“Assembled on a Point of Land next to Grape-Island”

Yesterday we left the people of Weymouth and surrounding towns in a panic as three or four vessels full of British soldiers appeared off their north coast early on Sunday, 21 May 1775.

Abigail Adams happened to be writing on her husband’s behalf to Edward Dilly, a British publisher and bookseller sympathetic to the American Whigs. She portrayed the situation like this:

Now this very day, and whilst I set writing the Soldiers provincial are passing my windows upon an allarm from the British troops who have been landing a number of Men upon one of our Sea coasts (about 4 miles from my own habitation) and plundering hay and cattle. Each party are now in actual engagement. God alone knows the Event, to whom also all our injuries and oppressions are known and to whom we can appeal for the justice of our cause when the Ear of Man is deaf and his heart hardned.

At the command of Lt. Thomas Innis of the 43rd Regiment, scores of those redcoats started coming ashore, carrying long, sharp…scythes. They got to work harvesting hay from Grape Island, to take back to Boston to feed the garrison’s horses.

Meanwhile, local militia companies gathered in the towns, eventually augmented by three companies from the provincial army camp at Roxbury. An 1893 Hingham town history assumed that Capt. James Lincoln, commander of a new company of Massachusetts troops, took charge. That history stated: “The old people of fifty years ago, used to tell of the march of the military down Broad Cove Lane, now Lincoln Street.”

Once those local men reached the shoreline, however, they discovered that there was little they could do. As the 25 May New-England Chronicle reported:

The People of Weymouth assembled on a Point of Land next to Grape-Island. The Distance from Weymouth Shore to the said Island was too great for small Arms to do much Execution; nevertheless our People frequently fired.

The Fire was returned from one of the Vessels with swivel Guns; but the Shot passed over our Heads, and did no Mischief.

Matters continued in this State for several Hours, the Soldiers polling the Hay down to the Water-Side, our People firing at the Vessel, and they now and then discharging swivel Guns.

In Scituate, Paul Litchfield recorded in his diary, the Rev. Ebenezer Grosvenor went ahead with the second part of his Sunday sermon as normal.

Eventually the tide came in. Abigail Adams wrote of the shoreline defenders:

At last they musterd a Lighter, and a Sloop from Hingham which had six port holes. Our men eagerly jumpt on board, and put of for the Island. As soon as they [the regulars] perceived it, they decamped. Our people landed upon [the] Island, and in an instant set fire to the Hay which with the Barn was soon consumed, about 80 ton tis said.

The newspaper report offered more details:

The Tide had now come in, and several Lighters, which were aground, were got afloat, upon which our People, who were ardent for Battle, got on board, hoisted Sail, and bore directly down upon the nearest Point of the Island.

The Soldiers and Sailors immediately left the Barn, and made for their Boats, and put off from one End of the Island, whilst our People landed on the other. The Sloops hoisted Sail with all possible Expedition, whilst our People set Fire to the Barn, and burnt 70 or 80 Tons of Hay; then fired several Tons which had been polled down to the Water-Side, and brought off the Cattle.

Lt. John Barker basically agreed with that sequence of events in his diary:

as soon as they [the foragers] landed they were fired on from the opposite shore but without receiving any harm, the distance being too great; the party did not return the fire but kept on carrying the hay to the boats, until at last the Rebels in great numbers got into Vessels and Boats and went off for the Island; the party then embarked and sailed off with what hay they had, and as they were obliged to go along shore they were fired upon, when Lt. Innis who commanded was at last forced to return the fire…

Back to the New-England Chronicle:

As the Vessels passed Horse-Neck, a Sort of Promontory which extends from Germantown [in Braintree], they fired their Swivels and small Arms at our People very briskly, but without Effect, though one of the Bullets from their small Arms, which passed over our People, struck against a Stone with such Force as to take off a large Part of the Bullet.

That ended the crisis. All that remained was for the two sides to tote up gains and losses.

TOMORROW: The bottom line.

“3 Sloops and one cutter had come out”

In May 1775, the people of Hingham and other towns along the South Shore from Boston weren’t really worrying about protecting livestock on harbor islands.

As a 3 May petition from selectmen in Braintree, Weymouth, and Hingham to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress put it, those towns felt “in great danger of an attack from the troops now in Boston, or from the ships in the harbor.”

They worried that the British military would attack the towns themselves, not off-shore pasturage—perhaps to seize food but mostly to punish the rebellious population.

The congress therefore authorized those towns to raise two and a half companies of men for their defense through the end of the year, on the same terms as the provincial soldiers being signed up to keep besieging Boston. In Hingham, James Lincoln took a captain’s commission and started recruiting.

On the morning of Sunday, 21 May, vessels were spotted maneuvering through the islands off the Weymouth shore. Abigail Adams described the response in north Braintree:

When I rose about six oclock I was told that the Drums had been some time beating and that 3 allarm Guns were fired, that Weymouth Bell had been ringing, and Mr. [Ezra] Welds [churchbell in Braintree’s middle precinct] was then ringing.

I immediatly sent of an express to know the occasion, and found the whole Town in confusion. 3 Sloops and one cutter had come out, and droped anchor just below Great Hill. It was difficult to tell their design, some supposed they were comeing to Germantown others to Weymouth. People women children from the Iron Works flocking down this Way—every woman and child above or from below my Fathers.

My Fathers family flying, the Drs. [Cotton Tufts’s] in great distress, as you may well immagine for my Aunt had her Bed thrown into a cart, into which she got herself, and orderd the boy to drive her of to Bridgwater which he did. The report was to them, that 300 hundred had landed, and were upon their march into Town.

