”Marched 8 Miles towards Boston on the late Alarm”

The third of Boston’s politically active physicians, Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., also wrote to Samuel Adams on 4 Sept 1774.

Church hadn’t been among the Whig leaders who went out to Cambridge in an attempt to calm the militia men who responded to the “Powder Alarm” before the situation became violent.

Instead, he passed on information from central Massachusetts:

Mr. Stearns just arrived from Paxton informs me that the Inhabitants of Springfield, Leicester, Paxton, Spencer and the Towns adjacent had risen in one body armed & equipped and had proceeded on their March as far as Shrewsbury on their way to Boston to the Number of Twenty Thousand, and were with difficulty perswaded to return, and would not till from many Passengers from this way they were convinced that there was no necessity for their Assistance at this time.

Church’s informant was likely Dr. Samuel Stearns (1741–1809), a physician and almanac-maker who lived in Paxton in this period. During the war he was accused of being a Tory and jailed for passing counterfeit bills, and then he fled to British-occupied New York.

The number of 20,000 militia men is clearly an exaggeration. A few days later, a head count of the turnout to close the Worcester County court session totaled 4,722 men, including 180 from Leicester, 80 from Paxton, and 164 from Spencer—and that was deemed a large number.

Other Boston Whigs told similar stories of rural companies feeling disappointed that they didn’t reach the scene of action in Cambridge on 2 September.

For some people, that emotion lasted a while longer. On 6 November, John Adams was coming back from the First Continental Congress when he stopped in Palmer, Massachusetts (not yet incorporated and therefore still referred to as “Kingsfield” or “Kingston” after an early settler, John King).

New England laws forbade travel from one town to another on the Sabbath except in emergencies. Adams and his colleagues therefore had to spend that whole day in Palmer. In his diary he wrote:

We walked to Meeting above 2 Miles at Noon. We walked 1/4 of a Mile and staid at one Quintouns an old Irishman, and a friendly cordial Reception we had. The old Man was so rejoiced to see us he could hardly speak—more glad to see Us he said than he should to see [Thomas] Gage and all his Train.—

I saw a Gun. The young Man said that Gun marched 8 Miles towards Boston on the late Alarm. Almost the whole Parish marched off, and the People seemed really disappointed, when the News was contradicted.

Adams’s host appears to have been Duncan Quinton, born in Ireland in 1694 and dying in 1776. He and his wife Eunice had sons John (1743–) and Thomas (1746—), who married a month apart in 1771 (Thomas because his son Robert arrived seven months later). One of those young Quintons probably told Adams about the gun.

Given the spirit evident in the fall of 1774, it’s disappointing that there are few if any first-hand accounts from men who marched in the Powder Alarm. One factor is that those same men probably marched at the news from Lexington, and perhaps when Gen. John Burgoyne approached from the north. Therefore, the memory of a march that didn’t go anywhere or end in any fighting could easily be overshadowed.

How the Massachusetts Press Responded to the 1783 Earthquake

Prompted by Karen Kleemann’s article quoted yesterday, I looked at how Massachusetts newspapers treated the 29 Nov 1783 earthquake and found some interesting details.

First, we’re used to a standard time extending across an entire time zone. But before railroads, every town had its own noon, and therefore its own perception of when something big happened.

The Massachusetts Gazette and General Advertiser in Springfield said this earthquake was felt “at 40 minutes past 10 o’clock.” The Boston Gazette reported it at “about six minutes before eleven o’clock.” And the Salem Gazette pegged it “at about 11 o’clock.” Of course, it took a few seconds for the shock to travel between those places. The big difference in those times came from how the Earth spins.

All those reports appeared in the first week of December. Starting on 8 December, Massachusetts newspapers began reporting on other places people detected the quake. Printers wondered if it wasn’t as small an event as it first seemed. On 12 December, the Salem Gazette said the shaking was definitely worse in Connecticut and New York.

By 18 December, the newspapers from Philadelphia had arrived, and Massachusetts printers could share details from nearer the epicenter in New Jersey. China and pewter thrown off shelves! People woken from sleep! Aftershocks later the same night!

Still, there were no deaths. Earlier in the year, American newspapers had reprinted news of many people dying from earthquakes in Italy, and similar reports from China.

Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy editorialized:

This year must make a conspicuous figure in the instructive records of Time: Great revolutions have occured in the natural and political world.

In Europe the convulsions of nature have destroyed a great part of Sicily, &c. with about one hundred thousand inhabitants. In America such events have taken place, as were before unknown to its civilized inhabitants.

What gratitude is due from us to heaven for its Benedictions—Independence, as a Nation, with the blessings of Peace; and that we have not in the first transports of our national existence met with those calamities that might in a moment have reduced our Continent to its original Chaos!

The Salem Gazette’s 12 December follow-up to its first report ran just above a local disaster with real damage: A fire in John Piemont’s barn in Ipswich had killed one cow and consumed all his hay for the winter.

Back in 1770, Piemont was a hair stylist at the center of Boston, and at the center of Boston events, as I discussed back here. He was able to bounce back from this fire, and in 1784 advertised that he once more offered a stable for horses.

(The broadside shown above dates from almost thirty years after this quake.)

“Do what you can to forward Mr. Swift to me”

Contemporaneous sources about Samuel Swift’s last months are thin.

Swift turned sixty years old on 9 June 1775. His first wife, the former Eliphal Tyley or Tilley (1713–1757), had borne three daughters in the 1740s.

One of those daughters, Sarah, had gone to live with her husband Amos Putnam in Sutton. The other two, Ann and Eliphal, were still unmarried in 1770, but I can’t trace them further.

In October 1757 Swift had married for a second time, to Ann Foster (1729–1788). That couple had six children between 1758 and 1773, and those children were with their parents in Boston when the war began.

The Swifts were still in the besieged town two months later, during the Battle of Bunker Hill. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband on 25 June 1775:

As to Boston, there are many persons yet there who would be glad to get out if they could. Mr. [Thomas] Boylstone and Mr. [John] Gill the printer with his family are held upon the black list tis said. Tis certain they watch them so narrowly that they cannot escape, nor your Brother Swift and family.

Around that time, however, Ann Swift managed to get a pass for herself and her children from a British army officer named Handfield—probably Capt. William Handfield of the 94th Regiment, who was attached to the quartermaster’s department in June.

By the end of that month, Ann Swift and her family were in Springfield. She wrote in her diary, as printed in The Memoirs of Gen. Joseph Gardner Swift:

Here I am in the woods, Boston being so surrounded by armies that we could not enjoy our home: no school for the children, and the town forsaken by the ministers—the pillars of the land.

In the following weeks she wrote to that army officer for another favor:

Capt. Handfield, S[i]r,

Your kindness in undertaking to get a pass for me emboldens me to ask the like favor for my dear husband whom I hear is in a very weak state of health. The anxiety of my mind is great about him. A word from you would have more weight than all the arguments that he could make use of.

