Searching for Revolutionary Charlotte

I was in western North Carolina when Hurriance Helene blew through at the end of September.

Fortunately for me, I was in Charlotte, away from the worst damage by wind and flooding.

After speaking at a convention, I’d planned to spend another day and a half in the Asheville area, just relaxing. Well, that became impossible.

I made new arrangements and saw more of Charlotte. In particular, I checked out the markers along what the city calls its Liberty Walk, obviously inspired by Boston’s Freedom Trail.

Signs, linked by tablets in the sidewalk, mark the locations of long-gone buildings and events. The walk doesn’t pass the sort of historic houses, churches, or civic structures that Boston has preserved. Instead, the city is quite new, with lots of construction and recent skyscrapers styled to recall earlier decades. To be sure, the Settler’s Cemetery, where I took the photo above, dates back to the eighteenth century.

About half of the markers along the Liberty Walk refer to one of two events:

• The Battle of Charlotte on 26 Sept 1780, in which Gen. Cornwallis’s forces seized the town after a short resistance by local militia companies under Col. William R. Davie.
• The so-called “Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.”

In the battle, the markers say, the militia succeeded in delaying Cornwallis’s advance guard. However, there appears to have been no larger effect of such a delay. The Crown forces took the town, camped there, and left after learning that another part of the army had lost at Kings Mountain.

As for the Mecklenburg Declaration, that’s a myth that only people from North Carolina speak up for. Since it’s referred to on the state flag, though, everyone is brought up believing in it.

The strong historical consensus outside of North Carolina is that a Mecklenburg County convention on 31 May 1775 issued twenty radical resolutions, printed in newspapers that same year. There’s no historical dispute about that event, but it gets only one marker on the trail instead of several.

Imperfect memories of that gathering, tinged by later events, grew into a claim in 1819 that locals had made a full-throated declaration of independence from British government on 20 May 1775. There’s no contemporaneous documentation of that putative event. The reconstructed “Declaration” actually provides evidence that it was composed later.

The Liberty Walk has some other miscellaneous markers, such as one for a soldier of African ancestry named Ishmael Titus. However, I couldn’t find that marker, and the audio tour gave no details about what it called Titus’s “remarkable life” after he was born enslaved in 1759.

I therefore looked up information about Ishmael Titus after getting home. That webpage gives an earlier birth year and states that he lived to be about 112. In later life Titus lived in Savoy and Williamstown, Massachusetts. William Cooper Nell described him in The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution. That passage and an application for a Revolutionary War pension (rejected) are the two big sources on Titus’s life, and they don’t always mesh.

Most of the stops on the Liberty Walk are just metal or stone signs, such as one reporting that Gen. Nathanael Greene took command of the Continental Army’s southern forces in Charlotte.

But there is a fully modeled, though less than full-sized, statue of Queen Charlotte with two little dogs. A main avenue through the city still bears the name of Gov. William Tryon, who moved on to New York in 1771. So the royal government still has a presence in the “Queen City.”

Also in Charlotte, the university library where I spoke displays N. C. Wyeth’s painting of Patrick Henry bathed in heavenly inspiration.

“Too deeply impressed with the melancholy Situation”

A few days back I mentioned fireworks at New York’s celebration of King George III’s birthday in June 1774. I thought the report of that event in John Holt’s New-York Journal was interesting.

Saturday, June 4, of that year was when the king “entered the 27th Year of his Age.” The newspaper started with a discussion of the British military’s actions under Gen. Frederick Haldimand and Cdr. James Ayscough. (Gov. William Tryon was in Britain or else he would probably have led the celebration.)

The item continued:

In the Evening some very curious Fireworks were exhibited, and a small Number of Houses were illuminated; but the Generality of the Inhabitants (though perfectly well affected to his Majesty’s Person and Family, and prefering the English Constitution to every other Form of Government) were too deeply impressed with the melancholy Situation of all the British Colonies, to assume the least Appearance of public rejoicing, while it remains in Suspense whether we shall remain Freeman by maintaining our Rights, or submit to be Slaves.

Hugh Gaine’s New York Gazette and [James] Rivington’s New York Gazetteer didn’t include any of the words after “illuminated.”

