Who Was the “person out of Boston last Night”?

The Pennsylvania Packet article describing the flag on Prospect Hill in January 1776 also reported that the British inside besieged Boston had misinterpreted it:

…the Boston gentry supposed it to be a token of the deep impression the [king’s] Speech had made, and a signal of submission—That they were much disappointed at finding several days elapse without some formal measure leading to a surrender, with which they had begun to flatter themselves.——

This is bunk. According to the article’s own timing, the flag went up on 2 January and the latest news from Cambridge was written on 4 January, so “several days” had not elapsed.

This newspaper anecdote is thus too good to be true. Joseph Reed, who most likely supplied the article, must have been tickled with the idea of the royalists falsely thinking the Continental Army was ready to give up.

In fact, no sources created inside Boston show the royal authorities thinking the rebels were about to surrender. The two British mentions of the flag later that January correctly interpreted it as a signal of colonial unity. So where did the story come from?

The first version appeared in Gen. George Washington’s 4 January letter to Reed:

we had hoisted the Union Flag in compliment to the United Colonies, but behold! it was receivd in Boston as a token of the deep Impression the Speech had made upon Us, and as a signal of Submission—so we learn by a person out of Boston last Night

That person might have had an idiosyncratic interpretation of the flag. More likely, I suspect that person described initial perplexity inside the town on seeing the new flag, which Washington preferred to interpret in the way that made his enemy seem most foolish.

So who was that person who arrived at Cambridge headquarters on 3 January?

On the same day that Washington wrote to Reed, he sent a more formal letter to John Hancock as chairman of the Continental Congress. In that report the general wrote:

By a very Intelligent Gentleman, a Mr Hutchinson from Boston, I learn that it was Admiral [Molyneux] Shuldhum that came into the harbour on Saturday last . . .

We also learn from this Gentleman & others, that the Troops embarked for Hallifax, as mentioned in my Letter of the 16—were really designed for that place . . . 

I am also Informed of a Fleet now getting ready under the Convoy of the Scarborough & Fowey Men of War, consisting of 5 Transports & 2 Bomb Vessels, with about 300 marines & Several Flat bottom’d Boats—It is whispered that they are designed for Newport, but generally thought in Boston, that it is meant for Long-Island . . .

Washington sent that same information to Reed, and it went into the newspaper.

Also, at “8 o’clock at night” on “the 3d.” of January, Washington’s aide Stephen Moylan wrote to Reed:

a very inteligent man got out of Boston this day, says, two of the Regiments of the Irish embarkation pushed for the River of St. Lawrence . . .

he allso says that it was generally thought in Boston that Nova Scotia was in our possession——

Reed didn’t include that last tidbit in his digest for the newspaper—probably because he knew it was false.

Thus, although Gen. Washington mentioned “others,” his headquarters’ main source for information from inside Boston in those two days was “Mr Hutchinson.” Both letters called him “intelligent,” which Dr. Samuel Johnson described as meaning both “knowing” and “giving intelligence.”

A footnote in the Washington Papers says, “Mr. Hutchinson has not been identified.” So let’s do something about that.

On Tuesday, 9 January, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper wrote in his diary:

I din’d at Mr. [Edward] Payne’s with Mr. Shrimpton Hutchinson, Deacon [Ebenezer] Storer, [Joseph] Barrell &c.

The transcription of Cooper’s diary published in the American Historical Review in 1901 doesn’t identify the men Cooper dined with. But at this time Cooper and his family were living in Waltham, and Edward Payne’s son later wrote that during the siege his father “lived at Medford and at Waltham.” Payne, Storer, and Barrell all came from the top echelon of Boston businessmen, and they all appeared several times in Cooper’s diary before this date.

Shrimpton Hutchinson (1719–1811, gravestone shown above) was another well established Boston merchant. As an Anglican and a cousin of Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, he had reasons to become a Loyalist. But instead he kept out of politics, even as a justice of the peace. We know he lived in Boston after the war, becoming one of the leaders of the King’s Chapel congregation.

I’ve looked for other signs of Shrimpton Hutchinson’s movements during 1775 and 1776 without success. Therefore, I can’t say for sure that he had left Boston just a few days before his dinner at Payne’s, which was the first time Cooper mentioned him. But he was the sort of older, upper-class, well-connected man that Gen. Washington and his aides would have respected as a valuable intelligence source.

TOMORROW: The missing copies of the king’s speech.

Joseph Reed’s Second Source

As I discussed yesterday, Joseph Reed (or someone close to him) adapted a 4 Jan 1776 letter from Gen. George Washington into part of an article that appeared in John Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet on 15 Jan 1776.

That article started by announcing its sources: “authentic advices from the Camp at Cambridge, of the 3d and 4th instant”—i.e., letters sent on 3 and 4 January. That meant it was based on at least one other source.

The second major source was Stephen Moylan’s letter to Reed dated 2–3 January, particularly the later pages penned on the 3rd. That document has been digitized by the New-York Historical Society.