Could I come to him, this favor I would not ask. O, S[i]r I trust in your goodness that you will do what you can to forward Mr. Swift to me and in doing so you will greatly oblige
Your distressed friend,
ANN SWIFT.

Should be glad if he would bring out two trunks which there is clothing in that I want very much for myself and children.

Evidently the royal authorities didn’t provide a second pass. Samuel Swift remained inside Boston. Margaret Draper’s Boston News-Letter reported that he died on 30 August.

On 4 September, Mercy Warren reported to John Adams in a bald postscript: “Swift of Boston is Really Dead.”

Ann Swift put in her diary this note about that 30 August date:

Departed this life, in the 61st year of his age, my dear husband, Samuel Swift. He died in Boston, or in other words, murdered there. He was not allowed to come to see me and live with his wife and children in the country. There he gave up the ghost—his heart was broken; the cruel treatment he met with in being a friend to his country was more than he could bear, with six fatherless children (in the woods) and all my substance in Boston.

Thus began the family tradition of blaming Gen. Thomas Gage for Swift’s death—not through violence but by not letting him leave Boston when ill to rejoin his family.

Swift’s body was placed in a tomb belonging to his first wife’s family in the burying-ground beside King’s Chapel, shown above.

TOMORROW: The family legend.

“Henry Knox Symposium” in Springfield, 6 May

On Saturday, 6 May, Springfield Armory National Historic Site and the Friends of Springfield Armory will host a “Henry Knox Symposium” looking at the bookseller, the artillery officer, the secretary of war.

When the Revolutionary War began, Henry Knox was still in his early twenties and married to the daughter of Massachusetts’s royal secretary. Within a couple of years he was one of Gen. George Washington’s closest colleagues, helping to lead the Continental Army and then the new nation.

Perhaps most importantly, Knox had a quality that’s hard to nail down on paper: lots of people just thought he was fun to be around.

Here’s the lineup of speakers and topics, basically in chronological order:

• J. L. Bell [that’s me], “Henry Knox, Loyalist?”
• Nathan D. Wells, formerly Quincy College, “Henry Knox: A Flawed Brilliant Amateur, A Microcosm of the American Struggle for Independence”
• Matthew Keagle, Curator, Fort Ticonderoga, “Knox Alone?”
• William F. Sheehan, Historical Services Branch, Massachusetts Military Division, “Henry Knox’s Fortnight in Albany: The Knox Expedition Finds Its Footing”
• Maria G. Cole, Boston National Historical Park, “Henry Knox and the Siege of Boston”
• Richard Colton, Springfield Armory (retired), “Henry Knox and the Establishment of ‘The American Foundry’ at Springfield Arsenal, Massachusetts, 1776–1800: Assuring Independence”
• Roger Johnson, Friends of the Springfield Armory, “Henry Knox and the Constitutional Convention: The Knox/Washington Letters”

This event will take place from 9:00 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. Registration is free, but organizers strongly recommend attendees purchase the box lunch for $12 (that’s the “ticket” on Eventbrite) or bring their own meal. There are limited eating options nearby, and the whole point of a symposium is supposed to be spending time talking with other people over food instead of driving around, right?

The “Henry Knox Symposium” will take place on the 7th floor of Scibelli Hall, Bldg 2, at Springfield Technical Community College, One Armory Square, in Springfield.

Henry Knox Symposium in Springfield, 6 May

Springfield Armory National Historic Site and the Friends of Springfield Armory N.H.S. are organizing a one-day public symposium on Henry Knox, to be held on 6 May 2023.

As commander of artillery for the Continental Army, Knox recommended making Springfield the site of an arsenal and laboratory. That facility remained a federal armory in the early republic while Knox rose to be secretary of war.

The organizers have announced, “We invite scholars, historians, archivists, curators, and other interested parties to submit abstracts for short presentations that address Henry Knox and his role in American history.” These can include explorations of less admirable facets of this “complex and controversial man,” not just heroic portraits.

Presentations will be thirty minutes long (fifteen double-spaced pages when typed out) with ten minutes for questions. Up to eight proposals will be selected for the symposium.

Prospective presenters should send an abstract of no more than 500 words about their topic, including the presenter’s full name, contact information (name, title, organization, address, phone, email), and a 100-word biography. To send proposals, use the “email us” link on this page.

The due date for proposals is 8 March. By 22 March, the organizers will notify prospects if their proposals have been accepted. The presentations will be due on 19 April in order to ensure they will be ready for 6 May.

Independence Booth in the New Nation

Toward the end of 1778, when Independence Booth was two years old, her parents had a little girl named Hannah. She was their ninth and last child; mother Mary Booth was then forty-five years old.

It looks like Joseph Booth was home for the rest of the Revolutionary War, though his neighbors in Enfield, Connecticut, would continue to call him “Captain Booth” as a courtesy for the rest of his life.

Independence Booth grew up in Enfield and married a man named Danforth Charles in 1802. He appears to have been born in Brimfield, Massachusetts, in 1779. Their first child was a boy named Henry, born in September 1803 but dying thirteen months later. In 1805 they had another boy, whom they also named Henry.

In late 1806, the couple conceived a third child. But in January 1807, Danforth Charles died. Independence gave birth in June to a girl she named Hannah. The widow still had her parents and most of her siblings nearby for support, though Mary and Joseph Booth died in 1809 and 1810, respectively.

In 1817 Independence Charles was listed as an inhabitant of Springfield, Massachusetts, when she married Lewis Barber of Ludlow there. That marriage was newsworthy enough to be reported in the Franklin Herald of Greenfield. Three years later, the Enfield church dismissed “Widow Independence Charles” to the congregation at Ludlow; she and her children had probably already made the move.

In 1828 Independence (Booth Charles) Barber died in Ludlow, survived by her third husband and her two children, then in their twenties. Courtesy of Revolution Happened Here, her gravestone in that town appears above, showing her birthdate as 4 July 1776. She had lived to see the fiftieth anniversary of the independence she was named after. Notably, the gravestone also includes her original surname.

The following year, daughter Hannah Charles married Elisha Taylor Parsons, a man from Enfield who had settled in Ludlow as a schoolteacher. He would become locally prominent as a deacon and town officeholder. Later Hannah’s older brother Henry married a woman named Nancy Parsons; I can’t confirm her family tie to Hannah’s husband. Both of Independence’s children had children of their own, passing on the story of how she was (almost) born on the 4th of July.

“Playing with a loaded Gun”

In the same 14 Dec 1772 issue of the Fleet brothers’ Boston Evening-Post that I mentioned yesterday, just above the rumors about Rhode Island, were two stories of firearms deaths.

Longtime Boston 1775 readers might remember when we discussed the pseudo-historian David Barton’s offhand claim that there were almost no firearms accidents in the Founding era. We found a lot.

Here are two more:

We hear from Springfield, that two Lads about 10 Years of Age, playing with a loaded Gun, one of them shot the other in the Groin, and mortally wounded him, so that he died within two Hours after.

