“Growing Up in the Gore Family” in Waltham, 19 Jan.

On Sunday, 19 January, I’ll speak at Gore Place in Waltham on “Growing Up in the Gore Family: Class and Conflict in Revolutionary Boston.”

That estate was built by Christopher and Rebecca-Payne Gore in the early republic after they returned from a diplomatic mission. Christopher had made his fortune as an early corporate lawyer, setting up some of the region’s first large industrial companies.

Among those companies was a glass factory co-owned by Christopher’s older brother Samuel and their twice-over brother-in-law Jonathan Hunewell. That factory supplied the glass for the mansion’s first windows.

But I’m going to talk about the American Revolution before America’s Industrial Revolution. As the event description says:

Christopher Gore grew up in a family on the verge of entering Boston’s genteel class. The Gores were active in the Revolutionary resistance—organizing protests at Liberty Tree, hosting spinning bees for Daughters of Liberty, and even being hurt in a riot before the Boston Massacre. But as that conflict heated up, Christopher’s father chose to side with the royal government and left America in 1776. This talk explores the difficult choices that one family worked through.

If that sounds staid, rest assured there’s bloodshed, bigamy, effigies, and weapons theft along the way.

This event is scheduled to start at 3:00 P.M. After we’re done with questions, attendees will have a chance to walk through the mansion. The cost is $10, free to Gore Place members and through Card to Culture. Reserve tickets through this link.

“Mr Felch is delivering a course of Phrenological Lectures”

Walton Felch was born in Royalston, Massachusetts, in 1790, youngest in a large family. Eventually his parents and some siblings moved to Vermont, forming the village of Felchville in Reading.

Walton Felch appears to have gone to work in one of Rhode Island’s early industrial mills as a teenager. Ambitious and eager for knowledge, he rose to management ranks. He then did something even more unusual, turning his experience into poetry.

In 1816 Felch published The Manufacturer’s Pocket-Piece, or, The Cotton-Mill Moralized: A Poem, with Illustrative Notes. The notes about how mills of this time really operated appear to have had more lasting value than the poetry.

Felch continued to write poetry his whole life. He composed verses on fire, the stars, his ancestors, and other topics. When he died, a big part of his legacy to his family was hundreds of unpublished poems.

The year before The Manufacturer’s Pocket-Piece appeared, Felch married Lydia Inman of Smithfield, Rhode Island. He was then listed as living in Attleboro, and the couple may soon have moved to Medway. Walton and Lydia had at least three children: Hiram (house builder and assessor who stayed in Massachusetts), Walton Cheever (trained as a printer, moved to California in the Gold Rush), and Sarah (married a man named Dunbar).

Walton Felch was living in Hubbardston in 1831 when he married again, to Mrs. Nancy Sullivan. By 1840 he was in the area of Oakham called Coldbrook Springs, and he was living there at the end of his life—but didn’t necessarily remain there the whole time.

Felch was certainly intellectually restive. He enjoyed the lyceum movement of the time, particularly the Barre Lyceum, right over the town line. He spoke there in 1834 on the subject of geology. The next year, he participated in a debate: “Does the strength of temptation lessen the turpitude of crime?” In 1837 he spoke on the costs and benefits of government-sponsored South Sea exploration.

One of Felch’s most consuming interests was grammar. In December 1834 he lectured on his “Architectural System of the English Grammar.” He then published A Comprehensive Grammar, Presenting Some New Views of the Structure of Language (1837) and Grammatical Primer: Comprising the Outlines of the Compositive System (1841). The Norfolk Democrat credited Felch with “a very amusing and instructive Lecture” on the topic in January 1840.

The Barre Gazette of 23 Feb 1838 signaled a new interest:

Oakham Lyceum Meets on Monday evening, the 26th inst. Lecture by Mr Felch on Phrenology.

Phrenology was a relatively new scientific pursuit—diagnosing people’s personalities, strengths, and deficits from the bumps on their skulls, usually as felt through through hair and skin. By the next year, Felch felt he had mastered it enough to publish A Phrenological Chart: And Table of Combinations.

On 15 Nov 1839 the Christian Freeman and Family Visitor of Waltham published this item:

Phrenological Lectures.

Mr Felch is delivering a course of Phrenological Lectures in Rumford Hall [shown above]. We perceive from letters in his possession, that he shares the confidence of Mr [George] Combe, and has given great satisfaction where he has lectured. He has not only read extensively on the science upon which he lectures, but is a close observer of mankind, and an original thinker. We were pleased and instructed by his lecture last Tuesday evening, which was the first of a course of six, to be delivered on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Admission 12 1-2 cents each evening.

That expertise seems to have been enough to persuade the selectmen of Lincoln to let Felch take the skulls of two British soldiers killed on 19 Apr 1775 from the town’s old burying-ground. Indeed, according to Henry David Thoreau’s understanding, Felch actually had those skulls “dug up” particularly for his phrenological investigation.

TOMORROW: When Felch took his skulls to Concord.

Emerging Revolutionary War Bus Tour of Battle Road, 11–13 Oct.

The Emerging Revolutionary War team are planning their fourth annual bus tour of historic places, and this year they’re coming to Massachusetts.

On 11–13 October, historians Phillip Greenwalt, Rob Orrison, and Alex Cain will lead “The Shot Heard Round the World: Battles of Lexington and Concord Bus Tour.”

This tour will consist of:

• an overview lecture on Friday night.
• all-day tour of battlefield sites in Lexington, Concord, and other towns on Saturday.
• a half-day tour of more sites on Sunday morning.

The tour bus and Saturday lunch are included in the $250 cost.

