David Library’s “Letters from the Front”

The David Library of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania is blogging some items from its collection transcribed and collected as “Letters from the Front.” (Not all items are tagged that way yet, hence the list below.)

Several of the documents so far are letters from Col. Jedidiah Huntington (1743-1818, shown here courtesy of the Huntington Family Association) to his father, Connecticut militia general Jabez Huntington, during the siege of Boston. But there are some other familiar names as well.

• Introduction from scholar Will Tatum.
• Dr. Samuel Adams to Samuel Adams, 7 Feb 1775.
• William Coit on Bunker Hull, June 1775.
• William Tudor to Stephen Collins, 27 Sept 1775.
• Charles Lee to Alexander MacDougall, 26 Oct 1775.
• Huntington, 11 Nov 1775.
• Isaac Sears to the Connecticut delegates to the Congress, 28 Nov 1775.
• Huntington, 4 Dec 1775.
• Huntington, 25 Dec 1775.
• Huntington, 18 Jan 1776.
• Dr. Samuel Adams to Sally Preston, 10 Mar 1776.

Just to make things interesting, there were two physicians named Samuel Adams in the Continental Army in 1775-76. The son of the Boston Patriot organizer, born in 1751, was assigned to the hospital in Cambridge.

The Dr. Samuel Adams one who wrote the two letters listed above was born in Connecticut in 1745 and practiced on Cape Cod. He joined the provincial army as surgeon for Col. John Fellows’s regiment, and in 1776 was assigned to the 18th Continental under Col. Edmund Phinney. He was a widower, having lost his wife and their first child in 1765. Sally Preston became his second wife.

The David Library will undoubtedly post more letters, following the front as it moves away from Boston.

Don’t Make Me Come Back There!

Moses Fargo was a non-commissioned officer in Capt. William Coit’s Connecticut company, Col. Samuel Holden Parsons’s regiment, during the siege of Boston. On 23 Apr 1775, he was given a small notebook with this instruction, which he wrote on the first page:

That Each Adjutant Serjt Majr and Each Sert be Immediatly provided With orderly Books in order Regularly to Enter the orders of the army.

Each morning, the regiment’s sergeants were summoned to take down the day’s orders by dictation from Parsons or his adjutant. Those orders tended to cover administrative matters, not military strategy. Here, for example, is what Fargo wrote on 1 Aug 1775:

Notwithstanding Former orders For making Return of the Number of tents in Each Company in the Regment [there are] Great Complaints that more tents are in the Company or in the posestion of Idevideals Belonging To the Companys then the Number Returned

it is therfore orderd that the Commanding officer of Each Company Forthwith Mak a Return under his own hand of the Number of men in there Respective Companys and of the Number of tents in there Respective Companys or of any Noncomisiond officer or soldier in there Company that Equil Justus may be Don to the Companys Respecting the tents

Complaints being Made of Great Destruction of the Frute Belonging to the Inhabetants at Roxbury and that Damige has been Don to the owners of the Frute Such Personal Ingures have been Sufferd by the pratice of Throwing apples about the Camp It is orderd that all persons Belonging to this Regment upon there peril Forbear Distroying the Frute & also that the aforesaid pratice be Immediatly disused

Fargo was, as we see, a phonetic speller. But when the Connecticut Historical Society published this document alongside others in 1899, its editor wrote: “The two following journals are by much more illiterate men than the preceding order-book.”

Lt. Champion Couldn’t Hold a Candle to Washington

Yesterday I quoted a letter from Capt. William Coit, commander of one of the armed schooners that Gen. George Washington ordered out of Beverly, Plymouth, and Newburyport to try to intercept British supply ships.

In early November Coit’s ship, the Harrison, did just that, capturing ships named the Industry and the Polly. They were headed for Boston, loaded with what the besieged British needed for the winter: vegetables, fish, cheese, butter, cattle, hogs, sheep, forage for horses, and forty cords of firewood.

