“To Preserve Him and His Family and Substance from Injury and Abuse”

At the top of New England rural society were a town’s wealthy landowners and professionals, its selectmen, its militia officers, and—once political turmoil reached its boiling point in 1774-75—its local committee of correspondence. Those groups overlapped a lot, and they and their children tended to intermarry.

Usually the town minister was part of that class, but in Groton in 1775 the Rev. Samuel Dana was siding with the Crown, and therefore unpopular. Even so, his genteel neighbors didn’t want to see a mob hurt harm him, for several overlapping reasons: class solidarity, dislike of disorder, a wish to preserve the town’s reputation, &c.

In early May 1775, a committee of local bigwigs met with Dana and brought the following report to the town meeting:

This memorandum witnesseth, that at a conference between Dr. Oliver Prescott, Capt. Josiah Sartell, Dea. Isaac Farnsworth and Benjamin Bancroft, Ensign Moses Child and Mr. Jona. Clark Lewis, on the one side, and the Rev. Samuel Dana, on the other side, it was proposed and agreed to by all parties, that the pastoral relation between the said Samuel Dana and the inhabitants of Groton, should be dissolved, on conditions, the town when properly met shall judge it expedient, and at the same time will restore the said Samuel Dana to the usual privileges and advantages of society and neighborhood, and use their influence to preserve him and his family and substance from injury and abuse, either from the inhabitants of this, or any of the neighboring towns. The said Samuel Dana, at the same time, giving the town the reasonable assurance in his power, that he will not only not oppose their political measures, but will unite with them agreeable to the advice of the Continental and Provincial Congresses, and the votes of the town.

Groton’s official committee of correspondence, which consisted of Prescott, Sartell, Farnsworth, and Child, as well as James Prescott, presented that agreement to the town meeting on 15 May. (That meeting probably took place in the town church, which doubled as the public meeting-house.) The committee also apparently offered a text that Dana would have to sign:

I, The Subscriber, being deeply affected with the Miseries bro’t on this Country, by a horrid Thirst for ill-got Wealth and unconstitutional Power—and lamenting my Unhappiness, in being left to adopt Principles in Politics different from the Generality of my Countrymen; and thence to conduct in a Manner that has but too justly excited the Jealousy and Resentment of the true Sons of Liberty against me, earnestly desirous, at the same Time, to give them all the Satisfaction in my Power do hereby sincerely ask Forgiveness of all such for whatever I have said or done, that had the least Tendency to the Injury of my Country, assuring them that it is my full Purpose, in my proper Sphere, to unite with them, in all those laudable and fit Measures, that have been recommended by the Continental and Provincial Congresses, for the Salvation of this Country, hoping my future Conversation and Conduct will fully prove the Uprightness of my present Professions.

According to the town’s records of that meeting:

the Rev. Samuel Dana came into the meeting, and after some conference with the town, and the memorandum above being read and duly considered, he, the said Dana, desired the town would grant him a dismission from his pastoral relation and office, in the said town; whereupon, the town voted nem. contract, that the said Samuel Dana be dismissed from his pastoral relation and office aforesaid, and he is hereby finally discharged therefrom accordingly.

But that consensus among the gentlemen and yeomen wealthy enough to vote in town meeting didn’t put an end to the troubles. Part of the problem might have been that Dana didn’t sign the document right away.

Around 20 May, Jason Russell and John Tarbell of Mason, New Hampshire, went into a pasture Dana owned in that town and “took from thence a three year heifer, and killed and converted it to their own use.” The Mason committee summoned the men and “required of the offenders full satisfaction therefor.” The two men refused. The Mason leaders called in the committees from New Ipswich and Temple. But Russell and Tarbell, the committeemen reported, “not only neglected to make their appearance before us, but, as we learn, have fled to the Army.”

Ordinary people in and around Groton might have been signaling Dana and his genteel protectors that his property was fair game, and that he might be, too. That in turn might have been enough to make him sign the town’s document on 22 May. It was printed in the New-England Chronicle the following month along with the committee’s report. 

Finally, the Groton church met on 29 May, after a summons by the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper, and voted, “that what Mr. Samuel Dana has offered to the public for satisfaction, for his conduct in political matters, is by no means satisfactory to this church, as a brother.” The congregation formally dismissed Dana from their pulpit.

TOMORROW: Whatever happened to Samuel Dana?

Groton Seeks a New Minister

By April 1775, as described yesterday, the Patriot majority in Groton and their Loyalist minister, the Rev. Samuel Dana, were at a stalemate. Dana refused to call a meeting of the church members, where they could dismiss him. The congregation apparently felt they couldn’t call a meeting on their own authority, at least in part because Dana said he wouldn’t show up.

According to historian Caleb Butler, local tradition held that at some point, probably after war began at Lexington and Concord, “the inhabitants were so enraged, that they shot bullets into Mr. Dana’s house, to the great danger of his life and the lives of his family.” Nevertheless, the minister didn’t leave town and seek the protection of the British army in Boston.