In Philadelphia the diarist Christopher Marshall reported even less visible enthusiasm on what was ordinarily a patriotic holiday:

4th. This being the birth day of King George III., scarcely, if any, notice was taken of it in this city, by way of rejoicing: not one of our bells suffered to ring, and but very few colours were shown by the shipping in the harbour; no, nor not one bonfire kindled.

The problem was the Boston Port Bill and other Coercive Acts. Americans Whigs like Marshall were alarmed by how Parliament was clamping down after the Tea Party and wanted to make their fellow colonists equally alarmed that the same could happen to them.

At the same time, Whig printer Holt wanted to assure readers in America and Britain that the colonists were still loyal to the king and constitution. They just differed with the ministers in London about what that constitution demanded.

“Azor Betts be sent to Ulster county jail”

As I quoted yesterday, on 20 May 1776 Gen. George Washington ordered that no one associated with the Continental Army should be inoculated against smallpox.

Four days later, Dr. Isaac Foster appeared before the General Committee of the City of New York and reported:

that information was given to General [Israel] Putnam, that several persons had been inoculated, at the house of one Fisher, in Stone Street, contrary to a resolve of the Provincial Congress of this Colony, he, the examinant (agreeable to Genl Putnam’s order) immediately went to the house of the above mentioned Fisher, where he discovered that Lt Colonel Moulton, Capt. Parks, Doctor Hart and Lieut. Brown had been inoculated by Doctor Azor Betts.

The committee already knew about Dr. Betts.

Back in January, Christopher Duyckinck, the chairman of the city’s committee of mechanics, had accused Betts of

having, in his presence, damned the Congresses and Committees, both Continental and Provincial, and said that they were a set of damned rascals, and acted only to feather their own nests, and not to serve their country; that they had shut up his shop, but that he hoped to see the day when he would shut them up, or overturn them

Duyckinck mentioned a “Captain Buchanan and others as witnesses to support the charge.”

Now Duyckinck was a radical. He himself had defied the committee’s authority, called one member “a usurper and a coward,” and even seized that man’s watch. But Duyckinck had then made some sort of partial apology (while still keeping the watch), and there was no question he supported the Patriot resistance. So when he pointed his finger at Betts, the committee listened.

Betts had come to New York from Norwalk, Connecticut, where he was born in 1740, the seventh child of Nathan and Mary Betts. About 1764 he married Glorianna Purdy of White Plains, and their first child came shortly afterward—or before, according to some online genealogies. By the time the war broke out, Dr. Betts was the father of several children and practicing medicine in or near New York City.

The committee summoned Betts to answer the accusation. He didn’t “deny the charge or desire any other witnesses to be called.” He said he expected Buchanan to corroborate Duyckinck’s testimony. The doctor’s only defense was “that he did not mean to include all the members of Congresses and Committees, and supposes there are some good men among them.”

Not surprisingly, that didn’t mollify the New York committee of safety. [ADDENDUM: And its journal shows members heard from other witnesses:

Capt. John Buchanan says he heard Azor Betts damn the Congresses and committeee, and say they had taken the bread out of his mouth; that his business was inoculation; that the said Azor Betts has taken great pains to prevent Joseph Hunt, an ensign in Capt. [Nathaniel] Tylee’s company, from taking his commission.

Peletiah Haws gives the like testimony as to Azor Betts.]

On 17 January the members resolved that “Azor Betts be sent to Ulster county jail, to be there confined in close jail until the further orders of the continental or provincial Congress, or of this committee."

Years later, Betts told the Loyalists Commission that he had been “confined by a Committee for carrying Intelligence on Board the Duchess of Gordon & Asia. [Gov. William Tryon’s base of operations in late 1775 and early 1776], and for attempting to spike same at King’s Bridge.” However, at that time he had reasons to burnish his services to the Crown. The New York Patriots’ records don’t suggest any suspicion that Dr. Betts was a spy, [unlike other men examined the same day]. Rather, the committee of safety locked him up just for saying nasty things about them.

TOMORROW: Dr. Betts in and out of jail.

(The image above is a broadside Christopher Duyckinck had printed in April 1776 during local elections. I have no idea what he was on about, but it gives a sense of the man’s political style.)