Other meals and lodging are separate, not included in the ticket fee. The host hotel is the Courtyard Marriott in Waltham, with a block of rooms set aside at $239 a night.

Alex Cain is the author of We Stood Our Ground: Lexington in the First Year of the American Revolution and a proprietor of Untapped History.

Phil Greenwalt and Rob Orrison are coauthors of A Single Blow: The Battles of Lexington and Concord and the Beginning of the American Revolution, April 19, 1775. (I wrote the foreword to that book.)

For more information, check out Emerging Revolutionary War. To sign up, go to this page.

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.

“They ordered out both their Regiments to fire on Each other”

In his 24 Sept 1775 intelligence report, Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., didn’t just describe dissatisfied enlisted men in the Continental Army.

He also wrote about the disputes among officers in the forces besieging Boston.

One paragraph of Church’s letter described a conflict that I haven’t found mentioned anywhere else:

A Quarrell happened between Col. Bruer and Col. Patterson, at length they got so high, that they ordered out both their Regiments to fire on Each other, but were Quelled by a third that was ordered to fire on them both in case they did not disperce which they did,

“Col. Patterson” was John Paterson (1744–1808, shown here) from Lenox by way of Connecticut. His regiment was assigned to Gen. William Heath’s brigade and thus stationed near the center of the lines.

Identifying “Col. Bruer” is less certain because the Continental Army had two colonels with the surname Brewer: Jonathan of Waltham and David of Palmer. They were in fact brothers, born in Framingham.

Col. Jonathan Brewer’s regiment was part of Gen. Nathanael Greene’s brigade, centered on Cambridge and Charlestown. Col. David Brewer’s regiment was assigned to Gen. John Thomas’s brigade, thus in Roxbury. I don’t know which was closer to Paterson’s position.

I suspect Paterson quarreled with David Brewer, who in October was cashiered for paying his teen-aged son as a lieutenant while the boy was back on the farm and other petty matters. The court-martial record said this Col. Brewer acted “contrary to the repeated remonstrances of the Officers of the regiment,” so it makes sense for another colonel to criticize him as well.

On the other hand, back in the spring Jonathan Brewer got a reputation for arguing with other officers about recruiting. So it’s possible Paterson harbored some hard feelings from that.

Cols. John Paterson and Jonathan Brewer reenlisted in 1776. Brewer, who had been wounded at Bunker Hill, shifted to the Massachusetts regiment of artificers later that year. Paterson (shown above) went on to become a major general.

Another conflict Church was happy to report on:

They begin to try Colonels and Captains for bad behaviour at Bunkers Hill battle, three Colonels have been Cashired and several Captains for their Cowerdice—and could the Army in General have their will General [Artemas] Ward wou’d go for one, for he never so much as gave one Written order that day.

There was indeed a short series of courts-martial in late 1775 removing officers from the army, either for misbehavior at Bunker Hill or for similar failings. (Sometimes, it seems, an officer’s behavior in that battle wasn’t bad enough on its own but left the man with no more chances to screw up.)

Gen. Artemas Ward definitely had his detractors. But he had exercised control during the Bunker Hill battle, sending spoken orders to the commanders on the Charlestown peninsula and to the other sections of the siege lines, which he also had to maintain.

TOMORROW: Dr. Church’s secrets and tales.

“Wishing you Every Blessing in Time and Eternity”

Among the documents in the Samuel Adams Papers at the New York Public Library is a letter from the politician’s second wife, the former Elizabeth Wells (1735–1808), on 12 Feb 1776.

Small portions of this letter have been transcribed and published, sometimes with an erroneous date and other errors. Here’s my best rendering at the whole text (with added paragraph breaks for easier reading).

Cambridge Feb 12, 1776

My Dear

I Receivd your affectinate Letter by Fesenton [express rider Josiah Fessenden], and thank you for your kind Concern for My health and Safty. I beg you Would not give your self any pain on our being so Near the Camp. the place I am in is so situated that if the Regulars should Ever take prospect hill (which God forbid) I should be able to Make an Escape, as I am Within a few stones Cast of a Back Road Which Leads to the Most Retired part of Newtown.

if a Large Reinforcement should Come in to Boston I propose to send the Best of my things into the Country, and have My Self Nothing but a bed and a few Necessarys, and be in Readiness to Move at an Minutes Warning—

Mr. [John] Adams made me a visit after I Wrote to you, so I Must aquit him of treating me with Neglect. I Should have sent a Letter by Him, but I was unexpectedly sent for three days to dine at Cambridge, With Samey [?] and was treated by General Washington and his amiable Lady With great Friendship.

I hadn’t included Elizabeth Adams on the list of people who visited the Washingtons in Cambridge before, but this letter shows she did.

I’m not sure about the name “Samey” or, if that’s the right transcription, who it referred to. Samuel Adams’s son by his first wife was also named Samuel, but at this point he was a grown man and a doctor serving in the army, and he and Elizabeth were usually more formal with each other.

I was in hopes I should had the opportunity of Returning the Compt. by inviting them to dine with you at our house, but by what Fesenton tells Me I fear I shall not see you so soon as I Flatterd My self. I beg (My dear) you would try to Come if the visit is Ever so Short——

I saw the Doct. [I think this is Dr. Samuel Adams, Jr.] this day he is Well and says he Wrote to you last Week. Jobs Father and his family is come out of Boston, but I have not seen him so that I Cannot tell what he has done with the things we left in his Care.

