William Jasper and the Resistance

First in Boston 1775 postings and then in this article for the Journal of the American Revolution (also printed in this volume), I posited that Dr. Joseph Warren’s crucial informant on the night of 18 Apr 1775 was a British-born cutler named William Jasper.

I also laid out that argument in this talk for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts in April.

In collecting information about William Jasper, I looked for ties between him and the Boston activists. Of course, he couldn’t appear too close to Dr. Warren’s network in 1774–75 or else he wouldn’t have made a good spy. But I kept hoping for some documented link between Jasper and Boston’s resistance movement.

This summer I stumbled back into this page of signatures on a non-importation agreement from October 1767, protesting the new Townshend duties. It’s at Harvard’s Houghton Library.

And there’s William Jasper’s signature. He pledged to join this boycott several months before his June 1768 marriage to Ann Newman, previously the earliest sign I’ve found that he’d moved from New York to Boston.

What’s more, William Jasper’s signature appears right after John Pulling’s, and on the same sheet as Paul Revere. Those men were probably all in the same neighborhood, or even at the same neighborhood meeting. This sheet thus includes the signatures of three men involved in spreading the alarm on the night of 18 Apr 1775.

William Jasper Article Available in the Latest J.A.R. Collection

Yesterday I quoted the New York Post reporting that I think one of Dr. Joseph Warren’s informants about the British operation on 18 Apr 1775 was “a pragmatic British-born knifemaker named William Jasper.”

The response of most people who’ve looked into that question might well be: “Who?”

Fortunately, my article making the case for William Jasper as “Dr. Warren’s Crucial Informant” is available in the Journal of the American Revolution 2025 Annual Volume, just published by Westholme and available through the University of Chicago Press and online booksellers.

That volume also includes another of my articles on the first battle of the Revolutionary War, “The Story of Isaac Bissell—and the Legend of Israel Bissell.”

Even better, the same book offers dozens of other articles on the broad American Revolution chosen and edited by Don N. Hagist. Contributors include Katie Turner Getty, Salina B. Baker, Gene Procknow, Tim Abbott, Philip D. Weaver, Todd W. Braisted, Phillip Hamilton, Jim Piecuch, Derrick E. Lapp, Tyson Reeder, Ray Raphael, Gary C. Shattuck, and many more.

Yesterday’s Posts

I’m home from Battle Road 250, at which I watched the Parker’s Revenge tactical demonstration, said hello to several excellent local reenactors, heard a fine talk by Matthew Keagle of Fort Ticonderoga, and chatted with the Emerging Revolutionary War crew.

I capped that off with dinner with Lee Wright of The Pursuit of History, discussing different possible future projects, including upcoming weekend events.

During the day I was gratified to see two big newspapers air two of my pet theories about the start of the Revolutionary War.

The Washington Post published David Kindy’s article “Who really fired the shot that started the American Revolution?” in its Retropolis section. That delves into the mysterious first shot at Lexington.

(I suspect Kindy’s editor was responsible for the subhead referring to that as “the shot heard round the world,” which was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s term for the first return fire at Concord.)

Following up on a tip from me, Kindy focused on young Lexington militia man Solomon Brown.

“It’s not that I think he is definitely the man who fired first,” states historian and author J.L. Bell, who writes the daily blog Boston 1775 about the American Revolution. “But if I could go back in time, he’s the first person on my list that I would want to interrogate.”

The previous day, the same Washington Post section ran “Was a woman the informant who helped launch the American Revolution?” by Petula Dvorak. That article went over the theory advanced in the newspaper’s editorial a century ago (and circulating at least sixty years before that): that Margaret Gage leaked her husband’s plans for the Concord march to Patriot leaders.

That article prompted Dana Kennedy to write “Inside one of the biggest conspiracy theories of the American Revolution: That a woman may have kick-started the whole thing” for the New York Post.

Kennedy gave me a chance to spout off on weak points in the theory:

“I don’t think anybody actually leaked it,” Bell, who also runs the blog Boston 1775, told The Post. He believes that Joseph Warren and others had been gleaning information about British troop movements from a variety of sources and events.

“For one thing, Gage’s plan was to send troops to Concord, but Warren told them to just go to Lexington. Revere and Dawes went on to Concord on their own accord.”

If anything, Bell thinks the spy might have well been a pragmatic British-born knifemaker named William Jasper. He was renting a room to a British sergeant who may have unwittingly trusted him with the army’s plans.

