Thomas Seward and “the calms of domestic felicity”

At last we reach the thing that prompted me to look into the life of Continental Army artillery officer Thomas Seward: his gravestone in the Copp’s Hill Burying-Ground.

This stone is well preserved and has been written up and photographed many times. The photo here is by Ken Horn and appeared on Find a Grave.

The stone’s ornaments include an urn, a rising sun, and a cannon and pyramid of cannon balls to reflect Seward’s military service. The text reads:

Reader!!!
Beneath this Stone is deposited,
the Remains of,
MAJOR THOMAS SEWARD,
who gallantly fought
in our late revolutionary War,
and through
its various scenes, behaved
with Patriotic fortitude
& died in the calms
of domestic felicity, as becomes
a Universal-Christian,
Novr. 27th 1800 Ætat 60

“The lonely turf where silence lays her head,
The mound where pity sighs for hon’d dead,
Such is the grief where sorrow now doth sigh,
To learn to live is but to learn to die.”

I haven’t found a source for that verse, so it may have been composed expressly for the Seward grave.

Some webpages describing this stone question why it doesn’t mention the major’s wife. Nineteenth-century books about the cemetery reported that the stone has further lines, now buried in the ground:

Also
SARAH SEWARD his Wife
Obiit March 14th 1800
Ætat 63

When I set out to research Thomas Seward, I hoped to find some dramatic story, the way probing the named attackers of Owen Richards led me on a round-the-world voyage and into colonial Boston’s system for managing poor children.

But recounting drama depends on finding personal details about a life’s inflection points, and the records of Seward’s life are stubbornly low-key. Very few personal papers survive. He rarely showed up in newspapers. Other people didn’t write much about him.

Over sixty years Thomas Seward maintained a business, married, and had children. He lived through the political turmoil of Boston in the 1760s and 1770s and then spent eight years fighting for American independence. During his final years he had a mild religious conversion, formed a political affiliation, and took on a new government job. At age sixty he lost his wife, and he died eight months later. His life must have contained drama. But it went with him to the grave.

“A respectable and well-known Officer”

For Thomas Seward, his military service in the Continental artillery, rising from lieutenant to brevet major over eight years, remained an important part of his identity after the war.

Seward was an original member of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati and served on its standing committee in the 1790s.

Like a lot of networked Continental Army officers, he eventually accepted a job in the federal government, becoming an officer of the United States Customs in Boston in 1796.

When Alexander Hamilton was vetting officers for the “Quasi-War” with France in 1798, Henry Knox apparently told him that Seward was “advanced in years & corpulent,” and would be best as a “Garrison Capt” rather than in the field, but there were “few better Officers.”

Thomas Seward’s namesake son, a merchant captain, married in 1799. The following year, the major’s wife, Sarah, died in March.

On 28 Nov 1800 the Massachusetts Mercury reported in its Deaths section:

Yesterday, Major Thomas Steward, aged 60. A respectable and well-known Officer in the revolutionary army of the United States. His funeral will be from his late dwelling at the bottom of Middle-street, near Winnisimet-Ferry, this afternoon, which his relations and friends are requested to attended, without further invitation.

[pointing hand] The Members of the Cincinnati are respectfully requested to attend the funeral.

The next day’s Jeffersonian Constitutional Telegraph repeated the sentence describing Seward as a “respectable and well-known Officer” and added a new line: “A firm and determined Republican.” The major had taken sides in the nation’s political divide.

Seward died without a will, so probate judge George R. Minot appointed his late wife’s sister Abigail Brett to work out the estate. The inventory she filed shows that Seward owned many artifacts of gentility: a silver watch, a Bible and seventeen other books, an angling rod, two canaries in a cage, a $35 desk, $100 worth of wearing apparel. The house contained twenty pictures of various sizes, including two of “Bounaparte & Lady”—reflecting early Republican admiration for France.

That inventory also confirms that Seward owned a pew in the Rev. John Murray’s Universalist meetinghouse. At some point he had moved from an orthodox Congregationalist meeting to this liberal new sect. Among other converts to Universalism was Col. Richard Gridley, the artillery officer Seward had served under back in 1775.

TOMORROW: Why we remember Thomas Seward.

Thomas Seward, Continental Artillery Officer

Thomas Seward (1740-1800) was born in Boston and grew up to be a hatter. He married Sarah Colter at the Rev. Andrew Eliot’s New North Meeting-House in October 1763, and they had five children between 1764 and 1773.

Seward also joined the Boston militia artillery company, or train, founded in the early 1760s and commanded for most of that time by Maj. Adino Paddock. As I described in The Road to Concord, Paddock remained a Loyalist while most of the company were Patriots. In September 1774 the train fell apart, and its four brass cannon disappeared from the militia armories under redcoat guard.

By May 1775, Seward was outside Boston. He joined Col. Richard Gridley’s new artillery regiment as a lieutenant and rose to the rank of captain-lieutenant at the end of the year. On 15 July 1776 Henry Knox wrote back from New York to his brother William in Boston:

Pay Mrs Sarah Seward wife of Capt Lt Seward 20 Dollars, and inform her that Cap Seward is well and gone up to the Highland Forts about 50 miles from this City up the river—he lives near [??] ferry—don’t neglect this

That summer Seward signed a petition to Col. Knox seeking better pay for artillery captain-lieutenants. At the start of 1777, Seward became a captain in charge of his own company in Col. John Crane’s Continental artillery regiment.

Seward shows up in the documents on Founders Online only once during the war, as Gen. George Washington considered ordering him to move from one spot of the lines around New York to another. There are some letters from, to, and about Seward in the papers of Gen. Knox. The Massachusetts Historical Society holds an orderly book he kept in late 1782 with some company returns. 

Seward remained in the army until June 1783, and he was given the brevet rank of major that September as a retirement gift, along with a warrant for land.

Seward returned to Boston, his family, and his business. On 7 June 1788 he advertised in the Massachusetts Centinel:

THOMAS SEWARD
INFORMS the publick, and particularly his friends, that he has REMOVED from the Shop he lately occupied in Dock Square, to STATE STREET, adjoining Mr. Elliot’s Snuff-Store—where he continues to carry on the
HATTER’s BUSINESS—
Where any commands will be punctually executed—and every favour gratefully acknowledged.

This is the only advertisement I’ve found for Seward’s shop. Obviously he was able to keep customers without newspaper promotion. That orderly book also includes some of his personal accounts from the 1790s.

TOMORROW: Drawing on military connections.