“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.

Great Barrington Divided Against Itself

Yesterday I started to analyze a letter that Great Barrington militia colonel and politician Mark Hopkins wrote to the Massachusetts Council in March 1776. The town had formed two militia companies and elected militia officers, but a lot of the rank and file were coming to him with complaints about those officers.

Hopkins, little brother of the town’s Congregationalist minister, explained what he saw as the root of the problem:

It must be observed that the town consists of members of the Church of England and Dissenters [i.e., Congregationalists]; the former of which (a few excepted) have been very backward in all our late publick matters, and amongst us are denominated Tories. It is said that by their interest principally, the aforementioned officers were elected. They have never turned any men out for the publick service, which the other party have; and thus, being all present, are able to outvote the Whigs.

I was surprised to read about an Anglican church this far into the New England countryside. Most were in seaside communities where significant numbers of merchants and mariners had arrived after the early-1600s Puritan migration. In contrast, Great Barrington is in Massachusetts’s westernmost county.

It looks like geography was a big factor behind this Anglican outpost in the Berkshires as well: it was so far west that it was close to northern New York, and there was an overlap between Massachusetts’s claims and a patent issued by New York in 1705. The Great Barrington settlement therefore included a community of Dutch descent who had come east from Albany.

Those Dutch families preferred to worship more in the style of the Lutheran churches they had grown up with. The town’s adherents to the Church of England thus included men named Burghardt, Schermerhorn, and Van Deusen. The new church also gained support from some of the local gentry, such as David Ingersoll, Jr., a young lawyer from Yale like Hopkins.

Great Barrington’s Anglicans organized themselves into a parish in 1762 under the guidance of a minister from Connecticut. They started to build a church two years later. Gideon Bostwick, yet another Yale graduate, read the prayers before going to England to receive holy orders and coming back as the church’s Anglican minister in 1770. Five years later, Bostwick and his wardens could list fifty men who usually attended their services, and that was evidently a significant voting bloc in the town militia.

Having described the militia split, Hopkins discussed a possible solution based on what later generations called gerrymandering—but also said most locals weren’t ready to take that step:

A petition has been presented to me, signed by fifty-four persons, requesting an alteration in the division of said companies into East and West Companies [instead of north and south]. By the proposed new division, the main of those called Tories will be in the West Company. The petitioners imagine that, upon a choice according to this division, such officers would be chosen as would give general satisfaction. The other party say that this proposed division will give as great uneasiness as the present, and they, to the number of eighty-seven, have petitioned against the proposed new division.

The Field-Officers, upon the present appearance, are of opinion that, if the now proposed division had been made at first, it might have been for the best; but after we had proceeded to make a division, and a choice of officers has been made accordingly, thought ourselves hardly warranted to make a new division without the direction of the honourable Council; and the rest of the Field-Officers directed me to write to your Honours upon the matter. William Whiting, Esq., the Representative from the town, can fully inform your Honours of the difficulties and circumstances attending the whole matter, to whom we refer for that purpose.

I beg leave further to mention, that a part of this town, called the Hoplands, containing about thirty-eight men, is separated from the rest of this town by mountains, in such a manner that the people there cannot get to the place of parade here without travelling eight or ten miles. They lie contiguous to a part of Tyringham; we therefore determined that they should join that part of Tyringham, and so make a company; but upon notice, the said Hoplanders refused to join with Tyringham. They are so few that, by the act, they cannot be formed into a company by themselves; so that, as matters now stand, they must be obliged to join the North Company in this town; and yet they have had no voice in the choice of the officers, it not being known but that they would be willing to join with Tyringham till after the choice here.

We look to your Honours for direction in these matters, not doubting but the people will acquiesce in what your Honours shall direct in the premises.

I suspect this was the sort of problem that the legislature liked locals to work out for themselves, especially when they were on the far side of the province. But Hopkins wanted the authority of the General Court to act.

TOMORROW: Taking steps.