The allarm flew [like] lightning, and men from all parts came flocking down till 2000 were collected

In Scituate, Paul Litchfield was home from Harvard College, his senior year cut short by the war. He wrote in his diary:

Just before meeting began in morning, hearing the King’s troops were landing near Hingham, the people in general dispersed, so no meeting.

The 25 May New England Chronicle, newly moved to Cambridge, reported this military response:

Last Sabbath about 10 o’clock A.M. an express arrived at General [John] Thomas’s quarters at Roxbury, informing him that four sloops (two of them armed) were sailed from Boston, to the south short of the bay, and that a number of soldiers were landing at Weymouth.

Gen. Thomas ordered three companies to march to the support of the inhabitants.

But the first newspaper report of the action was the 22 May Newport Mercury:

An express arrived here this morning, from Providence, with advice, that a party of soldiers from Boston had landed at Weymouth, and burnt the town down, and were ravaging the country when the express came away. Troops from all parts of the country were going to oppose them.——The particulars not yet come to hand.

TOMORROW: The particulars of what really happened.

“Townspeople took four brass cannon”

Here are all the entries from Thomas Newell’s 1774–74 diary that pertain to artillery and thus show the coming of war.

• 4 June 1773: “King’s birthday; general training; the grandest appearance ever known in these parts.”

John Rowe wrote about this same militia exhibition in honor of the king:

Colo. [John] Hancock & Company of Cadets, Major [Adino] Paddock & Artillery, Colo. [John] Erving & the Regiment, Colo. [David] Phipps & Company all made their appearance in the Common — Such a Quantity or Rather Multitude of People as Spectators I never saw before, they behaved very well.

Phips commanded the horse guards.

• 1 July: “Major Paddock’s son drowned at Cambridge River.”

Adino Paddock was a coachmaker as well as commander of Boston’s militia artillery company. His son John was a student in Harvard College’s class of 1776, carrying the family’s hopes to secure their rise into gentility, when he died at age seventeen.

• 15 September: “General training.”
• 22 September: “General training for the last time this year.”
• 12 November: “Workmen began to set another row of elms in the common.”

Paddock instigated the planting of trees along Tremont Street, opposite his coachyard. Years after he had left Boston as a Loyalist, those would still be called the “Paddock elms.”

Gen. Thomas Gage arrived as the new royal governor in May 1774, and the following summer was punctuated by the arrival of more army units, including companies of Royal Artillery:

• 2 July: “A.M. Artillery from Castle William landed, with eight brass cannon, and encamped in the common. 258 sheep given for the relief of this town by the town of Windham, in Connecticut. (I cut my hair off.)”
• 6 August: ”The Scarboro. man-of-war arrived, nine weeks from England; P.M. three transports from Halifax, with the 59th Regiment on board, and company of artillery, and brass cannon, eight days out.”
• 7 August: “A.M. three transports from New York with the Royal Regiment of Welsh Fusileers and detachment of Royal Artillery, and a quantity of ordnance stores, &c.”
• 8 August: “Company of artillery landed; encamped in common.”

Soon after Gage put the Massachusetts Government Act into effect, he had his soldiers remove militia gunpowder from the storehouse in Charlestown. That set off a big reaction in the countryside:

• 1 September: “This morning, half after four, about 260 troops embarked on board thirteen boats at the Long Wharf, and proceeded up Mystic River to Temple Farm, where they landed; went to the powder-house on Quarry Hill, in Charlestown bounds, from whence they have taken 250 half-barrels of gunpowder, the whole store there, and carried it to the castle. A detachment from this corps went to Cambridge and brought off two field-pieces.”
• 2 September: “From these several hostile appearances, the county of Middlesex took the alarm, and on last evening began to collect in large bodies, with their arms, provisions, and ammunitions, &c. This morning some thousands of them advanced to Cambridge, armed only with sticks. The committee of Cambridge sent express to Charlestown, who communicated the intelligence to Boston, and their respective committee proceeded to Cambridge without delay. Thomas Oliver, S[amuel]. Danforth, J[oseph]. Lee, made declaration and resignation of a seat in the new constituted council, which satisfied the body. At sunset, they began to return home. At dark, rain and thundered very hard.”

That “Powder Alarm” uprising prompted Gen. Gage and Adm. Samuel Graves to strengthen Boston’s military defenses against attacks from land.

• 3 September: “Four large field-pieces were dragged from the common by the soldiery and placed at the only entrance into this town by land. The Lively frigate, of twenty guns, came to her mooring in the ferry-way between Boston and Charlestown.”
• 5 September: “Artillery training.”
• 15 September: “Last night all the cannon in the North Battery were spiked up: it is said to be done by about one hundred men (who came in boats) from the man-of war in this harbor.”
• 17 September: “Last night, townspeople took four brass cannon from the gun-house near very near the common.”

Newell conflated two events in that last entry. Maj. Paddock’s militia artillery had two gunhouses, each containing one pair of small cannon. As other sources show, persons unknown spirited away the two cannon in the old gunhouse on the night of 14–15 September. When Royal Artillery officers opened the new gunhouse on 17 September, they discovered its two cannon were gone, too.

Newell’s diary entry shows that many Bostonians knew about those events even though they were never reported in the newspapers or in Gen. Gage’s letters to the government in London.

• 20 September: “Some cannon removed (by the man-of war’s men) from the mill-pond.”

People had tried to smuggle these guns up the Charles River, but their boat got hung up on the dam that formed the Mill Pond and they had to abandon it.

