“Ought to be paid by the United States”

To bolster his request for compensation after the Battle of Chelsea Creek, Noddle’s Island estate owner Henry Howell Williams assembled several documents, shared by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

One came from William Burbeck, who before the war had a job managing munitions in Castle William as well as helping to lead Boston’s militia artillery train.

I quoted Burbeck’s account last month. Because Williams took the risk of helping him get out of town, Burbeck was able to become second-in-command of Massachusetts’s artillery regiment.

As for Williams’s loyalty, Burbeck wrote:

it was Done at ye Risque of Every thing that is Dear And [he] informd. me that he was ready to save me or his Country in any thing that he Could

I know of but few men if Any in America that would have taken such Risques they being in his then situation (on an Island Surounded by men of war)—

Mr. Williams Complaynd. to me of the Ill treatment he Recd. from the Enemy that his family had been abused And his Interest taken from him & Recd. nothing therefor and that his situation was Dredfull, That he wished his Interest was off the Island and himself in the Country.

Burbeck signed that account (it’s not written in his handwriting) on 17 Apr 1776, just after the siege, as the Massachusetts legislature was moving to fortify Noddle’s Island. Obviously that document was meant to answer suspicions about Williams’s loyalty and willingness to provide provisions, even passively, to the British military the previous spring.

Williams also collected two statements signed by Moses Gill (shown above), prominent Patriot politician from the town of Princeton. One is dated 20 Mar 1786 and written in what looks like the same hand as the Burbeck statement. That document was composed for multiple people to sign, but only Gill did. It said:

in the year 1775 we were appointed by the Government A Committee of Supplies for the Army that when Genrl. [Israel] Putnam Removed the Stocks from Noddles Island, Among which were a Number of Horses which were Committed to our Care, And Upon Genrl. [George] Washington taken the Command of the Army they were with other Stores turnd. over to Colo. [Joseph] Trumbell the Continental Commissary Genrel at Cambridge

The other document signed by Gill isn’t dated, but it responds to an “account above”—probably meaning Williams’s inventory of lost property. As quoted yesterday, that accounting included “43 Elegant Horses...@ 30£.” The statement said:

I cannot with precision recollect the number, yet I believe the above amount is too high charged either with respect to the number or value of the horses.

And then the scribe inserted “not” in front of “too high.” I think that was the intended meaning all along, given the rest of the sentence, but that particular edit does raise eyebrows.

Williams also claimed to have lost “3 Cattle” and “220 Sheep.” Gill responded:

As to the Cattle & Sheep charged above, I have no personal knowledge in what manner they were applied, but I have no doubt they were used for the benefit of the American Army. as I was informed so by officers & others at that time

The bottom line for Gill:

Upon the whole, the account above charged is in my opinion just & ought to be paid by the United States.

Williams was already in discussions with a representative of the national government.

TOMORROW: A federal agent.

“Permission to pass to & repass from Noddle’s Island”

As discussed yesterday, Henry Howell Williams’s oversaw what was probably the biggest farming operation in Boston harbor in 1775. He was renting Noddle’s Island to raise sheep, cattle, and horses and to grow forage and vegetables.

According to Mellen Chamberlain’s Documentary History of Chelsea, Williams’s “most profitable business had been supplying the King’s troops rendezvoused at Boston, in time of war, and merchant vessels, in time of peace, with fresh provisions from his fields and stock yards.”

That tie to the royal establishment and imperial trade was probably why Williams had signed a complimentary address to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson on his departure for London in June 1774, which quickly became a litmus test for Loyalism.

On the other hand, Williams also had strong ties to the other side of the political divide. He was the son of Roxbury farmer Joseph Williams, and I found hints that that family helped to smuggle cannon out of army-occupied Boston in 1774–75. Williams’s sisters married into Patriot families like the Mays, Heaths, and Daweses. His brother Samuel had moved out to Warwick but then came back east as a Provincial Congress delegate and militia captain.