Reed knew Moylan in Philadelphia before the war. The two men worked together in Cambridge as Washington’s military secretary and muster-master general. When Reed went home to his wife, he passed off a lot of his tasks to Moylan. So it was natural for those two men to correspond.

The Pennsylvania Packet article contained many items of intelligence, in addition to the general’s anecdote about the new flag. Here are those topics, and in whose letter that information appeared:

• Boston’s harbor was open. (Moylan)
• A British warship was outside Salem, Beverly, and Marblehead harbor. (Moylan)
• 500 British soldiers arrived from Ireland, later identified as from the 55th and 17th. (Moylan, Washington)
• Two British regiments had been sent to Halifax. (Moylan, Washington)
• Two more regiments were moving up the St. Lawrence River to Québec. (Moylan)
• Admiral Molyneux Shuldam arrived in Boston. (Washington)
• H.M.S. Scarborough and Fowey would lead nine transport ships and other vessels south; they were said to be headed to Newport, but more likely were going to Long Island or Virginia. (Washington, Moylan slightly different)
• British ships were taking on drinking water and biscuits. (Washington, Moylan slightly different)
• The British army had no intention of attacking the Continental siege lines. (Moylan)
• The redcoats were grumbling, so they were told that Gen. John Burgoyne had headed home to Britain to help settle the whole colonial dispute. (Moylan)
• Four ships had sailed from Hispaniola with arms and ammunition. (Moylan)
• The Continental “army were all in barracks, in good health and spirits.”
• Five thousand militiamen were filling in for soldiers who had gone home when their enlistments ran out. (Washington)
• The “whole army [was] impatient for an opportunity of action.”

Thus, almost every piece of information in the article came from one or both of those letters. The few exceptions were details of the anecdote about the flag, as listed yesterday, and positive descriptions of Continental soldiers being “all in barracks, in good health and spirits,” and “impatient for an opportunity of action.”

In fact, Gen. Washington had written gloomily about how few troops he had left after the end of 1775 and what he could now expect:

for more than two Months past I have scarcely immerged from one difficulty before I have plunged into another—how it will end God in his great goodness will direct, I am thankful for his protection to this time. We are told that we shall soon get the Army compleated, but I have been told so many things which have never come to pass, that I distrust every thing.

But of course Reed would never have those thoughts printed in a Patriot newspaper. In fact, sections like that are probably why he edited the general’s letter for public consumption.

Likewise, Moylan wrote a lot about how George III’s uncompromising speech to Parliament should impel the Continental Congress into seeking help from foreign powers like Spain—a big step toward independence which top politicians were not yet ready to go public with. His 2–3 January letter is becoming famous for containing the earliest appearance of the phrase “the United States of America,” months before the Congress adopted that moniker.

In the quest to find out more about the flag on Prospect Hill, however, Moylan’s letter is a dead end. He wrote nothing about the banner, and therefore didn’t provide the details that appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet without first appearing in Washington’s letter. Did Reed draw on another source?

TOMORROW: My theory that belongs to me.

“Came to Head Quarters and gave the following Intelligence”

After Continental troops moved onto Dorchester heights on the night of 4–5 March 1776, Gen. George Washington and his commanders waited anxiously for the British response.

As of 8 March, Gen. Horatio Gates was telling John Adams that headquarters still didn’t know what was going on inside Boston “as neither Townsman, nor Deserter, has yet come in to acquaint us!”

But some men were making their way out of Boston, bringing intelligence. Maj. Samuel Blachley Webb (shown above, courtesy of the New-York Historical Society), stationed with Gen. Israel Putnam’s brigade in Cambridge, wrote in his journal on 8 March about “Capt. Erving, of Salem, who last night stole out of Boston.”

Four different letters sent from Washington’s headquarters on 9 March, the next day, described that man in slightly different ways:

• “A Captain of a Transport who made his escape from Boston the night before last” —Washington’s letter to Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull
• “a Captain Irvine who escaped from Boston the night before with Six of his Crew” —Washington’s letter to John Hancock and the Continental Congress
• “Captain Irwin of Salem escaped from town the night before last” —aide Stephen Moylan to the president of the New Hampshire assembly (in the Provincial and State Papers of New Hampshire)
• “Captain Erwin escaped from Town the Night before last” —Moylan to the commanding officer in New York (in the Naval Documents of the American Revolution)

After looking at Salem vital records, which provide yet more variant spellings, I think this captain was most likely named Ervin, so I’m going to refer to him that way.

At first I thought Capt. Ervin was the most likely person to have reported Gen. William Howe’s exclamation on seeing the Dorchester heights fortifications. His rank as a captain in command of a “Transport,” or troop ship, suggested that the general was more likely to have spoken frankly in front of him.