• 3 October: “Artillery training for the last time this year.”

Since the train’s weapons had vanished, and most of the company’s men were refusing to serve under Maj. Paddock, there probably wasn’t a lot of artillery training accomplished that day.

• 22 October: “This morning, about 7 o’clock, after three days’ illness, Mr. William Molineaux died, in the fifty-eighth year of his age. (A true son of liberty and of America.) It may with truth be said of this friend, that he died a martyr to the interest of America. His watchfulness, labors, distresses, and exertions to promote the general interest, produced an inflammation in his bowels, of which he died. ‘Oh, save my country, Heaven,’ he said, and died.”

Molineux was involved in many acts of resistance, and among the last was buying four cannon from Duncan Ingraham, Jr., in September or October 1774. Those guns were sent out to four rural towns to be equipped for use by spring. 

• 23 October: “This day four transports arrived here from New York, with a company royal artillery, a large quantity of ordnance stores for Castle William, three companies of the Royal Regiment of Ireland, or the 18th Regiment, and the 47th Regiment on board.”

This one document thus shows us both sides of the political conflict preparing for military action—with cannon.

Ultimately those efforts led to the British army’s march to Concord and to war. I’ll tell that story at the Scituate Historical Society this week.

Thursday, 15 May, 7–8:30 P.M.
Secrets on the Road to Concord
G.A.R. Hall, 353 Country Way, Scituate

Admission is $15, or $10 for society members. Reservations are recommended, but payment will be accepted at the door. I look forward to meeting folks there.

TOMORROW: Thomas Newell and the tea.

“Secrets on the Road to Concord” in Scituate, 15 May

On Saturday I attended the “Spies Among Us” event in Concord, described back here.

Top highlights:

• Seeing the Wright Tavern sprucing up as it prepares to reopen to the public next month, including the Pursuit of History weekend on “The Outbreak of War” that I’m helping to organize there (a couple of seats may still be available).
• Enjoying all the special touches the National Park Service staff and volunteers brought to this event, including a full-size replica of Ens. Henry DeBerniere’s map from the Library of Congress and a Concord role-playing game.
• Hearing details about what brought the British troops to Concord and remembering back during the 2000 commemoration when many of those were still little beads I was trying to string together into a narrative that became The Road to Concord.

So I’m eager to keep spreading the word at my upcoming speaking engagement for the Scituate Historical Society. [This event was originally scheduled for March and postponed.]

Thursday, 15 May, 7–8:30 P.M.
Secrets on the Road to Concord
G.A.R. Hall, 353 Country Way, Scituate

Early in the spring of 1775, British army spies located four brass cannon belonging to Boston’s colonial militia that had gone missing months before. British general Thomas Gage devised plans to regain the cannon. Massachusetts Patriots prepared to thwart the general’s hopes. Each side wanted control of those weapons, but each also had reasons to keep their existence a secret. That conflict would end with blood on the road to Concord.

Admission is $15, or $10 for society members. Reservations are recommended, but payment will be accepted at the door.

I look forward to meeting more folks in shoreside Plymouth County.

(The picture above is a page from one of Scituate Historical Society’s artifacts of the 1770s: Caleb Litchfield’s notebook from when he was a teenager studying mathematics and navigation. Litchfield served in the Continental forces on land and sea during the war. After a brief time as a merchant ship’s master, he retired inland to Milton and then Weathersfield, Vermont.)

“One of the skulls was that of a British soldier”

Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr. (1828–1908), was the son of the Unitarian minister at Scituate. Both father and son bore the surnames of two of Massachusetts’s eminent families.

The Rev. Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr., had studied for the ministry with the Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley in Concord. There he had met his wife, introduced by two members of the Thoreau family.

At the age of nine, Edmund started keeping a journal, on the advice of Bronson Alcott. He kept up this habit for his whole adult life but, as with John Quincy Adams, had trouble maintaining the momentum at first.

In the spring of 1840 Edmund started to attend a boarding school in Concord, living with his teachers: the brothers John and Henry David Thoreau. They reenergized his journal-keeping for that season.

The American Antiquarian Society has shared transcripts of Edmund’s childhood journals, including this entry from 1840:

April 1st. I had a nice sail on the river yesterday after school. Messrs John and Henry T[horeau]. rowed and Jesse [Harding] and I were passengers.

We went up the river against the wind and then sailed down to the monument where we got out with the intention of all embarking again, but Mr. J and Jesse being near the monument and Mr H. and I near the boat we jumped in and went across to the abutment of the former bridge on the opposite side.

I suppose that we should have come back for them if they had staid but they went off with the sail which we had left on the bank. Mr. H. rowed up the river a little way and got out. We had not the keys of the boat and should have been obliged to leave her without being securely fastened or have hauled her up on the shore if Joseph had not come down with the keys. He got two wet feet for his pains.

Three years after Concord had dedicated its monument to the 19 Apr 1775 fight, that obelisk and the nearby “abutment of the former bridge” were landmarks for boaters. But because there was no longer a bridge nearby, once the Thoreau brothers and their pupils disembarked on opposite sides they couldn’t easily get back together.

That same entry in Edmund’s diary reported:

We then went to the Lyceum expecting that a Phrenologist would lecture. His apparatus was there but the lecturer had not arrived. A man there set out his casts and several real skulls on the desk but immediately put them back again.

One of the skulls was that of a British soldier who fell in the Battle of Concord. It was dug up in Lincoln. It was only the upper half of the head. There was the bullet hole through which the ball which killed him had passed.

