Exploring the Story of Samuel Dyer

This week I have two articles up on the Journal of the American Revolution:

• “The Return of Samuel Dyer: An Attempted Assassination in Revolutionary Boston”
• “The Secrets of Samuel Dyer”

These are two parts of the same research project. To borrow the summary from the second article:

in October 1774 a sailor named Samuel Dyer returned to Boston, accusing high officers of the British army of holding him captive, interrogating him about the Boston Tea Party, and shipping him off to London in irons. Unable to file a lawsuit for damages, Dyer attacked two army officers on the town’s main street, cutting one and nearly shooting another—the first gunshot aimed at royal authorities in Boston in the whole Revolution. Those actions alarmed both sides of the political divide, and Dyer was soon locked up in the Boston jail. Everyone seemed to agree the man was insane.

But there was a lot more going on than Bostonians could see. And Dyer resurfaced in an unexpected way.

Originally I wrote up this story for The Road to Concord, but it has only a passing connection to that book’s focus, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s cannon. Still, the events involved many of the same players and further raised tensions in October 1774. Dyer’s attack could even have started the war in a way quite different from how we remember it.

To spread the word about this project, I’ll do a couple of audio interviews in the next few days.

On the morning of Friday, 7 April, starting at 10:00 A.M., I’ll be Jimmy Mack’s guest on the Dave Nemo show on Sirius XM, discussing the months leading up to April 1775. This will be part of the show’s “Revolution Road” segment featuring writers from the Journal of the American Revolution.

On Sunday, I’ll discuss these articles with Brady Crytzer for the Dispatches podcast. That episode will drop later this month.

Talking About Revolutionary Massachusetts This Week

From midnight to 1:00 A.M. on Wednesday, 26 July, I’m scheduled to be interviewed by Bradley Jay on his radio show, Jay Talking. That will be on WBZ, 1030 AM.

[CORRECTION: It turns out that when I agreed to be on the show on 26 July, the producer was thinking that’s the date when I’d show up at the studio for a show to be broadcast on 27 July. So the conversation will actually happen early on Thursday.]

(Assuming, that is, that the U.S. Constitution is still operative and we haven’t stumbled into any wars that will preempt regular programming. Hard to be confident these days.)

I understand that Jay is a fan of Revolutionary history. I expect we’ll talk about The Road to Concord, Gen. Washington in Cambridge, and other gossip I’ve collected over the years. But this will be a new experience.

On Saturday, 29 July, I’ll be one of the many speakers at History Camp Pioneer Valley, to be held at the Kittredge Center at Holyoke Community College. This is the second annual gathering of history enthusiasts sharing their research to be organized by the Pioneer Valley History Network.

My presentation will be “An Assassin in Pre-Revolutionary Boston: The Strange Case of Samuel Dyer.” Other presentations on Revolutionary history include “Resurrecting the Memory of Major Joseph Hawley of Northampton: John Adams’s Campaign for a Forgotten Patriot” by Morgan E. Kolakowski, “A Forgotten ‘Hessian’ Prisoner in Brimfield during the Revolutionary War” by Larry and Kitty Lowenthal, “Early Black American Patriotism” by Adam McNeil, and “Pioneer Valley Gravestones (and some of the men who made them), c. 1650-1850” by Bob Drinkwater.

As of today there are still a few slots available for History Camp Pioneer Valley.

“The wretched blunder of the over sized balls”

In the summer of 1775, a letter from a British army officer in Boston circulated widely in London. Dated 5 July 1775 and stripped of a signature, it reported critically on the Battle of Bunker Hill. On the performance of the Royal Artillery, the officer wrote:

As they were marching up to attack, our artillery stopped firing, the General on enquiring the reason was told they had got twelve pound balls to six pounders, but that they had grape shot; on this he ordered them forward and to fire grape. . . .

The wretched blunder of the over sized balls sprung from the dotage of an officer of rank in that corps, who spends his whole time in dallying with the Schoolmaster’s daughters. God knows he is old enough—he is no Sampson—yet he must have his Dalilah.

By 1780 that letter was published in London in a pamphlet titled The Detail and Conduct of the American War. People interpreted the “officer of rank” to be Col. Samuel Cleaveland of the Royal Artillery. He was around age fifty-eight, perhaps “old enough,” according to the European Magazine’s report of his age when he died in August 1794 near Lymington, England.

Cleaveland had approved Benjamin Lovell, son of Master John Lovell of the South Latin School, as the artillery corps’s storekeeper. He later signed off on John Lovell, Jr.’s petition for support from the Crown. Was the artillery commander so close to the Lovell family because he was flirting with the schoolmaster’s daughters?

According to his biography in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, John Lovell had three daughters: Priscilla and Elizabeth, baptized six weeks apart in 1749 [?!], and Mary, baptized in November 1752. So they were “old enough” for dallying, too.

Cleaveland’s own report on the battle doesn’t suggest any problem with the artillery supplies—but of course it wouldn’t. It might be more telling that the accusations in the letter don’t appear to have hurt his career. He remained in charge of the Royal Artillery in North America and became a brigadier in 1776. Interestingly, Cleaveland held those ranks under Gen. William Howe, who some later authors speculated (without apparently any evidence) was the officer who wrote this letter.

Regardless of the letter’s accuracy, because it was published so early, the colonel’s affair with the schoolmaster’s daughter has long been part of the historiography of the Battle of Bunker Hill. For example, in his address on the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, Alexander H. Everett referred to Cleaveland’s “Fatal error!”; “delusion”; “superannuated gallantry”; and “slumbering in the lap of some beauteous Delilah.”

I won’t be able to drop such phrases into my talk at Anderson House in Washington, D.C., next Tuesday since that will focus on the American artillery in 1775. Which is a shame since (a) it’s a tidy story with a neat moral, whether or not it’s true; and (b) sex sells.