On 21 April, Williams was in Boston and ran into William Burbeck, who held the Massachusetts government post of storekeeper at Castle William. A year later Burbeck described their interaction:

after some Conoversation with him setting forth my Concern how I should git out of town, Expecting every minute that I should be sent for; to go Down to that Castle—

he told me that he would Carry me over to Noddles Island if I would Resque it that he would Do the same for ye good of his Country; And am Sure that if we had been taken Crossing of water must have been confind. to this Day, or otherway more severly punished. . . . And that the Very next morning after; A party of men & Boat was sent after me And Serchd. my house & Shop to find me—

that after we got to ye Island Mr. Williams ordered one of his men to Carry me over to Chelsea by which means I am now in Cambridge—And that a few Days after I got into Cambridge sent to Mr. Williams Desiring him to Send my millitary Books & plans as also all my instruments which ye Army stood in great Need of. And Could not Do without.

Days after arriving behind provincial lines, Burbeck became the second-in-command of the Massachusetts artillery regiment.

However much Williams wanted to support the Patriot cause, the British military still controlled Boston harbor. So he also made a deal with the royal authorities. On 1 May, Capt. Robert Donkin, one of Gen. Thomas Gage’s aides, issued Williams a pass, shown above courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Head Qrs. Boston 1st. May 1775

The Bearer, Mr. Williams, has the Commander in Chief’s permission to pass to & repass from Noddle’s Island to this place as often as he has occasion; he having given security to carry no people from hence, or bring any thing off the Island without leave from His Excelly or the Admiral—

Rt. Donkin
Aide Camp

NB. his own Servants row him.

Adm. Samuel Graves approved this pass as well. After all, the Royal Navy had at least one storehouse on Noddle’s Island, including a cooper’s shop.

Legends of Paul Revere’s Departure from Boston

After the publication of “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry W. Longfellow in 1860, there was a lot more attention on the silversmith and his activity on 18-19 Apr 1775.

Little stories that Paul Revere’s descendants had told within the family soon became parts of America’s national story. Some of those tales do, as W. S. Gilbert wrote, “give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.” Maybe too much artistry.

Are all those anecdotes reliable? Were any created to entertain and instruct children, who then grew up with them as unquestionable truth?

We can say for sure that those dramatic stories came from, or were supported by, descendants of Paul Revere. They’re not just random folktales.

One source was John Revere (1822-1886), son of Joseph Warren Revere (1777-1868), the silversmith’s eleventh child. Since Joseph Warren Revere wasn’t alive in 1775, he had only secondhand knowledge of that April through his parents or siblings. Likewise, John Revere never knew his grandparents nor most of his father’s siblings, so his knowledge was probably thirdhand.

Paul Revere’s own 1798 description of his ride said simply: “two friends rowed me across Charles River.” In a letter dated 11 Oct 1876, quoted by Elbridge H. Goss in his 1891 biography of Revere, John Revere wrote more, starting with how that boat was hidden under “a cob-wharf at the then west part of the town, near the present Craigie Bridge,” which is now the Charles River Dam.

The two men who rowed Revere across remained publicly unnamed for a century. In November 1876 the Old South Meeting House exhibited a “Pocket-Book of Joshua Bentley, the Ferryman who carried Paul Revere across to Charlestown,” then owned by a descendant in Lexington.

Joshua Bentley (1727-1819) is variously described as a boatbuilder and a ship’s carpenter. He “lived directly opposite Constitution Wharf,” according to a grandson. In the late 1880s that was on Commercial Street near Hanover Street, sticking out the top of the North End. (The current Constitution Wharf is in Charlestown.)

The Bentley family was rising in society. Joshua’s second son, William, graduated from Harvard College in 1777 and became a minister in Salem, as well as an opinionated diarist. In 1780 the Massachusetts General Court appointed Joshua Bentley himself as clerk of the laboratory assembling artillery shells. For that reason, Boston’s 1780 tax records identify him as “Clark to Conll [William] Burbeck,” the comptroller of that state enterprise. Bentley’s family recalled him as a ”commissary.” So he was part of the same crowd of socially mobile, politically active mechanics as Revere. Eventually Joshua Bentley moved out to Groton to live with a daughter, and he was buried there.