A Mr. Haskins lectured on Roger Williams the founder of Rhode Island—a description of his life. Bought 2 cents worth of burnt almonds going home.

In one busy spring day, young Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., had seen the gravesite of two British soldiers and the half the skull of a third. Plus, burnt almonds!

TOMORROW: A walk to Lincoln.

Talking about Stolen Cannon in Falmouth, 25 Apr.

On Tuesday, 25 April, I’ll speak to the Falmouth Historical Society about The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War.

My book explores how Massachusetts Patriots were furiously collecting cannon months before the war broke out in April of 1775, but of course keeping that effort as quiet as possible.

Today I’ll share a glimpse of one such cannon from the diary of Israel Litchfield, a sergeant in Scituate’s minute company. The town militiamen were drilling on 19 April when they heard a rumor of fighting between locals and redcoats in Concord. “Some Discredited it and Some Believed it,” Litchfield wrote, but gradually the new situation became clear.

The next day, the Scituate militia companies mustered. They took a few local Loyalists prisoner. But they didn’t march toward Boston because, as I discussed last year, there was a contingent of British soldiers a lot closer, in the neighboring town of Marshfield. Furthermore, seaside communities worried about the Royal Navy—shouldn’t the militia companies stay close to home to guard against a possible attack from the sea?

On 21 April, Litchfield and his company were ordered to bring in the big guns—well, one big gun—evidently to push the redcoats out of Marshfield. The sergeant wrote:

Colonel [John] Bailey I Say ordered our Companey the Rangers and Capt. Galen Clapps Company to march up to [Atherton] Wales’s [tavern in Hanover] to gaurd a Cannon down to marshfield. We were very Loath to go because there was Several tenders playing off and on upon our Coasts. However we were obliged to go

So we marched up to upriver meeting house and Joind Capt. Galen Claps Company. We marched up to wales’s and took the Cannon under our protection. We march’d from Wales’s to Dr. [Jeremiah] Halls in pembroke. There we heard a rumur that there was 500 Regulars Landing in Scituate.

We Sent posts to the Col. for Leave to march Back to Scituate, which after we had marcd. aboute a mile beyond Dr. Halls the major Came to us and ordered us to march back to Scituate. The Sun was aboute an hour high.

We marchd down to upriver meeting house where we heard that there was nothing in the rumur of mens Landing in Scituate but that the Regulars were embarkd on board a tender and gone off.

So everything ended almost peacefully in that part of the province. Sgt. Litchfield didn’t record what happened to the cannon his company had left behind on the road. Was it taken up to the siege lines around Boston or kept nearby to guard a local harbor?

I’ll have more answers about other cannon at Falmouth on Tuesday. My talk will begin at 7:00 P.M. at the historical society’s Cultural Center, 55 Palmer Avenue. I believe the admission cost is $5 for members and $8 for others. I’ll stay after the talk to answer questions, sign books, and chat about the Revolution.

[The photograph above shows Atherton Wales’s tavern in Hanover as the building appeared in the 1900s.]

Rev. Ebenezer Thompson, Minister to the Marshfield Loyalists

Ebenezer Thompson was born in West Haven, Connecticut, in 1712. He graduated from Yale College in 1733, married the following March, and then did what Yale graduates weren’t supposed to do: start worshipping in the Church of England. In fact, in 1743 Thompson took holy orders in England, becoming an ordained Anglican minister.

At that time the Church of England considered most of New England to be missionary territory, hostile or indifferent to the established denomination. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (seal shown here) paid ministers to take posts there since the congregations were too small to support them.

The S.P.G. sent Thompson to Scituate, Massachusetts, at the end of 1743 with a salary of £40 per year. His job was not only to serve Anglicans in that town, where St. Andrew’s Church had been built in 1731, but also to proselytize in the neighboring towns.

In November 1748 Thompson wrote back to his employer:

I beg leave to acquaint the Venerable Society that by the blessing of God on my sincere Endeavours, the Church of England continues to increase in these parts, and people in general begin to conceive a much better opinion of it than they had when I first came here. The good people of Marshfield have so far finished the new Church that on Sunday the 18th of September last, I preached in it to a large Congregation and administered the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper to 18 regular Communicants. I hope the Honorable Society will be pleased to favour this new Church with a Bible and Prayer Book.

Thompson’s reports back to the S.P.G. appear to be almost the only records of Marshfield’s first Anglican church, called Trinity. The presence of that place of worship was a big change for the community. Marshfield was one of Massachusetts’s oldest settlements, its earliest English inhabitants defining themselves by not being Anglican. When Thompson reported performing a service in nearby Plymouth in 1755, he added, “although the town had been settled more than 120 years, the Liturgy of the Church of England had never before been used in public.”

By 1754 Thompson was preaching “once a Month to the New Church at Marshfield, where, and at his own Church of Scituate he has the Pleasure to see the neigbouring Indians come frequently to Church.” Four years later the S.P.G. understood his three churches “at Scituate, Marshfield, and Bridgewater” to be “in a flourishing and encreasing State.” He received a raise to £50 per year.

In March 1760 Thompson reported that his three congregations “live among themselves and with the Dissenters their Neighbours in Friendship and Love; some of whom, of various Denominations, observing the Order and Regularity of our Church, begin to have a much better Opinion thereof than heretofore.” As of 1763 he counted “700 Families of various Persuasions” in those towns, “50 of which profess themselves of the Church of England, and attend the publick Worship with Seriousness, Decency and Devotion.” He had forty-seven white communicants and three Indians, and preached once every five weeks in Marshfield.

