“Brisk Firing” along the Rivers in 1775

When we last peeked in on Malden during the siege of Boston, a British raiding party from Charlestown had crossed the Mystic River and burned the building at the Penny Ferry landing.

The Continental Army officer assigned to that spot, Capt. Eleazer Lindsey, was no help. Reports differ about whether he had gone home or took just that moment to go home in a hurry.

The British floating battery remained in the Mystic River, threatening those parts of the American siege lines.

A week later, on 13 Aug 1775, there was another exchange of fire. It started when some British boats came to resupply the floating battery. Capt. William T. Miller of Rhode Island, stationed on Prospect Hill, told his wife there were “2 Boats that were armed from Bunkers hill.” The historian Richard Frothingham later stated there were “two barges and two sail boats, on their way from Boston.”

Men guarding Malden’s ferry landing opened fire. Capt. Miller wrote that the British boats “were Drove back by the brisk firing of Some field pieces from Malden this day which Caused them in a Very great Hurry to Retreat and Run ashore on Bunkers hill Shore.”

Those small cannon might have been the two that had arrived in April from Newburyport. If so, the men firing them appear to have been a local guard rather than men from Lindsey’s company. In addition, Lt. Col. Loammi Baldwin’s soldiers at Winnisimmet in Chelsea fired on the British boats.

There were no known casualties on either side. The Continentals were quite pleased with their performance in comparison to the previous week, though presumably the redcoats would have gone back to their lines anyway.

Both Lindsey and Baldwin reported to Col. Samuel Gerrish of Newbury. His regiment was spread out over several spots along the northern wing of the siege lines. When a group of officers from the regiment sent a petition to Gen. George Washington complaining that they hadn’t been paid, they signed from the “Camps at Chelsea, Malden, Medford, and Sewells Point” near what is now the B. U. Bridge.

Gen. William Heath’s memoir records a similar British attack on that Brookline fortification a couple of weeks earlier, on 31 July:

A little before one o’clock, A.M. a British floating-battery came up the river, within 300 yards of Sewall’s Point, and fired a number of shot at the American works, on both sides of the river.

Some of the works on the Cambridge side survive as Fort Washington Park. The picture above, a detail from Henry Pelham’s map of the siege, shows the area in 1775. (Pelham’s map has north on the right.)

That attack might have been the occasion when Col. Gerrish chose not to shoot back at the British but instead told his men to hunker down behind their walls. Reportedly he said, “the rascals can do us no harm, and it would be a mere waste of powder, to fire at them with our 4 pounders.” That was the wrong attitude for an officer already under criticism for how he had behaved at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

COMING UP: Washington’s “pretty good Slam” among the officers.

The Truth about Thomas Machin

I’ve been discussing the early life of Thomas Machin, commissioned a lieutenant in the Continental Army artillery on 18 Jan 1776. But what had he been doing before then?

His family left an account that had Machin born to a distinguished British scientist, working for a duke, coming to America in 1772, and quickly joining the movement that led to independence. But there’s no evidence for any of that, and strong evidence against it.

And then there’s this 27 July 1775 entry from the journal of Lt. Richard Williams of His Majesty’s 23rd Regiment of Foot:

Last night Thos. Machin, soldier in our Regt. deserted when sentry on the fire boat in the river near the neck. he went off in the Canoe go to this float, he took the other man’s firelock with him, as it was that man’s turn to lay down, this fellow will give them good intelligence of our Works, for he was a pretty good Mechenik & knew a little of fortification. he invented a new carriage for guns on a pivot &c. his books & instruments were sent for to the General’s.

Lt. Col. Stephen Kemble also noted the desertion that night of a man from the 23rd, “a sensible intelligent fellow, some knowledge of fortification and Gunnery.”

The 23rd Regiment’s muster rolls record that Thomas Machin had enlisted in Maj. Harry Blunt’s company on 17 Feb 1773 and sailed to New York that spring. The regiment arrived in Boston in August 1774. Machin was thus in the army during the Battle of Bunker Hill—but in the British army.

Several people on the American side noted Machin’s arrival, though most didn’t record his name. Col. William T. Miller of Rhode Island wrote on 29 July that “it is thought [he] will prove a very serviceable man to our army, as he is able to give a plan of all the works and fortifications in Boston, and knows all their plans.” The old veteran Jedidiah Preble said he was “as sensible intelligent a fellow as I ever met with.”

Most important, Gen. George Washington wrote down “An Acct. of the Killed & Wounded in the Ministerial Army” based on a conversation with a man he recorded as “John Machin.” The commander-in-chief assigned the deserter to work with his young aide-de-camp, John Trumbull, to draw plans of the British fortifications. (One product of their collaboration appears above.) Later Machin worked for quartermaster general Thomas Mifflin and was most likely a scout during an 8 Jan 1776 raid on British positions at Charlestown.

Machin’s entry in American National Biography says nothing about that activity, accepting the family story of a genteel life in England and a respectable arrival in America. But Machin was a British army private, a deserter, and part of “Washington’s First Spy Ring” during the siege of Boston. I’ll divulge more secrets of the general’s early intelligence efforts this afternoon in Lincoln at an event sponsored by the Friends of Minute Man National Park.

(Thanks to Bob Vogler for posting the quote from Lt. Williams’s diary above to the Revlist in 2002. That sent me hunting for the elusive Thomas Machin.)

He Promised Me He Would Advance No Further

On 29 July 1775, Col. William T. Miller from Rhode Island wrote a letter from the Continental army camp at Prospect Hill in Cambridge that revealed some of the etiquette of the siege of Boston at the time—namely, that the sides shouldn’t do anything needlessly provocative:

I had the honor to be field officer of the day here yesterday: and as I was visiting the out sentries, which stand within half musket shot of the enemy’s sentries, the regulars came out with a party, and began to cut some trees and remove some fencing stuff which was between the sentries.

I beckoned to the two officers who commanded there, one of whom I took to be Major [Andrew] Bruce of the regulars, who came out and met me between the sentries, when I told him that his conduct in felling the timber so near our sentries created a jealousy, and desired him to desist from any further encroachments; when he told me he thought the trees, &c., which they were getting, were as near their lines as they were to ours, and that they had not interrupted our men in cutting hay close to the lines; and he promised me he would advance no further.

I immediately retired, and reported what had happened to Major-general [Charles] Lee, who thanked me for my conduct.

I also saw a gentleman that came out of Boston yesterday, who says the people of Boston and the soldiers are very sickly and much dejected; that General [Thomas] Gage had given orders for all the inhabitants of Boston that have a mind to depart by water to return their names, and they should have liberty to depart.

We have three deserters from the regulars come into this camp since we came here, one of whom found his own brother here in the camp. Their meeting was very affecting.

We don’t usually think of this canpaign as a “brother v. brother” conflict, at least in the enlisted ranks. The bulk of the Continentals were New Englanders or other natives of the colonies. Almost all the regulars were from the British Isles. Yet here were two brothers in the opposing armies, apparently unknown to each other.