The identical item had appeared in the Boston News-Letter on 10 December, pushing back the date of the event a few days. I looked in Springfield’s vital records for a death that matched this report and didn’t find one. It’s possible that the news came from Springfield but the boys lived in a nearby town. In any case, kids, don’t play with guns.

The Fleets went on to print:

We hear from East Hampton, on Long Island, that on Monday the 30th of November, being Training Day there, as the Company were discharging their Muskets, in order to break up, a young Man, named Osborne, thinking to make a louder Explosion than the rest, spat into the Muzzle of his Gun, & struck the Breech against the Ground, when she went off, and the whole Charge enter’d at his left Eye, and blow’d his Brains out; he expir’d in a few Minutes after.

Some internet research brought up not only the the name of this militiaman but his grave, shown above.

East Hampton, New York’s vital records state that on 30 Nov 1772 “Jedediah Osborn, Junr., was shot to Death.” The gravestone reads, per an issue of the New England Historic and Genealogical Register:

This Monument Erected
by Col. Gardner, Capt.
Mulford Lieut. Dayton &
their Soldiers, is in
Memory of Jedediah
Osborn, who was Kill’d
by the Discharge of his
Gun, Novr. 30th. 1772 in
the 21st. Year of his Age.
How sudden was my Death
Life is but fleeting Breath

The colonel was probably Thomas Gardiner. There were too many Mulfords and Daytons active in the Long Island militia in 1776, a year for which records are published, for me to name the other officers.

Whoever the officers were, it’s clear that they felt very bad seeing Jedediah kill himself, evidently just hoping for some fun. Some of those other men might also have been competing to make the loudest noise. This was the sort of militia training hijinks that Timothy Pickering warned about.

Also, though the story of Osborn’s death made the newspapers in neighboring states, the embarrassing circumstances were kept out of the official record and not carved in stone. Local tradition now says he was “a Revolutionary War soldier killed by friendly fire.” This may be the first time the newspaper item and gravestone are tied back together.

(The image of the Osborn gravestone above comes from B.S.A. Troop 298 via Find a Grave.)

Calvin Piper in Sickness, War, and Peace

Yesterday we left eleven-year-old Calvin Piper of Westborough in bed after falling off a colt and banging his head in August 1774.

Dr. James Hawes gave the boy a poor prognosis. The Rev. Ebenezer Parkman came to pray with him.

After a few days, Hawes gathered some medical colleagues to consult and perhaps perform surgery to relieve pressure in Calvin’s skull.

But on that morning of 6 August, Calvin woke up feeling much better than before. He was no longer delirious or babbling. The surgeons reconsidered.

The Rev. Mr. Parkman wrote in his diary:

It was feared the Trepan must be used: but it was first determined to take off part of his scalp and examine his Head. We began with prayer. Dr. [Charles] Russel [shown here] performed the Operation, and finding the grumous Blood, and that there was no Fracture, desisted from any thing further.

So Calvin was sewn up and allowed to keep recovering on his own. Parkman visited him again a couple of days later, and then Calvin drops out of the minister’s diary, presumably going back to normal farm boy behavior.

Nearly two years later, as the British military was preparing to leave Boston, Parkman had to visit the Piper family again. On Sunday, 10 Mar 1776, he wrote:

At Even went to see Mrs. Piper, newly brought to bed, and is very low; prayed with her in her Distresses.

The next day, Parkman added, “She is in a dangerous state.” And on Tuesday:

Capt. Wheelock early, Suddenly, hastily calls me to Visit Mrs. Piper as being near her End. I rode speedily (before Breakfast — nay before Family Prayer), found her groaning as in very great Distress. Prayed with her, Commending her Case to God, most gracious and compassionate. . . .

Mrs. Piper dyed about noon, about 42 and an half.

The funeral was on Thursday, 14 March. The minister noted, “her Father Whitcomb and one of her Brothers were there.”

The Parkman diary thus contains some clues to the Piper family history. The mention of “Father Whitcomb” might indicate Mary Piper’s surname at birth. There were Mary Whitcombs born in Bolton and its parent town, Lancaster, in the 1730s. However, none was born in 1733 and thus “about 42 and an half” in 1776. It’s also possible that “Father Whitcomb” was a stepfather.

In addition, Parkman’s record confirms that this Mary Piper died in 1776. John Piper remarried the next year to a woman from Templeton named Mary White. That means there were two wives named Mary Piper having John’s children in quick succession, and some genealogies don’t recognize they were separate women.

Back to Calvin Piper: As he reached his late teens, he had a new stepmother. Did that push him to leave the house? Or did he want some adventure, or just need money? Whatever the combination of reasons, on 1 July 1780 Calvin enlisted among the “men raised to reinforce the Continental Army for the term of 6 months.” When he reported to the camp at Springfield, Calvin was recorded as seventeen years old, 5'4" tall, with a ruddy complexion.

Pvt. Piper served a little more than five months at West Point, New York, before being discharged. He liked the experience enough to reenlist the following June. By now he was an inch taller and had been trained as a tanner, perhaps in a family shop. This time there was a dispute about whether he was counted in the quota for Lancaster or Templeton—not that it mattered to him. Piper agreed to serve three years, but the war ended before that term was up.

The twenty-year-old veteran moved to Norridgewock in the district of Maine. In April 1785 he married Zeriah Parker there. Five years later, however, Mrs. Zeriah Piper remarried, indicating that Calvin Piper had died in his late twenties—about fifteen years after he escaped having a hole drilled in his skull.

John Akley, Continental Drum Major

The next Akley brother, after Francis, Joseph, and Thomas, was John, baptized in September 1757.

In October 1764 John had just turned seven, and the Boston Overseers of the Poor sent him all the way out to Springfield.

Samuel and Lucy Williams promised to teach the boy to “Read Write & Cypher” and give him £13.6s.8d. when he came of age in 1779.

Before that date, war broke out. In April 1775, at the age of seventeen, John Akley marched with the town militia company. That unit got as far as Brookfield before the officers realized the emergency had passed and marched everyone home again. John served only three days that year.

In early 1776, however, John Akley enlisted in the Continental Army. In his pension application filed in May 1818 from Norwich, New York, he recalled that he had then lived in Longmeadow, a part of Springfield that didn’t formally become a town until 1783. Akley reported that he was a drummer and his first company commander was Capt. Silvanus Walker of Brookfield.

With that unit “he was in the battle at Trenton at the taking of the Hesians.” When his year was up, Akley recalled, he was discharged in Newtown, Pennsylvania. He then reenlisted for three years in the company of Capt. Asa Coburn of Sturbridge, regiment of Col. Icahbod Alden of Duxbury. Based on his experience, he was immediately made the drum major. He was nineteen.

During his second stretch, Akley stated, “he was in the Battle at the taking of Burgoin [Saratoga], and at Cherry Vally in the State of New York where the Col. was killed.” On 11 Nov 1778 Crown forces under Joseph Brant and Maj. Walter Butler attacked that settlement, catching Col. Alden and many other officers outside the fort. That defeat with civilian casualties became known to Americans as “the Cherry Valley Massacre.”

