Locating “Revolution Happened Here”

Here’s a digital public history project to keep an eye on the coming years: Revolution Happened Here: Our Towns in the American Revolution, from the Pioneer Valley History Network.

This website invites local history organizations from western Massachusetts to upload pictures of Revolutionary-era items and the stories behind them.

As the project description says:

This website will become a place where visitors can discover how the American Revolution, while globally seismic in its consequences, was at its heart intrinsically local and intensely personal.

To be sure, there’s some regional rivalry or healthy resentment involved:

In the conventional, top-down history of the Revolution, western Massachusetts towns simply reacted to the ideas, decisions and actions of elites from Boston, the presumed hub of Revolutionary activity. Revolution Happened Here will enrich and complicate this narrative by sharing the debates and experiences in our towns.

Because of the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers, many towns in western Massachusetts had more business and other interaction with the colonies of Connecticut and New York than with Boston. Plus, the issues of import tariffs and military occupation that roiled Boston from 1767 to the start of the war had less direct impact on farming communities.

That makes the developments at the end of summer 1774 all the more striking. While Bostonians chafed under the return of troops, most other communities were free to organize and protest against the Massachusetts Government Act. The westernmost county began the court-closing movement in August, and it spread eastward.

Western Massachusetts returned to that tactic after the war, “regulating” courts again in protest of what the region’s small farmers saw as economic and legal hardships. The Boston trading class responded by dubbing that movement “Shays’ Rebellion” and raising funds for a militia force to put it down.

Some of the interesting artifacts on display on the Revolution Happened Here site include:

• The gravestone of John Morrison, who arrived as a soldier in one of Britain’s Highlander regiments and defected.
• A letter from Continental soldier Caesar Phelps to the man who had enslaved him and sent him into the army.
• Thirteen-year-old Anna Stoddard’s sampler, from a family ostracized in Northampton for Loyalism.
• The notebooks of Dr. Estes Howe, regimental surgeon and Belchertown town clerk.
• Another copy of Paul Revere’s Massacre print, because some folks in the valley did care a little about Boston.

And this online collection should grow as the Sestercentennial proceeds.

Dr. Dexter’s Boys

When Lydia (Woods Dexter) Curtis died at the end of 1772, her three surviving sons were all in their late teens, of age to be apprentices. They may therefore have left the household of their stepfather, Dr. Samuel Curtis.

Lydia was from a large and established family in Marlborough. The boys’ paternal relatives in Dedham were also rich enough to take them in if that seemed like the best course. (In 1771 their grandmother there offered to pay “the Charge of Rideing” for one boy so that he could recover from an illness through “moderate exercise.”)

Two of those Dexter boys went into medical professions, and it’s possible that Dr. Curtis helped to train them. But it’s also possible those sons were inspired entirely by their father, Dr. Ebenezer Dexter, and wanted little to do with Curtis. Here’s what we know about the next generation of Dexters.

William (1755-1785) went out to Shrewsbury, perhaps to train under Dr. Edward Flynt, who had treated his father in his last illness. In February 1775, at the age of nineteen, William married a local woman named Betsy Bowker, age twenty-one. Their first child, named Ebenezer after William’s father, arrived eight and a half months later.

By then, Edward Flynt and William Dexter had enlisted as surgeon and surgeon’s mate for Gen. Artemas Ward’s regiment of the Massachusetts army. The young man’s handwritten commission signed by James Warren for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress appears above. Dexter served in the Continental Army through the siege of Boston and accompanied the regiment down to New York under Col. Jonathan Ward.

Betsy Dexter, according to her 1843 application for a pension, was living at her father’s house in Shrewsbury all this time. William “returned after warm weather in 1776,” she recalled. He had reached the age of majority that April, and I wonder if he inherited his father’s estate in Marlborough. (It’s worth recalling that Dr. Curtis decided to leave town and go to sea the next spring.)

According to his wife, William brought his little family home to Marlborough in December 1776 and set up his own practice as a physician. William and Betsy had children in 1777, 1778, and 1779, all of them living to adulthood. But like his father, William Dexter died young, at age thirty. His widow Betsy remarried ten years later to a man named Edward Low and settled in Leominster, living until 1846.

Samuel Dexter (1756-1825) became an apothecary, married Elizabeth Province in Northampton in 1790, and settled in Albany, New York. She was a daughter of John and Sarah Province of Boston, and thus a sister of the David Province whom George Gailer sued for helping to tar and feather him in 1769, when she was six. How she got to Northampton is a mystery. Samuel and Elizabeth had five children, three living to adulthood. Samuel was the longest-lived of the brothers, and Elizabeth died in 1846.