Groton’s town leaders sought a replacement. On 5 May, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper (shown here), a Patriot who had slipped out of Boston to Weston just before the war, received a visit from Dr. Oliver Prescott of Groton. The physician “propos’d my Supplying their Pulpit.”

Cooper was apparently reluctant, perhaps because Groton was far from the political action in Watertown and Cambridge. He suggested that his host, the Rev. Samuel Woodward, should handle the Groton job while he filled in for Woodward. But the Weston minister didn’t agree.

As I discussed back here, on Saturday, 13 May, Cooper heard that Concord’s minister, the Rev. William Emerson, “was to supply Groton,” so he promised to preach the next day at Concord, no doubt happy to escape the long trip. Instead, both men showed up at Concord’s meeting-house, and the Groton congregation was presumably left waiting.

On 21 May, Cooper wrote that he preached at Concord and “Mr. Emerson for me at Groton,” indicating that he felt some responsibility to serve that town. On Saturday, 27 May, he finally set out “in my Chaise for Groton,” stopping along the way at Acton, Littleton, and the house of a man named Rogers for coffee. The next day, Cooper wrote, he:

Pch’d all day at Groton; spoke with Mr. Dana after Service a.m. din’d at Dr. Prescot’s baptiz’d a child P. M. Slept and Horse kept at Dr. Prescot’s.

The Groton church record notes that Cooper did something else as well:

Rev. Dr. Cooper, of Boston, preached, and was desired by the deacons and some of the brethren of the church to appoint a church meeting, to be held at the public meeting-house on the next Monday.

Cooper issued that call for a meeting, breaking the stalemate. Between then and 18 October, he preached in Groton on six Sundays, and received £60 Old Tenor. The congregation might have thought that money well spent because they got to fix their Dana problem.

TOMORROW: Class conflict over dealing with Dana.

“Persons Suspected of Being Inimical”

According to Caleb Butler’s 1848 recounting of how Prudence Wright and the women of Pepperell arrested Leonard Whiting in April 1775, that New Hampshire man “was in reality the bearer of despatches from Canada to the British in Boston.” Butler reported that Whiting’s “despatches were sent to the Committee of Safety,” created by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress to coordinate the armed resistance.

In An Account of Some of the Early Settlers of West Dunstable, Monson, and Hollis (1915), Charles S. Spaulding wrote of Whiting, “He was detected while carrying treasonable despatches from Canada to Boston to the British officers, by the women of Pepperell…”

Yet the published records of the Committee of Safety don’t mention Whiting, or important intercepted messages from Canada. No researcher appears to have turned up those “treasonable dispatches” in the Massachusetts archives. We do have a short 24 Apr 1775 letter to the Committee of Safety from Oliver Prescott of Groton, the man who reportedly examined Whiting after his arrest, but it says nothing about a prisoner.

Whiting and his associates were definitely under suspicion. On 13 July, a Hillsborough County congress investigated his brother Benjamin, considering depositions from Robert Fletcher and Thompson Maxwell. That body concluded that Benjamin was “an open and avowed enemy to his country,” and cautioned “persons from connexions with him.”

In spring 1776, according to Samuel T. Worcester’s History of the Town of Hollis, local committees of safety and then the New Hampshire assembly summoned the Whiting brothers and Samuel and Thomas Cumings as “persons suspected of being inimical to the Rights and Liberties of the United Colonies.” (This means Thomas Cumings could not have left the area forever immediately after meeting his sister at the Pepperell bridge, as one later tradition claimed.)

In June both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature agreed:

That the said Suspicion is not sufficiently Supported, and that the said Leonard Whiting, Benjamin Whiting, Samuel Cummings, and Thomas Cummings be acquitted & fully Discharged.

But soon the courts indicted Thomas Cumings on a new charge. He forfeited his bail and left the state. Samuel Cumings and Benjamin Whiting followed, and New Hampshire confiscated their property.

Only Leonard Whiting remained in America, but that same local history says, “for a large portion of the years 1777 and 1778 he was imprisoned in the jail at Amherst, with several other accused persons.” Finally, he was released, and returned to the community, regaining a measure of respect by the time he died.

If Leonard Whiting had indeed been caught carrying “treasonable dispatches” in April 1775, it’s hard to believe that the Patriot authorities who kept locking him up between then and 1778 didn’t have enough evidence to convict him.

I think it likely that at some point in 1775-76 the Pepperell women did stop Whiting at the Nashua River bridge and take him to Prescott, the local Patriot organizer. (As for whether Samuel Cumings was along for the ride, the evidence for that is weaker.) Whiting may even have been carrying letters of some sort, and the locals, already suspicious about him, saw those documents as trouble. But treasonable “despatches from Canada to the British in Boston”? I doubt they existed.

What about the alternative explanation that Wright had overheard one of her brothers and Whiting planning to ride to Boston? Given how often those men were arrested in the next few years, heading for the British lines might have made sense. But it seems unlikely they could have brought along much useful military information from north central Massachusetts.