On 1 Feb 1780, John Akley was discharged from the regiment, now led by Col. John Brooks, at West Point. He went home and became close to Miriam Ward of West Springfield, then about sixteen years old.

In 1839 Miriam Akeley applied for a pension as John Akley’s widow. The law providing such pensions offered more money to women who had married soldiers while they were still in service. That might have influenced how Miriam Akeley described their nuptials on 29 Oct 1781:

John Akeley (or Ackley as the name is some times spelt) was at home on furlo and could not remain at home a sufficient time to be published according to the laws of Massachusetts, and that they went from West Springfield to Suffield in Connecticut and was there married (without being published) on the day where written by Rev. Mr. [Ebenezer] Gay Minister of said Suffield.

Suffield’s town clerk verified that marriage date. According to his widow, John Akley returned to the army in late 1781, then came home for good a year later.

Nonetheless, John Akley mentioned no such additional year in the army in his 1818 pension application. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War records his last army service in February 1780.

Massachusetts also listed a man named John Ackley serving on board the Continental frigate Hague under Capt. John Manley in 1783. However, that’s probably another man of the same name. John Akley’s 1818 application didn’t mention fighting at sea, either.

Another wrinkle appears in Charles Martyn’s The William Ward Genealogy (1925). It states:

Miriam Ward married John Ackley of Brattleboro, Vt. They resided for a time in Brattleboro, then he disappeared and was never heard of again. She afterwards lived in Wethersfield, Conn.

That book lists two children for the couple, including Polly Ackley, who married a man named Flint in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Polly and John Flint appear in the Akleys’ pension file, so clearly it’s the same family.

According to the 1790 U.S. Census, “John Akeley” was then living in Guilford, Vermont, with one white boy and two white females—no doubt his son, wife, and daughter. That was close to Brattleboro. By 1800 that family may have moved to Hartford County, Connecticut, where a John Ackley and relatives appear on the census.

According to John Flint’s 1838 affidavit, he had known John Akley personally, Miriam Akley had lived at the Flint house in Wethersfield since about 1808, and John Akley was absent from that house “about eighteen or twenty years since.” Around that time, Polly Flint destroyed her father’s drum major warrant, “not supposing it to be of any value.”

Putting the dots together, that suggests John Akley left his extended family in Connecticut and went to central New York before 1818. He applied for a federal pension in Norwich that year. The government paid Akley that pension until he died on 1 Apr 1819.

Eventually word of John Akley’s death got back to his family in Connecticut, though Flint never knew the exact date, thinking it was in June 1820. Almost two decades later, the U.S. government approved a widow’s pension for Miriam Akeley. She was still signing for those payments (albeit with a mark) in 1848 at the age of eighty-five. Miriam Akeley finally died on 8 May 1850, and her gravestone, mentioning her long departed husband by name, appears above.

TOMORROW: An Akley artillerist.

Shays Rebellion Symposium in Springfield, 25 Jan.

On Saturday, 25 Jan 2020, the Friends of Springfield Armory National Historic Site is hosting a symposium titled “Shays Rebellion: Perspectives on History.”

This event will take place on the campus of Springfield Technical Community College, and is co-sponsored by the National Park Service and the Pioneer Valley History Network.

There will be a day of presentations and discussion about the “regulation” in western Massachusetts in 1786 and 1787, the suppression of it, and the far-reaching effects.

The event description says:

While “Shays’ Rebellion” is often seen through an elite perspective of agrarian unrest by western Massachusetts farmers in 1786 and 1787, other viewpoints saw “Regulators” and their long campaign against unjust taxes. This crisis was by no means simple. It has a complex relationship not only with the history that preceded it, but also had a profound effect on the young United States moving forward. From the French and Indian War and the American Revolution to the Constitutional Conventions; from populist resistance movements to the exercise of a powerful centralized government, we may find that Shays’ Rebellion is not simply a local story with local meanings.

Scheduled presentations include:

• “The Final Fight at Sheffield,” Tim Abbott, Regional Conservation Director, Housatonic Valley Association
• “Shays Kerfuffle: A People’s Perspective,” Daniel Bullen, Ph.D.
• “Archeology of the Shays Settlement,” Stephen Butz, Shays Settlement Project
• “Three Men in Debt,” Tom Goldscheider, farrier, David Ruggles Center 
• “More than a Little Rebellion,” Barbara Mathews, Ph.D., Public Historian and Director of Academic Programs, Historic Deerfield
• “The Contested Meanings of ‘Shays Rebellion Day’ 1986,” Adam Tomasi, Northeastern University

Each bank of speakers will be followed by panel discussions and question and answer sessions.

The symposium will be held in the first-floor auditorium of Scibelli Hall (Building 2) at Springfield Technical Community College, One Armory Square in Springfield. That’s near the site of the largest clash of the uprising, where the Shaysites clashed with Massachusetts militia on 25 Jan 1787.

Presentations will begin at 9:00 A.M. with doors opening half an hour earlier. The program is scheduled to end at 4:00 P.M. Admission is $6 per seat, and box lunches are available for $10. Food options nearby are limited, so attendees should either order a box lunch or bring their own. In case of very bad weather, the event will be postponed to Sunday, 26 January.

Dr. Thacher’s Diagnoses

On 7 June 1780, Dr. James Thacher served as a Continental Army surgeon during the Battle of Springfield, New Jersey. In his diary, published decades later, Thacher described one casualty like this:

In the heat of the action, some soldiers brought to me in a blanket, Captain Lieutenant [Alexander] Thompson of the artillery, who had received a most formidable wound, a cannon ball having passed through both his thighs near the knee joint. With painful anxiety, the poor man inquired if I would amputate both his thighs; sparing his feelings, I evaded his inquiry, and directed him to be carried to the hospital tent in the rear, where he would receive the attention of the surgeons. "All that a man hath will he give for his life." He expired in a few hours.

After the battle, Gen. Nathanael Greene reported to the commander-in-chief: "The Artillery under the command of Lt Colonel [Thomas] Forest was well served—I have only to regret the loss of Capt. Lt Thompson who fell at the side of his piece by a cannon ball."

Dr. Thacher recalled having to leave another casualty of the British artillery fire:

While advancing against the enemy, my attention was directed to a wounded soldier in the field. I dismounted and left my horse at a rail fence, it was not long before a cannon ball shattered a rail within a few feet of my horse, and some soldiers were sent to take charge of the wounded man, and to tell me it was time to retire.

I now perceived that our party had retreated, and our regiment had passed me. I immediately mounted and applied spurs to my horse, that I might gain the front of our regiment. Colonel [Henry] Jackson being in the rear, smiled as I passed him; but as my duty did not require my exposure, I felt at liberty to seek a place of safety.