John Dexter (1758-1807) worked as a quartermaster sergeant for the Continental Army for several years under Col. Timothy Bigelow of Worcester. On 3 Mar 1783 he married a woman from Marlborough named Mary Woods, likely a cousin on his mother’s side, with a justice of the peace from Stow rather than a local minister presiding. John and Mary Dexter’s first daughter arrived in late December, and three more children followed by 1794.

John was a tanner. He gained the militia rank of ensign under Gov. John Hancock. In the 1790s the Dexters moved to Berlin. Then John “went into Trade,” and in 1802 he moved the family into Boston. John died five years later, Mary in 1823. The children all lived well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, but none had children.

John Dexter’s third child was John Haven Dexter (1791-1867), who apprenticed at Benjamin Russell’s Columbian Centinel but then went to work in the mercantile firm of Amos and Abbott Lawrence. J. H. Dexter wrote two books (Mercantile Honor, and Moral Honesty and A Plea for the Horse) and also left several manuscripts of genealogical information and gossip about his family and fellow Bostonians, some helpfully transcribed and published in 1997.

Mixed Reactions to the Massachusetts Convention

The Boston Whigs weren’t surprised there was pushback against their Convention from Massachusetts towns where friends of the royal government dominated local politics—such as Hatfield, as I quoted yesterday.

But they may have hoped for a positive response from Marblehead and Salem, two of the largest towns in the province with a mercantile communities also hit by the Townshend Act and stricter Customs enforcement. Instead, both those towns were in political turmoil, so they didn’t make a clear response.

Salem’s representatives to the Massachusetts General Court in the spring of 1768, William Brown and Peter Frye, had both voted to rescind the body’s Circular Letter. Neither would be reelected. The new representatives for May 1769 were strong Whigs Richard Derby, Jr., and John Pickering. But the Convention came in the midst of that shift.

Likewise, of Marblehead’s representatives, Jacob Fowle had voted to rescind and William Bourne had sat out that vote; neither would be reelected. Richard Brown found that Marblehead didn’t even meet to consider Boston’s invitation. George A. Billias suggested that the loss of several fishing vessels that summer gave the town bigger things to worry about.

Another notable result came from Northampton, to the west. That town regularly sent Joseph Hawley, a respected lawyer and strong Whig, to the General Court. But its citizens voted overwhelmingly—66 or 65 to 1—not to send Hawley or anyone else to the Convention. At the same time, little Montague, which often sat out the regular legislature, sent Moses Gunn to the Convention.

Cambridge was a politically active town, and so close to Boston that it wouldn’t have been much expense to send a delegate. But it also had a relatively large and very wealthy Anglican community, and those citizens kept the town from responding quickly.

The citizens of Cambridge didn’t meet about Boston’s invitation until 26 September, four days after the Convention had started. Katie Turner Getty kindly shared her notes on that meeting, which show that attendees chose Samuel Whittemore, a septuagenarian militia captain from the western part of town, as moderator. But the meeting’s only recorded action was to adjourn “to Tuesday next at three of the clock in the afternoon.”

That would seem to put the next session of the meeting in early October, but that same Monday the Boston Gazette reported:

The Torries [sic] in Cambridge have had the Address, with the Aid of a veering Whig, to get the Town Meeting adjourned to Thursday next.

That would be Thursday the 29th, which is indeed when the men of Cambridge came together again. By then the Convention was nearly over, but Lucius Paige’s town history said the meeting considered

whether it be the mind of the inhabitants of this town to proceed on the article in the Warrant, relating to the choosing a person to join with the committees of Convention of the other towns in this Province, now sitting in Boston, and it passed in the afiirmative.

The town voted to send two delegates to the Convention—more than it had sent to the last General Court. The local Whigs may have been trying to make up for lost time.

Cambridge’s first choice was Andrew Bordman, who had represented the town in that last legislature. He “declined the service.” The town asked Deacon Samuel Whittemore (1721-1784), son of the meeting moderator. He also declined. The town then asked Capt. Whittemore, who said yes. Finally the town chose Thomas Gardner as the second delegate, and he agreed as well.

But neither Whittemore nor Gardner arrived in time to be listed among the Convention attendees by Robert Treat Paine. Both remained politically active, with Gardner taking over for Bordman in the General Court. Whittemore is famous for being wounded during the Battle of Lexington and Concord; Gardner died of wounds suffered at Bunker Hill.