Citing John Revere’s 1876 letter, Goss identified the other rower as shipwright Thomas Richardson. This letter added that “Richardson, with two others, laid the platform for the American guns at Bunker Hill; one of the three was killed by a cannon ball from the British.” However, Goss also quoted that letter as saying, “John Richardson, his brother, was with Paul Revere in notifying the inhabitants of Charlestown of the intention of the British to march to Concord.” Does that suggest that John, not Thomas, was in the boat? Without the full letter, there’s some ambiguity.

The 1780 tax records show a bevy of Richardsons working as shipwrights in the North End, including John; John, Jr.; and Thomas. The elder John was presumably the one who died in 1793 at age seventy-seven; he lived near the North Church. Another John Richardson died in 1789; that could have been John, Jr., but the name is too common to be sure.

There are two delightful—perhaps too delightful—anecdotes about Revere’s departure from Boston. One was first put into print by Samuel A. Drake in his History of Middlesex County (1879):

A tradition also exists in the Revere family, that while Paul and his two comrades were on their way to the boat it was suddenly remembered that they had nothing with which to muffle the sound of their oars. One of the two stopped before a certain house at the North End of the town, and made a peculiar signal. An upper window was softly raised, and a hurried colloquy took place in whispers, at the end of which something white fell noiselessly to the ground. It proved to be a woollen under-garment, still warm from contact with the person of the little rebel.

John Revere stated in his 1876 letter: “The story is authentic of the oars being muffled with a petticoat, the fair owner of which was an ancestor of the late John R. Adan, of Boston; Mr. Adan having repeated the account to my father within a few years of his decease.”

City councilor John Richardson Adan (1794?-1849) lived in a house originally built in the seventeenth century and standing on North Street as late as 1893, as shown above. Adan also stated that his grandfather was the last person Dr. Joseph Warren spoke to before leaving town on the Charlestown ferry early on 19 April. So he definitely wanted people to know about his ancestor’s connections with famous Revolutionaries.

What else can we find out about that anecdote? John R. Adan’s parents were Thomas Adan (also spelled Eden) and Mary Swift, who married in 1791. Mary’s father was a shipwright named Henry Swift (1746-1789?), captain of the North End gang during the 1765 Stamp Act demonstrations. In 1768 Henry Swift married Mary Richardson—a daughter of shipwright John Richardson, Sr.? In 1798 Mary Swift was taxed for what appears to be the house shown above, then said to be at the corner of Ann Street and North Street. (The name of Ann Street was later changed to North Street, and North Street to North Centre Street.)

So here’s a scenario to test: Thomas or John Richardson realized he and Joshua Bentley needed cloth to muffle their oars while they rowed Paul Revere to Charlestown. Richardson went to the house of his sister, now Mary Swift. She supplied a petticoat. The story and the house descended in her daughter’s family to her grandson, John R. Adan.

(Another measure of how small Boston society was: In the 1820s John R. Adan served on the city council with John Dumaresque Dyer, mentioned yesterday.)

Yet another family tradition came from a different branch of the Revere family. The silversmith’s daughter Mary (1768-1853) married Jedediah Lincoln of Hingham. Their grandson William Otis Lincoln (1838-1907) told Goss that he had “often heard his grandmother tell this” story:

When Revere and his two friends got to the boat, he found he had forgotten to take his spurs. Writing a note to that effect, he tied it to his dog’s collar and sent him to his home in North Square. In due time the dog returned bringing the spurs. 

Mary Lincoln witnessed the events of April 1775 as a child, so she could indeed have seen this happen or heard about it immediately afterward. However, this is also literally a grandmother’s tale, and it would definitely have entertained the grandchildren. So it seems the least likely of these legends.

Capt. David Bradlee, Wine-Merchant

If there’s not enough evidence to say David Bradlee participated in the Boston Tea Party of 1773, I don’t know what he did between the collapse of George Gailer’s lawsuit in late 1771 and the start of the war.

When Bradlee resurfaces in my notes, however, he was still deep inside Boston’s Revolutionary resistance. In early 1776, he was quartermaster of the Continental artillery regiment. (He may have had this job earlier as well.)

Once the war moved south to New York, Bradlee declined to move with the regiment, recently assigned to young Col. Henry Knox. So did the second-in-command, Lt. Col. William Burbeck, and a significant number of the men.