Job was a servant boy the Adams family had hired a couple of years before. I’ve written about wanting to identify him. This paragraph adds a clue: Job was from Boston, not a rural town, and his father was still alive in 1776.

a great Number of the poor Come out Every Week, and are taken good Care of by the Committe Chose for that Purpose——

I Supose you have heard that a great Number of tories are gone to England, old gray among them. young Mr [William] Peperell has lost his Wife. [Thomas] Flukers youngest Daughter [Sally] is an actress on the stage in Boston, and her Father and Mother gone home. Mr. [James] Otis daughter [Elizabeth] is Married to an Regular officer [Leonard Brown].

they have pulled down a great many houses for fire Wood among nothers in our Neighbourhood are old Mr. grays, Blairs Coles [?] and Walcuts and an Number in long Lain. you see that I Write you all the News however trifling.

that house that Mother Lived in of Mrs. Carnes is Burnt, and and [sic] all her goods taken away by the soldrs. I saw her last Week, she is Well, and Boards at one Mr Sanders at Waltham where she is treated very kind. She has her Board and Hannahs paid out of the donations. She sends you her best Love and Blessing.

Elizabeth Adams’s mother, Susanna Wells, was evidently accompanied by her daughter Hannah (c. 1755–1803), then unmarried.

In the following paragraph, “Polly” was someone Samuel Adams sent greetings to as “Sister Polly,” so I’m guessing she was Mary Checkley (b. 1721), sister of his late first wife. “Surry” was an enslaved woman given to the family, whom at some point Adams freed.

Polly desires her particular Regards to you and thanks you for the kind manner you Mention her in your Letters. We are all in good health. Surry and Job send their duty—after Wishing you Every Blessing in Time and Eternity, I subscribe My self yours
Elizah. Adams

PS. I beg you to Excuse the very poor Writing as My paper is Bad and my pen made with Scissors. I should be glad (My dear) if you should not come down soon, you would Write me Word Who to apply for some Monney for I am low in Cash and Every thing is very dear
—adieu

Back in June 1775, Samuel had closed a letter to Elizabeth, “when I am in Want of Money I will write to you.” The family’s only source of income was the Massachusetts government, which of course was in some flux.

The Service of Pvt. Amos Harrington

Earlier this month I wrote about Lt. Col. Abijah Brown, and how a Continental Army court-martial in October 1775 found him guilty of “employing Harrington for fourteen days, and Clarke for eighteen days, out of Camp, upon his own business.”

In other words, while those two enlisted men were supposed to be on the siege lines with the rest of Col. Benjamin Ruggles Woodbridge’s regiment, Brown actually had them working on his farm in Waltham.

It was a pleasant surprise to be able to identify one of those men from army records. He was Pvt. Amos Harrington of Waltham. That’s the only man named Harrington in the Woodbridge regiment, and of course his home town matches Lt. Col. Brown’s.

Amos Harrington was born in Waltham on 18 Nov 1755, making him almost twenty years old when he became a legal matter.

On 19 April, he marched with Capt. Abraham Peirce’s Waltham militia company. The alarm reached Waltham late, so its men didn’t engage with the British troops that day, but on orders from regimental colonel Thomas Gardner they “served as guards until Saturday, the fourth day after the fight at Concord.”

As of 30 Sept 1775, Amos Harrington was listed in Capt. Seth Murray’s company in Col. Woodbridge’s regiment, assigned to Prospect Hill. Whether he was actually there or not during the harvest season was another question.

Harrington appears to have gone home at the end of the year, but then he mobilized with his local company from 4 to 8 March 1776. At Gen. George Washington’s request, Massachusetts called up militia troops to support the push onto Dorchester Heights and reinforce the lines against possible counterattack.

On 10 Oct 1779 Amos Harrington married his cousin Esther, and their first son arrived less than six months later. According to Frederick Lewis Weis’s Harrington genealogy quoted at this Find a Grave page, they had ten children in all, three dying in infancy. Esther died in October 1794, several months after giving birth to her last daughter, who survived her.

After that, I lose track of Pvt. Amos Harrington. He never applied for a Revolutionary War pension, suggesting that he died before the law made those available for nearly all veterans.

Weis’s genealogy says Harrington died in Weston on 15 Jan 1846. However, Weston vital records make clear that was another man of the same name, born in that town in 1754 and still “single” when he died. He was called up for militia service under Capt. Jonathan Fisk in August 1777, as Gen. John Burgoyne was coming down from Canada. I put his gravestone above.

I’d been hoping the Amos Harrington from Waltham did indeed live into the Polk administration, apply for a pension, and leave some comment about his service under (and work for) Lt. Col. Brown in 1775. But no such luck.

Commanding Lt. Col. Abijah Brown

As I related yesterday, Lt. Col. Abijah Brown chose not to reenlist in the Continental Army for the year 1776. He remained in Waltham as the army moved south.

But Brown remained active in the Massachusetts militia. As much of a headache as he was to work with, Brown really was committed to the Patriot cause. And he appears to have been capable. Within a couple of years he resumed his work in the Waltham town government as well.

It looks like authorities who had dealt with Brown before might have learned to be really strict with him, to leave him as little wiggle room as possible.

For instance, in late 1776 Brown led some Massachusetts militia troops north to Lake Champlain, but then balked at further orders. On 10 September, Gen. Horatio Gates, who no doubt recalled how Brown had escaped serious punishment a year earlier during the siege of Boston, wrote from Fort Ticonderoga to Lt. Col. Philip Van Cortlandt:

On receipt of this you will immediately order Lieutenant-Colonel Abijah Brown (who is now at Skenesborough) to this post. If he offers to make any hesitation or delay, you will instantly put him under an arrest and send him down under a good guard.