Thompson’s Anglican community continued to grow through conversions. In 1771 the minister wrote, “there has been added to the Church four families of good reputation from among the Dissenters.” In 1774 the S.P.G. understood, “The Rev. Mr. Thompson's congregation at Scituate and Marshfield have received an addition of 8 families from the Dissenters.” The Anglican communicants were up to 57 people in 1774, the year that Marshfield had its open political split.

Clearly most of Thompson’s adherents were in Scituate, but it appears some of the most prominent were in Marshfield. Without surviving church records, I can’t say for sure which of Marshfield’s political leaders became Anglican. Cynthia Hagar Krusell’s 1976 pamphlet Of Tea and Tories says the White and Little families did, and Loyalist leader Nathaniel Ray Thomas was definitely C. of E. after he settled in Nova Scotia in 1776.

In the early 1770s the S.P.G. reported, “The Rev. Mr. Thompson Missionary at Scituate and Marshfield, informs the Society that there is more harmony than formerly between his People and the Dissenters.” But that denominational difference was probably significant in the split of 1774. The Anglican ministers of New England were among the strongest proponents of remaining loyal to the government of the king, who was also the head of their church. Thompson’s work was a likely factor in how Marshfield had more Loyalists, and more fervent Loyalists, than nearby towns—even Scituate.

The Rev. Mr. Thompson died on 2 Dec 1775, after the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. In reporting his death to the S.P.G. the following April, the Rev. Edward Winslow of Braintree said:

He continued firm to his principles to the last. In the support of them, and of his duty to the Church, he met with some harsh treatment, under which he gave substantial evidence of a truly Christian temper, as he also did under a long and painful exercise from bodily infirmities.

The Rev. Dr. Henry Caner of Boston’s King’s Chapel wrote, “It is said that his death was partly owing to bodily disorder, and partly to some uncivil treatment from the rebels in his neighbourhood.” An 1899 book went further: “Being a Royalist he felt it imperative upon him, during the Revolution, to continue praying for the King and was imprisoned therefor, dying from the accompanying exposure.” That was too far, in fact—there are no records of Thompson’s imprisonment. But political stress probably contributed to Thompson’s death at sixty-three.

Thompson’s widow stayed in Scituate and died there in 1813 at the age of ninety-nine. After 1775 the Anglican church in Marshfield lacked both a minister and enough parishioners to remain open. Not until decades later did Trinity Church have a significant presence in the town again.

TOMORROW: A child’s view of Marshfield’s Revolution.

The Mystery of Marshfield’s “many ill disposed people”

I’ve been tracing the political back-and-forth in Marshfield, Massachusetts, often labeled a “Tory town” but more clearly a split town.

When the story left off, the Patriot faction was in the ascendancy. Loyalist leader Nathaniel Ray Thomas had been chased out of Marshfield by crowds from the neighboring communities. As its legislative representative the town had replaced Loyalist Abijah White with a moderate Whig, town clerk and treasurer Nehemiah Thomas. A public meeting had then approved sending him to the extralegal Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

But that wasn’t the end of the seesawing. In January 1775 Abijah White and four other citizens of Marshfield, all also named White, plus five men from neighboring Scituate “In behalf of ourselves and our Associates” wrote to the royal governor, Gen. Thomas Gage:

We the Subscribers Inhabitants of Scituate and Marshfield, being loyall Subjects of his Majesty King George the Third, desireous of Supporting his Crown, & dignity and the Laws of Great Brittain, But being insulted, our persons and property’s threatned by many ill disposed people, who declare their intention of Assembling in great numbers to Attack & destroy us and many others among us who are determined as far as in us lies to Support the Laws of the Realm, and repel by force every unlawfull Attempt to destroy his Majestys good Government over us, Desire we may be Assisted with One Hundred of his Majestys troops to repair to Marshfield as Soon as conveniently may (or such number as may be thought proper) by whose Assistance we will to the Utmost of our power repel and resist any violent or rebellious attempt that may be made against us, or any other of his Majesty’s loyall & peaceable Subjects whom we can protect there are about two Hundred & forty in Marshfield & Scituate who are loyally disposed & who we have good reason to believe will stand forth in Support of his Majestys Government:

That brings us back to the moment when I started this series of posts, the arrival of Capt. Nisbet Balfour and one hundred soldiers, two drummers, four corporals, four sergeants, and three subaltern officers in Marshfield on 23 Jan 1775.

It’s unclear to me whether Nathaniel Ray Thomas was back on his large farm by that time or came back with the troops. In any event, he hosted most of the hundred soldiers while others lived at a nearby tavern belonging to a man the Boston Evening-Post called “Tory White.”

And that tilted the political seesaw once again. As I quoted back here, in February the Loyalists had the numbers to control the town meeting, and they voted official thanks to Gage and Adm. Samuel Graves for providing military support. Sixty-four men left in the minority could do no more than issue a public protest. That’s how the situation remained when the war began.

What were the tensions underlying Marshfield’s split? As of October 1765, the town had appeared united against the Stamp Act, calling it “so terrible a calamity as threatens this Province” and urging its representative to respect the Stamp Act Congress in New York. (Marshfield also condemned “the late riotous proceedings in the town of Boston,” but even Boston was embarrassed about those.) The committee who drew up that anti-Crown message included future Loyalists Abijah White and Nathaniel Ray Thomas as well as future Whig Nehemiah Thomas. So whatever divided the town so deeply and evenly appears to have happened in the next eight years.

