Going Back onto Noddle’s Island

The message from Thomas Chase quoted yesterday makes clear that in 1780 Henry Howell Williams still felt he had a claim to “the Soil” of Noddle’s Island.

Williams had leased and farmed the harbor island for years before the Revolutionary War—as his father-in-law had done before him.

But that letter doesn’t indicate Williams was living on that island again. Williams’s appearances in the Boston newspapers during the previous half-decade also suggest he wasn’t.

On 7 Sept 1775, during the siege, Thomas Bumstead put a notice in the New-England Chronicle about “a likely, well built black Mare, and a Colt by her Side,” that were “STRAYED or stolen from Mr. Henry Williams, of Roxbury.” Henry Howell Williams did raise horses on Noddle’s Island, and he may well have gone back to his father’s family in Roxbury during the siege. On the other hand, the lack of a middle name or initial might suggest this was one of his relatives with a similar name, also raising horses.

More telling, on 24 Mar 1777 James Bell advertised in the Boston Gazette for the return of a stout 28-year-old black man named Dick, who had freed himself from slavery. Bell was from Colrain, and he told readers they could deliver Dick “to Mr. Henry Howell Williams in Boston.”

On 7 Sept 1778, Henry Howell Williams himself advertised in the same newspaper for the return of an enslaved 23-year-old woman named Phillis. That notice was datelined in Boston.

Thus, in those two years Williams could be found living in Boston, not in Chelsea, as Noddle’s Island was designated. Meanwhile, the island was occupied by provincial troops and then sick French soldiers.

Then the war ended. On 11 June 1784, the Massachusetts house received “A petition from the Rev. Charles Chauncey [shown above] and others, owners of Noddle’s island, in Boston harbour, stating that said island had been greatly damaged by the troops stationed there, and praying for some compensation.” Chauncy’s third wife had inherited an interest in Noddle’s Island which passed to him on her death in 1783, and then to his heirs.

Williams and his family returned to Noddle’s Island around that time. Back in the early 1770s he had run regular ads complaining about hunters and other trespassers. He did so again in the 15 Aug 1784 Independent Ledger, saying that “Gunners” were endangering his livestock, his mowers, and his family. That notice was signed from “Noddle’s-Island.” Obviously, the farm was back in operation.

As Williams rebuilt his estate, he probably commandeered the barracks originally constructed for Continental troops in Cambridge and then moved to the island by the state in 1776. After all, no one was using that building anymore.

TOMORROW: Renewing the quest for compensation.

“Belonging to Mr. Henry Howell Williams”

Henry Howell Williams lost more property in the Battle of Chelsea Creek than anyone else but the Royal Navy.

Williams held the lease for Noddle’s Island. He had a big house there—big enough to show up on maps of the harbor. He’d invested in agricultural outbuildings, horses, sheep, cattle, hogs, and hay.

Williams probably took his family off the island in April, soon after the war began. On 1 May, Adm. Samuel Graves granted him a pass to go to and from his home, with the stipulation that he not remove anything. Williams later reported that his house still contained a clock bought in Britain, mahogany furniture, family pictures, and other genteel possessions.

Late that month, provincial troops went onto Hog Island and Noddle’s to grab animals, keeping them away from the British. In the fighting that followed, they set fire to the hay and most buildings on Noddle’s Island. In early June the provincials returned to grab the remaining livestock and burn the last structure.

Williams’s farm was reduced to charred ruins on an empty, singed landscape. As I wrote back here, Williams was protective of his interests, placing regular advertisements to warn off trespassers and hunters. He came from a wealthy Roxbury family. He had connections to men in the Patriot leadership.

However, Williams had also signed the farewell to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson. He sold his livestock and forage to the British military, possibly even after the war began. That no doubt affected his standing with the provincial authorities.

On 31 May, Gen. Artemas Ward’s general orders stated:

That the stock, which was taken from Noddle’s Island, belonging to Mr. Henry Howell Williams, be delivered to his father, Col. Joseph Williams, of Roxbury, for the use of the said Henry H. Williams.

But evidently few or no animals were driven all the way around the siege lines to Roxbury and returned to the Williams family. After all, there was a war on. The provincial army also needed food and horses.

TOMORROW: The first petition.

“The fire then commenced and fell heavy on our Troops”

The rest of Lt. John Bourmaster’s April 1775 account of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which I started to quote yesterday, didn’t relate his personal experiences as a Royal Navy officer.

He didn’t, for example, write anything about the operation to evacuate regulars from Charlestown back to Boston on the night of 19–20 April. He didn’t mention Maj. John Pitcairn of the marines.

Instead, Bourmaster’s letter passed on what he‘d heard from British army officers. And of course the big message that those officers, up to Gen. Thomas Gage, wanted to put out was that the rebels had started it.

Bourmaster’s very first statement about the fighting was that locals shot first.

A firelock was snapt over a Wall by one of the Country people but did not go off, the next who pulld his triger wounded one of the light Infantry company of General [Studholme] Hodgsons or the Kings own.

Other sources, including Pitcairn, Ens. Jeremy Lister of the 10th, and Capt. John Barker of the 4th (King’s Own), said that a soldier in the 10th Regiment was wounded in the morning at Lexington. In this case, Bourmaster had false information.

The lieutenant never actually got around to describing the search in Concord or the shooting there. Instead, his letter continued:

the fire then commenced and fell heavy on our Troops, the Militia having posted them selves behind Walls, in houses, and Woods and had possession of almost every eminence or rising ground which Commanded the long Vale through which the King’s Troops were under the disagreeable necessity of passing in their return.

Colonel [Francis] Smith was wounded early in the Action and must have been cut Off with all those he commanded had not Earl Percy come to his relief with the first Brigade; on the Appearance of it our Almost conquer’d Granadiers and light Infantry gave three cheers and renew’d the defence with more spirits.

Lord Percys courage and good conduct on this occasion must do him immortal honour, upon taking the Command he Ordered the King’s own to flank on the right, and the 27th [actually the 47th] on the left, the R Welsh Fuseliers to defend the Rear and in this manner retreated for at least 11 Miles before he reached Charlestown—for they could not cross at Cambridge where the Bridge is, they haveing tore it Up, and fill’d the Town and houses with Arm’d Men to prevent his passage;

our loss in this small essay ammounts to 250 Kill’d wounded and Missing. and we are at present cept up in Boston they being in possession of Roxbury a little Village just befor our lines with the Royal and Rebel centinels within Musquet shot of each other. The fatigue which our people pass’d through the Day which I have described can hardly be belived, having march’d at least 45 Miles and the Light Companys perhaps 60,

In fact, even the regulars who went all the way out to James Barrett’s farm in Concord and back traveled less than forty miles that day.