There might be a sad backstory to that conflict. Two days after that letter, Lt. Brown’s teen-aged son, Abijah, Jr., died at Skenesborough (now Whitehall).

In the spring of 1778 Lt. Col. Brown mustered militiamen for another mission to upstate New York. He wrote to the Massachusetts General Court about those troops needing arms. On 9 June the legislature resolved:

On the Petition of Colo. Abijah Brown praying that a number of militia-men mentioned in his petition, who are now on their march to join their regiment at North River, may be supplied with Fire Arms and accoutrements.

Resolved that the Board of War be, and they hereby are directed to deliver to said Colo. Brown twenty-two Fire Arms and accoutrements for the use of said men, he giving security to said Board of War that said Fire Arms and accoutrements shall be returned in good repair at the expiration of their tour of duty; and that there be stopped out of each one’s wages who shall so receive Fire Arms, the sum of ten shillings for the use of the same, unless any one or more shall choose to purchase said Fire Arms and accoutrements, in which case the Board of War are directed to sell to such as choose to purchase and give them a receipt for their payment.

Evidently some people thought that law wasn’t strong and specific enough to ensure the state would be fully repaid. The next day, the General Court resolved:

WHEREAS some doubts have arisen with respect to the Resolve on the Petition of Lieut. Colo. Abijah Brown of the 9th instant, for solving of which it is

Resolved that the Board of War be directed without delay to deliver to Lieut. Colo. Abijah Brown, twenty-two Fire Arms and accoutrements compleat for the use of that number of men belonging to the regiment of militia from this State, commanded by Colo. [Thomas] Poor; and that the Board of War take an obligation of Lieut. Colo. Brown for the return of the arms and accoutrements aforesaid in good order, at the expiration of the term for which said regiment is raised, and also said Brown’s obligation for ten shillings for the use of each Fire Arm and accoutrement delivered as aforesaid, as also to pay the said Board of War for each of the said arms and accoutrements as may be deficient, or that may be purchased by any of the men, such price as they shall determine, and that the Board of War be directed to set the price of said Fire Arms and accoutrements previous to their being delivered out.

Abijah Brown lived to the age of eighty-one, dying in 1818 at the home of a widowed daughter in Lincoln.

TOMORROW: Back to Col. Gridley’s horse.

“The secret resentment of designing persons”

In late May 1775, the Massachusetts committee of safety received a message from Abijah Brown of Waltham reporting that he had delivered three cannon to Watertown as ordered, and that he was their “most obedient and most humble servant.”

But the committee also received a report co-signed by five Waltham selectmen that Brown was bad-mouthing them and Gen. Artemas Ward as the equivalent to “a set of idiots and lunaticks.”

Perhaps even more disturbing, Brown was reportedly saying things like:

that the [Massachusetts Provincial] Congress had no power to do as they did; for all the power was and would be in the Army; and if the Congress behaved as they did, that within forty-eight hours the Army would turn upon the Congress, and they would settle matters as they pleased; that there would be nothing done but what would be done by the Army

Notably, Brown lumped Gen. Ward in with “the Congress” instead of “the Army.” It would be interesting to know what he might have meant by this rant—was he pining nostalgically for the situation only a few months earlier, when locally appointed town committees and militia companies were organizing rebellion with no provincial authority telling them what to do? Or did he just want to keep those three cannon? 

The committee of safety, with Benjamin White of Brookline in the chair, decided that “any determination on this case is out of the department of this committee” and passed it up to the whole congress. They added a wish “that you may be furnished with such light as may enable you to determine thereon as to you in your wisdom.” So good luck, gentlemen.

The lead signatory of the report, Jonas Dix, was himself a member of the provincial congress. Earlier in the year, Brown had led an effort to disqualify him from that post. Presumably he was happy to share all that he had heard back in Waltham.

The legislature appointed a committee led by Dr. Richard Perkins of Bridgewater to consider the matter. On 27 May he reported back. Notably, he addressed the “complaint against lieutenant colonel Brown.” The Waltham warning had referred to “Abijah Brown, who calls himself Lieutenant-Colonel,” casting doubt on his rank. So by using that title the committee recognized Brown as a high-ranking officer in the state army.

Dr. Perkins said:

That after a full hearing of the allegations and proofs for and against said Brown on the complaint of some unknown person through the selectmen of Waltham to this honorable Congress we are of the sentiment that an unhappy controversy has existed in said town relating to public affairs in which said Brown had exerted himself very earnestly in favor of the cause of liberty by which means he had disgusted several persons who have since endeavored therefor to censure and stigmatize him as being an officious busy designing man

and unhappily it appears that Mr Brown has associated in taverns indiscriminately with many persons in discourse with whom he at some times had inadvertently expressed himself which he would not strictly justify himself in

And that it is evident those disaffected antagonists of Mr Brown’s had taken the advantage of his halting purely from revenge and the committee adjudge from the whole of the evidence for and against said Brown that he is injuriously treated by the secret resentment of designing persons and that he ought to be reinstated to the esteem and countenance of every friend to the liberties of this country

The official ruling, in sum, was that some of Lt. Col. Brown’s neighbors (Dix?) were out to get him—and that he had helped them along by running off at his mouth. Would that scare be enough to make him toe the line in future?

TOMORROW: Of course not.

(I couldn’t find Dr. Richard Perkins’s gravestone to stand in for a portrait, so the stone above is for his wife Mary [1735-1779]. She was John Hancock’s older sister. Richard and Mary were also stepsiblings, his widowed father having married her widowed mother.)