Unlike in some other communities I’ve seen, this conflict wasn’t between people whose ancestors had joined the Puritan migration of the early 1600s and other families who had arrived more recently and thus felt a tighter tie to Britain. All the men involved had ancestors among the town’s earliest English settlers.

Nor did this political divide seem to reflect old feuds between families. Certainly family networks were involved in each side’s organizing—as in, for instance, all those Whites asking for troops. But other members of that family were Patriots, such as Benjamin White, who took the responsibility of hiding the town militia company’s gunpowder away from those regulars at his house near the town border.

Likewise, the old Little and Winslow families had politically active members on both sides of the conflict. Nathaniel Ray Thomas and Nehemiah Thomas actually descended from two different early settlers surnamed Thomas, but all the families had intermarried, so it looks very hard to draw lines between them.

Geography played some role in the disagreements. Like a lot of old Massachusetts towns, Marshfield had more than one village by this point, and people living in one spot clamored not to have to go all the way to the old town center for worship, town meetings, and school. A second Congregational meeting had been established in the northern part of town in 1738, called the “Chapel of Ease.”

I mentioned how a proposal to annex part of Scituate, to the west, had become an area of contention between almost evenly matched parties in the early 1770s. Sometime in 1774 the town voted that “one-half of the annual town meeting for the future shall be held & kept at the North meeting house.” In contrast, when Marshfield voted to participate in the Provincial Congress, the body met “at the South meeting house.” And the people who protested the town’s thank-you message to Gen. Gage complained that meeting had been “held in a part of the Town where a Town Meeting was never before had.”

Yet there doesn’t seem to have been one neighborhood where all the Loyalists lived. Crown supporters Nathaniel Ray Thomas and Dr. Isaac Winslow lived in the south part of town, as did Whig Nehemiah Thomas and radical young men like Benjamin White.

The weather may have been a factor in which party won votes at town meetings, especially if that factor was combined with having to travel longer. Generally the pro-Crown party prevailed at meetings held in January through March while the pro-Whig party won votes from June through October. But that might be just an artifact of incomplete records and turbulent years.

TOMORROW: Was the Rev. Ebenezer Thompson a factor in Marshfield’s split?

London’s Response to the Marshfield Loyalists

In February 1775 Gen. Thomas Gage received the thanks of the town of Marshfield, or at least of the Loyalist majority at that February town meeting, for stationing British soldiers in that town.

The royal governor responded as protocol demanded: he sent back a public letter of gratitude, praising the citizens’ initiative “at a Time when Treason and Rebellion is making such hasty Strides to overturn our most excellent Constitution, and spread Ruin and Destruction through the Province.” Likewise, Adm. Samuel Graves thanked the town for its loyalty.

Back in January, Gage had reported to his superiors in London how he had sent troops to Marshfield and expected good results. He might even have started to turn the political tide, regaining some control over Massachusetts outside of Boston.

Marshfield came up as Parliament debated further steps to pacify New England. Former governor Thomas Hutchinson (shown above) visited the House of Lords on the afternoon of 16 March. In his diary he recorded that one of the colonies’ strongest supporters, Lord Camden

upbraided the Ministry with being pleased with every appearance of concession from the Americans: a little town of Marshfield had desired soldiers from Gage; he thought it was an inland town, and that 100 men had marched 40 miles into the country without being destroyed: but, alas! it appears by the map to be a town upon the sea coast, to which the men were sent by water—a town which had six of Mr Hutchinson’s Justices in it.

Upon mentioning my name, most of the Bishops, and many Lords who sat with their backs to me, turned about and looked in my face. It happened that I never made a Justice in that town whilst I was in the Government.

Two days later, Hutchinson complained to Jonathan Sewall in unusually emotional terms about Lord Camden’s remark:

I am a little angry wth him for asserting that the departure of the little town of Marshfield from the confederacy was owing to Mr Hutchinson’s having made six Justices there, wch. brought the eyes of the Lords upon me, who, I doubt not, believed him, though it happens unluckily for him that I never made a Justice in that town. Our American patr[iots] hardly exceed him in boldly asserting, to say the least, what he knows not to be true (you may transpose not if you will) to support his cause.

Ld Suffolk spake very well. Ld Mansf. was silent, but looked with sovereign contempt upon his adversary. Attending two or three debates in the H. of L. has lessened the high opinion I had formed of the dignity of it when I was in England before.

On 30 March, Parliament passed the New England Restraining Act, designed to apply economic pressure to the whole region in the same way the Boston Port Bill was squeezing Boston. That law limited both trade and fishing out of New England ports. However, it made a couple of exceptions, such as:

XI. Provided also, and be it enacted by the authority aforesaid, That nothing in this Act contained respecting the Fisheries carried on by his Majesty’s subjects in North America, shall extend, or be construed to extend, to any Ship or Vessel being the property of any of the inhabitants of the Townships of Marshfield and Scituate, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, employed in or carrying on the Mackerel, Shad, and Alewife Fisheries only, if the Master or other person having the charge of any such Ship or Vessel as aforesaid, shall produce a Certificate, under the hand and seal of the Governour or Commander-in-Chief of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, setting forth that such Ship or Vessel, (expressing her name and the name of her Master, and describing her built and burthen) is the whole and entire property of his Majesty’s subjects of the said Townships of Marshfield and Scituate, and was the property of one or more of them, on or before the twenty-fifth day of March, in the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, which Certificate or Certificates such Governour or Commander-in-Chief is hereby authorized and required to grant.

Thus, Parliament viewed Marshfield and its neighbor to the north—the one part of Massachusetts that appeared to have welcomed the king’s troops—as not part of the rebellion.