Bradlee instead became an officer in Massachusetts’s artillery regiment under Col. Thomas Crafts, who had helped to organize Boston’s resistance since the first anti-Stamp Act protest in 1765; Crafts was bitterly disappointed not to receive a colonelcy from the Continental Congress. The second-ranking officer in that regiment was Lt. Col. Paul Revere. The regiment’s major was Thomas Melvill, a veteran of the Tea Party. The regimental surgeon was Dr. Joseph Gardner, who had helped Bradlee carry Crispus Attucks away from the Boston Massacre.

Again, Bradlee was right in the middle of the socially rising mechanics who drove the Revolution in Boston’s streets and public meetings. He now had a military rank, and people referred to him as “Captain Bradlee” for the rest of his life. He joined the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons in 1777.

Bradlee’s connections helped him start building his fortune. On 10 Apr 1778 he joined Melvill and John Hinkley as majority investors in the privateer Speedwell. The ship left Boston harbor in July. After only three days, it captured a British sloop “laden with Sugar, Coffee, Cocoa, Limes, etc.” David Bradlee’s ship had come in.

In Boston’s 1780 tax roll, Bradlee was listed as a tavern-keeper, no longer a tailor. That same year, his younger sister Elizabeth Bradlee (1757-1832) married Gershom Spear (1755-1816), a nephew of Pool Spear, thus uniting the families of two of the people that Gailer had sued ten years earlier.

By the mid-1780s, David Bradlee was recognized as a “wine-merchant,” importing a commodity of upper-class life. He started to rent the basement of the State House to store his inventory, a sign of his continuing connections with the local government. The rent was £17, and the selectmen didn’t collect for two years until he’d finished renovating the space.

In 1794, after nine years, the State House rent was raised to £45, and Bradlee moved out. He bought a large wood and brick shop on the “w[est] side of the…Corn Market,” erected a set of scales outside the front door, and continued selling wine.

Bradlee had carried his family into genteel society. His daughter Sarah married a U.S. Navy captain, Patrick Fletcher. His son Samuel married Catherine Crafts, a daughter of Col. Crafts. His son David W. Bradlee became a member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company and of the Boston Board of Health.

Capt. David Bradlee died on March 6, 1811—“very sudden,” according to one citizen’s diary. He was mourned as a respected member of Boston’s business community and laid to rest in the family’s own tomb, purchased in 1800.

The American Revolution allowed this tailor to become an officer and a merchant. Still, Capt. Bradlee may never have escaped hearing words like those the Rev. Jeremy Belknap attributed to a blacksmith chafing at the demands of a newly-rich tailor: “Come, come, citizen pricklouse, do not give yourself such airs as this! It was but t’other day that you was glad to measure my arse for a pair of breeches.”

John Goddard: “constant in service of the Province”

Back in April, I quoted from the diary of John Goddard (1730-1816) of Brookline, recording how he carted military supplies out to Concord for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s Committee on Supplies just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

Goddard’s work for the army continued after that break, as preserved in the same notebook:

April 22nd 1775—to supping and Breakfasting twelve Men and four oxen. £0:7:4

24. to dining 4 Men
to entertaining teames and men that brought Canteens 0:2:0

May 2d, 1775.
Delivered to the Commasary at the Store in Camebridge
Sixteen Bushels of potatoes £1:8.9 [etc. etc.]

May 2 for Entertainment for Carter with ordinance stores 0:1:0

May 22. Began to be constant in service of the Province Myself.

June 2, 1775. to load of flour and porke from Watertown 0:7:0
2 to Carting Catrage paper from Brookline to Watertown 0:4:0

June 3 to Carting load canteens to Camebridge 0:6:0

June 5. for going to Camebridge with team for ammunition 0:5.0

June 27. 1775. to one days work of two hands and teams Drawing tree to the brestwork 0-14-0

July 7, 1775. To hand and team carting stons to the well in the fort at Brookline 0-6-0

1775. Octr. 3. To a days work carting together Bombs & Balls for Colo. [William] Burbeck To 1/2 day’s work removing Powder from my own house to ye Magazine in Jamaica Plain.