Bourmaster also wrote:

A most amiable young man of General Hodgson’s fell that Day his name Knight brother to Knight of the 43 who was with us at Jamiaca.

This was Lt. Joseph Knight, killed and buried in Menotomy. Ezekiel Russell’s Salem Gazette agreed that Knight was “esteemed one of the best officers among the Kings troops.”

TOMORROW: Those crazy provincials.

“The workmen all pack’d up their tools and left the barracks”

In late September 1774, as described by the Boston merchant John Andrews yesterday, towns neighboring Boston put pressure on their own citizens and on Bostonians to stop helping the British army build barracks.

As commander of all the British army in North American, Gov. Thomas Gage had faced that problem before back in 1768. Then the royal government had ended up renting buildings from willing owners and turning them into barracks. But in 1774 there were more regiments to house, and even more on the way.

Gage asked Boston’s selectmen to forestall what would amount to a labor strike. They replied that they actually wanted the troops grouped in barracks, but they had no power over rural towns’ policies.

The next day, 26 September, Andrews reported that Gage approached John Hancock directly. Since Hancock was one of the selectmen, he might already met with the general. Hancock was also the chair of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and thus might have had leverage with other towns, but Gage officially refused to recognize that extralegal body. Furthermore, at the start of August, the governor had dismissed Hancock as commander of the Company of Cadets, so coming to the man for a favor was quite a concession.

Andrews wrote:

Sometime this day the Governor had a conference with Col: Hancock, requesting him to use his influence with the Committee to re-consider their vote respecting the barracks.

The Colonel observ’d to him that he had taken every possible measure to distress us: that notwithstanding it was the Solicitor’s opinion that the [Boston Port] Act could be construed to prevent goods, &ca., being transported within ye. bounds of the harbour, yet he had not suffered it to he done, and the Ships of War had seiz’d whatever had been attempted to be transported in that manner.

He likewise told him that he had been threat’ned, and apprehended his person was in danger, as it had been gave out by some of his people that he deserv’d to he hang’d: upon which the Governor told him he might have a guard, if he chose it, to attend him night and day. You will naturally conclude that he declin’d accepting.

The work stoppage took hold the next day:

At four o’clock yesterday afternoon, the workmen all pack’d up their tools and left the barracks, frames, &ca.; so that I am apprehensive we in the town will feel ill effects of it, as it has been given out that the troops will force quarters next month, if barracks are not provided for ’em: neither should I blame them for so doing, as the nights are so cold already, that it’s impossible for ’em to sleep comfortable under their slight canvas tents. And as to empty houses, now since we have got so many [Loyalist] refugees among us, there is not half sufficient to hold what troops we have got already here.

After the carpenters had left off work, the General sent Col. Robinson [actually James Robertson] and Major [William] Sheriff to Mr. Hancock, to let him know if they would proceed with the barracks, he could suffer any thing to be transported within the limits of the harbour, under the sanction of King’s stores—but all would not avail; as they very justly suppos’d, that after the work was compleated he would withdraw the indulgence, as he deems it, though in justice it not be prevented at all.

They have got the Carpenters from the Ships of War, and have sent an arm’d Schooner to Halifax for all the Artificers they can procure from there. It’s possible they may be as averse to coming as the Yorkers.

New York’s Patriots had already voted not to cooperate with the British army in Boston, a move that reportedly inspired the rural towns’ decision.

On 29 September, the merchant reported:

In the course of a day or two past, the Roxbury people have burnt several load of straw that was bringing in here, which has enrag’d the soldiers to such a degree, that I am in continual apprehension we shall soon experience another fifth of March, which God forbid!

In those same days, Andrews described how the Royal Artillery, Boston’s Patriot leaders, and ordinary people were all maneuvering over the mortars, cannon, and other ordnance in the inventory of hardware merchant Joseph Scott. Meanwhile, other artillery pieces were being seized by one side or the other (the focus of my book, The Road to Concord). Andrews was not alone in fearing that violence could break out any day.

“The barracks that were begun now stand still”

Richard Lechmere was a friend of the royal government with a country estate in Cambridge.

In the summer of 1774, the ministry in London appointed Lechmere to the new mandamus Council. He accepted the post and for his safety moved into Boston.

Lechmere continued to support Gov. Thomas Gage’s administration, as shown in a letter he wrote to his London mercantile contacts on 28 September, published by the Massachusetts Historical Society:

Some time ago Capt. Mitchel left with me about 4000 feet plank, board measure, which I sold to the contractor for building barracks, who sent a cart to the wharfe for them. They got one load into the street, and the populace pull’d them out of the cart, and left them in the street ’till towards evening when a party of soldiers were sent to take them up, which was done without any interruption, but in the night all the rest of the plank were split in peices, and thrown into the water and lost.

This was the first instance of attempting to oppose the building the fortification at the Neck and barracks for the troops. They have since done every thing in their power to oppose and obstruct every measure of governmt. for the safety, as well as convenience of the troops, and finally have prevented the tradesmen from working for them, so that the barracks that were begun now stand still.

I have let them have my distill house, which was fitting for them, and in good forwardness for their reception, and will contain one regiment. By this step, selling the plank to them, accepting the office of a Councillor, my connection with the navy and army, together with my being an Addresser, Protestor against the Committee of Correspondence, and a variety of other incidents, has render’d me one of the most obnoxious of all the friends of government. This scituation, you must be sensible, is not the most desirable, especially to a person who very lately was, I may venture to say, as much esteem’d by the people as almost any private gentleman in town. . . .

They have gone so farr as to prohibit any person’s supplying the government with materials for the King’s service. They have burnt several loads straw at Roxbury, as they were coming in for the troops, and for a day stopp’d the butcher from bringing in beef and other provissions for them, but this last circumstance they soon found wou’d not do, for by this step they wou’d starve six or eight of their own party to one of the other, and that the General wou’d take possession of all the provissions and grain in the town.

They really act like distracted men more than reasonable beings, and seem at their wit’s end, what will become of them when a sufficient number of troops can be got here. By some parts of their conduct one wou’d imagine they were endeavourg. to bring things to extremities before a reinforcement can arrive, but are afraid to make the first attack, and by every act of insolence and impudence they seem to be contriving to provoke the General and troops to commence hostilities, but they, with that calmness and prudence that does them honor, carefully avoid, and put up with many insults and abuses ’till they may be sure of success, both in the town and in the country.