However, the timing doesn’t quite work. In one of his 9 March letters Gen. Washington wrote that it was “Yesterday evening,” or 8 March, when this captain “came to Head Quarters and gave the following Intelligence.” James Bowdoin understood that the general questioned the source we’re looking for at or after midday dinner on 9 March.

In addition, Bowdoin used the term “deserter.” None of the headquarters letters used that word for the sea captain, even when Washington described him as “A Captain of a Transport,” presumably working for the Crown.

But Maj. Webb did use that language in describing another man in his diary on 9 March: “Three Inhabitants and one Soldier last night deserted to us from Boston—they confirmed the accounts Rec’d yesterday…” If that soldier reached Washington’s Cambridge headquarters on 9 March, then the general would have seen him as an army deserter and questioned him that day, as Bowdoin described.

Finally, while Ervin and the deserter told the same basic story about the British authorities preparing to leave, they provided different details—about numbers, hospital ships, and so on.

It therefore looks like Gen. Washington spoke to Capt. Ervin on the evening of 8 March, received a letter from the Boston selectmen with similar news (as discussed here), and dispatched reports based on all that information to the Congress and nearby colonies in the middle of 9 March. Later on that day the deserting soldier arrived, offering yet more corroboration and the story of Gen. Howe exclaiming, “Good God! These fellows have done more work in one night than I could have made my army do in 3 months. What shall I do?”

TOMORROW: Digging into these intelligence sources.

John Brown’s Gunpowder for Sale

Yesterday I quoted a story from Elkanah Watson describing a trip to Medford with gunpowder for the Continental Army during the siege of Boston.

Watson’s memoir didn’t specify a date for that mission. We know from contemporaneous sources that Gen. George Washington was confident about his army’s gunpowder supply until 3 Aug 1775. Then suddenly Massachusetts officials told him that their reports showed what gunpowder they had collected without subtracting the powder that the army had used.

Immediately after that bad news, Washington wrote to the Continental Congress and regional governments asking for more powder. He issued sharp orders that Continental soldiers should not to fire their guns unnecessarily. (He did not, however, spread rumors to British informants of having 1,800 barrels of gunpowder on hand, as biographer James T. Flexner claimed.) More powder started to arrive, enough so that by September the commander was ready to propose an attack on the British Boston.

Elkanah Watson’s employer, the Rhode Island merchant John Brown (shown here), entered this story with a letter dated 3 November:

I having a Vessel arrived at Norwich [Connecticut] from Suranam which having brought a Small Quantity of Powder Viz. Forty four Cask Containing a Half hundred Each, I thought it proper to acquaint you thereof, but I am at a loss to determin which may be best for the General Cause for it to go to the Camp or to be Sold out here, so that People in General may be better quallified to Defend the Sea Coast…

With a postscript written the next day:

Since the above, Our General Assembly has applyed for the Refusel of the Powder. and if they Give the price which will make it as Good to me as tho the money had bin Layd out in mello. Viz. 6/ per ¶ Ct, must Give them the prefference.

The response came from Stephen Moylan, the Continental mustermaster general just elevated into the role of Washington’s acting military secretary. He wrote on 8 November: “As the powder you mention to have Imported, is disposed of, I have nothing to say thereon.”

More than two weeks later, on 21 November, Brown wrote again to say he hadn’t heard back from the general. Either Moylan’s letter never arrived or Brown decided to pretend it hadn’t since he still had powder to sell after all: “This is to Offer you One Ton of good Pistol Powder at Six shillings per pound here.” That was 50% more than Washington had paid for powder from another supplier in late October.

Moylan responded:

in your Letter of the 21st you make an offer of one ton of good Pistol powder at 6/per pound The General Will take it tho it is a most exorbitant price, he is willing to encourage the importation of that necessy article.

P.S. There are two Companys orderd from your quarter to this place, Governor [Nicholas] Cooke will inform you when they march you will please to Send the powder under their Guard in a Coverd Waggon shoud they have Set out before this reaches you must get a few of the minute or militia men of your Colony to guard it to this place

Brown presumably sent that gunpowder in December. It’s conceivable that he entrusted the shipment to his teen-aged apprentice Watson, who recalled having made such a journey with “six or eight recruits.“ Indeed, an escort of militiamen, if they were indeed men, might have made Brown more comfortable sending young Watson.

However, even if this was the mission Watson described, it’s clear that he exaggerated the details in his memoir. The army’s gunpowder supply never dropped to “four rounds to a man,” even at the crisis point in August, and that crisis was well past by December. Brown offered a ton of gunpowder, not “a ton and a half.” And the merchant didn’t “immediately forward” the powder to Cambridge once his ship arrived; he played two potential customers off against each other for a couple of weeks in order to get his high asking price.

Elkanah Watson may well have delivered gunpowder to the American lines for his master. But as to whether he supervised the shipment, met the commander-in-chief at his headquarters, or learned anything about barrels of black sand in the powderhouse, I suspect some of those details were embellishments to make the memory more interesting.