I suspect descendants of the folks who detained Whiting wanted to remember that act as justified, hence the stories of “treasonable despatches” and overheard conversation. No doubt Wright, Prescott, and their neighbors saw themselves as bravely standing up to their enemies. But all the times Whiting was arrested and released without charge look like parts of a wartime witch-hunt, a local manifestation of what historians have called 1775’s “rage militaire.” That’s not the history we like to reenact, but it’s part we should also remember.

TOMORROW: Meeting Prudence Wright.

Prudence Wright and Her Brothers

Yesterday I quoted an 1848 anecdote about women in Pepperell seizing a Loyalist suspected of carrying “despatches from Canada to the British in Boston” in April 1775. Over the next half-century, other authors added to that story.

In an 1873 address in Dunstable, New Hampshire, Samuel T. Worcester filled in some information:

The maiden name of Mrs. David Wright, the heroine of the bridge guard, was Prudence Cumings, a daughter of Samuel Cumings, one of the first settlers of Hollis, and first town clerk. It appears from the Hollis records of “births and marriages,” that Prudence Cumings was born at the parish of West Dunstable, now Hollis, Nov. 26, 1740, and married to David Wright, of Pepperell, Dec. 28, 1761.

In 1899, Mary L. P. Shattuck delivered a talk to the local D.A.R. called “The Story of Jewett’s Bridge,” which she published in 1912. (Here’s the text in P.D.F. form.) This appears to be the most comprehensive telling of the bridge story.

Shattuck collected two versions of the tale, one each from descendants of:

• the suspected Loyalist, Leonard Whiting (1740-1807) of Hollis; unlike some other men arrested for favoring the Crown, he stayed in the U.S., moving only as far as Cavendish, Vermont.
• Prudence Wright (1740-1823), the leader of the women at the bridge.

Generally, Shattuck’s additions to the story make it more dramatic. For example, the earliest version reported that Whiting was detained at the home of Oliver Prescott (1731-1804), Groton’s Patriot political leader. Shattuck played up how Whiting’s daughter Nancy married Prescott’s son Oliver—which gives the tale overtones of “How I Met Your Mother.”

Another addition to the original tale isn’t possible to confirm through town records. It says Whiting was riding with another suspected Loyalist named Samuel Cumings, who recognized the voice of the woman shouting at them to stop—because Prudence Wright was his sister. Shattuck even quoted Samuel as saying, “Hold, that’s Prue’s voice, and she would wade through blood for the rebel cause.”

Yet a third addition to the tale was that Prudence Wright had actually overheard her brother (either Samuel or another one, Thomas Cumings) and Whiting discussing how they would ride to Boston and tell the British authorities about what the Patriots were doing. In this version, she organized the guard specifically to block them. And after hearing her voice, Thomas (in one version) left the area for good. That telling plays up family ties the most, and provides an even stronger justification for Wright’s actions.

I’m always dubious about stories that grow better over time without supporting documentation. And this tale strikes me as missing a particular type of evidence.

TOMORROW: The missing documents.

Arrest at the Pepperell Bridge

On Saturday, 4 Sept 2010, there will be a ceremonial reopening of the covered bridge in Pepperell, Massachusetts. One celebration will be a reenactment of something that reportedly took place at a predecessor to that bridge in 1775, soon after the start of the Revolutionary War.

The earliest description of this event that I’ve found appears in Caleb Butler’s History of the Town of Groton: including Pepperell and Shirley, published in 1848:

After the departure of Col. [William] Prescott’s regiment of “minute men,” Mrs. David Wright of Pepperell, Mrs. Job Shattuck of Groton, and the neighborng women, collected at what is now Jewett’s bridge, over the Nashua, between Pepperell and Groton, clothed in their absent husbands’ apparel, and armed with muskets, pitchforks, and such other weapons as they could find, and having elected Mrs. Wright their commander, resolutely determined, that no foe to freedom, foreign or domestic, should pass that bridge. For rumors were rife, that the regulars were approaching, and frightful stories of slaughter flew rapidly from place to place and from house to house.

Soon there appeared one on horseback, supposed to be treasonably engaged in conveying intelligence to the enemy. By the implicit command of Sergeant Wright, he is immediately arrested, unhorsed, searched, and the treasonable correspondence found concealed in his boots. He was detained prisoner and sent to Oliver Prescott, Esq., of Groton, and his despatches were sent to the Committee of Safety.

A footnote identified the detained man as: “Capt Leonard Whiting, of Hollis, N. H., a noted tory. He was in reality the bearer of despatches from Canada to the British in Boston.”

Lorenzo Sabine reprinted Butler’s words without credit in his Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, the first attempt to compile information on Americans who had sided with the Crown during the Revolution. And since Sabine’s book was more widely distributed than Butler’s, a lot of subsequent authors cited Sabine.

TOMORROW: How the story grew.