The Speakman Brothers at War

When we left the Barnes and Speakman families in Marlborough in the fall of 1770, they appear to have arrived at some sort of truce.

Henry Barnes continued to run a potash manufactory and general store. Older brother William Speakman probably managed the farming land while younger brother Gilbert Warner Speakman set up a tannery.

Four years later, in the summer of 1774, Parliament’s Coercive Acts radicalized the Massachusetts countryside far more than it had been before. Marlborough held a town meeting to endorse the Solemn League and Covenant, the strictest boycott yet on British goods and people selling them in America.

On 8 July, John Rowe, uncle and mentor of the Speakman brothers and then trimming toward the Crown, wrote in his diary:

I heard of the bad behaviour of the people at Marlborough; its said the Speakmans were concerned; if it proves so, they have not only behaved ill, but contrary to my sentiments, and forfeited my regard in future for them.

Then came the “Powder Alarm” of 2 September, when thousands of Middlesex County militiamen poured into Cambridge, spurred by Gen. Thomas Gage’s seizing of gunpowder from a provincial storehouse and false rumors of British military atrocities. The Marlborough militia companies were prominent in that action according to Boston merchant John Andrews:

Though they had an account at Marlborough of the powder’s being remov’d, last Thursday night, yet they were down to Cambridge (which is thirty miles) by eight o’clock Fryday morning, with a troop of horse and another of foot, both under the command of Gib. Speakman, a young fellow who serv’d his time with John Rowe.

When the real war came in April 1775, William Speakman marched with the Marlborough militia infantry. (That is, in fact, the last record I’ve found of him.)

Gilbert Warner Speakman became a captain in Col. John Glover’s regiment, drawn mostly from Marblehead, at the start of 1776. On 17 March, the British military evacuated Boston, taking many Loyalist families with them, including Henry and Christian Barnes.

The Speakmans’ uncles, John Rowe and Ralph Inman (shown above, courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum), stayed behind to tough out the change in political power. Just one week after the evacuation, with the British fleet still massed off shore, Rowe wrote in his diary:

I dined at Mr. Inman’s with him, Mrs. Inman, Genl. [Nathanael] Green, Mrs. [Catherine] Green, Tuthill Hubbard, Mrs. Forbes, Mr. Lowell [?], Mrs. Rowe, and Capt. Gilbert Speakman.

Rowe had regained his regard for his nephew, now that that nephew was on the winning side.

In May 1776, Capt. Gib Speakman advertised for deserters from his regiment. Those newspaper notices provide valuable descriptions of how Marblehead soldiers were dressing.

The next year, Capt. Speakman transitioned to being commissary of military stores at Springfield and then commissary of ordnance for the ill-fated Penobscot expedition of 1779. He offered damning testimony in the court-martial of Paul Revere. Revere was acquitted while Speakman was still petitioning the Massachusetts legislature for reimbursement for that mission in 1798.

The Speakmans expected to marry within the same class and religion, as their aunts had done by marrying Rowe and Inman. That became more difficult after the evacuation of so many genteel Anglican families as Loyalists. Gib Speakman and his sisters Hannah and Sarah all ended up marrying siblings in the Minot family of King’s Chapel, including historian George Richards Minot.

James Watson and the Tea Party

Yesterday I quoted Cyrus Eaton’s History of Thomaston, Rockland, and South Thomaston, Maine (1865) as a source about Benjamin Burton’s stories of the Boston Tea Party.

Eaton also wrote:

The other resident of this place present at this celebrated tea-party, was Capt. James Watson, who, at the time commanding a small coaster from this river, and being in Boston, assisted in breaking up the chests with a negro-hoe; as the tide abated, he went down the vessel-side to push it afloat, and filled his pea-jacket pockets with samples of the objectionable herb.

Stealing tea was what got Charles Conner in trouble on 16 Dec 1773, which is why he’s the one person we can identify from contemporaneous sources as helping to do away with that cargo. Some Boston families claimed that ancestors brought home some tea unwittingly in their boots or the folds of their clothing. But for Watson and his descendants to boast of him deliberately carrying tea away is unusual.

I haven’t found any other sources about James Watson’s involvement, however. Apparently Eaton’s book was enough for the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum to list Watson among the participants. Its website says:

Little is known about James Watson aside from his involvement in the Boston Tea Party; except for his service in the Revolutionary Army as a Captain.

There were captains named James Watson in the Continental Army, but they were from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, not Massachusetts/Maine. This Watson gained the title “Captain” by commanding a ship, as Eaton described.

James Watson was master of a 50-ton sloop named Sally in 1774. Eaton quoted a Salem Customs House document allowing it to sail from Marblehead to Boston with a load of firewood that December. According to Watson’s descendants, this “was the first cargo taken into Boston after the passage of the Port Bill”—which it most assuredly was not.

