, from Find-a-Grave, shows the marker now on Abel Benson’s grave. For a well researched study of the Benson family, see Michael Sokolow’s Charles Benson: Mariner of Color in the Age of Sail, published in 2003.)

The Legend of Abel Benson

In Framingham, there’s a tradition that the militia alarm on 19 Apr 1775 was spread by an African-American playing a trumpet. Lately, in fact, that tradition has said the trumpeter was a young boy of African and English descent named Abel Benson.

That tradition has been published in Norman Castle’s The Minute Men (1977), David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride (1994), Kenneth A. Daigler’s Spies, Patriots, and Traitors (2014), and various web articles and local talks.

It’s striking, however, that the first mention of that story didn’t appear in print until the early 20th century. As far as I can tell, Abel Benson’s connection to the Lexington alarm starts in 1908 in a compendium called Historic Homes and Places and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Middlesex County, Massachusetts.

In an entry on the Bacon family, this series quotes a man named Austin Bacon describing how he understood his grandfather John Bacon, lieutenant from Needham, responded to that alarm:

In the night or near morning the alarm was given and he set off on horseback to join his company at the more eastern part of the town, and sent his horse back when they got nearly to the Lower Falls. Soon after he had gone a trumpet sounded and some Framingham men came along with one Nero Benson, a negro, for trumpeter, and every house they passed had a blast.

Since Lt. Bacon had left, another relative presumably saw how the “Framingham men came along” and passed down that description.

That lore also surfaced (independently or not?) in George Kuhn Clarke’s History of Needham, Massachusetts, published in 1911. Clarke was a longtime collector of local history, old enough to have met a woman who lived through the first day of the Revolutionary War. Here’s how Clarke described the alarm in Needham:

On the morning of April 19, 1775, the news that the British were on their way to Concord was brought to Bullard’s Tavern, and the alarm was given by Ephraim Bullard, the tavern-keeper, or by his son of the same name, who fired a gun on Bullard’s Hill. . . .

In “The Leg” [a section of Needham later traded to Natick] the alarm was sounded by the trumpet of Abel, or Nero, Benson, a negro.

Unfortunately, Clarke didn’t write out the basis for that statement.

Both Nero and Abel Benson had appeared more than half a century earlier in William Barry’s History of Framingham, published in 1847. Three times in that book, Barry identified Nero Benson as the “trumpeter in Capt. Clark’s company” from Framingham in 1725—fifty years before the Revolutionary War. Another page lists “Abel Benson, trumpeter” among that town’s Revolutionary veterans. And there’s a genealogy that shows Nero was Abel’s grandfather through a son named William.

(Note that Abel Benson was also a brother-in-law of Peter Salem, a soldier at Bunker Hill sometimes credited with shooting Maj. John Pitcairn—though I think that’s dubious.)

It’s significant that Barry wrote about the Bensons without describing either Nero or Abel as being an important part of the area’s militia response in April 1775.

TOMORROW: In fact, there’s strong evidence neither Nero nor Abel Benson sounded the alarm.

A View of Battle Road from Needham

Continuing Boston 1775’s look back at the first major battle of the Revolutionary War, here’s a description of that event from the manuscript memoir of the Rev. Samuel West of Needham’s first parish, as transcribed here, courtesy of the town’s historical society and schools. This Rev. Samuel West of Needham and later Boston (1738-1808) was not the Rev. Samuel West of Falmouth (1729-1807) who deciphered Dr. Benjamin Church’s secret letter into Boston.

In the night after the eighteenth of April a detachment of the British troops marched out of Boston for the purpose of securing to themselves or destroying the provisions etc. which had been deposited at Concord, by order of the Provincial Government. They in part effected their purpose, but were soon attacked by our people and a continual skirmish was kept up during their march from Concord to Boston. About one hundred on both sides were killed and many were wounded.

The news reached us about nine o’clock A.M. The east company in Needham met at my house as part of the Military stores were deposited with me, they there supplied themselves, and by ten o’clock all marched for the place of action with as much spirit and resolution as the most zealous friends of the cause could have wished for.

We could easily trace the march of troops from the smoke which arose over them, and could hear from my house the report of the cannon and the Platoons fired by the British. The Needham company was soon on the ground, but unhappily being ignorant of what are called flank-guards they inserted themselves between them and the main body of the British troops. In consequence of which they suffered more severely than their Neighbors who kept to a greater distance. . . .

In the evening we had intelligence that several of the Needham inhabitants were among the slain, and the next morning it was confirmed that five had fallen in the action and several others had been wounded. It is remarkable that the five who fell all of them had families, and several of them very numerous families so that there were about forty widows and fatherless children made in consequence of their death.

I visited these families immediately, and with a sympathetic sense of their affliction I gave to some the first intelligence they had of the dreadful event, the death of a Husband and a Parent. The very different manner in which the tidings were received, discovered the very different disposition of the suffers. While some were almost frantic in their grief others received the news with profound silence as if in a consternation of grief they were incapable of shedding tears or uttering sighs or groans. . . .

Their treatment of such as the British left dead on the road was such as I could have supposed. They were stripped for the sake of their cloths and left naked on the highway until buried by order of our Government…

Epidemic Behind the American Lines

Today Boston 1775 welcomes Judith Cataldo as a guest blogger. She is researching an event occurring at the same time as the British and American military maneuvers in late August 1775: a summer epidemic of the “bloody flux,” or dysentery, in Middlesex County.

That outbreak may well have been related to the sudden concentration of men from all over New England in military camps around Boston. In his memoir, Lt. David Perry (1741-1826) wrote:

In the heat of Summer, the men were attacked with the Dysentery, and considerable numbers of them died. The people flocked in from the country, to see the camps and their friends, and took the disorder; and it spread all over the New-England states: it carried off a great many more in the country than in the camp, which seemed to dishearten the people very much.

Judy writes:

This was how I got interested in Rev War history. I was documenting the gravestone epitaphs in my home town cemetery, Needham, and found a higher number of stones for 1775 than for other years. In my travels of other graveyards I found the same pattern. Eventually, I tripped upon the Dedham Register, which had serialized a book documenting the town epitaphs with genealogical notes, and it mentioned an epidemic at that time.

Here’s the gravestone that started it all:

In memory of Mrs Esther wife of Mr Joseph Daniels who died Aug’st 1775 in ye 34th year of her age & 7 children of Mr Joseph Daniels & Esther his wife.

Martha Died August 31 in the 5th Year [she had been born 8/19/1770]

Sarah Died Sep’r 2nd in her 9th Year [born 4/9/1767]

Esther Died Sep’r 4th in her 12 Year

Anna Died Sep’r 7th in her 2th year [baptized 5/10/1773]

Josiah Died Sep’r 7th in the 6th year [born 4/9/1769]

Elizabeth Died Sept 12th in her 11th year 1775 [born 7/17/1765]

Joseph Died June 1st 1777 in his 16th year [born 2/24/1762]

The Rev. Samuel West, minister of Needham in 1775, mentioned this epidemic and the Daniels family in his autobiography:

The Dysentery soon prevailed in the American Army & Extended itself more of less through the country. Although it prevailed most in the Town near camp My parish partook largely of this calimity. We buried about 50 persons in the course of the season. Some families were dreadfully. One in particular a Mr Joseph Daniels buried an amiable wife & 6 promising children in about 6 weeks—we often buried 3 or 4 in a day. My time was wholly devoted to visiting the sick, attendance on the dying and dead.

Proportional to population, four deaths in Needham in 1775 would be about 200 people a day today.

Thanks for sharing that work, Judy!