“Unfortunately, that story is a lot less sexy and about a person we’ve never heard of,” Bell said.

Kennedy also quotes Alexander Cain of Historical Nerdery and Emily Murphy of the Salem Maritime National Historical Site. Sensible people who, of course, are on the same side of the debate as me.

[The photo above shows a British army reenacting unit in the Lexington town parade and comes from the Pursuit of History Twitter feed.]

Afternoon Talks in Lexington and Boston

Next week I have two afternoon speaking engagements that will also be available online to people in the know.

Monday, 14 April, 1:15 P.M.
Secrets on the Road to Concord
Lexington Veterans Association

In April 1775, British general Thomas Gage drew up plans for his troops to march nineteen miles into unfriendly territory. The Massachusetts Patriots, meanwhile, prepared to thwart the general’s mission. There was one goal Gage and his enemies shared: for different reasons, they all wanted to keep secret just what those troops would look for in Concord.

This will be the latest variation of my talk on Gen. Gage’s fateful mission. I continue to investigate that event, particularly the identity of the spy in Concord who sent him very good intelligence in very bad French. Alas, I don’t have any new discoveries to debut here.

The Zoom link for this talk is on this page. Other speakers in this series appear here.

Thursday, 17 April, 3 P.M.
The Mystery of Joseph Warren’s Informants
Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 87 Mount Vernon Street, Boston

According to one early source, as the last step before sending William Dawes and Paul Revere off to Lexington, Dr. Joseph Warren consulted with one crucial informant. Was that Margaret Gage? William Jasper? Another individual? Or is that story simply unreliable?

I’ll retrace my thinking on those questions and discuss the historiography around that issue. When did historians begin to investigate that person? How did the campaign for women’s suffrage color the discussion? And what does it mean that Dr. Warren’s intelligence was wrong?

This talk can be watched online by following the instructions at the bottom of this page.

Battling Myths and Misinformation about 1775

As we reach the cusp of the Sestercentennial year of 2025, I’m highlighting some articles I’ve written for the Journal of the American Revolution discussing myths and mistaken beliefs about the events of 1775.

Some of these articles were published in the past year, some more than a decade ago.

Here are the tl;dr versions with links to the full-length originals.

American Patriots didn’t call the laws that Parliament passed in 1774 to reform Boston (and Massachusetts as a whole) the “Intolerable Acts.” That term arose decades later in U.S. history textbooks. George III’s blanket term for those laws was “Coercive Acts.” Full article.

Tarring and feathering was a painful and humiliating public punishment, but it wasn’t fatal. Full article.

Dr. Joseph Warren didn’t obtain inside information about the British army march to Concord in April 1775 from Margaret Gage, Gen. Thomas Gage’s wife. Instead, he consulted with a man we’ve never heard of: a knife-maker named William Jasper. Full article.

Israel Bissell didn’t carry news of the fighting at Lexington south, and no single courier rode went all the way to Philadelphia. The first rider was named Isaac Bissell, and he carried the news to Hartford, Connecticut. Full article.

There’s solid evidence that Col. Israel Putnam (not Col. William Prescott) issued the order “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes” at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. That phrase didn’t come from the Prussian army but from the Royal Navy. Full article.

Maj. John Pitcairn wasn’t fatally shot as he topped the wall of the provincial redoubt at Bunker Hill. Of the many men credited with that fatal shot, the best evidence points to Salem Poor, but he probably shot a different British officer. Full article.

Gen. George Washington didn’t respond to news of a gunpowder shortage in August 1775 by creating a false rumor of an adequate supply and feeding it to the British inside Boston. That was a novelistic touch created by a biographer misreading his sources. Full article.

Finally, my article for Age of Revolutions on how the “Join Or Die” snake evolved into the “Don’t Tread on Me” snake remains one of that site’s most read. While this essay doesn’t refute a clearly mistaken belief, I argue that those were two different species of American snakes: the glass snake and the rattlesnake.

If more people avoid repeating those myths and errors in the coming year, then my work will have benefited the world. And we can all move on to repeating new myths and errors.

My Latest from the Journal of the American Revolution

Last month the Journal of the American Revolution published my article “Dr. Warren’s Critical Informant.”

Built from postings on this site over the years, this article proposed an identity for the “person kept in pay” by the Boston Patriots in early 1775.