It may be considered a singular circumstance, that the soldier above mentioned was wounded by the wind of a cannon ball. His arm was fractured above the elbow, without the smallest perceptible injury to his clothes, or contusion or discoloration of the skin. He made no complaint, but I observed he was feeble and a little confused in his mind. He received proper attention, but expired the next day. The idea of injury by the wind of a ball, I learn, is not new, instances of the kind have, it is said, occured in naval battles, and are almost constantly attended with fatal effects.

As for other soldiers, Thacher noted another curious condition:

Our troops in camp are in general healthy, but we are troubled with many perplexing instances of indisposition, occasioned by absence from home, called by Dr. [William] Cullen nostalgia, or home sickness. This complaint is frequent among the militia, and recruits from New England. They become dull and melancholy, with loss of appetite, restless nights, and great weakness. In some instances they become so hypochondriacal as to be proper subjects for the hospital. This disease is in many instances cured by the raillery of the old soldiers, but is generally suspended by a constant and active engagement of the mind, as by the drill exercise, camp discipline, and by uncommon anxiety, occasioned by the prospect of a battle.

As at summer camp, staying busy helped alleviate homesickness. As did the prospect of being hit, or even nearly hit, with a cannon ball.

Rehabbing Colonial Massachusetts’s Granite Positioning System

The Massachusetts Department of Transportation recently announced the completion of its project to preserve the remaining milestones along the old Upper Boston Post Road.

Those stones were initially put in place as early as 1729 by rich men vying for political acclaim, such as justice Paul Dudley (1675-1751), soon to be chief justice. In 1767 the Massachusetts Council ordered more markers. Traffic, urban growth, and highway projects have moved or removed a lot of the stones so that by 1971 only forty were still around to be listed in the National Register.

In 2011, a marker in Brighton was damaged by a truck. That prompted the Transportation Department to explore conserving all the known remaining milestones. In 2014, the Watertown firm Daedalus Inc. was contracted to survey and preserve the markers. The company identified twenty-nine stones that needed repairs, cleaning, cracks filled, resetting, and/or moving back to their original locations. That work is now complete.

The department’s blog post contains a complete list of the surviving markers and their locations. As an example, here’s a stretch of stones in central Massachusetts:

• Milestone Marker #35 is located at Dean Park on Main Street in Shrewsbury. This granite marker is inscribed with “Boston 35 Springfield 65 Albany 165”.
• Milestone Marker #43 is located on Main Street at the I-290 ramp in Shrewsbury. This granite marker is carved with the inscription “43 Mile to Boston”. Marker #43 has been moved to a more accessible location on the Shrewsbury Town Common adjacent to Main Street.
• Milestone Marker #47 is located on Lincoln Street in Worcester. This brownstone marker is carved with the inscription “47 Miles from Boston 50 Springfield”.
• Milestone Marker #48 was formerly located at the Worcester Historical Society, but, as part of the project, has been reset at Wheaton Square Park on Salisbury Street in Worcester. This brownstone marker is carved with the inscription “48 Miles from Boston”.
• Milestone Marker #53 is located on Main Street in Leicester. This brownstone marker is carved with the inscription “53 Mile from Boston”.
• Milestone Marker #54 was formerly located inside the Leicester Public Library, but has been relocated to Washburn Square in Leicester, which is within the vicinity of its original site. This brownstone marker is carved with the inscription “54 Miles from Boston”.

Markers 56 to 74 (the numbers indicating the miles to Boston) have all survived. In contrast, only one marker to the west of that stretch remains, and it was moved into the Springfield Armory Museum.

For more about Massachusetts milestones, see this guest blogger post from Charles Bahne.

The Problem with Ens. Eliphalet Hastings

Yesterday I quoted Capt. Moses Harvey’s newspaper advertisement from November 1775, minutely describing five soldiers who had deserted from his Continental Army company.

Harvey surmised that those men had left for these feeble reasons:

They have been apt to make excuses for their running away, and intimate they took a dislike to one Eliphalet Hastings, who was put in Ensign over them, and found much fault with the continental allowance.

Of course, it’s a soldier’s prerogative to grumble about food and pay. But what was the problem with the new ensign?

Eliphalet Hastings (1734-1824) was a veteran soldier. He had enlisted early in the French and Indian War, a decision that didn’t turn out well. In January 1760 the Massachusetts legislature voted to pay him £8 because

in the Year 1757 being a Soldier in the pay of this Province, he was taken Prisoner by the Indians near Fort William Henry by whom he was sold to the French and carried to Quebeck from whence he was sent to France where he remained till October 1758 when he was sent to England; and did not return home till May 1759

Hastings’s descendants understood that he had also participated Gen. James Wolfe’s Québec campaign and even “assisted in carrying General Wolfe to the rear, when mortally wounded.” But the timing for that would be awfully tight.

In April 1775, Hastings had marched as a minuteman, then rose to sergeant as Massachusetts formed its army. According to his pension application, he

was in the battle of Bunkers hill, commanded a company in Col Jonathan Brewers Regt in the Massachusetts line, had twenty-nine killed and eleven wounded besides myself out of seventy nine in that action, had my right arms and collar bone shot to pieces

Col. Brewer’s regiment was stationed mostly between the provincial breastwork and the rail fence. It got pretty shot up, with Brewer (d. 1784) and Lt. Col. William Buckminster (1736-1786) both wounded. But a Massachusetts report in 1775 said that in all the regiment suffered twelve dead and twenty-two wounded, far less than the figures Hastings recalled for one company decades later.

Col. Brewer had already gotten into hot water for aggressive recruiting tactics in Middlesex and Worcester Counties. He in turn complained about other colonels, on 4 July petitioning the Massachusetts legislature about how

a number of men that enlisted in different Companies in my Regiment have, through the low artifice and cunning of several recruiting officers of different Regiments, re-enlisted into other Companies, being over-persuaded by such arguments as, that Colonel Brewer would not be commissioned, and that if they did not immediately join some other Regiment, they would be turned out of the service; others were tempted with a promise to have a dollar each to drink the recruiting officer’s health; others by intoxication of strong liquor; by which means a considerable number have deserted my Regiment, as will be made to appear by the returns therefrom, as also the different Companies and Regiments they are re-enlisted into.

Around the same date, on 1 July, Eliphalet Hastings was appointed an ensign in the company of Capt. Moses Harvey. I can’t tell which company Hastings had been a sergeant in—perhaps Capt. Edward Blake’s—but it wasn’t Harvey’s.

Capt. Harvey was a late addition to Brewer’s regiment, not listed among his officers in early June. He had also come late to the Battle of Bunker Hill. A soldier from that company named Moses Clark recalled, “I was on the march towards Bunkers Hill on the day that battle was fought we arrived there just after the battle ended, while our men were carrying away the wounded.”

Col. Brewer appears to have assigned Ens. Hastings to Capt. Harvey’s company, rewarding a wounded veteran and filling out that company’s ranks so he could have more soldiers under him. But that created a problem.