Burbeck was the second-in-command of the artillery regiment.

A different partial transcription appears in Nathaniel Goddard: A Boston Merchant, 1767-1853 (1906), by Henry G. Pickering. It includes “July 19, 1775. To cart and tent poles and Baggage [“Also gabeons”] for Colonel [Timothy] Danielson’s Rigement 0..14..0”.

On August 9, Gen. George Washington’s orders included: “Mr. John Goddard is appointed by the Commander-in-Chief, Wagon-Master General to the Army of the twelve United Colonies, and is to be obeyed as such.”

New Henry Burbeck Collection at the Clements Library

Earlier this year, the Clements Library at the University of Michigan acquired more than 1,600 documents in the Papers of Henry Burbeck (1754-1848), a general in the early U.S. Army.

Burbeck was born in Boston, son of William Burbeck, who became storekeeper at Castle William as well as the town’s fireworks expert. Henry did his militia service in Boston’s artillery company; I’ve used letters he dictated late in life that are now at the Massachusetts Historical Society to trace the last days of that unit in September 1774.

When the war began, Henry and his brothers joined the provincial artillery regiment under Col. Richard Gridley; their father was the unit’s nominal second-in-command, but Gridley preferred to administer through his son Scarborough.

In late 1775, Gen. George Washington and the Continental Congress replaced Gridley with Henry Knox, bypassing Lt. Col. Burbeck. At the end of the siege of Boston, the lieutenant colonel refused to march to New York and thus left the Continental Army.

But Henry, then a lieutenant, remained in the army. In fact, he stuck out the whole war and then rejoined in 1786. He commanded at West Point and Springfield, served in the Northwest Indian War, and established a number of forts on the western frontier. In 1808 he presided over the court-martial of Gen. James Wilkinson, and finally he commanded troops through the War of 1812. Most of the new Clements collection appears to come from that long army career.

The longest report I’ve found about the acquisition is from the Mackinac Island News, focusing on documents of local importance:

In 1796 he peacefully received Fort Mackinac from its British garrison and then commanded the post until 1799. He was a steady officer and strict disciplinarian. A young British lieutenant who visited Mackinac in 1799 described Burbeck as “a little man, as stiff as his boots, awkwardly consequential and [who] passed for a martinet.” Perhaps Major Burbeck still harbored some animosity toward his old foes and greeted his British visitor with reserve.

The collection includes two previously unknown plans of the fort, one by Burbeck and Winthrop Sargent and one by Wilkinson, showing how it developed in those years.

That article also says the Clements’s new collection “represents only about 60% of Henry Burbeck’s entire archive. The remainder is divided among three institutions in the Northeast.” One of those is the New London County Historical Society, but I don’t know the others. A large lot of Burbeck’s papers was sold in 2011.

Generational Tension within the Artillery Regiment

The change at the top of the Continental artillery regiment that Gershom Foster’s early-1776 orderly book documents may have brought up some generational friction.

In his first regimental orders on 28 Jan 1776, the new colonel, Henry Knox, made a point to say:

The Colnl. is fully persuaded the officers of the Artillary Regt. will not loose the present opportunity. He wishes harmony to prevail in Every Company that the officers of Experience would Chearfully communicate their Knnowledg to the Younger and unexperienced Breathen that all the officers in their Respective spheres would inculcate to the noncommisioned officers & Soldiers the duty of their Stations & the advantage & necessity of a proper Subordination.

This message to “officers of Experience” came from a man in his mid-twenties who had just replaced a sixtysomething veteran of two wars, Col. Richard Gridley.

Furthermore, Knox now commanded Lt. Col. William Burbeck, who would turn sixty in 1776, and Lt. Col. David Mason, who would turn forty. Both those men had fought in wars against the French. Knox’s only military experience before 1775 was as a junior lieutenant in Boston’s militia grenadier company. Of course, he had won Gen. George Washington’s favor by helping to design fortifications in Roxbury and then cemented it by bringing more heavy artillery from Lake Champlain.