Dr. Joseph Warren reportedly consulted that informant just before sending William Dawes and Paul Revere out to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock of a British march on 18 Apr 1775.

I also chatted about that article with Brady Crytzer in an episode of the Dispatches podcast.

In addition, this month I received my contributor copy of the 2024 collection of articles from the journal, shown above. This volume includes the print version of my article “The Return of Samuel Dyer,” which can be read on the website in two parts.

“He collected many facts, for a history”

Another reason I suspect Josiah Waters, Jr., was the “Mr. Waters” who told the Rev. Jeremy Belknap about the Boston Patriots’ intelligence on the march to Concord is that it fits with what people tell us about Waters’s later behavior.

Waters was really interested in preserving military lore. By the mid-1780s he was colonel of the Boston militia regiment. He also served as treasurer of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, and one of the first books about that organization’s members says:

He collected many facts, for a history, but never published them. The manuscript is lost. The older members used to speak of it as containing important facts, as well as anecdotes of members, now preserved in the imperfect recollection of survivors.

Specifically, we know that Waters was passing on stories about the beginning of the Revolutionary War before he died in 1804.

In fact, we have another account of how Dr. Joseph Warren learned about the British army mission that came ultimately from this Josiah Waters. It was published in the New England Historic and Genealogical Register in 1853, and I shared it back in 2020.

That account was transmitted orally through a couple of people before being written down: from Col. Waters to Joseph Curtis to Catherine Curtis and into the journal. As a result, some details got muddled—most notably, the name of William Dawes (Waters’s first cousin) morphed into Ebenezer Dorr.

Putting that account together with what Belknap wrote down in 1775 shows how the two complement each other. Here are the passages about the best-placed informant.

Belknap, 1775:

Mr. Waters informed me, that the design of the regular troops, when they marched out of Boston the night of April 18, was discovered to Dr Warren by a person kept in pay for that purpose. . . . [After gathering early indications something was afoot] Dr. Warren…applied to the person who had been retained, and got intelligence of their whole design; which was to seize [Samuel] Adams and [John] Hancock, who were at Lexington, and burn the stores at Concord.

Curtis, 1853:

The Americans obtained this news, through an individual by the name of Jasper, an Englishman, a gunsmith by trade, whose shop was in Hatter’s Square; he worked for the British, but was friendly to the rebels; a sergeant major quartered in his family and made a confidant of him, telling him all their plans. Jasper repeated the same to Col. Waters, who made it known to the Committee of Safety.

Looking at those sources together, I think it’s likely that the Boston Patriots’ paid informant was William Jasper (d. 1786), a maker of cutlery and surgical instruments from Britain. I gathered all the information I could find about Jasper here.

If these two accounts are basically reliable, Jasper rented rooms to a British sergeant major, who trusted him because of his British birth and his work repairing army weapons. But Jasper was also funneling information to Waters and Dr. Warren in exchange for money.

As I understand it, the British army didn’t formalize the duties of a sergeant major until the late 1790s. But it was already the designation of a senior sergeant with more authority than any other enlisted man in that unit. A sergeant major wouldn’t have been privy to Gen. Thomas Gage’s whole plan. But by late on the afternoon of 18 April he may well have been aware of some crucial variables:

• The troops would leave Boston by water instead of over the Neck, indicating a destination to the northwest rather than, say, Worcester.
• The troops were preparing to travel farther and stay out longer than the training marches of previous weeks.

The man may even have known about those mounted officers sent out as far as Lincoln on 18 April.

With solid but incomplete information, Warren dispatched Dawes and Paul Revere, as well as an anonymous and unsuccessful rider out of Charlestown, out to Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock. Patriots in Concord were already on alert, hiding most of the military supplies stored there. Those mounted officers tipped off Patriots in Cambridge and Lexington. And the result was war.

Some Out of Town Jasper

As I quoted yesterday, in 1853 a story surfaced saying that Josiah Waters, Jr., had delivered intelligence about the impending British army march on 18 Apr 1775.

This story is significant in predating Henry W. Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which romanticized the event and focused people’s attention on Revere over all the other people involved in the Lexington Alarm.

It also came with a provenance: from Waters himself to Joseph Curtis to his relation Catherine Curtis to the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Though that story might have evolved along that path of transmission, it’s always good to know that path.