On 8 Nov 1775, Coit’s lieutenant Henry Champion, Jr. (1751-1818), hurried from Plymouth to Washington’s Cambridge headquarters with news that those two captured ships were safe at Plymouth. The commander-in-chief knew that he should be pleased—other captains hadn’t been so successful, or in some cases even left port yet. But something about the lieutenant and captain’s personal style appears to have rubbed Washington the wrong way. He complained at the end of a letter to his just-departed military secretary, Joseph Reed:

I had just finished my letter when a blundering Lieutenant of the blundering Captain [William] Coit, who had just blundered upon two vessels from Nova Scotia, came in with the account of it, and before I could rescue my letter, without knowing what he did, picked up a candle and sprinkled it with grease; but these are kind of blunders which one can readily excuse. The vessels contain hay, live-stock, poultry, &c., and are now safely moored in Plymouth harbor.

Champion eventually impressed Washington enough that in 1779 he became acting major of the Light Brigade organized to attack Stony Point. The picture above, which comes courtesy of Wikipedia, shows him as a substantial landowner and militia commander in postwar Connecticut.

I’ll be talking about Washington and his splendid little naval war at Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge on Saturday, 20 February, at 4:00. This talk is sponsored by the site and the Friends of the Longfellow House. It’s free, but the space is limited, so the site asks folks to R.S.V.P. by calling at 617-876-4491, or through this Eventbrite page I just set up.

On that Saturday and the preceding Friday there will also be guided tours of the House focused on how Washington used it as his headquarters from July 1775 to April 1776. Again, call 617-876-4491 to make reservations. Within those walls Washington met with the men he put in charge of those schooners: Reed, Col. John Glover, muster master general Stephen Moylan, and the ships’ officers. As we can see from this letter, some of those meetings went better than others.

Capt. William Coit Describes His Ship

Capt. William Coit was a Connecticut lawyer with a supersized personality. He arrived at the siege of Boston as a militia captain, and in the fall of 1775 Gen. George Washington made him commander of an armed schooner renamed Harrison, sailing out of Plymouth. This was part of the fleet that I’ll discuss on 20 February at Longfellow National Historic Site in my talk “Cambridge: Birthplace of the American Navy?”

On 7 Nov 1775 Coit wrote to his friend Samuel Blachley Webb, then an aide-de-camp to Gen. Israel Putnam in the American camp:

Since I parted with you, I have made a blackguard snatch at two of their [i.e., the British military’s] provision vessels, and have them safe at Plymouth, and if you were where you could see me and did not laugh, all your risible faculties must perish.

To see me strutting about on the quarter-deck of my schooner!—for she has a quarter-deck—ah, and more than that too—4 four pounders [cannon], brought into this country by the company of the Lords Say and Seal, to Saybrook when they first came [Saybrook was settled in 1635]. A pair of cohorns that Noah had in the Ark; one of which lacks a touch-hole, having hardened steel drove therein, that she might not be of service to Sir Edmund Andros [in 1689]—Six swivels, the first that ever were landed at Plymouth [in 1620], and never fired since.

Now, that is my plague; but I can tell you somewhat of my comfort. My schooner is used to the business, for she was launched in the spring of 1761, and has served two regular apprenticeships to sailing, and sails quick, being used to it.

Her accommodations are fine; five of us in the cabin, and when there, are obliged to stow spoon fashion. Besides, she has a chimney in it, and the smoke serves for bedding, victuals, drink and choking. She has one mast too, which is her foremast; she has a mainmast, but it was put in so long ago, that it has rotted off in the hounds. She has a deck, too. When it was first made, it was new; and because it was ashamed of being old, the first time we made use of a clawed handspike, it broke a hole through; notwithstanding the wench knew it was directly over the magazine.

Upon the whole, if there comes peace, I would recommend her and her apparatus, to be sent to the Royal Society; and I dare eat a red-hot gridiron if ever they have had, or will have, until the day of judgment, any curiosity half equal to her.

I haven’t time to give you her character in full, but, in short, she is the devil. But while I can keep the sea, and light only on unarmed vessels, she will do very well. But if obliged to fire both guns of a side at a time, it would split her open from gunwale to her keelson.

The Harrison was fast on the water, and maneuverable, and even managed to survive running aground several times. But Washington soon found Coit and his men hard to bear.

Here’s Coit’s house in New London, from Historic Buildings of Connecticut.