Raid on Isaac Hatfield’s House

As I described yesterday, in January 1780 Capts. Samuel Lockwood and Samuel Keeler of the Connecticut militia attacked the home of Isaac Hatfield, Jr., in Morrisania, New York.

Hatfield (1748-1822) had been born in America to a substantial farming family and raised in Westchester County. The notes of what he later told the Loyalists Commission say:

On breaking out of Troubles, from the first took part with Brit. Was required by rebels to serve in their Militia, & to sign their Association, which he refused. In consequence Of this he made himself Obnoxious. They fin’d him which he refused to pay, & he was obliged to quit home.

While he was away, Hatfield said, “he lost 18 Head Cattle, 4 Horses, farm horses, 50 Sheep.” He “Heard Of some being taken by one person, some by another, some for fines.” In other words, his neighbors were stripping away his property.

When the Crown forces landed on Long Island in the fall of 1776, Hatfield volunteered for the Queen’s Rangers, commanding a company in that Loyalist regiment. In 1777 he joined Gen. Oliver De Lancey’s Brigade. Then came commissions from Gov. William Tryon to be an officer in the Westchester County militia, ultimately a lieutenant colonel.

On 18 January, the Connecticut militia came for Hatfield. The raiders shot three sentries and killed his horse—“a very fine horse,” worth 40 guineas, Hatfield’s lieutenant, Thomas Kipp, recalled.

Hatfield and the men stationed with him raced to the upstairs chambers of the house. There, Lt. Col. Matthew Mead of Connecticut wrote, “they had prepared a number of Casks of salt, of Flour & other lumber” as barricades.

In his memoir Gen. William Heath described the fighting inside Hatfield’s house:

The Colonel and his men took to the chambers, and fired out at the windows and down stairs at those who had entered the house; it appeared difficult, if possible, to dislodge them, the house was instantly set on fire, by putting a straw bed into a closet [i.e., small room], which compelled the enemy to jump out at the chamber windows, to avoid the flames.

On 22 January, James Rivington’s Royal Gazette reported inside New York:

Early on the morning of the 18th instant, a detachment of Rebel Militia, collected from the neighbourhood of Horseneck [i.e., Greenwich], under the command of a Captain Lockwood, attacked ahouse between Kingsbridge and De Lancey’s Mills, in which Lieut. Col. Hetfield, Major [Thomas] Huggerford, Captain [Moses] Knap, a Quarter-Master, and ten private Refugees of the Lieutenant-Colonel’s corps, were quartered:

The house being bravely defended for fifteen minutes; the Rebels were enabled to set fire to it, from the having gained possession of the ground floor; in consequence of which, this small party were reduced to the necessity of abandoning their post, and laying down their arms; they were in course taken prisoners, and the enemy immediately began their retreat.

The Connecticut men had fifteen prisoners of war in all. They triumphantly headed back north to the Continental lines.

But then Maj. Huggeford escaped.

TOMORROW: Rearguard action.

[The photo above, from Find a Grave, shows the headstone of Mary (Bayeux) Hatfield, whom Lt. Col. Isaac Hatfield married in 1786 after settling in Digby County, Nova Scotia.]

A New Tavern Opened in Brunswick Town

Archeologists from East Carolina University announced that they are exploring the site of an eighteenth-century tavern in Brunswick Town, North Carolina, once capital of that colony.

The building was located by a student using ground-penetrating radar. It appeared as “a submerged structure measuring roughly 400 square feet (37 square meters) and buried under 5 feet (1.5 m) of earth.” A dig revealed more details, including the fact that the structure was destroyed by fire. The walls collapsed in a way that protected the crawl space under the floorboards from the flames, thus preserving an unusually large assortment of everyday objects.

LiveScience reports:

The objects hidden in the building’s crawl space include the brass tap from a wine barrel, unused tobacco pipes, broken mugs and goblets, crushed liquor bottles, and other items typically found in a tavern. An Irish halfpenny dated to 1766 helps narrow down the tavern's latest possible date of operation.

The Charlotte Observer also noted “iron tools that historians can’t yet identify.”

The British military burned Brunswick Town in 1776, and most people abandoned that settlement. (Gov. William Tryon had moved away in 1770, which didn’t help the local economy.) The archeologists seem to think, however, that this building had been destroyed in the preceding decade.