TOMORROW: A myth built on top of a myth.

“Who Goes There?” “St. Patrick.” “Really?”

As I quoted yesterday, Gen. George Washington’s orderly book records that on 17 Mar 1776 the Continental Army countersign—the main password for anyone in the army trying to pass a guard or sentry—was “St. Patrick.”

Since October, the army had a system for transmitting that password (and a higher-level password, called the parole) down from headquarters to all parts of the army besieging Boston.

However, the orderly book of Gen. Artemas Ward (shown here), second-in-command of the army around Boston and directly overseeing the troops in Roxbury and Dorchester, states that the countersign for that day was “Evacuate.”

Usually, of course, on any given day the whole army was supposed to be using the same passwords. That’s really the point. So we might ask what was wrong with Gen. Ward’s staff.

Except that that wasn’t the only discrepancy between the two generals’ orderly books that month. Here’s how they compare a few days earlier:

Date in book	Gen. Washington’s	Gen. Ward’s
11 Mar	Niagara/Thompson	Niagara/Thompson
12 Mar	Niagara/Thompson	Fairfax/Kent
13 Mar	Fairfax/Kent	Georgia/Amboy
14 Mar	[blank]	Lewis/Armstrong
15 Mar	Augustine/Bristol	Augustine/Bristol

Washington’s general orders, as written down at his headquarters, have repetitions and skips in the passwords. Ward’s orderly book looks more, well, orderly: each day a new pair of passwords. So which document is more reliable about 17 March?

Who was keeping the records at Washington’s headquarters? One man involved was the mustermaster general, then serving as the commander-in-chief’s chief aide: Stephen Moylan. He was one of the very few Irish Catholic officers in the Continental Army, and he had a sense of humor. Might he have influenced the choice of “St. Patrick,” or slipped that name into the record?

We can ask whether Gen. Washington was likely to have used that name as a password, even on 17 March. Certainly Gen. Ward, a traditional Congregationalist Yankee, wouldn’t have chosen the name of a Catholic saint. On most days the Continental countersign was a common British surname or place. Both possibilities for 17 March—“St. Patrick” and “Evacuate”—would have been breaks in that pattern, clearly chosen to highlight a memorable day.

Might the American commanders have given out two countersigns that day to the two wings of the Continental Army, or to the troops inside and outside Boston? Had the rejoicing over finally winning the siege made those men less worried about security? Did transcribers of one or the other document misread it? All are possibilities.

So was the American password on 17 Mar 1776 really “St. Patrick”? I think the most complete answer is “yes and no.” But there’s certainly enough evidence in the official transcript of Washington’s general orders to validate the claim.

Annual Flag-Raising in Somerville, 1 Jan.

The new year can’t start without Somerville’s annual commemoration of the raising of the “Grand Union flag” at Prospect Hill Park. That will start on 11:30 A.M. on Wednesday as an actor on horseback portraying Gen. George Washington leads a procession from Somerville City Hall to Prospect Hill Park, just north of Union Square.

This year’s ceremony will feature a presentation by Byron DeLear of the North American Vexillological Association. He’s found evidence that the phrase “United States of America” was first written in Washington’s Cambridge headquarters early in 1776, soon after that flag-raising.

Back on 4 July 1775, the new commander-in-chief had told the army that “They are now the Troops of the UNITED PROVINCES of North America.” That was still the Continental Congress’s official term for the entities it represented. The shift to calling those entities “states” was a step toward thinking of them as independent of Britain. Ironically, the first man on record to do so was an immigrant to America.

The Somerville ceremony will also feature songs, readings, and His Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot representing the British Army. A Grand Union flag will be raised atop the Prospect Hill Tower.

Of course, the term “Grand Union flag” was coined by George Preble in 1872, an error for what Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet called “the great Union Flag” in its 15 Jan 1776 issue. (The Pennsylvania Gazette used the same phrase on 17 January.) Gen. Washington had termed that banner a “Union flag” in his letter to Joseph Reed on 4 January.

Another vexillologist, Peter Ansoff, has argued that “Union flag” was the standard term for the British standard, showing how the Congress and Washington were not yet ready to break with Britain but still fighting for British rights within the Empire. Byron believes that the evidence supports the tradition that the Prospect Hill flag was a new design of the Union Jack with thirteen stripes. Unfortunately, a definite answer to that question harder to pin down than the phrase “United States of America” in a letter.

The Real Story of “Old Put”

When I wrote yesterday’s essay about Gen. Joseph Spencer’s nickname, I asked myself, “And now will someone ask about ‘Old Put’?” And sure enough, on the Boston 1775 Facebook page Peter Fisk asked about “Old Put,” the fabled nickname for Gen. Israel Putnam.

And my answer to myself yesterday was, “Well, of course Putnam was called ‘Old Put’! He was old. His last name was Putnam. Every author in the world says he was called ‘Old Put’!” But I was fooled by every author saying Gen. Horatio Gates’s men fondly referred to him as “Granny,” which is where this week started off. So I decided I should calm down and do the research to answer Peter’s question.