TOMORROW: Was Marshfield a “Tory town”?

A Plymouth County Protest “as if written with a sunbeam”

The letters I quoted yesterday described the arrival of about a hundred British soldiers in Marshfield on 23 Jan 1775, sent by Gen. Thomas Gage to support the local Loyalists. Those letters also reported that Patriots in the region had started to muster against those troops but hung back.

Instead, the nearby communities protested through their civil representatives and some high-flying rhetoric. They sent a letter to the governor that was published in the 27 Feb 1775 Boston Evening-Post:

We, his majesty’s loyal subjects, selectmen of the several towns of Plymouth, Kingston, Duxbury, Pembroke, Hanover, and Scituate, deeply affected with a sense of the increasing dangers and calamities which menace one of the most promising countries upon earth with political excision, cannot but lament, that, while we are endeavoring to preserve peace and maintain the authority of the laws, at a period when the bonds of government are relaxed, by violent infractions on the charter of the province, our enemies are practising every insidious stratagem to seduce the people into acts of violence and outrage.

We beg leave to address your excellency, on a subject which excites our apprehensions extremely: and, in the representation of facts, we promise to pay that sacred regard to truth, which, had our adversaries observed, we flatter ourselves, it would have precluded the necessity of our addressing your excellency, on this occasion.

We are informed, from good authority, that a number of people from Marshfield and Scituate, have made application to your excellency, soliciting the aid of a detachment of his majesty’s troops, for the security and protection of themselves and properties. That their fears and intimidation were entirely groundless, that no design or plan of molestation, was formed against them, or existed but in their own imaginations, their own declarations, and their actions, which have a more striking language, abundantly demonstrate.

Several men of unquestionable veracity, residing in the town of Marshfield, have solemnly called God to witness, before one of his majesty’s justices of the peace, that they not only never heard of any intention to disturb the complainants, but repeatedly saw them after they pretended to be under apprehensions of danger, attending to their private affairs, without arms, and even after they had lodged their arms a few miles from their respective houses. They frequently declared, in conversation with the deponents, that they were not apprehensive of receiving any injury in their persons or properties, and one of them, who is a minor, as many of them are, being persuaded to save his life by adjoining himself to the petitioners, but afterwards abandoning them by the request of his father, deposeth, in like solemn manner, that he was under no intimidation himself, nor did he ever hear any one of them say that he was.

It appears as evident, as if written with a sunbeam, from the general tenor of the testimony, which we are willing to lay before your excellency if desired, that their expressions of fear, were a fallacious pretext, dictated by the inveterate enemies of our constitution, to induce your excellency to send troops into the country, to augment the difficulties of our situation, already very distressing; and, what confirms this truth, if it needs any confirmation, is, the assiduity and pains which we have taken to investigate it. We have industriously scrutinized into the cause of this alarm, and cannot find that it has the least foundation in reality.

All that we have in view in this address is, to lay before your excellency a true state of facts, and to remove that opprobrium, which this movement of the military reflects on this country: and as a spirit of enmity and falsehood is prevalent in the country, and as every thing which comes from a gentleman of your excellency’s exalted station naturally acquires great weight and importance, we earnestly entreat your excellency to search into the grounds of every report, previous to giving your assent to it.

(This transcription was published in the journals of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress with 1800s spellings and punctuation. A contemporaneous printing is preserved in the Harbottle Dorr newspaper collection.)

Those towns also petitioned to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which on 15 February voted:

That the Congress do highly approve of the vigilance and activity of the selectmen and the committees of correspondence of the several towns of Plymouth, Kingston, Duxbury, Pembroke, Hanover, and Scituate, in detecting the falsehoods and malicious artifices of certain persons belonging to Marshfield and Scituate, not respectable either in their numbers or their characters, who are, with great reason, supposed to have been the persons who prevailed upon General Gage to take the imprudent step, of sending a number of the king’s troops into Marshfield, under pretence of protecting them: whereby great and just offence has been given to the good people of this province, as very fatal consequences must have arisen therefrom, if the same malevolent spirit which seems to have influenced them, had actuated the inhabitants of the neighboring towns; or if the same indiscretion which betrayed the general into the unwarrantable measure of sending the troops, had led this people to destroy them.

At this point the Massachusetts Patriots were anxious to deny or play down any reports of violence and intimidation, presenting themselves to the world as peaceful citizens. The Boston Gazette’s first comment on the troops in Marshfield carried a similar message.

No matter that there had indeed been some documented incidents of violence in the Massachusetts countryside. Or that fear of crowds had driven many supporters of the Crown out of their home towns and into Boston. Or that the Provincial Congress was secretly, as I discuss in The Road to Concord, gathering cannon.

TOMORROW: The Marshfield town meeting.

Marshfield’s Special Spot on the Road to Concord, 7 July

On Thursday, 7 July, I’ll speak on “The Road to Concord: How Massachusetts Moved Toward War in 1774-75” at the Winslow House in Marshfield. There will be a book signing and light refreshments afterwards. Admission is $5 for members of the Historic Winslow House Association, $7 for others. If you’re on the South Shore, please come!

In The Road to Concord, and in my talks about it, I say that after the “Powder Alarm” on 2 Sept 1774, Gen. Thomas Gage’s authority as royal governor of Massachusetts stopped at the gates of Boston. That was of course more than seven months before actual war broke out.

In the fall of 1774 Gage held power in Boston and in nearby Castle William. In every other town of the province, people were free to ignore the Massachusetts Government Act, and they did. They kept the courts closed and the Provincial Congress open, and there was almost nothing the governor could do about it.