Strikingly, the artifacts include “thimbles, straight pins and clothing fasteners associated with the town’s female populace.” The archeologists note those might have been a male tailor’s tools. Nevertheless, those discoveries led to speculation that the tavern was also a brothel.

Another oddity is that there is no paper record of a building having stood on that spot. Researchers studying Brunswick Town have relied on this 1769 map, but it shows no structure there. So perhaps the business burned before 1769, or perhaps the business was lying really low.

“After the Destruction of Captn. Chambers’s Tea”

Everyone agreed that during the New York Tea Party of 22 Apr 1774 and associated demonstrations, the rest of the city was peaceful. Lt. Gov. Cadwallader Colden told the absent governor, William Tryon, “the Quarter where I reside, and the greatest Part of the Town were perfectly Quiet.”

For the Whigs, that showed how the New York community was normally peaceful and under control; right-thinking locals destroyed the eighteen chests of offensive tea and did no other damage. For their opponents, the fact that only a small fraction of New Yorkers got involved showed how the movement wasn’t really popular.

That split reflected the ongoing battle for public opinion. The Whig committee that orchestrated the tea destruction was playing to several audiences. They wanted to show the government and mercantile community in London, and the East India Company, that their city was adamantly opposed to paying the new tea tax. They wanted to warn merchants and sea captains like James Chambers against trying to evade that boycott.

They also wanted to show the Whigs of Boston and Philadelphia and other North American ports, who had already dealt with tea shipments, that they were just as strongly opposed. As Hugh Gaine’s New-York Gazette concluded its 25 April report:

Thus, to the great Mortification of the Secret and open enemies of America, and the joy of all the friends of liberty and human nature, the union of these Colonies is maintained in a contest of the utmost importance to their safety and felicity.

In addition, the Whigs wanted to assure the city’s riled-up populace, who actually started destroying the tea before the self-appointed leaders wanted, that their committee was looking out for the public interest.

Of course, not everyone supported the tea destruction. The first newspaper attack on the action appeared in James Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer on 28 April. In highly emphasized language a correspondent demanded:

What is the Committee of Observation? By whom were they appointed? and what authority had they to order Capt. Chambers, or any body else, to attend them at Mr. [Samuel] Francis’s, or any other place whatsoever? Who says, and upon what authority does he say, that the sense of the city was asked, relatively, either to the sending away Capt. [Benjamin] Lockyer, or the destruction of the tea on board the London? Has not every London Captain brought tea, under the same circumstances? And, if so, what were the Apostates that informed against the unfortunate man, who was threatened with DEATH for obeying the laws of his country? . . .

I wish the printers of public chronicles would be cautious of disgracing their papers, by publishing party relations. While they adhere to matters of fact, ’tis all well; but when they expand their columns to either patriot or ministerial minions, without any known evidence,— nay, contrary to the truth of fact,—they must not, they cannot, they shall not hope to escape the animadversions of a lover of Constitutional Liberty; but a sworn foe to Coblers and Taylors, so long as they take upon their everlasting and unmeasurable shoulders, the power of directing the loyal and sensible inhabitants of the CITY and PROVINCE of NEW-YORK.

According to Lt. Gov. Colden, the radical Whigs actually lost the ensuing political struggle. On 7 Sept 1774, he wrote to the governor:

After the Destruction of Captn. Chambers’s Tea, and some other violent Proceedings of the pretended Patriots, the principal Inhabitants began to be apprehensive and resolved to attend the Meetings of the Inhabitants when called together by Hand Bills.

The Consequence has been that [John Morin] Scott, [Alexander] McDougall, [Isaac] Sears & [John] Lamb are all in disgrace, and the People are now directed by more moderate Men. I hope that the giving [of] any new offence to Parliament will be guarded against.

New York City remained in a delicate balance between factions. In the summer of 1775 it simultaneously welcomed both Gov. Tryon and Gen. George Washington. In 1776 New Yorkers celebrated the Declaration of Independence by tearing down George III’s statue, and then half a year later the city, retaken by the British military, became the center of Loyalism for the rest of the war.

TOMORROW: What happened to Capt. James Chambers?

