How Pvt. Joshua Williams Ended Up in Boston

A couple of days back I quoted a deposition from Pvt. Joshua Williams of His Majesty’s 29th Regiment about a bad encounter with Bostonians in June 1769. Williams said he was then new in the regiment and new in Boston, which intrigued me but which I didn’t know enough about British army bureaucracy to explain.

Luckily for me, that also intrigued Don Hagist, author of British Soldiers, American War and editor of the Journal of the American Revolution. He looked up Williams in his sources and added his deep knowledge of how the British army worked in the Revolutionary era. Here’s what Don found out:

Joshua Williams, a soldier in the 29th Regiment, said that he was assaulted in June 1769 “a few days after he joined the regiment in Boston.” The regiment had arrived the year before, so Williams was either new to the regiment or had stayed behind somewhere when the regiment sailed for Boston.

Particularly interesting is that the “Mob of People” recognized that Williams was new to Boston, “a new or a Strange Lobster.” Did Bostonians know the faces of over three hundred soldiers of the 29th Regiment that well, or was there something else about Williams that made him stand out as being new in town?

Williams first appears on the regiment’s muster rolls prepared in October 1769, with no indication of where he came from. Following his career forward on the rolls shows that he recovered sufficiently from his injuries to serve in the 29th Regiment for two more years. He was discharged on June 4, 1771, when the regiment was in New Jersey, along with a number of other soldiers.

Men who had been injured while serving as soldiers often received pensions after returning to Great Britain and going before the pension examining board in Chelsea, a London suburb. The records of that board show that Joshua Williams appeared there on August 29, 1771, and was granted a pension. On that date he was thirty-two years old and had been in the army for nine years; he was from “Glocester” and had no skilled trade, instead being called a “labourer.”

With nine years in the army but only two in the 29th Regiment, he must have transferred from another corps into the 29th. When a regiment that was on foreign service was sent home, it was not unusual for able-bodied men to be drafted—transferred—into other regiments still on service in the foreign land. Although the 29th’s rolls do not record where their new men like Williams came from, his entry in the pension examination book suggests that he was, indeed, a draft.

The disability that made him eligible for a pension was having been “wounded at Fort Pitt,” probably during the siege of that place in 1763 during Pontiac’s War.

As a draft into the 29th, Williams probably retained his uniform from his previous regiment; he would not receive one from the 29th until the next annual clothing issue, late in the year for regiments in America. This would make him easily recognizable to the Boston mob.

And, since British soldiers owned their own clothing, the loss of his “new Regimental Hatt” meant that he would have to purchase a new one—unless the mob could be convinced to return the property of a man who had been wounded defending colonists on the western frontier.

Thanks, Don!

Spero on “Frontier Rebels” in Worcester, 16 Apr.

On Tuesday, 16 April, the American Antiquarian Society will host a lecture by Patrick Spero on “Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776,” based on his recent book.

The event description:

Spero will recast the familiar narrative of the American Revolution, moving the action from the Eastern Seaboard to the treacherous western frontier and recounting the untold story of the 1765 rebellion of the “Black Boys.” In doing so, he will reveal an often-overlooked truth: the West played a crucial role in igniting the flame of American independence.

In 1763, the Seven Years’ War ended in a spectacular victory for the British, but many Native Americans, fearing that the British Empire would expand onto their lands and conquer them, refused to lay down their weapons. Under the leadership of a shrewd Ottawa warrior named Pontiac, they kept fighting for their freedom, eventually spurring the British to organize one of the largest peace offerings ever assembled.

As the cargo moved into the interior of North America in search of Pontiac, a ragtag group of frontiersmen known as the “Black Boys”—dressed as Native Americans and smearing their faces with charcoal—set about stopping this peace deal in its tracks. Furious at the Empire for capitulating to Native groups, whom they considered their sworn enemies, and suspicious of British intentions, these colonists turned Native American tactics of warfare on the British Empire. The outcome of these interwoven struggles would determine whose independence would prevail on the American frontier.

Patrick Spero is the director of the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia. His other books include Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania and the anthology The American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century (based on this conference). Before joining the A.P.S., Spero taught at Williams College in Massachusetts.

This event is cosponsored by the Franklin M. Loew Lecture Series at Becker College. It will start at 7:00 P.M. in the newly expanded A.A.S. building, 185 Salisbury Street in Worcester. It is free to the public.

250 Years After Pontiac’s (and Others’) War

On 4-5 April, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia will host a conference titled “The War Called Pontiac’s, 1763-2013.” As you can see, this year marks the 250th anniversary of that frontier conflict, which is usually overshadowed by the French & Indian War.

The conference description says:

The 250th anniversary of what has long been known as “Pontiac’s War” offers scholars an opportunity to reexamine the conflict and its impact on the history of North America. The role of the Odowa leader Pontiac and the widespread scope and the varying aims of other Native participants in the conflicts of the mid-1760s defy easy categorization, a problem well summed up by historian Francis Jennings’s phrase, “The War Called ‘Pontiac’s.’”

Many contemporary British observers and combatants sought some conceptual clarity by casting the blame on French-inspired treachery. Many Native people located the treachery among the British. In the mid-nineteenth-century, Francis Parkman constructed an epic tale of a single charismatic Indian leader and the last gasp of a doomed people. More recent work offers a much more complex interpretation of an inter-Native movement grounded in Native spirituality and aiming to regain status as well as land for its Native participants in the new geopolitical world after the Seven Years War.

Among commanders in the siege of Boston, Gen. Thomas Gage oversaw the British army in North America in the latter part of this war, and Israel Putnam was part of the force recruited by Robert Rogers to reinforce Fort Detroit. Among the political legacies of the war was the British government’s conviction that enforcing the Proclamation Line of 1763 and maintaining significant troops in North America were both necessary for keeping the peace, even after that year’s victory over the French Empire. Both policies would, of course, lead to discontent in the Atlantic colonies.

This conference will consist mainly of discussions of pre-circulated (and hopefully pre-read) papers rather than lectures. It’s free and open to the public, but to gain access to those papers online attendees have to register at the conference website.