Moses Harvey had been born in Sunderland, in the part of town that became Montague in 1754, and he had recruited men from that area. Of the five soldiers in his deserter ad, three had enlisted in Sunderland: John Daby; Gideon Graves, born in that town in 1753; and John Guilson, born in Groton in 1750 and married to Graves’s sister in 1769. Simeon Smith came from Greenfield and Matthias Smith from Springfield, other towns in the Connecticut River Valley. Capt. Harvey knew them so well he could describe them in acute detail.

In contrast, Eliphalet Hastings lived in Waltham, on the eastern side of Middlesex County. Harvey’s men didn’t know him. By tradition, New England soldiers enlisted under neighbors they knew and trusted. They expected to elect their own officers instead of having someone assigned over them. So over the summer of 1775 those five men decided to head back home to western Massachusetts.

Capt. Harvey was lenient enough not to advertise for their return right away; he didn’t even report them as deserted until 27 September. But as November came around, there was new pressure from Gen. George Washington to recruit soldiers for the coming year. Harvey might have thought his own hopes to remain in the army depended on showing that he could maintain discipline in his company. So on 8 November he finally put his neighbors’ names and descriptions into the newspaper. Did he really expect them to return, or did he just want to make their lives in and around Sunderland a little less comfortable?

TOMORROW: What became of those deserters?

“Last Argument” Symposium at Fort Ti, 5-6 Aug.

Fort Ticonderoga will host a symposium on 5-6 August titled “New Perspectives on the Last Argument of Kings: A Ticonderoga Seminar on 18th-Century Artillery.”

This event complements the exhibit “The Last Argument of Kings: The Art and Science of 18th-Century Artillery,” which runs at the site through October 29.

Presenters from Fort Ticonderoga’s own staff and elsewhere include:

• Stuart Lilie, “Artillery at This Post: Three Case Studies of Artillery at Ticonderoga.”
• Matthew Keagle, “Lost in Boston: The Artillery of Carillon/Ticonderoga” and “Pell’s Citadel: The Ticonderoga Artillery Collection.”
• Nicholas Spadone, “Green Wood and Wet Paint: American Traveling Carriages at Ticonderoga.”
• Christopher Bryant, “Ultima Ratio Regum: A Pair of Vallere 4-Pounders at Yorktown and Beyond.”
• Richard Colton, “The American Foundry-Springfield Arsenal, Massachusetts, 1782-1800: Assuring Independence.”
• Andrew De Lisle, “If you are satisfied with the methods the workers have found…then so am I: Reproduction as a method of understanding Eighteenth-century Artillery.”
• Eric Schnitzer, “Pack Horses, Grasshoppers, and Butterflies reconsidered: British light 3-pounders of the 1770s.”
• Robert A. Selig, “The Politics of Arming America or: Why are there still more than 50 Vallere 4-pound cannon in the United States but only 3 in all of Europe?”
• Christopher Waters, “When the King’s Last Argument is but a whimper: Artillery Deployment in Antigua’s Colonial Fortifications.”

Registration costs $155 per person, or $135 for Fort Ticonderoga Members. Registration forms can be downloaded from the fort’s website under the “Education” tab, “Workshops and Seminars.”

I’m already signed up.

An Aged Veteran and “The Young Provincial”

I’ve been discussing the Rev. W. B. O. Peabody’s sketch “The Young Provincial,” published in 1829, and Jacob Frost’s 1832 claim for a pension as a Revolutionary War veteran. Together they raise interesting questions.

First, looking just at the pension file, Jacob Frost’s wound on Breed’s Hill was bad enough to disable him but not to kill him, even with months in prisons and eighteenth-century medicine and hygiene. He must have had one hell of an immune system.

That wound also wasn’t bad enough to keep Frost from reenlisting for a short stint in 1780. Probably his experience as a soldier in battle and a prisoner of war was a reason the company made him its orderly sergeant. Yet that same wound was enough to earn Frost an invalid pension after the war. I suspect it was awarded in recognition of his suffering as a prisoner as much as for actual disability.

Next the bigger question of how Frost’s experiences relate to “The Young Provincial.” Dave Marcus of the Tewksbury Historical Society spotted the strong parallels between “The Young Provincial” and Jacob Frost’s experiences, as this article from the Tewksbury Town Crier in 2014 reported.

The Springfield Republican article from 1829 confirms that connection: “all the narrative parts of it are facts, in the life of a Mr. FROST, now living in Norway, Maine.” Even more clearly it made a connection between that literary sketch and “Dr. JOSHUA FROST of this town,” the veteran’s little brother.

Tewksbury vital records confirm that Jacob Frost, born 9 July 1753, had a little brother named Joshua, born 2 Dec 1765 and thus nine years old at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, just as the newspaper stated. Dr. Joshua Frost graduated from Harvard in 1793.

(Curiously, Sketches of the Old Inhabitants and Other Citizens of Old Springfield from 1893 says that Dr. Frost was “born in Fryeburg, Me., in 1767.” Fryeburg wasn’t even formed into a town until 1777. It’s about thirty miles from Norway, where Jacob settled, but perhaps the two communities were more closely linked in the eighteenth century. But there’s some mix-up there.)

Given the Springfield newspaper’s hints, it seems likely that the Rev. W. B. O. Peabody heard stories about Jacob Frost from the old soldier himself during a visit, or from Dr. Frost, talking about his big brother.

The next question is whether “The Young Provincial” is a reliable source on Jacob Frost’s military experiences, filling out the bare-bones account that he submitted to the federal government. And on that question I’m skeptical. I think Peabody took so much literary license that we can’t accept any particular detail as reflecting Frost’s own story unless it also appears in his own account.

It’s not just a matter of how much dramatic detail “The Young Provincial” has but also how details contradict Frost’s own statement:

• Frost stated that after the Battle of Lexington and Concord “he immediately enlisted at Cambridge near Boston for a term of eight months.” The narrator of “The Young Provincial” says he went home after the battle, joined a company in Tewksbury, and “arrived at the camp the evening before the battle of Bunker Hill.”
• Frost was quite clear that he “was employed on the night previous to the battle of Bunker Hill on the 17th. Day of June 1775, in throwing up breast works.” The “Young Provincial” narrator describes other men doing that work; he “happened to reach the spot just as the morning was breaking in the sky.” (Veterans who worked all night digging and then had to fight the battle tended not to let anyone forget.)
• Frost was “severely wounded in the hip” during that battle. For the narrator, “the ball entered my side,” and he also “was beaten with muskets on the head.”
• The “Young Provincial” arrives home “on a clear summer afternoon.” Frost stated it was “the last of September.”
• The final scene of “The Young Provincial” turns on the soldier’s family believing him to be dead, based on a report from a companion on the battlefield. In 1775 and 1776, Massachusetts newspapers published lists of provincial prisoners from the Battle of Bunker Hill which told everyone that Frost was still alive. His return home was a surprise, but not that much of a surprise.

