A Job Recommendation from Dr. Warren

Last month the Times Observer newspaper of Warren, Pennsylvania, reported on an exhibit at the local historical society that included a letter from Dr. Joseph Warren, the city’s namesake.

According to the society’s managing director, a man named John Blair donated the letter in 1976, not saying how he had obtained it. “It’s been housed in a safe at the Historical Society that hasn’t been inventoried so the letter had been forgotten to some degree.”

A transcription of this letter was included in Richard Frothingham’s 1865 biography of Warren, so the text has been available to scholars. That book says it was addressed to the Massachusetts committee of safety, which met in Cambridge while the Provincial Congress was in Watertown.  

The society’s transcription of the letter is:

Watertown May 12, 1775.

Gentlemen

Mr. Pigeon is now sick, his business must be attended to, he requests that Mr. Charles Miller the Bearer hereof may be appointed his assistant and immediately directed to go upon Business – pray desire the young Gentleman you were pleased to appoint to be my clerk, to attend here as I have much writing to do and want a number of papers copied for the use of Congress.

I am Gentn. you most obed svt
Jos. Warren

“Mr. Pigeon” was John Pigeon of Newton, the congress’s commissary. Within a few weeks he was replaced, unable to keep up with the demands of the job. Once the Continental Congress assumed responsibility for the army around Boston, it appointed Joseph Trumbull the commissary general.

Charles Miller (1742–1817) was deputy commissary general under both Pigeon and Trumbull, working out of Cambridge. At the end of the siege he returned to Boston, where he had been a merchant, and continued to gather food and supplies for the army. He later became senior warden at King’s Chapel before retiring to his native Braintree/Quincy.

In 1779 Miller’s wife Elizabeth was hosting Dr. Warren’s eldest daughter, Betsey. According to Samuel Forman’s biography of the doctor, citing letters of Mercy Scollay, the Millers also took in the mysterious Sally Edwards.

TOMORROW: The next generation.

The Trail of Sally Edwards

Yesterday I shared some details about how a woman named Sally Edwards—possibly still in her teens, with no husband in sight—gave birth to a baby, also named Sally Edwards, in Dedham in June 1775.

There are two big problems in tracking that mother and child much further. One is that people probably took steps to keep them from being tracked. The other is that their name was not uncommon—and looking for “Sarah Edwards” as well brings up possibilities all over the place.

According to Dr. Sam Forman in his new biography Dr. Joseph Warren, which unearthed this event, the baby remained in Dedham for another three years, with Warren’s former medical students paying the bills for her support.

The mother—to innkeeper Dr. Nathaniel Ames’s relief—returned to Boston after the siege in mid-1776. Forman cites letters from Warren’s fiancée Mercy Scollay to say that a “Mrs. Charles Miller” took in both Sally Edwards and Dr. Warren’s oldest child Betsey in 1776.

The most prominent Charles Miller around at the time was a Boston merchant whom the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had appointed deputy commissary general in May 1775. After the Continental Congress took over the war, he worked under commissary general Joseph Trumbull for the rest of the siege. In 1776, Miller stayed in Massachusetts as Trumbull’s deputy in the work of collecting and shipping food to the Continental Army.

That Charles Miller was born in 1742 at Braintree, son of the region’s Anglican minister. In 1769 he married Elizabeth Cary, daughter of prominent Charlestown merchant Richard Cary, in King’s Chapel, Boston’s most prestigious Anglican church.

That religious affiliation may help to explain why Sally Edwards had her baby baptized by an Anglican minister in Dedham—and they were scarce on the ground in New England outside Boston during the siege. Did she come from an Anglican family? Was she feeling more support from the Millers than from anyone else in her life?

I have no further clues about either Sally Edwards, mother or daughter. As has been discussed previously on Boston 1775, some families have claimed descent from Dr. Joseph Warren through an undocumented daughter. In one case that daughter was said to be named “Sarah Warren.” However, I haven’t seen evidence to support those traditions, and Sarah was (as I said above) a very common name.

The Mysterious Sally Edwards

On 19 Nov 1775, the Rev. Samuel Clark, an Anglican missionary to Dedham and Stoughton, recorded baptizing “A daughter of Sally Edwards, named Sally.” He didn’t name a father.

That child had been born back on 29 June, according to Sam Forman’s new biography Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty. That lag between birth and baptism was unusually long, but there was a war on, and this baby was probably being kept under wraps.

Dedham’s leading intellectual, the prickly physician and almanac-writer Nathaniel Ames, referred to the mother as a “fair incognita pregnans,” Forman writes—a pregnant woman being kept hidden. The book also says she was in her teens, though I’m not sure what the direct evidence for that is. Dr. Warren had sent Sally Edwards to Dr. Ames before dying in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Over ten months after the birth, on 12 May 1776, Dr. Ames wrote in his diary: “Sally Edwards left my house having made much Mischief in it.” Drawing on Ames’s papers, Forman reports that Warren’s medical protégés William Eustis and David Townsend had continued to pay for boarding the mother and child from the Warren estate.

That financial support raises the possibility that baby Sally was Dr. Warren’s child. It’s of course possible that another man had gotten Sally Edwards pregnant and Dr. Warren simply arranged a place for her to give birth during the siege of Boston, but then we would expect her support to start coming from another family.

Forman will be speaking about Dr. Joseph Warren this Wednesday, 7 March, in the Orientation Room of the Boston Public Library starting at 6:00 P.M. The library says this illustrated lecture “will focus on his life and the posthumous arc of Warren’s legacy from national fame to near-total obscurity and perhaps back again. . . . Forman reveals Dr. Warren as a humanist, devoting his career to improving health care for all, while making real the concepts of liberty and representative government.” But I suspect Forman might also talk about the unanswered questions of Dr. Warren’s personal life.

TOMORROW: Whatever happened to Sally Edwards?