With every regiment in North America headed for Boston and the New England winter coming on, Gen. Gage was feeling pressure to find housing for his troops.

TOMORROW: Calling in the selectmen.

Darius Parkhurst, “deprived of Sight and hearing”

On 27 May 1774, the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman of Westboro wrote in his diary about a trip to Boston:

At Mr. Joseph Coollidge’s bought me a new pair of Gold Buttons, and paid him for them 8£ 6/. Undertook my Journey home. Called at Mr. [most likely the minister Amos] Adams’s at Roxbury where I saw Mr. [blank] of Woodstock [Connecticut], who was blind and deaf. The way to Converse with him, was by writing in his hand.

Parkman had forgotten the name of the deaf and blind man he met, and mistaken his home town. But the minister still remembered that encounter months later because on 12 August he wrote:

Mr. [the minister Aaron] Putnam of Pomfret and his Sister Bethiah dined here.

N.B. He gave me a further account of Mr. Darius Parkhurst of Pomfret (whom I saw at Mr. Adams’s at Roxbury last May) and his accomplishments though deprived of Sight and hearing about 11 AEts [i.e., age eleven]. Is now about 34. You must write in his hand, with your or his finger, to convey your meaning. Blessed be God for my sight and hearing! May I have grace to improve them!

Those details about the man match genealogical records of a Darius Parkhurst born in Pomfret on 7 June 1739 and dying there on 12 May 1792. His gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find a Grave.

Now it’s possible there was a cousin or other man of the same name and approximate age in Pomfret, but I haven’t come across one. So for the rest of this posting I’m going to assume that all the sources refer to one man. There are no mentions in newspapers, but he does appear in government records.

In September 1776 Darius Parkhurst of Pomfret married Joanna (sometimes called Anna) Sabin. Darius’s mother had also been a Sabin, but I can’t trace the family link to his wife.

The Parkhursts started having children, including a little Darius (1777–1778) memorialized on the same stone as his father. There were three more kids by 1785: Darius, Simeon, and Sarah.

In 1783, the town paid Darius Parkhurst for “keeping Seth Sabin.” That might have been Joanna’s father, then nearing seventy.

Joanne Pope Melish’s Disowning Slavery mentions another member of the household:

In 1790, when Jacob Dresser of Thompson, Connecticut, apprenticed “a Negro Girl Named Peggy” (apparently a child of his slave) to Darius Parkhurst of Pomfret, he wrote, “During the aforesd term Sd Dresser Doth fully impower Sd Parkhurst to Control, order & command said Peggy in all Respects, and to all Intents & Purposes a sthrough She were born his Servant.”

This reflected Connecticut’s slow move away from slavery. If Peggy had been born after 1784, she was legally free and would become a free adult at the age of twenty-one. Until that time, however, she was a child (of an enslaved woman, furthermore), and therefore not free but in need of both care and governance.

Remarkably, none of those local and legal records say anything about Darius Parkhurst himself being disabled. (Once again, assuming there was only one man in town by that name.) Legally Darius was the recipient of the town’s relief payments and the master of Peggy, but it seems likely that Joanna provided most of the care and oversight. In fact, the household might have received that money and that indentured child because people knew Darius couldn’t do ordinary farm work.

Still, Darius Parkhurst must have had some way to support himself since he did inherit land, marry, raise kids, travel as far as Roxbury, and so on. His minister told Parkman about “his accomplishments.” Yet he doesn’t seem to have been remembered in any local history. Without Parkman’s diary entries, we’d have no way of knowing that he’d lost his sight and hearing.

“The Siege of Boston” Tour for Social-Studies Educators, 21 Nov.

The National Council for Social Studies, the largest professional association devoted to social studies education, will meet in Boston on 19–24 November. Over 3,000 classroom teachers and other educators from around the country are expected to come.

Attendees arriving before Thursday, 21 November, have a choice of two all-day tours, among other offerings. One is a trip to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The other, which I’m involved in, is an exploration of “The Siege of Boston” in preparation for the Sestercentennial of that campaign.

This tour has been organized by Dr. Gorman Lee through Revolution 250, and he describes it this way:

The Siege of Boston refers to a significant period in colonial history when militias from the American colonies surrounded the British-occupied city of Boston. Teachers will visit five historical sites to explore how the Siege unfolded through the lenses of enslaved and free African Americans, Loyalists, women, and rank-and-file rebels.

The five significant historic sites are:

• The Royall House & Slave Quarters in Medford, used by Gen. Charles Lee and Col. John Stark during the siege.
• The Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, site of the biggest, bloodiest, and ultimately decisive battle of the siege.
• Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site and nearby Cambridge common, from which Gen. George Washington and the Massachusetts committee of safety directed the siege.
• The Shirley-Eustis House in Roxbury, a former governor’s mansion used as a hospital.
• The Dillaway-Thomas House in Roxbury, from which Gen. John Thomas spearheaded the final move onto Dorchester Heights.

Prof. Robert J. Allison of Suffolk University will be the expert guide on the first leg of the tour. I’ll hop on in Cambridge, and gents from the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati will be awaiting us in Roxbury. Of course, the docents and curators at each site will share their knowledge.

That’s a packed itinerary, and I expect we’ll adjust the times spent at each site on the day based on time spent in traffic. I’ll try to bring along a store of stories to fill those moments.

This tour has a fee of $50 above the conference registration cost. Conference attendees can sign up for it through this webpage. (At least I think so. I can’t figure out the registration pages myself, but I expect educators have experience navigating that sort of complex bureaucratic system.) 

Adm. Benjamin Hallowell Carew, R.N., a Son of Boston

Last month David Morgan’s Inside Croydon website profiled a notable British naval figure who grew up in pre-Revolutionary Boston.

Adm. Benjamin Hallowell Carew was one of the sons of Loyalists who joined the British military during the American War and remained in it through the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

Morgan writes:

He was an American, born in 1761 in Boston to a family who were supporters of the British in the difficult years before the American War of Independence. Hallowell’s father, also named Benjamin, had also seen service in the Royal Navy, and had become a Commissioner of the Board of Customs in the port of Boston. His mother, Mary Boylston, was a second cousin of John Adams, who would go on to become the second President of America. . . .