“Representing the General and Committees as a set of idiots”

As I related yesterday, in April 1775 the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s committee of safety ordered Abijah Brown of Waltham to prepare three cannon for use.

Then, about three weeks later, the congress ordered him to deliver those three guns to Watertown.

That wasn’t the congress’s first dealing with Brown. Back in February, the rebel legislature had to consider “A petition of Abijah Browne and others, setting forth the irregularity of the choice of Jonas Dix, Esq., to represent the town of Waltham in this Congress.”

Other Waltham men led by Leonard Williams sent a petition supporting Dix (1721-1783, gravestone shown above courtesy of Find a Grave). Obviously, there was some sort of argument going on in Waltham. It might even have been over politics.

The congress decided to stay out of it. It decided that even if the first petition’s complaints were all true, they were “not sufficient to disqualify Jonas Dix.” So he remained in his seat, in power, with a (further?) reason to dislike Abijah Brown.

Those circumstances set the stage for another message to the congress, printed in Force’s American Archives, that followed the orders to Brown to hand over the cannon:

Whereas a number of the inhabitants in and about Waltham, in the County of Middlesex and Province aforesaid, having a deep sense of their obligations to the Honourable Committee for their services, upon information given, look upon themselves in duty bound, to represent to them in this publick manner, the repeated and publick insults and abuses that the Honourable Committee and Congress are from day to day treated with by one Abijah Brown, who calls himself Lieutenant-Colonel, who, from time to time, and in different company, in the most publick manner upon the road, and in publick houses, where company of strangers or town’s people are on any occasion assembled, taking such opportunity to declare, though in such profane language that we must be excused from repeating, viz: that the Congress had no power to do as they did; for all the power was and would be in the Army; and if the Congress behaved as they did, that within forty-eight hours the Army would turn upon the Congress, and they would settle matters as they pleased; that there would be nothing done but what would be done by the Army; and with respect to the General [Artemas Ward] and Committee, that they had no more right or power to give their orders to remove the cannon and stores from Waltham, than one John Stewart, who is a poor unhappy man, that is non compos mentis; hereby representing the General and Committees as a set of idiots and lunaticks, in order to lessen and bring into contempt the power and authority of the Province, at this very important day.

This conduct from one assuming rank in the Army, in and about Head-Quarters where the Army is, and his reasons for such conduct, we leave every one to judge for himself, &c.

We therefore would bumbly pray that your Honours would be pleased to take into your consideration this very dangerous matter, before it is too late, and before the seeds of discord and mutiny have taken too deep root, and take such steps to put an end to it, as well as to him, with regard to his being any way concerned in the Army, as your Honours in your wisdom shall see fit.

Abner Sanders, John Sanders, Jedediah White, Peter Ball, Eleazer Bradshaw, &c., of Waltham, and Captain Abijah Child, now in the Army, stand ready, upon any day ihat your Honours may appoint, to appear and give your Honours the fullest proofs of what is here set forth, though this is but in part.

Jonas Dix,
Nath’l Bridge,
Josiah Brown,
John Clark,
Selectmen of Waltham.

Abijah Brown was clearly upset about being ordered by the Massachusetts army command to hand over the cannon he had been working on.

And Jonas Dix was clearly thinking Brown shouldn’t be in the Massachusetts army at all, especially at a lieutenant colonel’s rank.

TOMORROW: The congress plays referee.

How Maj. Abijah Brown Went to War

Abijah Brown was born in Watertown in 1736, and on 24 May 1758, at the age of twenty-one, he married Sarah Stearns of Waltham.

Their first child, Abijah, Jr., was born in Watertown the following March. By the next year they had moved to Waltham, where Sarah gave birth to:

• Edward (1760)
• Anna (1763)
• Elizabeth (1765)
• Jonathan (1767)
• Abner (1769)

Abijah Brown became involved in town politics as a selectman and meeting moderator. He served on committees to respond to the Boston committee of correspondence, draft instructions for the town’s legislators, and attend the Middlesex Convention of late August 1774.

Brown was also active in the town militia company, rising to captain in 1773 and major at the start of the war. According to Henry Bond’s Family Memorials (1855), he was “one of the first to ascertain the proposed march of the British upon Concord and was active in giving the alarm.” I’m not sure what that means because most histories say that Waltham never got word about the British march on 19 April and had to catch up to its neighbors.

Contemporaneous evidence leaves no doubt that Brown was militarily active in the first weeks of the war. On 28 April the Massachusetts committee of safety declared “Major Brown appointed to give such repairs to the cannon at Waltham, as may be judged proper.” Three days before the committee had ordered that “three Cannon now at Marlborough, be brought to the Town of Waltham, and mounted on carriages prepared for them, till further orders.” 

In this period Maj. Brown probably supplied Col. Richard Gridley, the commander of the artillery regiment, with a horse and sulky so he could move around the siege lines as quickly as possible, overseeing fortifications and gun emplacements.

On 17 May the committee of safety issued new orders:

That the three pieces of cannon, with the stores, now at Waltham, be immediately removed to Watertown, near the bridge, by the advice of the general [Artemas Ward], and that Mr. Elbridge Gerry, one of the Committee of Supplies, be desired and empowered to remove the same.

Where did that leave Maj. Brown? On 19 May he wrote back to the committee:

Agreeable to your order I have removed the cannon under my care at Waltham, to the Town of Watertown, and have delivered them to the Committee of Correspondence for the same Town; and shall have my company in readiness to march to Cambridge to-morrow morning.

I am, gentlemen, with much respect, your most obedient and most humble servant…

TOMORROW: But was he? Was he really?