Orreries in a Time of War

Silas Deane was the first American diplomat in Paris during the Revolutionary War, trying to win support for the Continental Congress from the French government.

Since France was a monarchy, Deane decided to do some old-fashioned fawning, presenting influential people with special gifts from America.

On 28 Nov 1776 he wrote to the Congress’s Committee of Secret Correspondence, which was directing foreign policy:

I wish I had here one of the best saddle-horses of the American or Rhode Island breed. A present of that kind would be money well laid out with a certain personage. Other curious American productions at this time would, though trifles in themselves, be of consequence rightly timed and placed. I mentioned Mr. [David] Rittenhouse’s orrery in a former letter, and I think Arnold’s collection of insects, etc., but I submit any step of this kind to your mature judgment.

I haven’t come across that “former letter,” but a few days later, on 3 December, Deane wrote to John Jay with the same bright ideas—and an identification for that “certain personage”:

The queen is fond of parade, and I believe wishes a war, and is our friend. She loves riding on horseback. Could you send me a narrowhegansett horse or two; the present might be money exceedingly well laid out. Rittenhouse’s orrery, or Arnold’s collection of insects, a phaeton of American make and a pair of bay horses, a few barrels of apples, of walnuts, of butternuts, etc., would be great curiosities here, where everything American is gazed at, and where the American contest engages the attention of all ages, ranks, and sexes.

On 10 May 1777, John Adams wrote to his wife:

Upon a Hint, from one of our Commissioners abroad, We are looking about for American Curiosities, to send across the Atlantic as presents to the Ladies. Mr. Rittenhouse’s Planetarium, Mr. Arnolds Collection of Rareties in the Virtuoso Way, which I once saw at Norwalk in Connecticutt, Narragansett Pacing Mares, Mooses, Wood ducks, Flying Squirrells, Redwinged Black birds, Cramberries, and Rattlesnakes have all been thought of.

Is not this a pretty Employment for great Statesmen, as We think ourselves to be? Frivolous as it seems, it may be of some Consequence. Little Attentions have great Influence. I think, however, We ought to consult the Ladies upon this Point. Pray what is your Opinion?

I haven’t found Abigail Adams’s reply to the idea of shipping rattlesnakes and other curiosities to Queen Marie Antoinette.

The man behind “Arnold’s collection of insects” was Edward Arnold of Norwalk. On his way to the Congress in May 1775, Robert Treat Paine “Went to see Mr. Edward Arnold and saw his Museum a very large Collection of Birds, Insects, Fossils, Beasts, Fishes &c w’h he has been 9 yrs collecting.” Those curiosities did eventually make its way to Europe. According to Adams, Arnold sold his collection to William Tryon, royal governor of New York, who shipped it to London. Those specimens went into Sir Ashton Lever’s private museum.

It’s not clear to me how Deane expected the Congress to obtain a Rittenhouse orrery for Marie Antoinette. Was the Congress to buy or confiscate one of the devices from the college at Princeton or Philadelphia? [The one at Philadelphia appears above.] Or did he want the legislature to commission a new device from Rittenhouse, despite the going price of £300-400?

In January 1777, soon after Deane wrote, the British and Continental Armies battled over the town of Princeton, each occupying the college buildings in turn. The Congress’s envoy to Spain, Arthur Lee, told Deane and Benjamin Franklin that “The barbarity of these Sarracen Invaders went so far as to destroy the Philosophical Apparatus at Princeton College, with the Orrery constructed by Dr. Rittenhouse.” That report was exaggerated, but after that news Deane stopped asking about shipping over an American orrery for the queen.

TOMORROW: Boston’s own orrery.

Through the Roof at the Fraunces Tavern Museum, 23 Feb.

On Thursday, 23 February, I’ll make my New York debut with a talk about The Road to Concord at the Fraunces Tavern Museum in lower Manhattan.

I’ll speak about the race for artillery in Massachusetts in the late summer and fall of 1774, which spread to the other New England colonies in December and finally brought on war in April 1775.

Doors will open at 6:00 P.M., and the presentation will start at 6:30. Admission is $5 for museum members, $10 for others.