The Hallowells of Boston lived a comfortable life by the standards of the time, with enough income to be able to employ one of the great American portrait painters of the day, John Singleton Copley, to produce family portraits.

Distance from Boston led Morgan into some geographical errors in describing the Hallowells’ houses. On 26 Aug 1765, an anti-Stamp Act mob damaged the Customs official’s house in Boston. He also owned a mansion in the Jamaica Plain part of Roxbury which was more secluded and safe. (J.P. and Roxbury are separate neighborhoods now, but in colonial times Roxbury was the town, Jamaica Plain simply an area within it.)

As a Customs officer, Benjamin Hallowell was unpopular with the merchants and people of Boston. He may have attracted special resentment because he was from a local family, his father a prominent merchant captain himself. In other words, people might have perceived him as switching sides.

In 1768 Hallowell helped to seize John Hancock’s ship Liberty, and the waterfront crowd physically attacked him, driving him into hiding onto Castle Island. Within the Customs service, however, Hallowell parlayed that treatment into a promotion as the Crown’s replacement for John Temple, a commissioner the administration came to see as too close to the locals.

Commissioner Hallowell was also the target of part of the “Powder Alarm” multitude gathered on Cambridge common on 2 Sept 1774. Leaders of that crowd successfully urged most of the men to leave him alone, but some chased him on horseback all the way across the Charles River bridge, up through Brookline and Roxbury to the gates of Boston.

Naturally, the family didn’t stick around to try their chances in March 1776. Commissioner Hallowell moved to Britain, taking his wife and children.

The next Benjamin's story continues:

Young Hallowell was aged 14 or 15 when he arrived in England, and wasted little time before joining the navy.

Hallowell enjoyed Navy life and was promoted to lieutenant in 1783 having already been involved in the Battle of Chesapeake Bay in 1781, St Kitts in 1782 and the Battle of Dominica later that same year.

Hallowell, by then a Commodore on frigate HMS Minerve, was on board the British flagship HMS Victory with Nelson at the Battle of Cape Saint Vincent in 1797. . . .

By the time of Battle of the Nile in 1798, Hallowell was in command of the 74-gun HMS Swiftsure. The British had hunted down the French fleet all the way from Toulon, via Malta, and tracked them to Egypt.

For how that fight worked out for Hallowell, why Adm. Horatio Nelson sent him a coffin, and finally how his surname became Carew, see the Inside Croydon post.

Two Online Archeology Events on 15 Feb.

Two online events about archeology are coming up next Thursday, 15 February.

The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum will host its third annual Virtual Archaeology Conference that afternoon from 1:00 to 4:00 P.M., with staff speaking about various work going on at and around the museum.

The scheduled presentations are:

• Patricia Reid, “Legacy Collection: Leege Collection Artifacts from Arnold’s Bay”
• Cherilyn Gilligan, “Arnold’s Bay Artifacts: Conservation and Context”
• Chris Sabick, “The Excavation and Documentation of the Revolutionary War Row Galley Congress”
• Paul Gates, “Site Formation Processes: Defining the Theoretical Process of Archaeology for the Revolutionary Warship Congress”

Those will be followed by a live question-and-answer session.

Go to this webpage for more details on the museum’s program and to register.

That same evening, starting at 7:00 P.M., the Shirley-Eustis House Association will host an online lecture by Boston City Archaeologist Joe Bagley on “Archaeology at Shirley Place.”

Bagley will share new information learned about the eighteenth-century enslaved inhabitants of the estate and new insights into the former location of the 1747 Shirley-Eustis House. The presentation will include artifact discussions and digital reconstructions of the historic property before it was developed in the nineteenth century.

Go to this page to register for the Shirley-Eustis House’s event.

Both of these online events are free, but donations to the hosting organizations are welcome.

“They were hurried Volens Nolens to a general Hospital at Cambridge”

On 27 July 1775, the Continental Congress created a hospital department for its army outside Boston.

It also appointed Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., to be Director-General of that department—though he was often called the army’s Surgeon-General.

Church had impressed Congress delegates with his years of work in the Boston Patriot leadership, his genteel bearing during a visit to Philadelphia, and his renowned surgical skills.

Receiving the news in August, Church quickly began to develop hospitals in Cambridge and Roxbury. He started to insist that regimental surgeons send their worst sick and wounded to those hospitals instead of maintaining smaller hospitals near their stations.

That policy soon became a bone of contention between Church and Dr. Hall Jackson, who until then had been working as respectful colleagues.

On 5 September, Jackson wrote to New Hampshire politician John Langdon:

I had established a Hospital for General [John] Sullivan’s Brigade had near a hundred Patients for more than a month, under as good regulations as could be desired, provided with every necessity that prudence and economy would dictate. When all of a sudden they were hurried Volens Nolens [willingly or not] to a general Hospital at Cambridge without a single compliment paid either to them, or their former attendants.

Jackson was ready to return home to Portsmouth—he was a volunteer, after all, with no commission or salary. He stated:

General [Charles] Lee, General Sullivan with all the Officers and Surgeons of his Brigade, will not suffer me to hint an intention to leave them; as not a Surgeon in the whole Brigade has ever had the small Pox, or ever performed a Capital Operation. Some Officers in the Army have offered me a substitution equal to anything I would expect, but this I should dipise, their pay being little enough to support their own Commissions with Honour and decency. Gratitude to them, obliges me to continue with them, until the pleasure of the Continental Congress is known…

On 4 September, Sullivan himself had told Langdon:

I know Doctor Church complains of those Regimental Hospitals as having been very expensive, which the Regimental Surgeons Deny, & say he cannot prove the assertion. How that is I cannot say, but am very certain that good Brigade Surgeons may assist in preventing extraordinary expense as well as Doctor Church or any other person, & give great satisfaction to both Officers & Soldiers in the Army.

That conflict had grown worse after the Continental move onto Ploughed Hill on 26 August. William Simpson, a Pennsylvania rifleman, “had his Foot and Ankle shot off by a Cannon Ball as he lay behind a large Apple Tree, watching an Opportunity to Fire at the Enemy’s Advanced Guards.”

It looks like nobody expected Pvt. Simpson to live, but all agreed that his only hope was an amputation. And, as we’ve seen, Hall Jackson considered himself an expert on amputations.

According to Sullivan, “Doctor Jackson…was there, & had every thing prepared to take off the Limb—Doctor Church happened to come in—forbid him to proceed & ordered the man to be sent to the Hospital.”

TOMORROW: How the operation turned out.