There are several contemporaneous references to Putnam as “Old Put,” almost all of them coming from the very top of the Continental Army: Gen. George Washington’s headquarters.

• Mustermaster general Stephen Moylan to former military secretary Joseph Reed, 5 Dec 1775: “I would have given a good deal that you was here last Saturday when the stores arrived at camp. Such universal joy ran, through the whole as if each grasped victory in his hand, to crown the glorious scene there intervened one truly ludicrous, which was old PUT mounted on a large mortar which was fixed in its bed for the occasion, with a bottle of rum in his hand, standing parson to christen, while godfather [Thomas] Mifflin gave it the name of CONGRESS.”
• Moylan to Reed, 1 Feb 1776: “The Bay is open, everything thaws except Old Put. He is still as hard as ever, crying out for powder—powder—ye gods, give us powder!”
• Reed to Washington, 15 Mar 1776: “I suppose old Putt was to command the Detachment intended for Boston on the 5th Inst.—as I do not know any Officer but himself who could have been depended on for so hazardous a Service.”
• Washington back to Reed, 1 Apr 1776: “The 4000 Men destind for Boston on the 5th; if the Ministerialists had attempted our Works on Dorchester, or the Lines at Roxbury, were to have been headed by old Put.”
• Lt. Col. Joseph Ward, formerly aide to Gen. Artemas Ward, to John Adams, 9 May 1777: “Old Put—says, ‘Fact now is the time, I am for attacking the dogs without delay, drive them off that we me go home about our business’—thus he.”

So it’s hard to establish a nickname more solidly and officially than that.

Oddly, however, I didn’t stumble across any examples of enlisted men referring to their general as “Old Put.” The closest I found was veteran John Greenwood referring in his memoir to an operation ”planned by old Putnam.” More references might be buried in pension reminiscences or the like, but I was surprised, given how freely veterans spoke about his fellow Connecticut commander Spencer.

The Army and Navy Chronicle for 1837 yields one anecdote, credited to the New York Gazette, about that issue:

Original Revolutionary Anecdote.—

When the American army was stationed in Putnam county [New York], during the Revolutionary war, one of the soldiers saw a boat approaching, and he cried out, there comes “old Put,” a name familiarly applied to the gallant General Putnam.

A young upstart officer hearing this caused him to be put under arrest for speaking disrespectfully of the General.

On the arrival of General Putnam on shore, he inquired what that man was sent away for?

The officer said, he has spoken disrespectfully of your Excellency.

What did he say? inquired the General.

He called you “old Put.”

So I am old Put, said he; release him instantly.

That may be only a legend, but it certainly sounds true to Israel Putnam’s character.

TOMORROW: Might as well do a full week—the general with the most exotic nickname.

Princeton Battle Lecture in Arlington, Va., 4 Sept.

On Wednesday, 4 September, the the American Revolution Round Table of the District of Columbia will host an illustrated lecture by Wade P. Catts titled “As great a piece of Generalship as ever was performed: Reinterpretation of the Battle of Princeton, 3 January 1777.”

The group’s announcement says:

This illustrated lecture will present new information and in some cases, reinterpretation, of the battle of Princeton. The culminating battle of the “Ten Crucial Days,” Princeton was a remarkable military maneuver that had far-reaching results for the American cause, and a major setback for the Crown. Undertaken by the Princeton Battlefield Society and funded by a grant from the American Battlefield Protection Program, the recently completed study utilizes historical records, maps, topography, GIS, and archeology to examine the battlefield.

Catts is historic preservation consultant based in Pennsylvania who served the Princeton project as a historical archeologist. He’s worked on many other Revolutionary War sites as well.

“Piece of generalship” was a popular eighteenth-century expression for what we’d now call a clever strategy. On 7 Jan 1777, Stephen Moylan, volunteering as one of Gen. George Washington’s aides after a short, terrible tenure as quartermaster general, wrote to Robert Morris describing the battle:

By Heavens, it was the best piece of generalship I ever read or heard of. An enemy, within musket shot of us [at Trenton], determined, and only waiting for daylight, to make a vigourous attack. We stole a march, got to Princeton, defeated, and almost totally ruined, three of the best regiments in the British service; made all their schemes upon Philadelphia, for this season, abortive; put them into such a consternation, that if we only had five hundred fresh men, there is very little doubt but we should have destroyed all their stores and baggage, at Brunswick, of course, oblige them to leave the Jerseys, (this they must do)…

The British didn’t leave New Jersey, but they withdrew to the north of the state for the rest of the winter. The Trenton and Princeton victories cheered American Patriots, especially after the bigger British victories around New York, and helped the new republic last into the new year.

The ARRT of DC meets at the Fort Myer Officers Club in Arlington, Virginia, four times a year. See the website for more information on attending or joining. In November, the group will welcome Don N. Hagist, author of British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution, 1775-1781.