Young Doctors in Marlborough

Yesterday I introduced the figure of Dr. Ebenezer Dexter, Marlborough’s leading doctor in the 1760s.

On 3 May 1769, however, the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman of nearby Westborough wrote in his diary: “Dr. [Edward] Flynt came from Dr. Dexter, and says the latter will hardly live through the Night.”

Indeed, Dr. Dexter died the next day. On 6 May Parkman reported: “Dr. Dexter was buryed at Marlborough.”

The doctor’s gravestone, shown here courtesy of Find a Grave, says, “He was an Eminent Physician but was Subject unto Death even as other men.”

The doctor’s death left an opening in his town. Two young physicians soon moved into Marlborough, hoping to establish their own practices.

One was Amos Cotting, born in Waltham in 1749 (under the name Cutting, which would have been apt for a surgeon). He graduated from Harvard College in 1767 and then earned his M.A., presumably while studying medicine. Charles Hudson’s history of Marlborough said Cotting came to that town “On the death of Dr. Ebenezer Dexter, 1769,” but he wasn’t on the list of men paying the poll tax in 1770, so he may have arrived later.

The other young doctor was Samuel Curtis, eldest son of the Rev. Philip Curtis of Stoughton. He graduated from Harvard a year before Cotting and also gained an M.A. Curtis was apparently starting to practice medicine in Roxbury when he learned about the sudden opportunity in Marlborough. Hudson quoted from the town’s warning-out records to reveal what happened next:

Dr. Samuel Curtis came to town, June, 1769; came last from Roxbury. Taken in by widow Dexter.

The following month, the Rev. Mr. Parkman rode to Marlborough to see a sick relative, and he also recorded: “Visit Mrs. Dexter and Dr. Curtis who lodges there.”

Curtis had advantages over Cotting in any competition to become the town’s favorite physician. He was slightly older, and as son of a minister instead of a farmer he was probably more genteel. But the big edge appears to have been that he was now living in Dr. Dexter’s house, thus endorsed by Dr. Dexter’s wife, all ready to see Dr. Dexter’s patients.

The widow Dexter was still only in her early thirties, with four young sons to care for and an estate to maintain. Then, in early 1771, Lydia Dexter became pregnant.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

The Fate of Levi Ames’s Body

Last month I took another look at the crimes and execution of Levi Ames, but I neglected the important topic of what happened to his body.

Back in 2009 I discussed how groups of medical students competed to seize Ames’s body for dissection. In a postscript to his letter describing the chase, William Eustis wrote:

By the way, we have since heard that Stillman’s gang rowed him back from the Point up to the town, and after laying him out in mode and figure, buried him—God knows where! Clark & Co. went to the Point to look for him, but were disappointed as well as we.

“Stillman” was the Rev. Samuel Stillman, minister of Boston’s second Baptist meeting. Ames had begged him to preserve his body from the anatomists, and he succeeded.

So what happened to the corpse? The printer John Boyle left us an answer: “His Body was carried to Groton after his Execution to be bury’d with his Relations.”

Levi Ames was the son of Jacob Ames, Jr., and Olive Davis of Groton. They married in Westford in 1749. Levi was their second child, born on 1 May 1752. In his confession, Levi Ames said his father died when he was two years old., though there are no vital records to confirm that.

On 9 Oct 1765, Olive Ames married Samuel Nutting in Groton. Nutting was a Waltham widower with children born from 1752 to 1761. Levi Ames and his little brother Jacob thus became part of a blended family—presumably in Waltham, where Samuel and Olive Nutting had a little girl named Olive in 1770.

In his dying speech, Ames described committing some minor thefts in his childhood and promising his mother he would stop. At some point in his teens he was apprenticed into a household he didn’t identify and didn’t like. He stated:

Having got from under my mother’s eye, I still went on in my old way of stealing; and not being permitted to live with the person I chose to live with, I ran away from my master, which opened a wide door to temptation, and helped on my ruin; for being indolent in temper, and having no honest way of supporting myself, I robbed others of their property.

Ames robbed “Mr. Jonas Cutler, of Groton” and “Jonathan Hammond, of Waltham,” as well as householders in other towns where he didn’t have family.

Levi Ames’s corpse was buried among his Groton relatives in 1773. There was no marker.

Slavery Databases Open to Researchers

The Runaway Slaves in Britain database just became available for online researchers. It offers:

a searchable database of well over eight hundred newspaper advertisements placed by masters and owners seeking the capture and return of enslaved and bound people who had escaped. Many were of African descent, though a small number were from the Indian sub-continent and a few were Indigenous Americans.

Interest is so high that the host servers are having trouble keeping up.

This is just one of several online databases about enslaved people that researchers can now use. There’s the venerable Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which has numbers (not names) of every known slaving voyage from Africa to the New World. This project has recently received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to expand with information about shipments from one American port to another.

The New York Slavery Records Index has collected records that “identify individual enslaved persons and their owners, beginning as early as 1525 and ending during the Civil War.”

Runaway Connecticut is based on a selection of the runaway notices that appeared in the Connecticut Courant between 1765 and 1820. Those advertisements involve different sorts of people—escaping slaves, runaway apprentices, deserting soldiers, escaped prisoners, and dissatisfied husbands and wives.

The Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy site is based on databases created by Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and published on CD-ROM by the Louisiana State University Press in 2000.

The Virginia Historical Society’s Unknown No Longer website collects “the names of all the enslaved Virginians that appear in our unpublished documents.” That means it’s not as comprehensive as other compilations, but the society felt it was better to share what they had which would otherwise remain hidden than to wait for more.