“Authentic advices from the Camp at Cambridge”

On 15 Jan 1776, John Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet newspaper in Philadelphia published a round-up of war news for its readers.

Here are some selections:

By authentic advices from the Camp at Cambridge, of the 3d and 4th instant [i.e., written on the third and fourth of this month], we learn, that the bay and harbour of Boston yet continue open; that a man of war is so stationed as to command the entrance of Salem, Beverly and Marblehead harbours.— . . .

An intellligent person got out of Boston on the 3d instant, who informed General [George] Washington that a fleet consisting of 9 transports, containing 360 men, were ready to sail under convoy of the Scarborough and Fowey men of war, with two bomb vessels and some flat bottomed boats; their avowed destination in Boston was to Newport, but it was generally supposed to be Long-Island or Virginia— . . .

This person also informs, that they have not the least idea in Boston of attacking our lines, but will be very thankful to be permitted to remain quiet—That before General [John] Burgoyne’s departure it was circulated thro’ the army, in order to keep the soldiery quiet under their distresses, that the disputes would soon be settled, and that he was going to England for that purpose— . . .

Our advices conclude with the following anecdote:—That upon the King’s Speech arriving at Boston, a great number of them were reprinted and sent out to our lines on the 2d of January, which being also the day of forming the new army, the great Union Flag was hoisted on Prospect Hill, in compliment to the United Colonies—

this happening soon after the Speeches were delivered at Roxbury, but before they were received at Cambridge, the Boston gentry supposed it to be a token of the deep impression the Speech had made, and a signal of submission—That they were much disappointed at finding several days elapse without some formal measure leading to a surrender, with which they had begun to flatter themselves.——

When these accounts came away the army were all in barracks, in good health and spirits—That 5000 Militia had taken the places of those soldiers who would not stay beyond their time of service; that they were good troops, and the whole army impatient for an opportunity of action.

This newspaper article is a crucial piece of evidence for the raising of the “Grand Union Flag” in Somerville each New Year’s Day, as shown above. No other source names Prospect Hill as the high point where that banner flew.

The British lieutenant William Carter wrote that the flag appeared on “Mount Pisga.” This hand-drawn map of the siege at the Massachusetts Historical Society shows that was the British officers’ term for the Continental fort on Prospect Hill.

One curious detail is that the Pennsylvania Packet article says the flag went up on 2 January, not New Year’s, when Somerville celebrates it.

The American commander-in-chief’s general orders seem clear that he considered New Year’s Day to be the launch of the new army—“new” in the sense that the men were enlisted and organized into regiments to serve for all of 1776.

Most historians have therefore concluded that the flag went up on the first of January, and somehow a dating error was introduced in the chain of communication from Cambridge to Dunlap’s print shop.

I’m going to do more analysis of this article over the next few days.

TOMORROW: From “great Union Flag” to “Grand Union Flag.”

“Discovered to be active in exposing our works to the enemy”?

Benjamin Boardman (1731–1802, shown here) graduated from Yale College in 1758, and two years later he became the minister in Middle Haddam, Connecticut.

When Gen. Joseph Spencer led Connecticut troops to the siege of Boston in the spring of 1775, Boardman went along as a chaplain.

He kept a diary from 31 July to 12 November, at least, and that document was published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1892.

Boardman recorded mostly events in the Connecticut regiments’ camp in Roxbury, particularly deaths, and news about big events elsewhere.

The minister’s frustration with rumors comes through in several places. On 9 November, for example, he wrote a detailed account of a British army raid on Lechmere’s Point in Cambridge and the Continental response. Then he added, “The above acct. cant be relied on,” and wrote down different details; “indeed there is no certainty can be come at,” he concluded.

Nonetheless, two entries stood out for me. On 31 August, the chaplain wrote:

I collected this day in cash for the encouragt. of Mr. Bushnels Machine the sum of £13.4.4. in cash out of our regt.

That must refer to the invention of David Bushnell, which turned out to be a small submarine and an underwater bomb or mine. This entry shows that Connecticut men were talking about the inventor’s work in the summer of 1775, even if they didn’t know the top-secret details.

On 31 October, Boardman’s entry was:

Bought me a flanel waistcoat this day, cost 9/2. We hear that Coll. [Joseph?] Gorham with about 40 tories are taken from ye. eastward who went after wood; also that Harry Knox, who married Secretary Fluckers daughter, and offered himself last July as a voluntary engineer to lay out our works, is taken & discovered to be active in exposing our works to the enemy.

At some later point Boardman returned to that entry, put marks around everything after the semicolon, and wrote: “Mistake of ye. clause in the crotchets.” In other words, never mind that thing about Knox. For that matter, the rumor about Gorham doesn’t seem reliable, either.

Nonetheless, this diary entry shows that some people in the American camp were suspicious about Knox’s family ties in the same month that Gen. George Washington had started angling to get him appointed to command the whole Continental artillery.

That October had started with news of “Doctr. [Benjamin] Church under an arrest for keeping up a correspd. with the enemy in Boston,” as Boardman wrote. Men were deserting both to and from the enemy. So it was easy to be suspicious about someone with such strong ties to the royal government as Knox had. Even if such rumors were quickly deemed to be unfounded.

Open House at Boston Archaeology Program, 25 Oct.

On Wednesday, 25 October, the city of Boston’s Archaeology Program will open its new Mary C. Beaudry Community Archaeology Center to the public.

At this open house in West Roxbury, visitors can meet staff members, take a behind-the-scenes tour of the facility, and see the new exhibit on the archaeology of a Charlestown house dating from the 1630s.

The new facility features, behind glass walls:

• two processing laboratories
• an artifact-digitizing lab with 3D scanners, printers, and photography equipment
• a repository of over 1,000,000 artifacts from dozens of ancient and historical sites in Boston
• an extensive collection of historical ceramic and lithic raw material for comparisons
• a “specialized wet laboratory”
• a research library containing over 2,000 reference books and archaeological reports

The Archaeology Program still shares a building with the City of Boston Archival Center. Neighbors include archivists and collections librarians from the Boston Planning & Development Agency and the Boston Public Library.

This open house will start with a ribbon-cutting ceremony with special guests at 9:00 A.M. and last the whole workday at the City of Boston Archival Center, 201 Rivermoor Street. The first-floor exhibits will be available for viewing year-round during business hours.

For the curious, Mary C. Beaudry (1950–2020) was a historical archaeologist and professor at Boston University. In the latter part of her career she focused on the anthropology of food. Among many other sites she studied the Spencer-Pierce-Little Farm in Newbury.

