Tracking the Wheaton Brothers

Winthrop Sargent, Sr.’s list of civilian men captured on the Elizabeth on 2 Apr 1776 and brought into Gloucester included (in his unique spelling):

• Kalep Whitten – Bad Man…
• Calep Whitten ju
• Joseph [Whit]ten
• John Whitten

I discussed Caleb Wheaton of Machias, Maine, yesterday. E. Alfred Jones’s Loyalists of Massachusetts states that he and his wife Mary had sixteen children, but not all survived to adulthood. The genealogies I’ve found are contradictory and confusing.

According to one family researcher whose work is shared here, those other three Wheatons were all boys born on New York’s Long Island:

• Caleb, Jr., on 20 July 1753.
• Joseph on 30 Dec 1754.
• John on 9 Aug 1756.

Jones’s Loyalists says Caleb and John were both born in 1757 and thus probably twins. Other records put Joseph’s birth in 1755. But let’s agree they were all around twenty years old in 1776 when Massachusetts authorities took them into custody.

Not all three Wheaton sons were of legal age in 1776. But they were all prime age to be soldiers, which is probably what mattered for Sargent. Sisters and younger brothers didn’t make the list.

To jump ahead, Caleb, Jr., and John would have standard trajectories as young American Loyalists. By 1777 they made their way to British-occupied New York City and joined provincial regiments fighting for the king. Caleb became a lieutenant, John a captain. At the end of the war they settled in Canso and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, respectively.

The only odd blip in those brothers’ story was that when Caleb, Jr., married Sally Bryant in November 1792, the couple was in Boston’s Trinity Church (shown above). 

Joseph Wheaton followed a different course, one that took him to the U.S. Capitol.

TOMORROW: Defection.

“What I am to dow whith the Prisoners for I have Thirtey hear now upon Expences”

A lot of the correspondence that followed the Continental capture of the Elizabeth in April 1776 involved money.

First, there was the cost of housing the prisoners taken on that brig.

Eleven men were sent to Gloucester, including four British soldiers and Caleb Wheaton, the Customs officer from Maine. Their families came along.

Winthrop Sargent, Sr. (1727–1793), the Continental Army’s agent at that port, wrote to Gen. George Washington on 7 April:

The Bayer [bearer] of this has under his Gard a Number of Prisoners & Toreys tachen by Comodor [John] Manley & Capt. [Daniel] Warters the Prise is sent to Portsmouth I mack Know doubt you have had Acount of before this Reaches your Excellence thar nams you have below

thare is two Women & Sum Children Left hear which is not Abel to Travel Should be glad your Excellence would Send me Answor to what I Roat you Last about Capt. Watt:s Goods and what I am to dow whith the Prisoners for I have Thirtey hear now upon Expences.

I Rem[ai]n You[r] Hume Sarv.
Winthrop Sargent, Agent

P.S. Sence I rote the above Capt. [Samuel] Tucker here Carres the Prisners to Marvelhead ware thay well be sent to head Quartr will not Carrey the women & Children for fear of the Small Pox so I am fors to porvide for them hear Should be glad of your Order in Regard to the afore

Capt. Tucker on the armed schooner Franklin carried twenty-two people, including the Wheatons, to Marblehead on 9 April. That town’s committee of correspondence sent Azor Orne to ask the Massachusetts Council what to do with them.

On 13 April, the legislature “Resolved that the Soldiers belonging to the British Army, with their Wives and Children, be sent to General [Artemas] Ward.” Apparently they would be treated like other prisoners of war.

The Marblehead committee would be responsible for maintaining all the civilian women and children, tracking the expenses so the town could “endeavour to have the same discharged out of the Monies arising on the Sales of the Cargo and effects found on Board the said Vessel.”

And that was where the big money was. John Rowe heard that the Elizabeth had “Twenty five Thousand pound Sterling On board—in English Goods & Other Merchandise.” The Boston Gazette reported, “she is estimated to be worth about 35,000l. sterling.”

Cdre. Manley had sent the brig into Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Continental agent Joshua Wentworth would go through the legal process of ”condemning” the ship and its contents and putting them up for auction. Manley, his captains, and his crews were no doubt anticipating a good payday.

TOMORROW: What to do with the Wheatons.

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.