The Mysterious “Negro Co. from Sharon”

Earlier this spring, my eye was caught by a description of this document on the Internet Archive:

Muster roll of Negro Co. from Sharon.

The document is a Revolutionary War muster roll in the collection of the Boston Public Library.

The document and description also show up on Umbra Search, aggregating material related to African-American history from thousands of library catalogues.

I knew about the Rhode Island regiments that recruited from men of African and Native descent. But I also knew those were exceptions to how the Continental Army operated, and after a couple of years commanders decided to spread out the veterans of those regiments among others. On the enlisted level, all sources say, the Continentals were integrated.

So what was up with this “Negro Co. from Sharon”?

I looked more closely at the document. None of the men is designated as “Negro.” None have names that suggest they had been enslaved, such as Quock, Prince, or Caesar. In fact, the label “Negro Co[mpany]” appears nowhere on this paper.

Here’s what I’m sure happened. The commander of this company was Capt. William Burley of Ipswich. In February 1780 he was captured by Crown forces in the Battle for Young’s House outside New York that I happened to write about back here. Burley’s name still appears first on this muster roll, but he was listed as a prisoner of war.

The regimental commander, Col. Benjamin Tupper from the part of Stoughton became Sharon in 1775, therefore took direct command of Burley’s company. In British regiments, the colonel often had a company assigned to him, though a captain-lieutenant or lieutenant usually did all the real work. The Continental Army didn’t follow that pattern after the first months of the war, but this was a special case.

In September, Col. Tupper reported, “There is a very considerable deficiency of Officers in the Regiment,” and recommended several men for commissions. Recognizing the need, Gen. George Washington gave blanket approval for new officers.

Nevertheless, at the end of 1780, when Lt. Nehemiah Emerson of Haverhill made out this muster roll, Tupper was still the acting company commander. Emerson therefore labeled this listing as “the Colo. Company”—the colonel’s company.

At some point a cataloguer looked at that abbreviation and interpreted it to mean “the colored company.” Then or later, that language was updated to “the Negro company.” And that label hung around in the cataloguing data long enough to catch my eye and make me scratch my head for a while.

Dr. Samuel Curtis Goes to War

When, last September, I left Dr. Samuel Curtis of Marlborough, his wife Lydia and their two babies had all died in December 1774.

Lydia Curtis had been married before, to Dr. Ebenezer Dexter. Three teen-aged sons from that first marriage were still alive. The oldest, William Dexter, married in Shrewsbury in early 1775, so he was probably already in that town, training under another medical doctor.

I suspect the younger two boys were living with Lydia’s parents, who were wealthy and influential in Marlborough.

Dr. Curtis had served on Marlborough’s committee of correspondence since 1772 and represented the town at the 1774 Middlesex County convention. After his wife’s death, he may have thrown himself even more into the Patriot movement. In March 1775, as I recounted here, Curtis took the lead in hunting for British army spies seeking refuge at Henry Barnes’s house.

There are no records of how Curtis responded to the outbreak of war the next month. His name doesn’t appear in militia records. He continued to serve on town committees, and in the fall of 1775 the Massachusetts legislature appointed him a justice of the peace.

(Dr. Curtis was a son of the Rev. Philip Curtis of the second precinct of Stoughton, which in 1775 became the new town of Sharon. Late the following year, Samuel’s younger sister Susanna Curtis married his former trainee, Dr. Daniel Cony [1752-1842, shown above later in life], whose family had moved out to Shutesbury. Dr. Cony spent chunks of the next few years in military service. Eventually the Conys moved up to Maine, where one of his medical colleagues was the midwife Martha Ballard. But I digress.)

William Dexter turned twenty-one in 1776. I believe that meant he came into his mother’s Marlborough property, where Dr. Curtis had been living as a widower. That gave the doctor three reasons to make a life change:

• psychological, after his wife and children’s deaths.
• domestic, as his stepson was taking over the family home.
• political, to help fight the war.

And impulse control might not have been Curtis’s strength.

In March 1777, Dr. Samuel Curtis signed on to be surgeon aboard the Hancock, the first frigate built for the Continental Navy. He would serve under Capt. John Manley, who in the fall of 1775 had proved to be the most stealthy and successful naval officer in the Continental military, winning several important prizes. Manley had been granted the authority of a commodore, meaning that in company with other Continental vessels he could boss their captains.

The Hancock was an excellent product of Newburyport shipwrights. Some British officers would even deem it “the finest and fastest frigate in the world.” It carried 24 twelve-pounder cannon and 10 six-pounders, plus a crew of 290 men. Dr. Curtis spent his first two months in the navy collecting medical supplies for that vessel.

On 21 May the Hancock slipped out of Boston harbor, past the Royal Navy patrols lurking in the ocean. Along with it came the Continental frigate Boston, 30 guns, commanded by Hector MacNeill; the privateer American Tartar, 24 guns, under John Grimes; and eight other, smaller privateers. Manley’s target was British fishing vessels and unaccompanied merchant ships.

TOMORROW: Dr. Curtis’s first fights at sea.