In Memory of Jonathan Hale

On the night of 4 Mar 1776, the Continental Army moved onto the Dorchester peninsula and started to fortify a position on the heights.

On 5 March, the British military inside Boston started a countermove, then aborted it when the weather made an already difficult mission impossible.

On 6 March, Gen. William Howe ordered the king’s forces and Loyalists to prepare to evacuate the town.

On on 7 March, militia captain Jonathan Hale of Glastonbury, Connecticut, died in Roxbury.

Hale’s death wasn’t mentioned in any account of fighting, which leads to the conclusion that he died of illness, possibly a form of “camp fever.” He had turned fifty-five the previous month.

Capt. Hale’s body was buried in a local burying-ground later named for nearby Walter Street. The original headstone read:

Here lyes Buried ye. Body of Capt Jonathan Hale of Glastonbury in Connecticut who dyed March 7 1776, in ye. 56 year of his age.

Back in Glastonbury, this line was entered into the church records:

Capt. Jonathan Hale, died in the army at Jamaica plains, Roxbury, Massachusetts bay.

In the late nineteenth century the remains of other Revolutionary War casualties, unknown soldiers who had died at the Loring-Greenough House and other army hospitals, were moved to the same cemetery, and a single memorial installed for them.

The Hale grave marker disappeared by the end of that century, and the Sons of the American Revolution installed a new stone, shown above, courtesy of photographer BSN and Find a Grave.

I suspect there’s another stone memorializing Capt. Hale, in a curious way.

In the fall of 1776 the late captain’s son, also named Jonathan, did some service in the American military. I think he mobilized with a militia unit to defend either the Connecticut coast (Col. Erastus Wolcott’s regiment had that mission in late 1776) or New York City.

In September, this Jonathan Hale came back to Glastonbury. The church records record his death:

Oct. 1, Jonathan Hale, died a few days after he returned sick from the army.

A Hale genealogy also reports that the man’s teen-aged sister Jerusha died on 26 September. While the records don’t state what he died of, that’s consistent with him catching dysentery in camp and bringing it home.

The younger Jonathan Hale’s original grave marker survives, and it says:

In Memory of Mr. Jonathan Son of Capt. Jonathan & Mrs. Elizabeth Hale who died Oct. ye. 1st. AD. 1776, in ye. 31st. Year of his Age.

Nearby is another Sons of the American Revolution marker that says:

Revolutionary War Capt.
Jonathan Hale 2d
Col. Wolcott’s Regt.
Died Oct. 1776
AE. 30.

I suspect that latter stone mixes together the two Jonathan Hales, father and son. The father served in Wolcott’s regiment as a captain, but I see no contemporaneous record of the son being an officer. Yet that’s definitely the son’s death data. This stone thus serves as a memorial to the son’s military service, not mentioned on his own marker, and a cenotaph for the father, buried one hundred miles away.

Capt. Jonathan Hale at the Siege of Boston

Jonathan Hale was born in Glastonbury, Connecticut, on 1 Feb 1721, the eldest surviving child of Jonathan and Sarah (Talcott) Hale. As Jonathan grew up, his father held many public offices—town clerk, deputy to the Connecticut legislature, justice of the peace, and militia colonel among them.

The younger Jonathan Hale married Elizabeth Welles of Glastonbury in January 1744. Her father was likewise a legislator and militia colonel, so this marriage joined two of the town’s leading families. The groom’s father provided the couple with their own farmland.

Jonathan, Jr., and Elizabeth started having children the following December. Their first three were named, of course, Elizabeth, Jonathan, and Elizabeth—the first baby having died young. By 1770, Elizabeth had given birth to twelve children, eleven of them still alive.

Meanwhile, Jonathan’s younger brother Elizur went to Yale College and came back to Glastonbury to practice medicine. According to the 1885 guide to Yale graduates, “He is said to have been of dignified though rough exterior, witty and sarcastic, but benevolent and very useful.”

In 1772, Jonathan’s father died. He inherited more land and an enslaved man named Newport, and he got to drop the “Junior” after his name. By then he had become an officer in the Connecticut militia himself.

War broke out to the north in 1775. At the end of that year, the enlistments of New Englanders who had joined the army besieging Boston expired. In some desperation, Gen. George Washington asked the nearby colonies to send militia regiments for a few weeks to keep the British army bottled up.

Erastus Wolcott of East Windsor, son of a former governor, was commissioned colonel of one of Connecticut’s militia regiments. Among his captains was Jonathan Hale of Glastonbury—now a fifty-four-year-old grandfather. The regiment appears to have set out in early January 1776. It was assigned to the southern wing of the American forces in Roxbury under Gen. Joseph Spencer.

The Rev. Joseph Perry, a chaplain with those militia forces, wrote in his diary for 27 February:

About one P.M. when almost ready to dine came an alarm by General Spencers’ Sergeant brought it. The account was that the Regulars had landed on Dorchester point. Coll. Wolcott was ordered forth with to turn out with his Regiment. The Coll. sent the alarm to his Captins in every quarter to parade before his house immediately for an attack. . . .

Every face looked serious but determined and the thing was real to us. In a few moments the whole Regiment would have been moving to the expected scene of blood, but were countermanded by order from Genrl Spencer informing it was a false alarm. The men got out of the rain and mud as fast as they could and all was peace again.

Continental commanders were preparing to move onto the Dorchester heights and antsy about anything disrupting that plan. Washington wrote to Gen. Artemas Ward suggesting that he put “Six or Eight trusty men by way of Lookouts or Patrols” on that peninsula, “For should the Enemy get Possession of those Hills before us they would render it a difficult task to dispossess them.”

TOMORROW: March.

Visiting the Roxbury High Fort

Today I’m speaking at the Springfield Armory National Historic Site’s Henry Knox Symposium, so I’ll share one more post about Henry Knox.

Last weekend I took this photo of a monument to Knox that’s less visible and probably much less well known than the series of stones marking the path (in some places, conjectural) of the “noble train” of cannon he brought from Lake Champlain in early 1776.

This is the marker on the hill in Roxbury that Knox helped to fortify in the late spring of 1775, immediately after he came out of Boston. He was working as a gentleman volunteer without an army commission. (He could have enlisted in any company as a private, but he wanted to be an officer, as he had been in the Boston militia regiment.)