Washington Asks Lee for an Aide

In February 1776, Gen. George Washington was desperate enough for an aide de camp with the right skills that he asked Gen. Charles Lee to send him one. Specifically, he wanted William Palfrey (1741-1780, shown here), one of Lee’s aides in New York. Palfrey had worked for John Hancock before the war and was well respected by the Boston Whigs.

At that time, Washington was keeping the job of his military secretary open for Joseph Reed to return to it—which Reed never did. Aide de camp Robert Hanson Harrison was doing the secretary’s job, mustermaster general Stephen Moylan was helping out, but aide de camp George Baylor wasn’t much help at all when it came to office work.

On 10 February, Washington explained the situation to Lee in a letter:

It is unnecessary for me to observe to you, the multiplicity of business I am Involved In—the number of Letters, Orders, & Instruction’s I have to write—with many other matters which call loudly for Aids that are ready Pen-men—I have long waited in exasperation of Colo. Reeds return, but now despair of it. [Edmund] Randolph who was also ready at his Pen, leaves me little room to expect him [back from Virginia]; my business in short, will not allow me to wait, as I have none but Mr. Harrison (for Mr. Moylan must be call’d of to attend his duty as Commissary of Musters) who can afford me much assistance in that way, and he, in case Colo. Reed should not return, has the promise of succeeding him.

Now the Intention of this preamble is to know, whether, if Mr Palfrey (who from what I have seen and heard, is ready at his Pen) should Incline to come into my Family, for I have never directly or indirectly intimated the matter to him, although he has been very warmly recommended to me by some of his Friends for any thing that might cast up, you would consent to it—He would be of Singular use to me on another Acct also, and that is, the universal acquaintance he has with the People & characters of this Government [i.e., Massachusetts], with whom I have so much business to Transact.

Mr Baylor is as good, and as obliging a young Man as any in the World, and so far as he can be Serviceable in Riding, & delivering verbal Orders as useful; but the duties of an Aid de Camp at Head Quarters cannot be properly discharged by any but Pen-men—Mr [Anthony Walton] White in case of vacancy expected to be provided for in my Family, but as I believe he would be just such another as Baylor I must however disappointed he is be excused. Business multiplies so fast upon my hands that I am confined almost intirely to the House, and should be more so, if I am depriv[e]d of that assistanc[e] which is necessary to divide, & take of part of the trouble from my own Shoulders.

Lee would have had to invoke a military emergency to resist such a clear request by his superior and stand in the way of a promotion for Palfrey. At the time there was much more action in Boston than in New York. So Lee cheerfully sent Palfrey north, thus saving Washington’s headquarters from the return of Anthony Walton White.

In 2005 Sotheby’s sold this letter for $36,000.

TOMORROW: How Washington managed to divest himself of George Baylor.

America’s Anti-Catholic Turnaround

I think it was Prof. John Fea who recently alerted me to these Belief.net articles by Steven Waldman from 2008:

• “How Anti-Catholicism Helped Fuel the American Revolution”
• “Why George Washington Should Be the Pope’s Hero”

Anti-Catholicism defined British polity in the eighteenth century after the ouster of James II in 1688’s “Glorious Revolution” and Parliament’s choice to skip his heirs in favor of the Protestant George I. Anti-Catholicism was even stronger in Puritan-rooted New England and tinged the rhetoric of the pre-Revolutionary arguments, as Waldman wrote:

During the lead up to revolution, rebels seeking to stoke hatred of Great Britain routinely equated the practices of the Church of England with that of the Catholic Church. In the late 1760s and early 1770s, colonists celebrated anti-Pope Days, an anti-Catholic festival derived from the English Guy Fawkes day (named for a Catholic who attempted to assassinated King James I). . . .

Roger Sherman and other members of Continental Congress wanted to prohibit Catholics from serving in the Continental Army.

In 1774, Parliament passed the Quebec Act, taking the enlightened position that the Catholic Church could remain the official church of Quebec. This appalled and terrified many colonists, who assumed this to be a British attempt to subjugate them religiously by allowing the loathsome Catholics to expand into the colonies. Colonial newspapers railed against the Popish threat. . . . In Rhode Island, every single issue of the Newport Mercury from October 2, 1774 to March 20, 1775 contained “at least one invidious reference to the Catholic religion of the Canadians,” according to historian Charles Metzger.

At top is Paul Revere’s cartoon “The Mitred Minuet,” engraved for Isaiah Thomas’s Royal American Magazine. It’s another example of American anti-Catholic (and anti-Québec and anti-Scottish) propaganda.

However, Anti-Catholicism is also a clear example of how American Patriots changed their tenets, or at least their policies. At the start of the war they were trying to be more British than the British, and thus more anti-Catholic. But they soon realized they wanted to win over the French Catholic inhabitants of Canada, which meant toning down the “evil Papists” talk.