There are a couple of databases for North Carolina, drawing on different pools of data: N.C. Runaway Slave Advertisements and People Not Property – Slave Deeds of North Carolina.

African Runaway Slaves in the Anglo-American Atlantic World is a compilation of runaway advertisement by Douglas B. Chambers. There are separate sections for the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina Low Country regions.

The Black Loyalist site starts with the “Book of Negroes,” people who evacuated New York with the British military in 1783, adding other sources about their lives in Canada and elsewhere in the British Empire. It comes from the University of Sydney and grew from Cassandra Pybus’s research for Epic Journeys of Freedom.

[ADDENDUM: Marronnage in Saint-Domingue is a bilingual website from Canada offering a database on Haiti. It compiles advertisements about enslaved or formerly enslaved people that appeared in the Affiches américaines between 1766 and 1790.]

[ADDENDUM: Ancestry.com makes available the Slave Registers of Former British Colonial Dependencies, 1813-1834. Between outlawing the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 and outlawing slavery in 1834, the British Empire collected registers of “lawfully enslaved” people in many of its Caribbean colonies.]

What data of this sort is available for Massachusetts? I know of three sites that offer raw numbers, not names. Unfortunately, even those numbers are incomplete and not comparable from one database to the next, but they can provide a start.

Primary Research has shared the 1754 Slave Census of Massachusetts, which counted the number of enslaved people over age sixteen in 119 towns in Massachusetts and Maine. Thus, for example, in 1754 two men and two women over age sixteen were held in bondage in Waltham.

The province’s 1765 census was reproduced in Josiah H. Benton’s Early Census Making in Massachusetts, available on archive.org. So far as I know, these figures haven’t been transcribed into a searchable or formulatable data, so one has to consult this just like a printed book. Also, these numbers make no distinction between enslaved and free people. In 1765, Waltham was home to eight male Negroes and five female.

Finally, the 1771 Massachusetts Tax Inventory compiled the property of individuals in many towns (though not all towns’ records survive). One type of taxed property was “Servants for Life,” or slaves. Drilling down patiently from county to town data reveals that in 1771 four Waltham residents were taxed for each owning one enslaved person: the widow Anna Ball, Samuel Gale, Thomas Wellington, and Bezaleel Flagg. Unfortunately, we still don’t know the names of the enslaved people, but it’s possible that further research on the owners would yield more details.

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?

Arbogast on “Two Domestics” in Waltham, 12 Sept.

On Tuesday, 12 September, Camille Arbogast will speak at the Lyman Estate in Waltham on “A Tale of Two Domestics: Adventures in Archival Archaeology.” This event is co-hosted by Historic New England, owner of the estate, and the Waltham Historical Society.

The talk description says:

In 1772, Ruth Hunt, a thirteen-year-old from Concord, Massachusetts, was formally indentured to the family of the local minister. A generation later, Mary Tuesley, recently arrived from England, was hired by the wealthy Gore family. Both of these women worked in domestic service, but how they came to do so and what they expected from their service was very different. By uncovering and piecing together the original source material that exists for these women, we get a richer portrait of working class women’s lives in pre- and post-Revolutionary Massachusetts.

This talk is about the two women, the similarities and differences in their situations, as well as context about indentured servitude and domestic work in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It is also a bit of a detective story, describing the documents Arbogast used, how she found them, and what we might infer from them.

Arbogast has worked for Historic New England, the Trustees of Reservations, Gore Place, and the Historic Newton. She is currently researching the Codman family of Lincoln and colonial-era indentured servants.

The event will start at 7:00 P.M. at 185 Lyman Street in Waltham. Admission costs $10, $5 for members of Historic New England and the Waltham Historical Society. Call 617-994-5912 or go to this site to register.

(The picture above shows the original façade of the Lyman Estate, designed in the 1790s by Samuel McIntire.)

Lectures in Boston and Waltham, 7 April

On Thursday, 7 April, the Skinner auction house in Boston is hosting ceramics expert Robert Hunter speaking on “The Art and Mystery of Early English Pottery: The Troy D. Chappell Collection.”

Since 2001 Hunter has been editor of the annual journal Ceramics in America, published by the Chipstone Foundation of Milwaukee. Here is a gallery of examples from the Chappell Collection, courtesy of Chipstone in 2001.

Hunter has more than thirty-five years of experience in prehistoric and historical archeology. He was the founding director of the College of William and Mary’s Center for Archaeological Research and served as Assistant Curator of Ceramics and Glass in the Department of Collections at Colonial Williamsburg. He received the 2007 Award of Merit from the Society for Historical Archaeology and is an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Hunter’s talk will begin at 6:00 P.M. at the Skinner Boston Gallery, 63 Park Plaza. This event is free and open to the public, and refreshments will be served. Reserve a space here.

On the same night, the Lyman Estate in Waltham, owned by Historic New England, and the Waltham Historical Society are co-sponsoring a lecture by local historian Jack Cox on “Waltham in the Early Republic: A Time of Transition, 1789-1825.”

When George Washington was inaugurated as our nation’s first president in 1789, the Town of Waltham was a small agrarian village located along the Great Country Road just nine miles west of Boston.

Over the next forty years, economic and social developments fundamentally transformed Waltham, creating a community inhabited by yeoman farmers, factory workers, small business owners, and wealthy Boston families.

This talk will examine those changes and the forces behind them.

Cox is scheduled to speak from 7:00 to 8:00 P.M. The Lyman Estate is at 185 Lyman Street in Waltham. Admission is $5 for members, $10 for others. Registration is recommended. Waltham Historical Society members must call 617-994-5912 to register.