On 29 January, Knox’s regimental orders said, “the posts at prospect and Winter hills...are to be fired and directed by Colonel Mason.” Two days later Knox designated told all the artillery officers on the northern wing of the siege to report on their ordnance to Mason. The officers elsewhere in Cambridge were to report directly to Knox, and those at Roxbury to Maj. John Crane.

So where was Lt. Col. Burbeck in that arrangement? The Foster orderly book doesn’t mention the regiment’s second-highest ranking officer after the one regimental order he issued on 3 January. (It does mention “Capt. Burbeck at the Laboratory” on Cambridge common; that must have been one of the lieutenant colonel’s sons.)

Burbeck left the Continental Army when it moved south in April 1776, insisting that his contract was with Massachusetts. But perhaps he was already withdrawn from the regiment, or at least stopped behaving “Chearfully” around the new commander.

That’s another question scholars can investigate with the Gershom Foster orderly book, part of the archive at the Society of the Cincinnati’s Anderson House in Washington, D.C.

TOMORROW: Artillery officers versus infantry officers.

[The thumbnail above is Sharon Zingery’s photograph of William Burbeck’s gravestone in the Copp’s Hill Burying-ground, courtesy of Find-a-Grave.]

A Peek at Gershom Foster’s Orderly Book

While I was at Anderson House in Washington, D.C., last week, I spent a couple of days in the Society of the Cincinnati’s library. Like the David Library of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania, it’s tightly focused on Revolutionary America and its cultural legacy. There’s a solid endowment for acquiring books and hiring helpful staff, an excellent collection of published material, and an archive of rare books and manuscripts that scholars should be aware of.

One of the items I looked at was the orderly book of Gershom Foster from the Continental artillery regiment in early 1776. This document shows the arrival of Henry Knox as the regiment’s new colonel; the Continental Congress had voted on his appointment in the fall of 1775, but he was away from the siege lines in New York until the end of January.

Each daily record in Foster’s orderly book starts with the orders coming down from Gen. George Washington’s headquarters. Every day, Foster left space to write the parole and countersign words, but about half those entries are blank—i.e., the security information never seems to have reached him.

Orderly books are also supposed to record the brigade or regimental orders from the officers overseeing the company. On 3 January, Foster recorded this directive from Lt. Col. William Burbeck, acting commander:

That every orderly Sergent of the Artillary Quarterd in or near Cambridge do attend at the Ajudants Room at 2 oClock every day there to Receive Orders.

There’s no further word from Burbeck. It’s not clear how the lieutenant colonel expected orders to reach the artillery companies spread out in the southern wing of the siege lines.

Everything changed on 28 January. Foster penned a big headline: “Regimental Orders.” And we hear the voice of Col. Knox:

It is of the utmost Importance the Regt. of Artillary in the Service of the United Colonies Should be well Regulated & well disciplined. The great number of [sites] which we are Oblge to occupy: necesary occasion the Regt. to be dispersed or detached in consequence of this, the Commanding officers of the artillary at the Differnt posts have a much greater Call for the exercise of every Millitary abillity then if the Regt. was together they will have the praise if their detachments are perfect in their proper Exercise & they will have the blame if on the Contrary they either neglect their duty or behave in an unsoldierlike manner.

Perhaps their never was a period of time in which a good officer could better obtain the greatefull applause of his Country then the present—

Knox’s emphasis on order, hierarchy, and discipline matched Washington’s priorities. The remarks on praise, blame, and “greatefull applause” seem to reflect his own aspirations to gain honor and rise in society. I don’t believe those regimental orders from Knox have ever been published.

TOMORROW: More of Col. Knox’s new orders.

Henry Burbeck Papers Sold

Heritage Auctions just sold a large collection of the military papers of Henry Burbeck (1754-1848), who was a young Continental artillery officer during the Revolutionary War (getting his start because his father William was the original second-in-command of the American artillery).

Henry returned to the army after the war and became commander at West Point, New York. During the War of 1812 he led the Regiment of Artillerists and retired as a brevet brigadier general. He lived until 1848 in New London, Connecticut, and his letters back to Massachusetts historians are useful sources about the early career of Henry Knox and the activities of Boston’s pre-Revolutionary militia artillery company.