The Fraunces Tavern has its own link to the struggle over artillery—an event in New York in August 1775. Until then, the royal authorities and radical Patriots had coexisted on the island, with the city government anxious to tamp down any hostilities.

On 25 June, for example, both Continental general George Washington and royal governor William Tryon received excited public welcomes. They came onto Manhattan Island from different sides, and their audiences represented the different political sides.

But in August, Gov. Tryon and the city’s remaining redcoats went aboard H.M.S. Asia, a sixty-four gun warship in the harbor. That left the city in the hands of the Patriots. The merchant John Lamb had been a Whig leader before the war. In mid-1775 he secured a military commission from the New York Provincial Congress—and military weapons from a British army storehouse.

I’ll quote from Isaac Q. Leake’s biography of Lamb:

…a resolve having been passed by the Continental Congress, to provide cannon for the armament of the forts ordered to be constructed in the Highlands, the Provincial Congress deemed this sufficient warrant to direct the removal of the cannon from the battery in the city [at the southern tip of Manhattan].

Captain Lamb was ordered to this service, and on the 23d August, with his company, assisted by a part of a corps of independents of the command of Col. [John] Lasher, and a body of the citizens, proceeded in the evening to execute the order of the Congress.

Some intimation must have been given to Captain [George] Vandeput, the commander of the Asia (a line of battle-ship stationed off the Battery), of the intended movement; for upon the arrival of the military, they found a barge and crew, lying on their oars, close under the Fort. A detachment of observation was accordingly stationed on the parapet, to watch the proceedings of the enemy, with orders to return the fire if attacked. As soon as the artillery was in motion, a false fire [signal rocket] was signaled from the boat; and immediately afterwards, a musket was discharged at the citizens, who returned it with a volley.

The barge retreated to the ship, with several killed and wounded, and when out of the range of fire from the Asia, three guns from the ship were discharged in quick succession. The drums on the Battery beat to arms, and were answered by a broadside from the Asia, of round and grape; and the fire was rapidly repeated for some time.

Meanwhile the cannon were moved off with great deliberation; and all that were mounted, twenty-one pieces, were safely carried away. Three men were wounded on the Battery; and some damage was done to the houses near the Fort, and at Whitehall.

One of those houses was the Sign of the Queen’s Head, an inn operated by Samuel Fraunces. The cannon ball that crashed through the roof of Fraunces’s tavern was preserved as late as 1894, but then disappeared before 1900. I don’t expect to see it.

Stamp Masters in the Deep South

In South Carolina, two men received appointments under the Stamp Act: George Saxby as inspector of the stamps and Caleb Lloyd as distributor.

This appears to have been a way to spread the patronage around. But official news of those appointments didn’t arrive in Charleston until late October 1765, causing some confusion.

On 19 October, Charlestonians—“2000 souls” in all, according to the newspaper—went through the ritual of hanging the stamp master in effigy, even though they weren’t sure who that man was.

Before burning that effigy on the green, the crowd visited a house owned by Saxby and broke some windows. Later the crowd went to Lloyd’s home, demanding to know if he was going to execute the law. The next day, a Sunday, Lloyd posted a notice at St. Michael’s church in the center of town insisting he hadn’t received a commission—which might have been true, but he probably knew one was on its way.

Over the next couple of days, crowds went to other sites, seeking the stamped paper. On the night of 23 October, about seventy men pushed their way into the mansion of Henry Laurens. He hadn’t supported the Stamp Act or sought an appointment under it, but he’d advocated following the law instead of defying it. The crowd demanded the freedom to search Laurens’s house for the stamps. While those men did no more than 15 shillings’ worth of damage, they frightened Laurens’s pregnant wife badly.

The next morning, Lt. Gov. William Bull finally announced that the stamps had arrived back on 20 October and were “lodged in Fort Johnson, till it should be necessary for his Majesty’s service to remove them from thence.” Lloyd was probably in that island fort as well, and Saxby joined him after arriving on another ship from Britain on 26 October.

Two days later Saxby and Lloyd wrote from Fort Johnson with a promise to do nothing to enforce the Stamp Act. That was enough for Charleston’s mercantile and political leaders to promise them safety. The two men came into town, went through the ritual of publicly repeating their promise to the crowd, and were escorted to a tavern with music and flags for “some refreshment.”