Getty and I are both curious about the identity of the “veering Whig” who delayed Cambridge’s response. Was it Bordman, who had been one of the “Glorious 92” but didn’t want to attend the unofficial Convention? Was it old Samuel Danforth, a Council member who lived in Cambridge and was voting with Gov. Francis Bernard on a couple of issues that week? (Another Council member from Cambridge, William Brattle, voted firmly against Bernard and therefore hadn’t started “veering” yet.) Whittemore as moderator might have had the influence to adjourn the meeting, but he probably wouldn’t have been chosen as delegate after that. Absent a more revealing local source, we’ll never know.

(Read Katie Getty’s Journal of the American Revolution article about Samuel Whittemore here.)

Counterfeiting along the Borderlands

Last April Brian Barrett published an interesting article on the New York History Blog about a legal dispute between Massachusetts and New York on the eve of the Revolutionary War.

The underlying issue was people in western Massachusetts making and passing counterfeit New York currency. One of the men caught up in the trouble was a West Stockbridge farmer named Ichabod Miller.

On December 20, 1772 at two in the morning, Ichabod Miller and his family were awoken by Albany County Deputy Sheriff Daniel Davids knocking down the door. Miller lived close to the New York-Massachusetts border, but on the Mass. side of the line. He later testified that in arresting him for counterfeiting, the Deputy Sheriff and his five-man posse smashed open his door with an axe, and shackled and removed him to the jail in Albany, where he contracted smallpox.

At the time, New York asserted jurisdiction over all residents west of the Connecticut River, part of a long-standing dispute between New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts (and what would become Vermont). During examination by the King’s Attorney, Ichabod Miller invoked Massachusetts’ authority in the case. The King’s Attorney responded: “God Damn your Authority.” The King’s Attorney told Miller he would get a Massachusetts authority to endorse the Miller warrant after the fact. . . .

On March 9, 1773, the Pittsfield Inferior Court found against the Albany Posse and in favor of Ichabod Miller. The finding was that the posse assaulted, beat, wounded and abused Miller for a period of three weeks. He was awarded 150 pounds in damages, but the case was continued. On August 17, the court specified that only defendants Joshua Root, Icabod Squire Jr. and Abajiah Root were responsible for the damages, but again the case was continued.

A separate complaint filed by Miller against Joshua and Abajiah Root was presented in Inferior Court on March 1, 1774 and the jury awarded Miller an additional 45 pounds plus costs. Miller walked away empty handed again however, as the award was appealed to the Supreme Court in Northampton, MA.

Unfortunately for Miller, his case didn’t get though the entire Massachusetts system before Patriot crowds forced the county courts to close in the late summer of 1774 as a protest against the Coercive Acts. Lawsuits remained closed for the rest of the war, and when the courts reopened so much of society had changed that Miller’s case was moot.

Barrett’s article details several other men who were much deeper into the counterfeit scheme than Miller, who might even have been innocent.

Monsters in the Southwest Territory

On 24 Sept 1794, William Butler of Northampton ran this item on the last page of his Hampshire Gazette newspaper:

CURIOUS ANIMAL

In February last, a detachment of mounted infantry, commanded by Captain John Beaird, penetrated fifteen miles into the Cumberland Mountain:

On Cove Creek, ensign M’Donald and another man, in advance of the party as spies, they discovered a creature about three steps from them it had only two legs, and stood almost upright, covered with scales, of a black, brown, and light yellow colour, in spots like rings, a white tuft or crown on the top of its head, about four feet high, a head as big as a two pound stone, and large eyes, of a fiery red. It stood about three minutes in a daring posture

(orders being given not to fire a gun except at Indians,) Mr. M’Donald advanced and struck at it with his sword, when it jumped up, at least, eight feet, and lit on the same spot of ground, sending forth a red kind of matter out of its mouth resembling blood, and then retreated into a Laurel thicket turning round often, as if it intended to fight. The tracks of it resembled that of a goose, but larger.

The Indians report, that a creature inhabits that part of the mountain, of the above description, which, by its breath, will kill a man, if he does not instantly immerse himself in water.

You can see that item starting at the bottom of the first column on this page spread (P.D.F.).

Other newspapers ran the same story, crediting it (as Butler had not) to the Knoxville Gazette. At the end of the year, the same report was reprinted in Greenleaf’s New-York, Connecticut and New-Jersey Almanack for 1795.

Militia captain John Beaird was a notorious figure in the Southwest Territory, which became Tennessee in 1796. In June 1793 President George Washington’s federal agents were visiting a friendly Cherokee chief named Hanging Maw and other leaders at the town of Coyatee, planning a treaty meeting. Beaird led a renegade militia company charging into the town, killing a dozen people and wounding others, including Hanging Maw. Beaird’s men then burned the goods that the agents had brought as gifts.