Drawing from Watson’s papers, Eaton wrote that in January 1776 he carried some soldiers to Falmouth, and in October 1778 he sold hogsheads of lime in Beverly. On 28 July 1779 Capt. Watson landed at the mouth of the Bagaduce River, evidently in support of the Penobscot expedition, and in 1782 he was busy making salt. All of which left him no time to serve in the army. (Another James Watson was a private in Col. Jonathan Mitchell’s regiment in the 1779 campaign, just to confuse matters.)

The detail in Eaton’s description of Watson working to destroy tea that stood out for me is the phrase “negro-hoe.” Evidently in 1865 everyone knew what that meant. In C. G. Parsons’s Inside View of Slavery: or A Tour among the Planters (1855), I found this explanation for a similar term:

The “n[egro] hoe” was first introduced into Virginia as a substitute for the plow, in breaking up the soil. The law fixes its weight at four pounds,—as heavy as the woodman’s axe! It is still used, not only in Virginia, but in Georgia and the Carolinas. The planters tell us, as the reason for its use, that the negroes would break a Yankee hoe in pieces upon the first root, or stone that might be in their way. An instructive commentary on the difference between free and slave labor!

People who are being forced to work are naturally less protective of their enslavers’ property. Indeed, we should view tool-breaking as a form of rebellion against an unjust situation. Clearly the notion of a “negro-hoe” had become so well known that Yankees used the term for any heavy hoe.

As to whether James Watson was at the Tea Party in December 1773 and left no record of his involvement other than a local tradition set down in 1865, the evidence is slim.

Greenburg on the Revere Court-Martial, 10 June

On Wednesday, 10 June, the U.S.S. Constitution Museum will host a talk by Michael M. Greenburg on his book The Court-Martial of Paul Revere: A Son of Liberty and America’s Forgotten Military Disaster.

During the war, Revere succeeded Thomas Crafts as colonel in charge of Massachusetts’s state artillery regiment. In 1779 Massachusetts assembled an armada of over forty ships plus infantry and artillery to attack the Fort George at Penobscot Bay, Maine.

That didn’t go well. In fact, the usual comparison, based on the number of American ships lost, is to Pearl Harbor.

Revere was among the many men blamed for the bad results. He asked for a court-martial—in eighteenth-century society, that was a common way for military officers to gain public vindication. In fact, Revere asked for a court-martial multiple times. On 20 Jan 1780, for instance, he wrote to the Massachusetts Council:

Twice have I petitioned your Honors and once the House of Representatives for a Court Martial but have not obtained one. I believe that neither the Annals of America, or Old England, can furnish an Instance (except in despotic Reigns) where an Officer was put under an arrest, and he petitioned for a Tryal (altho the Arrest was taken off) that it was not granted. The complaints upon which my arrest was founded, are amongst your Honors papers, and there will remain an everlasting monument of my disgrace if I do not prove they are false; is there any other legal way to prove them false, than by a Court-Martial…

Eventually Revere got his wish.

Greenburg is an attorney from Ashland who has written two previous books about historical incidents from more recent decades.

This talk is co-sponsored by Old South Meeting House, the Paul Revere House, and the U.S.S. Constitution Museum. It begins with a wine and cheese reception at 5:30 P.M. Greenburg is scheduled to start speaking at 6:30, and will sign books afterward. The event is free and open to the public.

Paul Revere at Old South and Old North

Fans of Paul Revere can attend two talks about his Revolutionary activities beyond his famous and less-famous rides of 1774 and 1775.

Friday, 20 March, 12:15 P.M.
Old South Meeting House
The Picture of Innocence: Symbols and Propaganda from the Boston Massacre
The Boston Massacre became infamous throughout the American colonies in a matter of weeks. Patriot leaders immediately circulated the news with heavy doses of propaganda. So what really happened on March 5, 1770? Historian and Old South Meeting House Educator Tegan Kehoe will walk you through the facts and fictions of Paul Revere’s famous print and several other contemporary depictions of the “bloody massacre on King Street.”
Admission $6; free for Old South Meeting House members.

Wednesday, 25 March, 6:30 P.M.
Old North Church
Paul Revere: Beyond the Midnight Ride
Author and attorney Michael Greenburg will talk about Revere’s lesser-known travails and ultimate court-martial following the doomed Penobscot Expedition, an often-ignored chapter in the life of this beloved American icon. Following the lecture will be a reception and book signing of Greenburg’s book, The Court Martial of Paul Revere: A Son of Liberty & America’s Forgotten Military Disaster.
Free and open to the public.

One nice thing about lectures in these eighteenth-century Boston churches is that you can almost always get a seat. A hard, flat seat.