A similar situation in North Carolina played out as farce. On 19 and 31 October, Dr. William Houston was hanged in effigy as the colony’s stamp agent in Wilmington, New Bern, and one of the towns that became Fayetteville. Meanwhile, Houston reportedly had no idea he’d been appointed to the job.

Dr. Houston traveled from his plantation to Wilmington to meet with Gov. William Tryon on 16 November, only to be greeted by a crowd of three to four hundred men. They demanded that the physician resign his appointment, which he did, and then repeat that resignation in writing at the courthouse. As for the stamps, they didn’t arrive in the colony until 28 November, nearly a month after the law was supposed to take effect.

Likewise, as of 1 November, the small colony of Georgia had seen no stamped paper, no stamp master, and no anti-Stamp Act demonstrations.

Priscilla Hobart’s “happiest portion of her life”

Yesterday’s posting left Priscilla (Thomas Watson) Lothrop and the Rev. Noah Hobart reunited more than two decades after they had broken off their engagement because he was an indebted schoolteacher and she was being courted by a rich man. In the intervening years both had married, she twice. Both had become parents and then been widowed. Her Plymouth husbands had left her wealthy. He was established as the Congregationalist minister in Fairfield, Connecticut.

But when Noah came to ask Priscilla to marry him at last, she told him she’d promised her second husband she wouldn’t marry as long as his mother was alive—and presumably needing care. Priscilla’s great-grandson Benjamin Marston Watson continues the story:

Noah, disappointed, set out for home with a heavy heart & having reach’d Hingham, call’d on ye Revd. M’r [Daniel] Shute, who invited him to stop & preach ye Thursday lecture for him; to wch. he assented. After ye lecture was over, as they were going home, they met a traveller on horseback, of whom Mr. Shute enquired “where he was from?” — He answered “from Plymouth;” when they further enquired “if there was any news?”

He answered, “nothing particular, except that old Madam Lothrop died last night.”

Noah’s face brightened up on this announcement, & he turned his face again towards Plymouth; and without being able to state any intervening particulars, we know that in three weeks from that time, Priscilla married her third husband in ye person of her first lover, & was settled at Fairfield as “ye minister’s help-meet,” & ye wife of ye Revd. Noah Hobart.

The couple married in 1758, when he was in his early fifties and she in her late forties. What Watson wrote about their marriage is notable in that he was a descendant of Priscilla’s first husband:

The life of Priscilla at Fairfield was tranquil and happy; & it is said that she sometimes confessed to her children, in her old age, they being also ye children of her other husbands, that ye period she lived with Noah was ye happiest portion of her life. She had no children by M’r Hobart . . . Priscilla, however, was destined to be a widow for ye third time, as ye Revd. Noah Hobart died at Fairfield in ye year 1773, & left her in possession of his homestead there. . . .

After ye death of M’r Hobart, Priscilla remained at Fairfield, occupying his house & receiving ye manifestations of ye affection and respect of his late Parish for a period of six years, until July, 1779, when ye whole village of Fairfield was burned by ye English troops under ye command of Govr. [William] Tryon. Being now houseless she returned to Plymouth, & occupied ye house in wch. she had lived with her second husband, Mr [Isaac] Lothrop. . . .

In ye year 1786, when I was a child of about 6 years old, being on a visit to Plymouth with my Father, I well recollect visiting her, & being by her most cordially received & welcom’d, as ye first of her great-grand-children whom she had seen, & as a token of her satisfaction, & for a memorial of herself, she gave me a pair of gold sleevebuttons, as a keepsake. She was at this time 80 years old, her mental & corporeal faculties in perfection. Her carriage was exceedingly upright. Her person was small and well formed, she not exceeding in height 5 feet, 1 or 2 inches. Her countenance was animated & expressive & gave decidedly ye impression of having been handsome. . . . She lived until 1796, nearly 10 years after this interview, & died in June of that year, aged 90 years.

Other records indicate that Priscilla Thomas had been born in 1709, and was thus only in her late eighties when she died. Still, she’d enjoyed an impressively long and active life. And she’d married her first love at last. (A detail of her gravestone is above, courtesy of Sandra Lennox and Find-a-Grave.)