There was one exception to that pattern, however. In 1775 Gen. Gage wrested back some control over Marshfield, a coastal town in Plymouth County.

That episode started with a call by Timothy Ruggles, a former speaker of the Massachusetts House and militia general, for men to form a military Association to support the royal government. A large contingent of Loyalists from Marshfield answered that call, led by Nathaniel Ray Thomas, one of the mandamus Council. A letter sent from Boston on 26 Jan 1775 described how folks in the neighboring towns responded in turn:

About a week ago, one hundred and fifty of the principal inhabitants of the Town of Marshfield entered into General Ruggles’s Association against the Liberty plan. When this was known at Plymouth, the faction there threatened to come down in a body and make them recant, or drive them off their farms; on this the Marshfield Associators sent an express to General Gage, to acquaint him with their situation and determination, and to beg his support.

On 23 January, the governor detached Capt. Nisbet Balfour of the 4th Regiment to support the Marshfield Loyalists. The letter described him as bringing “three Subalterns, and a hundred private men,” plus “three hundred stand of Arms for the use of the gentlemen of Marshfield.” Those companies landed near the mouth of the North River and moved into buildings on Thomas’s estate.

The next day, one of those supporters reported on the regulars’ arrival in a letter which James Rivington later printed in his newspaper in New York:

Two hundred of the principal inhabitants of this loyal Town, insulted and intimidated by the licentious spirit that unhappily has been prevalent amongst the lower ranks, of people in the Massachusetts Government, having applied to the Governour for a detachment of his Majesty’s Troops to assist in preserving the peace, and to check the insupportable insolence of the disaffected and turbulent, were happily relieved by the appearance of Captain Balfour’s party, consisting of one hundred Soldiers, who were joyfully received by the Loyalists.

Upon their arrival, the valour of the Minute-Men was called forth by [Samuel] Adams’s crew; they were accordingly mustered, and to the unspeakable confusion of the enemies of our happy Constitution, no more than twelve persons presented themselves to bear Arms against the Lord’s anointed. It was necessary that some apology should be made for the scanty appearance of their volunteers, and they coloured it over with a declaration that “had the party sent to Marshfield consisted of half a dozen Battalions, it might have been worth their attention to meet and engage them; but a day would come when the courage of their Minute host would be able to clear the country of all their enemies, howsoever formidable in numbers.”

The King’s Troops are very comfortably accommodated, and preserve the most exact discipline; and now every faithful subject to his King dare freely utter his thoughts, drink his Tea, and kill his Sheep as profusely as he pleases.

The Patriot movement was encouraging Americans to make as much wool as possible so as to supply American spinners and weavers and cut down the need for imported cloth. Killing a sheep for meat had therefore become a political act.

On 27 January, Gen. Gage reported to the Earl of Dartmouth in London:

The town of Marshfield, with part of that of Scituate, having been lately under terrors…from the threats of their neighbours, for having formed some associations amongst themselves, applied to me for protection; and I have sent a detachment of one hundred men to their relief. It is the first instance of an application to government for assistance, which the faction has ever tried to persuade the people they would never obtain, but be left to themselves.

Three weeks later he confidently added, “The sending a detachment to Marshfield has had a good effect in that quarter of the country, and I hope will encourage other places, where oppression is felt, to make applications of the same nature.”

TOMORROW: Protests from the neighboring towns.

Israel Litchfield and “the Space for the Singers”

At Walking the Berkshires, Tim Abbott just posted several excerpts from the diary of Israel Litchfield, a young sergeant from Scituate during the busy winter of 1774-75. The diary shows the process of organizing militia companies, including learning new drills, electing officers, and gathering and making equipment.

So what was on Sgt. Litchfield’s mind on 10 Apr 1775? The important issue of who sat where in the town’s new meetinghouse. The previous 4 December, Litchfield had written, “the Carpenters have got all the pews Sat up and Some of the Seats the Space for the Singers was erected Last week.” But who sat where was an issue of great importance in colonial New England; assigned pews were valuable real estate.

in the Evening I went to Mr. Willm. Haydens In order to meet the Rest of the propretors to Settle Some affairs Relative to faceing & Seeting our Selves

they got the Vote for the Singers to face the minister when they Sang and We Chose out of the Body a Committee Consisting of the following Gentlemen to wit Capt. Insign Otis Messrs: Wm. Hayden Lawrence Litchfield Nemiah Merritt Joshua Otis & Benja. Bailey

they made their Report to the body wich was accepted (mind by the way that before this Comittee went out we had agreed that five of the Bass & five of the tennor Do Set in a Seet) the Report of the Comittee is as follows towards the weomen Viz at the right hand Was Seated mr. Wm: Haydon Next to him Viz at his Left hand Mr. James Turner Junr. Next mr. Joshua otis Junr.

at the right Hand of the Bafs mr. Hayward pierce next Capt. Infign Otis next Daniel Litchfd., Next my Self next Elisha Lappum these are to fill the fore Seet

after the meeting broke up I went home with Abednego Wade

So Litchfield, still in his early twenties and unmarried, at least knew where he would sit.

Israel Litchfield’s diary was published in a family history in 1906 and in the New England Historic and Genealogical Register in 1975. If I remember, I’ll post extracts about how he viewed the start of the war in the spring.

[The thumbnail above shows Scituate’s First Parish today. The meetinghouse that Israel Litchfield knew was destroyed in a fire in 1879, but a pulpit and communion table survived.]