“From his own incoherent stories”

On 4 Dec 1775, Col. Jonathan Ward of Southborough convened a court-martial in the Continental Army camp at Roxbury.

Col. Ward presided over a board of officers that included four captains and seven lieutenants.

Pvt. John Short of Rochester was one defendant in that proceeding. He had marched under Col. Theophilus Cotton and Capt. Earl Clapp (represented above by his shoe buckles) during the Lexington Alarm and then enlisted under them for the rest of the year.

Short was charged with “desertion and theft.” He pled not guilty. The record of the court-martial published in American Archives states:

On hearing the evidence brought to support the charge, the Court are unanimously of opinion the prisoner is guilty. It likewise appears very clear to the Court, from sundry papers that were found with him, and from his own incoherent stories, that he is guilty of a breach of the 27th and 29th, and also the 3d article of the Rules and Regulations of the Massachusetts Army.

[Those articles forbade corresponding with the enemy, leaving one’s post to plunder, and provoking mutiny, respectively.]

According to said rules, the Court adjudge the following sums of money to be paid out of his wages and effects, viz:

To Captain Earl Clapp, the sum of 1£.16s., for expense of advertising and apprehending him; also, 36s., that said Clapp paid, at said Short’s desire, for a former theft.

To William Cowing [also listed as Cowen], a soldier in Captain Clapp’s company, 36s.10d., that he carried away with him when he deserted.

To Daniel Crawford [also Croxford], in said company, 4£.16s., for the damage done him by stealing his clothes.

Likewise adjudge him to be whipped thirty-nine stripes on the naked back, and suffer two years imprisonment in Newgate Prison, in Symsbury [Connecticut], and as much longer as the present contest between Great Britain and the American Colonies shall subsist.

The court then turned to Pvt. John Smith, a soldier in Capt. Peter Harwood’s company of Col. Ebenezer Learned’s regiment. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors includes many pages of John Smith entries, of course, but this information matches a man from Brookfield who had enlisted on 12 June.

Smith was charged with “attempting to desert to the enemy.” He pled guilty. The court sentenced him to “pay the sum of eight shillings to Brigadier-General [John] Thomas, to defray the expense of bringing him back to camp, and suffer six months imprisonment in Newgate Prison, in Symsbury.”

Finally the officers considered “Owen Resick, a transient person,” for “aiding, advising, and assisting John Smith to desert to the enemy.” He denied the charge. (Based on other sources, I now think this man’s surname should have been transcribed as Ruick.)

After “hearing and examining the evidence,” the panel found Ruick guilty and sentenced him to “one year’s imprisonment in Newgate Prison, in Symsbury, and as much longer as the present disputes between Great Britain and the Colonies shall subsist.”

Gen. Artemas Ward affirmed those sentences. They don’t appear in Gen. George Washington’s general orders, issued out of Cambridge.

TOMORROW: A glimpse of John Short.

Around Barnstable County’s Courthouse

In 1763 Barnstable County commissioned a new courthouse. The sketch here shows one man’s memory of how it looked in the early 1800s.

The building wasn’t large. There was no separate jury room, for instance; juries deliberated in a nearby tavern.

The court records were stored in another building nearby, which burned down in 1827, leaving us records of only a handful of cases from colonial Barnstable County.

On 27 Sept 1774, 250 years ago today, there was supposed to be a court session in this building. 

However, back in August the men of Berkshire County had created a new meme for Massachusetts’s Patriot resistance: closing the courts as a protest against the Massachusetts Government Act. That law changed the constitution of the colony and the way juries were chosen.

Over the following weeks crowds shut down court sessions in one Massachusetts county after another, either by entering the building and refusing to let any judges enter, or by surrounding the building so no one dared to try.

On 26 September, men from the counties of Barnstable, Plymouth, and Bristol gathered in Rochester to plan the closing of the Barnstable Courthouse. 

On the morning of 27 September about 1,500 people assembled around that small building. They chose a committee to speak for them with Dr. Nathaniel Freeman of Sandwich as the leader.

Deputy sheriff Job Howland moved to ring the bell atop the building to signal the start of the court session. The crowd told him to stop.

Justices arrived to work. The crowd asked them to wait outside while they finished writing an address about the unconstitutionality of Parliament’s latest laws. After that document was read, some of the justices insisted that their own, older commissions were valid and that canceling the session would cause hardships.

Both sides spoke of adhering to whatever the upcoming Provincial Congress or the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia advised. But that didn’t resolve the question of what to do that day, 27 September.

TOMORROW: Signatures and James Otis.