The federal government tried Beaird in a military court, but public opinion forced his acquittal. The secretary of the territory reported, “to my great pain, I find, to punish Beard by law, just now, is out of the question.” The next month, Beaird attacked another Native town and killed half a dozen more people. Clearly he intended to stir up a war, scotching any treaty that limited white settlement.

And it worked. Cherokees counterattacked at Cavett’s Station. That fall, John Sevier led a larger militia force against the Cherokees, both friendly and understandably unfriendly, and drove them further west. (Some authors say Sevier had urged Beaird on in his early attacks.)

That Cherokee-American War explains why in February 1794 Beaird’s men were pushing into the Cumberland area with orders “not to fire a gun except at Indians.” However, there’s still no explanation for the creature that Ens. McDonald and his companion saw. Recent books on cryptozoology have dubbed it the “Cumberland Dragon” or “Goosefoot.”

A period term for the creature appears in a 7 Nov 1798 letter from William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory during Beaird’s raids, about a court case:

All the usual writs known in law are distinguished by some technical name or term, and this production of [Judge David] Campbell’s being unknown in law, it has been deemed proper to call it by a new name, to-wit, Cheeklaceella. I make no doubt you remember a description of an animal (a monster in nature) of this name being published in the Knoxville Gazette in the year 1793 [sic]. Campbell’s production is certainly as great a monster in law as anything under any description or name whatever could be in Nature. What a misfortune to a Country to have a fool for a Judge.

After Tennessee became a state, Sevier served multiple terms as its governor as well as representing it in the U.S. House. Blount was a U.S. Senator until being impeached in 1797; he remained popular at home, and his half-brother Willie succeeded Sevier as governor. Campbell was impeached as a state judge in 1798 and 1803, but acquitted both times. John Beaird served in the state legislature before moving his family and slaves to Kentucky and then to Illinois. Tennessee politics appear to have been lively.

Sylvanus Johnson “returned from captivity”

A few years ago, Ann M. Little shared this analysis of a passage, and an event, from A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. [Susanna] Johnson, Containing an Account of her Four Years of Suffering with the Indians and French:

First published in 1796, it told of her family’s experiences from 1754-58 as prisoners during the Seven Years War after they were captured in a raid on Fort Number Four in what’s now Charlestown, New Hampshire. Johnson relates this about the return of her son Sylvanus, whom she last saw at age six or seven. He was eleven before she saw him again:

In the October following [1758], I had the happiness to embrace my son Sylvanus; he had been above three years with the Indians, followed them in all their hunting excursions and learnt too many of their habits; to civilize him, and learn him his native language was a severe task, (136).

…In successive editions of her narrative, Susanna Johnson either gives us more details about Sylvanus’s condition, or she embroiders the story. From the 1814 third edition published after her death in 1810:

In October, 1758, I was informed that my son Sylvanus was at Northampton [Massachusetts], sick of a scald [a skin disease]. I hastened to the place, and found him in a deplorable situation; he was brought there by Major [Israel] Putnam, afterwards Gen. Putnam, with Mrs. [Jemima] How and her family, who had returned from captivity. The town of Northampton had taken the charge of him; his situation was miserable; when I found him, he had no recollection of me, but, after some conversation, he had some confused ideas of me, but no remembrance of his father. It was four years since I had seen him; he was then eleven years old. During his absence, he had entirely forgotten the English language, spoke a little broken French, but was perfect in Indian. He had been with the savages three years, and one year with the French. But his habits were somewhat Indian; he had been with them in their hunting excursions, and suffered numerous hardships; he could brandish a tomahawk or bend the bow; but these habits wore off by degrees, (130).

…The additions and changes in Susanna Johnson’s account also demonstrate the ways in which historical memory changes according to the times. Her account of her experiences in 1754-58 wasn’t published until nearly fifty years after the fact, but even then we see evidence of how the times continue to shape the story in the successive editions. By 1814, the “Indians” in the 1796 account became “the savages,” and she was much more fulsome about the injuries and changes that captivity had wrought on her young son in 1814, 1834, and perhaps successive editions too. In the later editions, what had been her “happiness to embrace [her] son Sylvanus” became a much more ambiguous account of their reunion, one that emphasized the child’s “deplorable” and “miserable” condition, as well as his trouble remembering his parents.

Henry Saunderson (among other nineteenth-century local historians) claims in his History of Charlestown, New Hampshire, that Sylvanus Johnson “so much preferred the modes of Indian life to the prevalent customs of civilization, that he often expressed regret at having been ransomed. He always maintained, and no arguments could convince him to the contrary, that the Indians were a far more moral race than the whites.” His boyhood captivity apparently had no long-term effects on his life and health, as he died at 84 in 1832, “leaving the reputation of an honest and upright man,” (458.)