Thus, I think we have to say “The Young Provincial” was inspired by a true story of a young soldier being wounded, imprisoned, and transported before escaping back home. But we can’t say the sketch is a true story.

(Thanks once again to Boston National Historical Park’s Jocelyn Gould for setting me off on this investigation. The photo above is the headquarters of Norway, Maine’s historical society; Jacob Frost would have known that 1828 building in its original location.)

The True Author of “The Young Provincial”

The idea that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “The Young Provincial,” the sketch I quoted yesterday from The Token, for 1830, wasn’t a bad guess.

In 1830 Hawthorne wrote to the editor of that volume, Samuel G. Goodrich, proposing a collection titled Provincial Tales. The next year’s volume of The Token contained two sketches unquestionably by Hawthorne, and he wrote more for later volumes—so many that in one year Goodrich worried about publishing too many pieces by one author.

Hawthorne never claimed “The Young Provincial,” but he left some hints about not wanting some of his early literary output rediscovered. And he suppressed his 1828 novel Fanshawe altogether.

In 1890 Moncure D. Conway published a biography of Hawthorne stating positively that “The Young Provincial” was one of his early stories that had “escaped the attention” of scholars. He repeated that claim in an 8 June 1901 article in the New York Times Saturday Review.

Franklin B. Sanborn also argued that Hawthorne wrote seven previously unrecognized stories, including “The Young Provincial,” in the New England Magazine in 1898 and elsewhere. George Edward Woodbury discussed the sketch as likely Hawthorne in his 1902 biography of the author, and John Erskine accepted that possibility in Leading American Novelists (1910).

There were some doubters. Nina E. Browne said the sketch “probably was not written by Hawthorne” in her 1905 bibliography of his work. But there was enough consensus about “The Young Provincial” that variously titled editions of Hawthorne’s collected works published in 1900 included it in an appendix.

However, back in late 1829, when The Token, for 1830 first appeared for sale, the author of “The Young Provincial” was named. The 25 November Springfield Republican reprinted the story and reported:

The Token, for 1830.—This elegant little work, published S. G. Goodrich, Boston, has been before the public some weeks. We have had opportunity to read only the following story; but if this may be considered a specimen of the merits of the other articles, the book must be interesting. Its typographical execution exceeds any thing of the kind we ever saw. It will doubtless be gratifying to our readers in this vicinity, to know that the following story was written by a gentlemen of this town who has contributed much to elevate the standard of American literature; and that all the narrative parts of it are facts, in the life of a Mr. FROST, now living in Norway, Maine, and brother of Dr. JOSHUA FROST of this town. Dr. Frost, who was then about nine years of age, was “the little brother who ran to the meeting-house” to carry the tidings of the young provincial’s return from captivity.

That item was reprinted in the Essex Register, and then in the 13 Feb 1830 Columbian Centinel. Those newspapers added a phrase to the Republican’s identification of the author as a Springfield local: “[meaning, we presume, the Rev. W. B. O. Peabody.]” The Essex Register was published in Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s home town, but he didn’t object to crediting the Rev. W. B. O. Peabody with “The Young Provincial.”

The Rev. William Bourn Oliver Peabody (1799-1847, shown above) was a Unitarian minister in Springfield. He wrote poems, hymns, book reviews, and short biographies for Jared Sparks’s Library of American Biography as well as sermons. The Token, for 1828 contained his poem “To an Aged Elm,” so he was definitely in touch with Goodrich.

After Peabody died in 1847, his twin brother Oliver William Bourn Peabody started to write a biography to be published with his literary work. “A few of his productions may be found in ‘The Token’,” Oliver wrote about his brother William. Oliver also dabbled in literary pursuits, publishing a poem in The Token, for 1831 himself, while working as a Boston lawyer, legislator, bureaucrat, and college professor. But in 1845 the pull of parallelism had become too strong, and Oliver became a Unitarian minister like his twin, preaching in Vermont.

In fact, that parallelism was so strong that Oliver died in 1848, just one year after his brother. The biography of William had to be completed by a friend before being published in a collection of William’s sermons. In 1850, Everett Peabody edited The Literary Remains of the Late William B. O. Peabody, D.D. He chose only reviews and poetry from the North American Review, leaving out “The Young Provincial” and everything like it.

As a result, no book credited W. B. O. Peabody with that sketch until Volume XI of the Centenary Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne. That scholarly edition of Hawthorne’s tales cited the newspaper articles I quoted above about “The Young Provincial.” It also took four other tales that Conway and Sanborn had attributed to Hawthorne and showed they had been written by Lydia Maria Child, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edward Everett.

Ironically, the 1900 collections of Hawthorne that include “The Young Provincial” are now in the public domain and thus available on Google Book and as digital texts. The more reliable Centenary Edition is protected by copyright and priced for research libraries. Therefore, people looking into “The Young Provincial” are once again apt to come across statements that it was most likely written by Hawthorne—I did so at first. This book dealer is even selling The Token, for 1830 on the possibility that it might contain an early Hawthorne story.

But all that literary investigation is just in service of the question of whether “The Young Provincial” has historical value. Is it a reliable narration of a certain private’s experiences in the first year and a half of the Revolutionary War?

TOMORROW: Back to Jacob Frost.

“Revolutionary War National Parks” Panel in Lexington, 7 June

On Wednesday, 7 June, I’ll be part of a panel discussion in Lexington on “Revolutionary War National Parks: Treasures Worth Protecting in Massachusetts.” This event is co-sponsored by the National Parks Conservation Association, the Lexington Chamber of Commerce, and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The evening will start with a screening of the N.P.C.A.’s short film on the assets at Minute Man National Historical Park and other Massachusetts Revolutionary sites, including Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters in Cambridge.

The discussion that follows will focus on the historic and economic importance of Revolutionary War national parks and the benefits they bring to local communities.

The moderator for that discussion will be Jayne Gordon, a public historian who has led education and preservation efforts at many area sites and organizations. In addition to myself, representing the Friends of Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters, the panelists will be:

• Prof. Bob Allison, Suffolk University and author of numerous books
• Paul O’Shaughnessy, Friends of Minute Man National Historical Park and longtime British army reenactor
• Prof. Bob Gross, formerly of the University of Connecticut and author of The Minutemen and Their World

This free event is scheduled to run from 5:30 to 7:30 P.M. at the Cary Memorial Library in Lexington; here are directions. Light refreshments will be available. To register for this event, go to this page.

Massachusetts Marriages in 1765

After reading about the idea that Massachusetts couples timed their marriages to avoid paying the Stamp Tax after 1 Nov 1765, I started to think about how to test whether that report was accurate.

I decided to go to Familysearch.org, the genealogy site built by the Latter-Day Saints, and run numbers there. Since the Boston Gazette item on couples marrying before the law took effect mentioned Marblehead, I asked to see all 1765 marriages in Marblehead in that database without regard for names. Then I asked for the same information about every other year in the 1760s. I recorded the number of listings that popped up each time.