On 5 July young Knox met Gen. George Washington and Gen. Charles Lee, who had arrived in Cambridge a couple of days before. They were inspecting the Continental siege lines. They were favorably impressed by the Roxbury fort and by Knox. That was the beginning of his rise in the Continental military and the national government.

The Roxbury fort was also probably where Knox had his first experience with large artillery pieces. There’s a myth that the provincial army didn’t have large cannon until Knox’s mission to Lake Champlain.

In fact, Pvt. Samuel Bixby of Sutton worked on the Roxbury earthworks and wrote in his diary for 1 July 1775:

We are fortifying on all sides, and making it strong as possible around the Fort. We have two 24 lbs. Cannon, & forty balls to each. We have hauled apple trees, with limbs trimmed sharp & pointing outward from the Fort. We finished one platform, & placed the Cannon on it just at night, and then fired two balls into Boston.

Bixby mentioned “the 24 pounder in the Great Fort above the meeting house” again on 2 August. On 21 September and 6 October he described firing an “18 pounder” set up in “the lower fort.”

The largest guns Col. Knox brought back from New York were one 24-pounder and six more 18-pounders. The 24-pounders already in Roxbury were the Continentals’ biggest cannon, and they had been there even before Washington arrived.

Clearly the British inside Boston had a lot more artillery and ammunition. (In response to the single October shot from the 18-pounder mentioned above, Pvt. Bixby recorded, “the enemy returned 90 shots.”) But the provincial army did have some big cannon in Roxbury at the start of the siege.

Where Did Lucy Flucker and Henry Knox Marry?

As I wrote yesterday, the marriage of Henry Knox and Lucy Flucker appears on the records of King’s Chapel, Boston’s most upper-class Anglican church, dated 23 June 1774.

The next week’s newspaper reports confirm that the rector of that church, the Rev. Dr. Henry Caner, presided at the wedding.

There’s another disagreement about that marriage, however: where it took place. Writers have come to different conclusions.

The most likely site would seem to be King’s Chapel itself. Nothing in its records suggests the Knoxes’ wedding was any different from others. Most biographers who describe the ceremony state that it happened in the chapel.

However, in The Revolutionary War Lives and Letters of Lucy and Henry Knox Phillip Hamilton wrote that the marriage took place in the building on Cornhill that Henry was renting as his house and shop. Lucy’s older sister Hannah Urquhart and “Aunt Waldo” attended, but her parents didn’t.

Hamilton appears to have relied on Henry Knox’s 29 August letter to his close friend Henry Jackson, which I haven’t seen in full. It’s now in the collection of the Gilder Lehrman Institute. Barring new discoveries, that’s the closest contemporaneous source about the young bookseller’s strained relationship to his new in-laws.

There are also a couple of memoirs written in the nineteenth century by members of the extended family that preserve their understandings about the marriage.

The Massachusetts Historical Society holds a manuscript called the “Winslow Family Memorial.” It was written by Isaac Winslow (1774–1856), a first cousin of Lucy Knox, and his daughter Margaret Catharine Winslow (1816–1890). The oh-so-handy transcript (P.D.F. download) offers this story of the marriage:

they were married at the house of her uncle Mr [Isaac] Winslow in Roxbury. I always understood, that he rather favor’d this union, and aided in its favorable issue. For this friendly disposition Gen Knox, as I have been led to think, from the little I know of the circumstances of the case, evinced more grateful feeling’s towards Mr Winslows family than his lady, who though not unkind to her cousins, yet when living in a good deal of style, after the peace in Boston, did not much notice her cousins, who were then in quite narrow circumstances

Hamilton’s citations show he looked at this manuscript, but he didn’t accept its statement that the Knox wedding took place in Roxbury.

Finally, the “Reminiscences” of the Knoxes’ longest lived daughter, Lucy Knox Thatcher (1776–1854, shown above), is held at the headquarters of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington, D.C. Nancy Rubin Stuart quoted from it in Defiant Brides. It agrees that Lucy’s parents didn’t attend the wedding but says her sister Hannah and their half-sister Sallie did. Again, I’ve seen only a bit of this document and plan to check it out on a future trip.

(The portrait above shows Lucy Knox Fletcher in the mid-1800s. Because there’s no portrait of Lucy Knox, and because of the similarities of the mother’s and daughter’s names, websites often mistakenly present this as a picture of Henry Knox’s wife.)

The Power of Specific Names and Details

This month the First Parish in Roxbury published a report by Aabid Allibhai that details the slave-holding by members of its congregation in the colonial period.

I have to admit no surprise at the fact that there were enslavers worshipping in a long-established meetinghouse in a large, prosperous town near Boston in the 1600s and 1700s.

The value of reports like this one (which can be downloaded in P.D.F. form) is bringing personal details out of the records. Here’s one example.

As Wayne Tucker wrote at the Eleven Names Project, in 1916 Great Britain published a volume of its Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, covering the years 1706-1708. Its entries summarized the documents and files stored in the Public Records Office. Like indexes and other compilations, such calendars were a valuable way for researchers to know where to look on different topics.

A few of those entries summarized documents in a court dispute involving Massachusetts chief justice Paul Dudley, privateer co-owner John Colman, and an enslaved “negro boy.” See the summary of document 532.i below.

In his report Allibhai reprints a scan of that actual certificate, showing that the child in question was named “Joachim alias Cuffee.”

That name was important enough in 1705 for auctioneer N. Shannon to put it into his certificate. But the archivist summarizing that document two hundred years later didn’t think researchers would want to know the boy’s name. That omission reflected the thinking of that time. He wasn’t an important person in this event, just the object of a dispute.

Simply by naming the enslaved child, Allibhai’s report helps to restore his individual humanity. Furthermore, as Allibhai and Tucker show, knowing the boy’s names makes it possible to find other references to him. He was baptized, presumably changing the African day name “Cuffee” for the Christian name “Joachim.” He was no more than fourteen years old. He testified at the trial of the privateering sailors.

The original certificate describes Joachim’s “Publick Sale by the Candle.” This was a form of auction in which a small burning candle served as a timer, and people had to get their best bids in before the candle went out or melted past a certain spot. Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary on 3 Sept 1662 about such an auction:

pleasant to see how backward men are at first to bid; and yet when the candle is going out, how they bawl and dispute afterwards who bid the most first.

And here I observed one man cunninger than the rest that was sure to bid the last man, and to carry it; and inquiring the reason, he told me that just as the flame goes out the smoke descends, which is a thing I never observed before, and by that he do know the instant when to bid last, which is very pretty.