Gen. George Washington, not from New England and skeptical of people’s abilities to discern the ways of providence, was a leading voice for religious acceptance. Waldman wrote, “On September 14, 1775, he banned the practice of burning effigies of the Pope once a year.” I think that’s a reference to Washington’s letter on how to treat the Canadians and accompanying orders to Col. Benedict Arnold. But those documents applied only to Arnold’s small contingent in Canada.

On 5 November, Washington took the bigger step by ordering his own larger body of troops around Boston, most of them New Englanders, not to celebrate Pope Night:

As the Commander in Chief has been apprized of a design form’d for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the pope—He cannot help expressing his surprise that there should be Officers and Soldiers in this army so void of common sense, as not to see the impropriety of such a step at this Juncture; at a Time when we are solliciting, and have really obtain’d, the friendship and alliance of the people of Canada, whom we ought to consider as Brethren embarked in the same Cause. The defence of the general Liberty of America: At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused; indeed instead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our Brethren, as to them we are so much indebted for every late happy Success over the common Enemy in Canada.

At the time, one of the general’s senior aides at headquarters was Stephen Moylan, an Irish immigrant to Pennsylvania whose brother Francis had just become the Roman Catholic bishop of Kerry. Moylan might even have drafted that paragraph for the commander-in-chief’s approval. I don’t think a lot of the New England troops or officers knew about his background, however.

Later the Congress made alliances with France and Spain, only a few years after some of those same American politicians had accused those Catholic powers of conspiring against their British liberties. Soon after the war, even Boston had a Catholic church, and the federal government required itself to be neutral on all religious questions. (Tax support for Congregationalist churches continued in most of New England for decades.) This was one of the biggest turnarounds of the Revolutionary movement, so complete that most of us don’t recognize the religious prejudices it started out with.

The Source of the “Huzzah” Anecdote

Yesterday I completed tracing the story of Gen. George Washington’s admonition to his troops not to cheer at Yorktown to Dr. Thomas McCalla, intendant (mayor) of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1810-11. The last step is determining if McCalla was at Yorktown and thus had the chance to hear Washington’s words, or a report of them, at the time.

There are at least two men named Thomas McCalla connected to the American forces. (And with the number of ways people spelled that surname—McCalla, M’Caula, Macaulay, McCauley, and so on—there are probably more.)

One Thomas McCalla appears in Elizabeth Ellet’s profile of his wife Sarah in Women of the American Revolution (1848-1850). That man did live in South Carolina, but wasn’t at Yorktown and wasn’t a physician.

The other man was Thomas Harrison McCalla, who graduated from Princeton in 1777 and joined Col. Stephen Moylan’s regiment of dragoons in Philadelphia as a surgeon’s mate the next spring. He remained with the unit through the end of the war, becoming a surgeon on 1 June 1780. (In some war records, McCalla’s middle initial has been transcribed as an M instead of an H.)

Moylan’s regiment was part of the American forces at Yorktown. Dr. McCalla was therefore on the scene when the British surrendered. Whether or not he was close enough to Gen. Washington to hear what the commander said, he could have learned the upshot of the orders soon afterward.

At the end of 1783, Dr. McCalla joined the Pennsylvania division of the Society of the Cincinnati. But the “Dr. M’Caula” whom Alexander Garden quoted in 1822 was from Charleston, South Carolina. And there were a few states in between those places.

Fortunately, in 1871 the Transactions of the Medical Society of New Jersey published this profile of the man—clearly the same one, even though it says nothing of his military activity:

THOMAS HARRISON McCALLA, son of John McCalla and Jane Harrison, was born in the city of Philadelphia, where he was educated. He pursued medical studies with so much zeal and success as ultimately to gain for himself an enviable standing as a physician. He practiced medicine in Greenwich, Cumberland County, N. J., some time between the years 1790 and 1800. He changed his residence to Charleston, South Carolina, where he soon became distinguished as a physician. He was for some years Poor Physician of that city. He was married to Miss Barksdale, of Charleston, by whom he had a daughter, who died a few days after her marriage, and left him childless. He did not long survive her. Like the most of his family, he was possessed of more than ordinary mental endowments. It is regretted that no further account of this distinguished physician has been obtained.

Now we can add that Dr. McCalla was elected to Charleston’s highest office in 1810 and 1811. According to Ancestry.com, his daughter Sarah Barksdale McCalla died in 1809 at the age of twenty. The Pennsylvania Society of the Cincinnati records that Dr. McCalla himself died in January 1813.

It’s striking how the different periods of Dr. McCalla’s career—his army years, his New Jersey medical practice, and his life in Charleston, including local government service—are preserved in wholly separate sources. I think that reflects how he died without descendants who could have pulled everything together and put it in print. It’s likely that the profile of McCalla in Princetonians, the reference to that college’s early graduates, has a more complete picture.