The auction house’s website says:

One of the more interesting items in the archive is Burbeck’s draft of his descriptions of the Revolutionary War battles at Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth. The draft reads in part as written, “The Regt. of Artillery raised in 1775 under the command of Col [Richard] Gredley who declined being too old [well, Gen. George Washington determined that Gridley had lost the confidence of his men and kicked him upstairs to the post of Chief Engineer] of which my father was Lt. Col expired on the 31 Decbr. A New Regt. was be raised which was offred to Him. He declind and recommended Henry Knox to be the Colonel. Genl Knox felt very delicate on the subject but my Father insisted. He knew Knox some years before this – When the Troops marched from Cambridge my Father resinged being 60 years of age [and not wanting to give up his Massachusetts salary, according to his resignation letter]. I knew Genl. Knox when he opened a Book Store and stationary the largest in N. England. It was a great resort for the British Officers and Tory Ladies.” 

The Henry Burbeck collection includes several plans for fortifications, and this item:

A notebook that appears to be a handwritten transcription of a military manual, complete with hand-drawn representations of the several plates from the manual. Written in pencil on the back of the front cover, “Peter Tulip / Lexington.” The first page, not part of the transcription, reads, “1775 April 18 Tuesday Will: Burbeck came from the Castle – Fryday got out from Boston – Saturday came to Cambridge April 22d 1775 - Provincial congress Watertown April 28 1775 Willm: Burbeck allowance for his Pay —.”

The Massachusetts Historical Society has posted William Burbeck’s own description of how he got out of Castle William at the start of the war.

TOMORROW: Who was Peter Tulip?

New “Siege of Boston” Website

I’ve been quoting from William Cheever’s diary, but that’s just one of the eyewitness accounts of the siege of Boston that the Massachusetts Historical Society has posted on its website in the past month. The society’s new “Siege of Boston” website extends its huge “Coming of the American Revolution” website.

There are lots of neat stories and familiar names here. For example, the horse given to Henries Vomhavi, a Native American soldier, in the summer of 1775 was apparently still an issue many years later as a man who lived on Noddle’s Island sought compensation from the state. One of that man’s supporting documents was from William Burbeck, the first second-in-command of the American artillery regiment. I already knew that Burbeck slipped out of Boston in a canoe soon after the start of the war, but this document offers his own account of his escape.

Here’s a broadside of songs celebrating the American victory in 1776, which the website editors point out recycled a woodcut created for the conquest of Louisburg in 1745. I’m less impressed by this terrible poem about British and American generals supposedly “Spoken extempore on hearing that General [Thomas] Gages was on his Passage from BOSTON to ENGLAND by an American Lady.” She was evidently unable to extemporize a rhyme for “Washington.” These lines appear to have been caught up in someone’s—maybe a child’s—writing exercises.

One strength of these archives is that they show not just the text of documents but actual images. Want to see the official notes of an eighteenth-century town meeting? Here’s the handwritten record of Boston’s meeting on 22 Apr 1775, with James Bowdoin presiding.

Of course, that was an unusual moment, with thousands of provincial troops ranged outside of town against thousands of regulars inside, and the inhabitants feeling caught in the middle. It was also unusual because town clerk William Cooper, who usually kept notes at big public meetings, as shown back here, had slipped out of town shortly before the war, so someone else made these notes for us to enjoy.

A Deadly Barrage from the Continental Artillery

On 2 Mar 1776, the Continental Army began an artillery barrage against Boston, firing from Cobble Hill and Lechmere’s Point in Cambridge and Lamb’s dam in Roxbury. This was the opening of a spring offensive designed to drive the British military away from the town.

Remember how excited the Americans were back in November after capturing a British ordnance ship? The biggest prize was a thirteen-inch brass mortar that Gen. Israel Putnam and Quartermaster-General Thomas Mifflin christened “the Congress.” That was deployed for this bombardment, and was probably one of the first guns to be fired.

In his history of Middlesex County, Samuel Adams Drake wrote:

It was related by Colonel [William?] Burbeck that the battery containing the “Congress” mortar was placed under the command of Colonel David Mason. With this mortar Mason was ordered to set fire to Boston. His first shell was aimed at the Old South, and passed just above the steeple.