That’s a crude way of estimating the number of marriages in each year. For one thing, each marriage is listed twice, once for the bride and once for the groom. The database is bound to have even more duplicates because of spelling oddities, couples hailing from different towns, and other factors. But I figure that the same problems affect every year of data about equally, so the relative numbers should be reliable. (Unless there’s some strange shift in the measurements I don’t know about.)

Then I mapped the numbers across the decade and graphed the results:

Gosh. Something strange sure happened in Marblehead in 1765. The number of listings was trending down from 1761, as young men started coming back from war and then the post-war economy set in. But listings made a big jump in 1765, and had a big tumble in 1766. That’s consistent with the idea that in mid-1765 couples planning to get married over the next eighteen months decided to do so sooner rather than later.

I then looked at the number of listings in a couple of other towns by the same method. In the smaller, inland town of Newton, there was a similar jump in listings in 1765, but it wasn’t quite as pronounced.

Out west in Springfield, the number of listings was only a little higher than the previous year and remained at the same level the next year.

Researchers who want to spend more than half an hour with the data could surely generate much more solid results and perhaps see trends. But based on this dip into the data, I’d say it looks like the Stamp Act really did affect Massachusetts couples’ marriage choices, at least within a day’s ride of Boston.

Anthony Haswell and Isaiah Thomas

During the preparation of “Mapping Revolutionary Boston” website/app, as I recall, someone asked if there was enough information to profile a printer’s apprentice—like Johnny Tremain, but real. So I worked up an article on the youth of Anthony Haswell (1756-1816).

The text under young Anthony’s yellow pin describes how he was born in England, brought to Boston by his father, and basically abandoned when he was a teen. He worked through the town’s Overseers of the Poor to get himself apprenticed to a printer instead of a potter.

Those paragraphs don’t cover Haswell’s later life: possible military service during the Revolutionary War; a return to printing; starting the first newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts, with Elisha Babcock in 1782; and then settling in Bennington, Vermont, as postmaster and publisher of the Vermont Gazette a year later.

I was surprised to find no biographical information about Haswell in Isaiah Thomas’s History of Printing in America, first published in 1810. Thomas claimed to write about everyone in the profession through the Revolution. To be sure, he highlighted firsts, and the Vermont Gazette was that state’s second newspaper, but Haswell was a very prominent printer in that state up through the time Thomas wrote his book.

Furthermore, Thomas must have watched Haswell’s career because he was the printer who’d signed up young Anthony as an apprentice back in 1771. During the war, when Thomas was beset by creditors, Haswell even became the nominal publisher of Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy for a while. That episode prompted the only mention of Haswell in Thomas’s History, and it’s hardly flattering:

The printer of the Massachusetts Spy, or Boston Journal, was obliged to leave Boston, as has been mentioned, on account of the commencement of hostilities between the colonies and the parent country. He settled in this place [Worcester], and on the 3d of May, 1775, recommenced the publication of that paper, which he continued until the British troops evacuated Boston; when he leased it for one year to William Stearns and Daniel Bigelow. . . .

After the first lease expired, the paper was leased for another year, to Anthony Haswell, printer. Owing to unskilful workmen, bad ink, wretched paper, and worn down types, the Spy appeared in a miserable dishabille during the two years for which it had been leased, and for some time after. At the end of that term, the proprietor returned to Worcester, and resumed its publication…

Why did Thomas have so little, and nothing good, to say about his former apprentice? I suspect politics was involved. Thomas was a Federalist. Haswell became a Jeffersonian, and not just any Jeffersonian—he was one of the printers jailed under the Sedition Act in 1799 and made into a martyr for press freedom. Here’s a page about Haswell at the Bennington Museum, and another from the Posterity Project.

So Anthony Haswell might not have been discussed in Thomas’s History of Printing because he was too prominent a printer.

The True Story of Isaac Bissell

We don’t have the original letter that Joseph Palmer dashed off on the morning of 19 Apr 1775, alerting the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s political allies in Connecticut that the British army had killed people at Lexington and asking speedy passage for the man carrying it. Instead, we have copies of that letter, hastily written at stops along the post riders’ route.

It’s only natural that errors crept into Palmer’s text. By the time the note reached New York, it referred to “Israel Bessel” and “T. Palmer.” Later copies, such as the one transcribed in Charles Burr Todd’s A General History of the Burr family in America (1872), appeared to render the rider’s name as “Trail Bissell.”

So we need to go back to the earliest copies that survive. The one from Brooklyn, Connecticut, now owned by the National Heritage Museum, gives the name Israel Bissell. But according to this article, a copy signed by Connecticut official Silas Deane and owned by the William L. Clements Library in Michigan names the rider as “Mr. Isaac Bissell.” And a copy transcribed from the Springfield archives also names “Mr. Isaac Bissell.”

The name “Isaac Bissel” appears in the records of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, authorizing payment for “a Post-Rider’s Account.”

That brings me to the research that Lion G. Miles has shared through iberkshires.com, the Berkshire Eagle, and Connecticut History.

According to Miles and his citations, all the papers in the Massachusetts Archives about the post rider who carried Palmer’s message are signed by “Isaac Bissell,” who identified himself as from Suffield, Connecticut, near the Massachusetts border. In July 1775, the Provincial Congress approved his bill for six days of expenses while riding “to Hartford,” but then that body dissolved for elections and no one got around to paying the man.

In March 1776 Bissell wrote to Palmer: “Sir you may Remember when Lexinton Fite was you gave me an Express to Cary to Hartford in Connecticut which I did. . . .I think I Earn my money.” Finally on 23 April the Massachusetts House voted to pay Isaac Bissell the £2.1s. he’d asked for.

So I now believe that Isaac Bissell rode to the Connecticut capital of Hartford, probably by way of Worcester and Springfield. An accurate copy of the letter he carried was sent on to Deane, who lived one town below Hartford in Wethersfield. Meanwhile, another rider or set of riders, names unknown to us, was carrying another copy of Palmer’s letter south from Worcester to Brooklyn, Norwich, and New London, and then along the coast to New York. That copy rendered the original courier’s name as “Israel Bissell,” and Isaac wasn’t around to correct that error or further deviations.

According to lineages published by the D.A.R. and S.A.R., after returning home to Suffield, Isaac Bissell (1749-1822) enlisted in a Connecticut regiment and marched back to Boston to participate in the siege. He was a sergeant in Col. Erastus Woolcott’s regiment until March 1776, and later mustered as part of the New Haven Alarm of July 1779. After the war he worked as a blacksmith in Suffield. His grave in the Suffield cemetery (shown in the thumbnail above; click for a full set on Flickr from caboose_rodeo) has been identified as that of a Revolutionary veteran for decades.

What about the Israel Bissell buried in Hinman Hinsdale, Massachusetts? His grave has gotten special attention from the D.A.R., and he’s been lauded in poetry, song, and art as the forgotten equal to Paul Revere. But all that celebration is just because of a spelling error.