In any event, we can say that the anecdote about Gen. Washington telling his men, “Let history huzzah for you,” is a garbled version of the original quotation; but that story did come from a regimental surgeon in the Continental Army at Yorktown.

“The spirit of equality which reigns through this Country”

In October 1775, muster master general Stephen Moylan went to Beverly to assist Col. John Glover in fitting out schooners with artillery and crews for the Continental Army. Back in Cambridge, the commander-in-chief’s military secretary, Joseph Reed, was impatiently waiting for word those schooners had sailed.

After Reed sent Glover a particularly harsh letter, suggesting that he was exploiting the contract, Moylan replied a week later with a list of the challenges involved:

You cannot conceive the difficulty, the trouble, and the delay there is in procuring the thousand things necessary for one of these vessels. I dare say one of them might be fitted in Philadelphia or New-York in three days, because you would know where to apply for the different articles; but here you must search all over Salem, Marblehead, Danvers, and Beverly, for every little thing that is wanting.

I must add to these, the jobbing of the carpenters, who are, to be sure, the idlest scoundrels in nature. If I could have procured others, I should have dismissed the whole gang of them last Friday—and such religious rascals are they, that we could not prevail on them to work on the Sabbath. I have stuck very close to them since, and what by scolding and crying shame for their tory-like disposition in retarding the work, I think they mend something.

There is one reason, and I think a substantial one, why a person born in the same Town or neighbourhood, should not be employed on publick affairs of this nature, in that Town or neighbourhood; it is, that the spirit of equality which reigns through this Country will make him afraid of exerting that authority necessary for the expediting his business.

He must shake every man by the hand, and desire, beg, and pray, do brother, do my friend, do such a thing; whereas a few hearty damns, from a person who did not care a damn for them, would have a much better effect, (this I know by experience,) for your future government. Indeed, I could give other reasons, but I think this sufficient.

In fact, Moylan, Glover, and their workers managed to launch four armed schooners by the end of that October. I think Reed was extraordinarily impatient because a committee of Continental Congress delegates had arrived in Cambridge, and he wanted to impress them by reporting that the schooners were already sailing.

This afternoon I’ll say more about this episode and others in my talk “Cambridge: Birthplace of the American Navy?”, at Longfellow National Historic Site.

What the Americans Found on the Nancy

Yesterday I described the capture of the British brig Nancy by a New England privateer in late November 1775. When the Americans discovered the weapons on that ship, “jubilant” is not too strong a word for their reaction. Gen. William Heath wrote in his diary on 30 Nov 1775:

Intelligence was received from Cape Ann, that a vessel from England, laden with warlike stores, had been taken and brought into that place. There was on board one 13 inch brass mortar, 2000 stand of arms, 100,000 flints, 32 tons of leaden ball, &c. &c. A fortunate capture for the Americans!

Those weapons were soon moved to Cambridge, and Col. Stephen Moylan wrote:

Such universal joy ran through the whole camp as if each grasped victory in his hand; to crown the glorious scene, there intervened one truly ridiculous, which was Old Put [Gen. Israel Putnam] mounted on the large mortar, which was fixed in its bed for the occasion, with a bottle of rum in his hand, standing parson to christen, while god-father Mifflin gave it the name of Congress.

Thomas Mifflin (shown above, courtesy of the U.S. Army Transportation Museum) was then Quartermaster-General of the Continental Army. In June 1776, he would be succeeded by none other than Col. Moylan.

Dr. James Thacher, an army surgeon, later explained the reason for such excitement:

Before our privateers had fortunately captured some prizes with cannon and other ordnance, our army before Boston had, I believe, only four small brass cannon, and a few old honey-comb iron pieces, with their trunnions broken off. . . . Had the enemy been made acquainted with our situation, the consequences might have been exceedingly distressing.

By the day after Heath heard about the Nancy, news of the capture had filtered into Boston, where selectman Timothy Newell recorded:

A large Brigt. with ordnance stores, a very valuable prize from London taken by Captn. [John] Manly in a Schooner Privateer from Beverly.

Lt. William Feilding wrote to his relative and patron, the 6th Earl of Denbigh, on 12 Dec 1775:

In my last I informed your Lordship the apprehension we were in for fear of the Ordnance Brigg was taken and am sorry to Acquaint your Lordship that by Accounts from the Rebels, she was Taken a few days before the Boyne sail’d. . . .

The Captain [of a privateer captured in the first week of December] says he saw the sea Morter (which was on Board the Ordnance Brigg) at Cambridge Common the Thursday before he was taken; and that from the Information of the Master, he was sent out to sea for a Powder Ship, which we have heard nothing of as yet. A deserter who came in a few days since, Says he saw all the Ordnance Stores safe Lodg’d at Cambridge last week.

On 19 Jan 1776, Feilding added that British officers expected the Americans to mount their new mortars on high ground at Phipps’ Farm, across the Charles River from Boston, “and endeavour to Burn the Town.”