The modern equivalent of waiting until the last second to enter your eBay bid.

Was Joachim present during that auction, watching that candle? The specifics—of the scene, of the boy’s name—can’t help but make the historical moment more compelling.

TOMORROW: A similar document.

Rewards Offered in 1798

As quoted yesterday, in July 1798 David Stoddard Greenough offered a “ONE DOLLAR REWARD” for the return of his teen-aged indentured servant Dick Welsh.

I wanted to know how that compared to rewards other newspaper advertisements announced for other people. So I looked up the word “reward” in Massachusetts newspapers from June and July 1798.

Here’s what advertisements offered for people of different sorts, sorted from smallest reward to largest:

• John Scofield, 19 years old, indented to John Neat, Boston: 1¢.
• Eber Potter, 15, indented to Eliel Gilbert, Greenfield: 1¢.
• Stephen Mulforde, 13, indented to Daniel Pepper, Boston: 1¢.
• Elisha Roberts, 16, indented to cordwainer Enoch Mower, Lynn: 1¢.
• Silas Nowell, boy, indented to printer Edmund M. Blunt, Newburyport: 5¢.
• Jacob Phelps, 16, indented to Jonathan Whitney: 6¢.
• Joseph Larrabee, 19, indented to John Newhall, Lynn: 20¢.
• John Sturgis, 16, from the sloop Nancy: $4.
• Walter Spooner Belcher, 18, indented to carpenter Marlborough Ripley: $5.
• John Holbrook, 22, and Ebenezer Hollis, 20, soldiers deserting from Castle Island: $8.
• Prince, 20, enslaved to Joseph Willcox, 2d, Killingworth, Connecticut: $10.
• Ebenezer Buckling, 19, indented to papermaker Hugh McLean, Milton: $20.
• John Barton, adult, sailor who had taken $20 advance pay from Capt. Stephen Curtis: $20.
• John Wilcot, adult, accused of stealing a horse from Caleb Easty: $50 for man and horse, $30 for horse and tackle alone.
• Frank, 25, sailor enslaved to Elijah Grinnelds of Virginia: $50.
• Joseph Haslett, adult, suspected forger: $100.

Greenough’s one-dollar reward for Dick Welsh was much more than some masters offered for their missing apprentices, but that probably reflected Greenough’s wish to be seen as a wealthy landed gentleman. He could afford to toss out a dollar where other men offered only a penny.

Nonetheless, Greenough’s message was probably the same as that from Neat, Gilbert, and the other masters at the top of the list above: this runaway is worthless, and I bought this newspaper notice only as a legality and to make life on the run more difficult for the lad.

For pocketbooks, horses, watches, and other property, people offered substantial rewards—sometimes for the goods alone, sometimes more for the goods and the thieves. Greenough himself advertised a $50 reward in May 1791 for thieves who had broken into his house and stolen a lot of gold and silver items. For people who could just walk away again, not so much.

It’s notable that masters were willing to pay far more for enslaved workers than apprentices. After all, those black men had taken many more years of free labor away with them. Not until the case of the slave-child Med in 1836 did Massachusetts law hold that people enslaved in other states became free if their owners brought them into the commonwealth.

One last observation: Ebenezer Buckling must have learned a lot of the valuable trade of papermaking to be worth $20.

“About 18 years old, uncommonly large of his age”

Earlier this month I wrote about Dick Morey, a young boy of African descent indentured to David S. Greenough of Jamaica Plain in the 1780s as the commonwealth’s law was shifted away from the slavery system.

I couldn’t find anything more about that child, but Wayne Tucker of the Eleven Names Project spotted a newspaper advertisement that must refer to him under a different name.

On 4 July [!] 1798, the Columbian Centinel ran this ad:

ONE DOLLAR REWARD.

RAN away from the Subscriber on the morning of the 21st inst. [i.e., of this month] an indented Molatto Servant by the name of Dick Welsh, about 18 years old, uncommonly large of his age; carried off with him a new broad cloth Coat; a chocolate colour’d short Coat; one fustian short coat; a drab colour’d cloth great coat almost new; one spotted velvet and several other Waistcoats; 3 pair tow Trowsers; 2 pair nankin Overhalls; 3 new tow Shirts; 1 linen do. 2 round Hatts, &c. &c. Whoever will apprehend said ran away and return him to the Subscriber at Jamaica Plains (Roxbury,) shall be entitled to the above reward.

All masters of vessels and others are hereby cautioned against harbouring or concealing said ran away, if they wish to avoid the penalty of the law.

DAVID S. GREENOUGH
Roxbury, June 25, 1798.

The same notice ran again a week later.

Both little Dick Morey and this teenager called Dick Welsh were born in 1780 and “Molatto.” It’s so unlikely that Greenough had two indentured servants matching that description, both named Dick, that this advertisement must refer to the same person.

Among the notable details in this ad is the phrase “about 18 years old, uncommonly large of his age.” That’s a reminder that people reached puberty later in the early modern period, so eighteen-year-old males still had significant physical growth ahead of them. It also gives us a peek at Dick Welsh as an individual.

The advertisement said Welsh took away a lot of clothing—far more than listed in similar ads. He probably planned to sell most of those garments to have money for a longer trip. All told, that clothing was worth more than the dollar Greenough was offering for his indentured teenager—I’ll discuss that promised reward later.

Back in 1785 Greenough and John Morey referred to this child as “known by the Name of Dick”; most slaves were not acknowledged to have surnames. But a year later Dick’s relationship to Greenough was put on a new legal basis when the selectmen indentured the boy, and they called him “Dick Morey.” Twelve years after that, Greenough stated he was “Dick Welsh.”

It wasn’t unusual for African-Americans to change their names in this period (or to convince the authorities to refer to them by names they were already using) as they developed their own identities, no longer bound to masters.

I wondered if the Morey surname implied something about this boy’s father, but the selectmen may simply have chosen it because John Morey was Dick’s last owner. As for the new surname “Welsh,” did that indicate the boy had a familial tie to a man in Roxbury named Welsh (or Welch, or Walsh, or even Weld)? Was it an ethnic signifier for a father in town during the war? Or did Dick adopt that name out of admiration for someone? We don’t know.

The second advertisement indicates Dick Welsh was still free as of 11 July—almost three weeks after he left Greenough’s house. It’s possible he came back, or was made to come back, to serve out his term until age twenty-one. It’s also possible he made good his escape.

TOMORROW: Rewards for runaways.