Waters reportedly credited his knowledge of the British military plans to “Jasper, an Englishman, a gunsmith by trade, whose shop was in Hatter’s Square.” This man “worked for the British,” gaining their trust. He rented space to the family of a sergeant major who ended up “telling him all their plans.” Or at least the plans that a sergeant major would be privy to.

Of course I went looking for traces of a gunsmith named Jasper working in pre-Revolutionary Boston. I didn’t find any. But I did find a man named Jasper who came from Britain and worked with metal, so he could have repaired gunlocks along with other things.

William Jasper moved from Britain to North America soon after the end of the French and Indian War. The first sign of him is this advertisement from the 29 Aug 1763 New-York Gazette.

WILLIAM JASPER, cutler, Just arrived from England, is now settled in New York, near the Fly, Queen-Street, near the Burling’s and Beekman’s Slip next Door to Mr. Murray’s, takes this Method to acquaint the publick, That he makes all kinds of Surgeons instruments, and grinds and cleans them; makes Razors, Pen knives, scissars, and all kinds of Edge Tools, which he also grinds; and makes Cutlery in general; makes Buckles of the best Block-Tin, wrought and plain Men’s Gold and Silver Ware; Pinking-Irons of all Sorts; Sadlers Tools; Fret-Saws; Hatters knives; likewise draws Teeth with great Ease and Safety, being accustomed to it for many Years. He likewise has brought over a Quantity of Copper and Tin Hard-Ware. All Persons that please to favour him with their Custom, may depend upon being served in the best and cheapest Manner.

A cutler, according to Dr. Samuel Johnson, was “one who makes or sells knives.” Jasper made all sorts of bladed tools, from surgeon’s scalpels to fret saws, and he also offered some dentistry.

In 1768 William Jasper was in Boston, marrying Anne Newman on 29 June 1768. This couple appears on the list of marriage intentions read in all the pulpits, and it’s not clear to me where they actually wed. I also can’t find records of the couple having children, though there’s a mention of them having done so.

The Curtis story said Jasper the gunsmith had a shop “in Hatter’s Square,” which was also known as Creek Lane and later Creek Square. It was near the center of town, literally on the Mill Creek that defined the edge of the North End. I can’t situate William Jasper the cutler there, but he must have rented a shop somewhere.

Weapons collectors have found William Jasper’s name on a couple of blades possibly made during the war. Above is his maker’s stamp on a spontoon head from the late 1700s. In For Liberty I Live, Al Benting described a halberd inscribed with Jasper’s name. I don’t see any sign that he made guns, though perhaps he repaired them.

There was also a William Jasper among the American prisoners of war taken on the Boston-based privateer Rising States on 15 Apr 1777 and housed in Forton Prison in Britain. I have no idea what happened to that man and thus whether he could be the cutler. But the surname Jasper was rare in Massachusetts.

The next time William Jasper appeared in a newspaper was this notice in the 8 Aug 1782 Continental Journal:

TO THE PUBLIC.

JASPER, Surgeon Instrument Maker in Boston, has lately invented and compleated an Instrument for drawing Teeth perpendicular, which was never done before, for which if he can have a patentee from Congress, it shall be universally known, if not, let it die in oblivion.

I see no indication that the Confederation Congress considered granting Jasper a patent for this new dental instrument. There was no statutory process for the national government to grant patents until 1790, and the Congress had a lot of other business to handle in 1782.

Finally, the Continental Journal of 23 Nov 1786 reported that “Mr. William Jasper, Cutler,” had died in Boston. Anna Jasper administered William’s estate, relying on two men to complete the paperwork since she couldn’t sign her name. William Jasper’s property, evaluated at £24.6.6, included metal-working tools, some old books and pictures, and household utensils, but no real estate. Probate judge Oliver Wendell signed off on the administration, which included a general mention of children.

On 10 Apr 1791 a woman named Nancy Jasper married Joseph Jones in the Rev. Thomas Baldwin’s Second Baptist Meeting-house. Was this the widow Anne Jasper? Or a daughter of the 1768 marriage? The next year, on 25 Mar 1792, another Baptist minister, the Rev. Samuel Stillman, married Mary Jasper to John Dumaresque Dyer. Was this a daughter of the cutler William Jasper? If the family had been Baptist before the war, that would explain why there are no records of the children being baptized soon after birth, as there usually are for Congregationalist and Anglican families.

Thus, the sparse record of William Jasper’s life in America shows that he could have been Josiah Curtis’s informant in April 1775 but is far from confirmation of that story.