“We advise you to resign your arms immediately”

I’ve been exploring the turmoil in Great Barrington during the spring of 1776. The trouble surfaced when the town elected officers for its militia companies.

As described by a local Patriot leader named Mark Hopkins, a group of Anglicans who had never participated in the Revolutionary actions voted as a bloc and narrowly elected some officers who were suspected Loyalists, lukewarm Patriots, or simple embarrassments.

While some men in the town wanted new elections, others felt that now that they had chosen officers under the prescribed methods it wouldn’t be right to change things.

In addition, Hopkins told the Massachusetts Council, men from the remote part of town called the Hoplands disliked having been shunted into neighboring Tyringham’s militia company.

Over the next two years, the Massachusetts legislature and local politicians took a number of steps that forced solutions to that situation. First, the legislature decided Berkshire County should organize three militia regiments instead of two, prompting a reshuffle of companies and officers. By July the once-court-martialed Peter Ingersoll was a militia captain in the new third Berkshire County regiment.

Second, in February 1776 the General Court had passed a resolve asking every town to elect a unified “Committee of Correspondence, Inspection, and Safety,” empowered “to Inspect whether there are any Inhabitants of or Residents in their respective Towns who violate the Association of the Continental Congress.” The Continental Association had started out in 1774 as yet another non-importation agreement, but by this point it was functioning as a loyalty oath. Hopkins thus became head of Great Barrington’s Committee with a mandate to root out Loyalists.

On 9 July 1776, the Great Barrington Committee served notice to thirty-three men who had “refused to subscribe” to the Association. Hopkins and his colleagues told them:

The People of this Town are very uneasy that you have not yet Resigned your arms, and we find they are determined to take your arms in their own way unless you resign them of your own accord. In order to prevent further confusion and mischief we advise you to resign your arms immediately to Sergeant Joshua Root who the committee have desired to receive & take the charge of the same, and we have desired him to give you Notice of this our advice.

Of those thirty-three men, at least nineteen were listed as regular worshippers in the Church of England the year before. The men asked to surrender their guns also included that church’s minister, the Rev. Gideon Bostwick, and the owner of the tavern where its members hung out, Timothy Younglove.

By October, Committee member William Whiting certified that Root had collected one gun from fourteen of those men, particularly in the Van Deusen and Burghardt families. Younglove went from being elected a militia officer at the beginning of the year to being disarmed. Furthermore, town officials gave four of those muskets to other men who were going off to military service.

According to local historian Charles G. Taylor, the town also confiscated “‘a cutlash without a scabbard’ from Asa Brown, who had renounced toryism a few months previous, but found the articles of Association too stringent for his compulsory patriotism.”

As for the dissatisfied Hoplanders, the Massachusetts government let them break off from Great Barrington and form a new town in 1777. They chose, perhaps too quickly, to have the town named after Gen. Charles Lee. Its first meeting-house, a traditional Congregationalist building put up in 1780, appears above.

Hopkins didn’t see the end of that process. He left to join the Continental forces in New York, fell ill, and died at White Plains on 26 Oct 1776, two days before the battle.

“The soldiers appear to be very uneasy with the officers elected”

Yesterday I quoted briefly from a letter that Mark Hopkins of Great Barrington sent to the Massachusetts Council on 30 Mar 1776. Hopkins’s whole report (as transcribed in Peter Force’s American Archives) is an interesting snapshot of how the New England militia system worked—and didn’t work.

Hopkins, born in 1739, was a young Yale-educated lawyer who had already represented his town in the General Court. In the spring of 1776 he became a militia colonel in Berkshire County, but, as he described, that regiment had problems:

Upon the receipt of the Militia Bill, and the order of the honourable Council conformable thereto, the Field-Officers of the Regiment which I have the honour to command, met, and divided the same into companies; and, amongst the rest, divided this town of [Great] Barrington into two companies, by a line running east and west through the middle of the same, having first taken off some of the out corners of the town, and placed them to other companies for their convenience.

After which division, the companies were brought to a choice of their officers, and chose those named in the list now sent to the Secretary. The Captains of each company were chosen by a bare majority of votes, and the Lieutenants but by a few more.

New Englanders probably had more elections than anyone else in the English-speaking world: for town officials and laws, representatives to the General Court, Congregationalist ministers, and, as in this case, militia officers. But they wanted to see strong majorities pointing to community consensus. A “bare majority” was troubling.

Since the choice, a large number of the soldiers appear to be very uneasy with the officers elected. Those of the South Company say that Captain Peter Ingersoll was broke last fall by the sentence of a Court-Martial in the Continental Army, and was then declared incapable of sustaining any office in the Continental service. The First Lieutenant, Timothy Younglove, they say is a Tory, and during the whole of our troubles has manifested himself unfriendly to the common cause, and openly opposed all the measures that have been recommended by the Congress; therefore that he ought not to have any command in the Militia.

Those in the North Company say that the Captain, Hewit Root, is advanced in years, and by frequent fits of the gout, or rheumatism, is rendered incapable of doing the duties of his office. They also object against the moral character and general conduct of the First Lieutenant; and the uneasiness in both companies has risen to that height, that they say they never will bear arms under these officers, so long as they are able to earn enough to pay their fines.

Hewitt Root was born in 1724, thus turning fifty-two in 1776. Despite being “advanced in years,” in 1777 he marched with his men to Fort Edward and back. As for Root’s first lieutenant, that appears to be William Pixley (1734-1800). I can’t find anything about his “moral character and general conduct.” Pixley lost his first wife and two children that fall. He later remarried and continued to fill political offices in Great Barrington during the war.

Ingersoll, Younglove, Root, and Pixley all owned taverns in Great Barrington. That reflected both how magistrates preferred to give licenses to well established property owners and also how tavern-keepers became popular in the community. David Conroy’s In Public Houses explores the cycle of influence those patterns produced.

Younglove’s tavern, “at the fork of the roads just west of Green River,” was remembered in local history as the “headquarters and place of rendezvous” for Loyalists, which helps to explain why people called him “a Tory.” That also raises the question of how the locals chose him to be a militia officer in the first place. (Younglove’s 1796 gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find a Grave.)

Hopkins saw the explanation lying in a deeper split within his regiment and his town.

TOMORROW: “an alteration in the division.”