Little was exploring the lives of captured children in connection with a biography she published last year, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright. Like Sylvanus Johnson, Esther Wheelwright was seized at age seven and adopted into a Wabanaki family. Unlike him, Esther never returned to her family.

Instead, Esther Wheelwright became an Ursuline nun in French Canada and eventually a superior of her order. Her family in Boston tried to lure her back with bequests if she returned, and she never did. Her British heritage, while mostly forgotten, proved useful when Gen. James Wolfe captured Québec the year after Sylvanus Johnson returned to his mother.

TOMORROW: Sylvanus Johnson in the woods.

Poking through the Joseph Hawley Papers

Harvard University isn’t the only institution digitizing Revolutionary-era documents, of course.

The New York Public Library ended up with a bunch of significant papers from Massachusetts, including Samuel Adams’s papers and the correspondence of the Boston Committee of Correspondence. It too has been scanning lots of documents and making them available to the world for free as part of its Early American Manuscripts Project.

I’ll start with the Joseph Hawley Papers. Hawley was an attorney in Northampton, respected by all Massachusetts Whigs for his legal knowledge and judgment. He was quite active in the Massachusetts legislature leading up to the Revolutionary War.

This is Hawley’s copy of the text of a letter that William Brattle sent to Gen. Thomas Gage in late August 1774 warning about rumblings of military preparation in the countryside. Gage responded by removing gunpowder from the provincial powderhouse in what is now Somerville. The rural militia mobilized in what became known as the “Powder Alarm.” That event signaled how Massachusetts farmers had become more confrontational than Bostonians.

Here’s a letter from a man in Boston on 27 Feb 1775 worrying that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress has given too much power to its Committee of Safety to call out the militia again:

when once the Soldiers are mustered by order of the Committee they will suppose it their duty to fight, and for fear of being Impeached for Cowardice, it is more than probable they will Commence Hostilities…

Who wrote that letter? The page with the signature doesn’t appear to have survived. But the handwriting looks a lot like that in this July 1775 letter from Thomas Cushing—Boston merchant, speaker of the Massachusetts house, and delegate to the Continental Congress.

Later in July Cushing wrote again with news that the Congress had chosen Hawley to help negotiate with Native American nations in the northern theater. Hawley’s papers also include a commission signed by John Hancock. There follow a few letters from the other commissioners, asking why they hadn’t heard from Hawley. Finally he wrote to the Congress saying he couldn’t take on the job because of this health—quite possibly the beginning of a long depression that curtailed his political activity.

Hawley appears to have remained active in local affairs, at least at times. His papers include an August 1775 document in which a bunch of British prisoners signed onto the terms of their parole within the town of Northampton. Here are notes on how Hawley’s town voted to pay “nine-month men” enlisting in the Continental Army, and here’s the list of some men who signed up on those terms.

Upcoming Events Off the Beaten Path

In addition to the annual commemorations grouped around Patriots’ Day that I linked to here, a few more talks caught my eye because they’re one-off events in unusual venues.

On Monday, 16 April (which is legally Patriots’ Day), at 10:00 A.M., Dr. Sam Forman will sign copies of Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty, at the Vine Lake Cemetery, 625 Main Street in Medfield. Why a cemetery in Medfield? Because that’s the burial place of Mercy Scollay, Dr. Warren’s fiancée when he died. Forman will “read from her newly attributed works and unveil her portrait.”

That same day at 7:00 P.M., Seamus Heffernan will do a book-signing and chat about his alternative-history comic Freedom in the Modern Myths shop at 34 Bridge Street in Northampton. Check out our conversation about that reworking of the Revolution starting here.

On Tuesday, 17 April, the Nichols House Museum will present a lecture by Peter Drummey, the Stephen T. Riley Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, on ”The Real Liberty Bell: Boston Abolitionists, 1700-1863.” This will take place the American Meteorological Society at 45 Beacon Street in Boston starting at 6:00 P.M. Admission is $20, or $15 for members of the museum. For reservations, call the museum at 617-227-6993, preferably by 13 April.

Finally, on the actual anniversary of the outbreak of the war—Thursday, 19 April—Prof. William Fowler will speak at the National Archives in Waltham about his latest book, American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two years After Yorktown, 1781-1783. Fowler is, among many other things, the Gay Hart Gaines Distinguished Fellow in American History at Mount Vernon. That free program begins at 6:00 P.M. Reservations are recommended; email or call toll-free 866-406-2379.