Gore Place’s Open Carriage House, 14 June

On Sunday, 14 June, Gore Place in Waltham is inviting the public to view its newly renovated (and recently relocated) carriage house.

This structure dates to 1793, thus making it even older than the brick mansion that defines the Gore Place estate.

Christopher and Rebecca Gore bought that property starting in 1789, then tore down the existing house and had their first mansion and outbuildings erected in 1793. After their wooden house burned while they were in Europe in 1799, they replaced it with the grander, more modern brick mansion in 1806.

The carriage house strikes me as particularly symbolic given Christopher Gore’s rise to wealth. His father, John Gore, was a decorative painter in pre-Revolutionary Boston. The Gore shop specialized in heraldic devices, so the elder Gore and his apprentices and at least one son, Samuel, no doubt painted coats of arms on richer men’s carriages. In particular, the Gores were close to Adino Paddock, a coachmaker with a large workshop opposite the Granary Burying-Ground, and Paddock’s customers included John Hancock.

After a Harvard education, training in the law, and lucrative investments in Continental bonds and many of Massachusetts’s earliest corporations, Christopher Gore could afford a grand carriage himself. His equipage even became a campaign issue when he ran for governor in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

In a 1790 letter to Samuel Adams, John Adams used the Gores as one of four examples of Boston families that had risen from the ranks of mechanics into genteel status as a “natural aristocracy.” Rebecca Gore’s family, the Paynes, was another.

The Gore Place open house, or open carriage house, is scheduled to take place from 3:00 to 5:00 P.M. It is free, and light refreshments will be served. To know about how many people to expect, the site asks visitors to reserve a space through goreplace@goreplace.org.

Samuel Williams: minister, astronomer, fugitive,…

Along with future physician Isaac Rand (profiled yesterday), Prof. John Winthrop took a young man named Samuel Williams (1743-1817) up to Newfoundland in 1761 to help observe the transit of Venus.

After that experience Williams, son of a Waltham minister (and former young captive from the Deerfield raid of 1704), set out on a rather conventional career path. He became minister at Bradford, Massachusetts. But he also kept up his scientific interests. In 1769 Williams observed the decade’s second transit of Venus from Newbury, publishing his observations through the American Philosophical Society seventeen years later.

In 1780 Williams succeeded Winthrop as Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard. That year he wrote about New England’s famous “Dark Day” and led a small college expedition to Maine to watch the Moon eclipse the Sun.

That trip was hampered by the fact that Williams decided that the best place to make his observations was an island in Penobscot Bay which the British military had just defended from a large Massachusetts attack. As with the 1761 transit of Venus, however, warring governments were willing to let gentlemen make observations for the sake of science.

Later in the 1780s, Harvard student John Quincy Adams wrote: “Mr. Williams is more generally esteemed by the students, than any other member of this government [i.e., college faculty]. He is more affable and familiar with the students, and does not affect that ridiculous pomp which is so generally prevalent here.”

But in 1788 Prof. Williams suddenly had to depart Harvard—and the U.S. of A. He was charged with forgery for falsifying a receipt from a trust he administered. Williams rode north, leaving his family in Cambridge to await word of where to find him.

Williams settled in Rutland, Vermont, and found work as a legal copyist and minister, first fill-in and then full-time. He brought his family north and rebuilt a respectable life. Williams launched the Rutland Herald newspaper and edited it for three years. He published a history of the state and a short history of the Revolution for use in schools. Williams helped found the University of Vermont and in 1806 used his astronomical knowledge to settle the state’s northern boundary with Canada.

One of the telescopes Williams reportedly used is shown above courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. The museum’s webpage says Williams used this one to observe the 1769 transit of Venus, but also implies he was a Harvard professor at the time. Soon I’ll share links to more of Williams’s equipment.

In 2009 Robert Friend Rothschild published Two Brides for Apollo, a sympathetic biography of Williams. I believe the title refers to the two types of astronomical events Williams studied: the transit of Venus and the solar eclipse.

Upcoming Events Off the Beaten Path

In addition to the annual commemorations grouped around Patriots’ Day that I linked to here, a few more talks caught my eye because they’re one-off events in unusual venues.

On Monday, 16 April (which is legally Patriots’ Day), at 10:00 A.M., Dr. Sam Forman will sign copies of Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty, at the Vine Lake Cemetery, 625 Main Street in Medfield. Why a cemetery in Medfield? Because that’s the burial place of Mercy Scollay, Dr. Warren’s fiancée when he died. Forman will “read from her newly attributed works and unveil her portrait.”

That same day at 7:00 P.M., Seamus Heffernan will do a book-signing and chat about his alternative-history comic Freedom in the Modern Myths shop at 34 Bridge Street in Northampton. Check out our conversation about that reworking of the Revolution starting here.

On Tuesday, 17 April, the Nichols House Museum will present a lecture by Peter Drummey, the Stephen T. Riley Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, on ”The Real Liberty Bell: Boston Abolitionists, 1700-1863.” This will take place the American Meteorological Society at 45 Beacon Street in Boston starting at 6:00 P.M. Admission is $20, or $15 for members of the museum. For reservations, call the museum at 617-227-6993, preferably by 13 April.

Finally, on the actual anniversary of the outbreak of the war—Thursday, 19 April—Prof. William Fowler will speak at the National Archives in Waltham about his latest book, American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two years After Yorktown, 1781-1783. Fowler is, among many other things, the Gay Hart Gaines Distinguished Fellow in American History at Mount Vernon. That free program begins at 6:00 P.M. Reservations are recommended; email or call toll-free 866-406-2379.