The next shell was aimed more accurately at the roof, which it would doubtless have entered had not the mortar burst, grievously wounding the colonel and killing a number of his men. . . .

Through the inexperience of those who served them, four other mortars were burst during the bombardment which preceded the occupation of Dorchester Heights.

Gen. William Heath of Roxbury wrote that the mortars “were not properly bedded, as the ground was hard frozen.” The Americans probably still lacked experienced artillerists, and were paying for it.

I suspect Drake relied on Richard P. Frothingham’s History of the Siege of Boston in counting five mortars burst over all. As of 3 Mar 1776, Heath and Dr. James Thacher had counted only three, so Frothingham may have counted two twice. Still, those deadly explosions must have been demoralizing for the Americans.

That bombardment was only the first part of the Continental commanders’ plan, however. The artillery fire was meant to keep the British busy while Americans fortified the heights on Dorchester point. The image above, from the Dorchester Atheneum, shows how that town’s peninsula overlooked the Boston peninsula to its northwest (so small it’s not even labeled on this map) as well as a narrow point in the harbor.

At the Battle of Bunker Hill, the provincials had started their redoubt in the middle of the night before the battle. The provincials improvised more protection for themselves along a rail fence, and had superior numbers available, but they ran out of gunpowder and couldn’t stop the British from taking not only the redoubt but the whole Charlestown peninsula.

Gen. George Washington and his commanders were determined to make the Dorchester fortifications strong enough to withstand a British counterattack. That required preparing parts of the works in advance, to be assembled on the heights, and a multi-day construction effort. Hence the need to distract the British with cannonballs and shells.

Documents for Sale and Col. William Burbeck

A while back author Don Hagist reminded me of the online auctions at EarlyAmerican.com, which often include Revolutionary items, including powder horns, buttons, pamphlets, books, and documents.

For example, one item recently on the block was a manuscript describing a “New manner of forming a company in order of Battalion, as practiced by the Independent Companies in Boston”. This is a guide to militia drill, with a diagram, for a captain, two lieutenants, and four sergeants.

Another was a list of Massachusetts non-commissioned officers and men raised for the defense of the Castle and Governors Island in Boston harbor, made out by Col. William Burbeck of the state militia in 1782.

In the middle of 1775, Burbeck was second-in-command of the American artillery regiment under Col. Richard Gridley. He probably had more experience with explosives than anyone else in Massachusetts outside the Royal Artillery, having worked at the Castle William fort for several years while it housed first militia troops and later regiments from the British army. Burbeck was also Boston’s fireworks expert. He was at the Castle when the war began in 1775, and reportedly escaped to the provincial lines in a canoe.

In late 1775, Gen. George Washington and the Continental Congress replaced Gridley with Col. Henry Knox, a much younger man whose highest previous rank was a lieutenant in the Boston grenadier company. Other aspiring officers, such as Thomas Crafts, Jr., seem to have resented Knox’s sudden promotion. Burbeck continued to serve in the regiment until the British military sailed away in March 1776.

Then Washington ordered most of the Continental artillery to move south to New York, where he anticipated another attack. On 12 April, Burbeck wrote to Knox:

I see, by your instructions from his Excellency, I am ordered to New-York directly. When I came out of Boston, the [Massachusetts] Provincial Congress voted me one hundred and fifty pounds during the war, and four shillings sterling a day for life. It would be ungenerous for me to leave their service, as they have provided so well for me. If I leave their service, the four shillings a day is lost to me. As I am advanced in years, I am unwilling to part with it.

I am not able to set out directly to New-York, because I am finishing the drafts for cannon, mortars, and carriages, for the Province.

I hope, sir, the above will excuse me for not complying with your orders.

Burbeck thus left his high post in the American artillery, preferring to remain in Massachusetts working for the state’s guaranteed salary and pension. (Two of his sons, Edward and Henry, remained Continental Army artillery officers; Henry eventually succeeded to Col. Gridley’s post as Chief Engineer of the U.S. Army.)

I suspect Burbeck may not have been happy continuing as Knox’s second-in-command; artillery officers seem especially touchy about relative rank. It was under that state authority as a militia commander that he wrote the document on sale this month.