“Went in pursuit of these royal pirates”

After setting the stage for the fighting over Hog Island, Noddle’s Island, and Chelsea 250 years ago this month, I should catch up on a couple of other shoreline skirmishes in May 1775.

One fight took place in the waters between Fairhaven and Martha’s Vineyard on 14 May. I wrote about that event starting here, and Derek W. Beck went into more detail in this article.

Today I’ll comment on a couple of sources.

First, Peter Force’s 1833 American Archives included an “Extract of a Letter from Newport, Rhode-Island, dated May 10, 1775” about the action.

That letter described that event as starting “Last Friday,” which is probably why Richard Frothingham writing in the mid-1800s misdated the fight by a week. Naval Documents of the American Revolution reprinted the letter from American Archives with the same date.

However, that passage first appeared in the 26 May Pennsylvania Mercury, and there it’s actually labeled as “Extract of a letter from New-Port, Rhode-Island, May 15,” meaning “Last Friday” was 12 May. That matches up with the other sources. The ship-seizing began on 12 May, and the fighting occurred on 14 May.

Second, here’s the report on the fight from Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, published 24 May in Worcester:

The week before last the Falcon sloop of war, was cruising about Cape-Cod, and meeting with a wood sloop, in ballast, seized her, but promising the skipper to release him and his vessel if he would give information of any vessel that was just arrived from the West-Indies with a cargo on board, he at length told the Captain of the Falcon [John Linzee] that there was a sloop at Dartmouth, which had just arrived;

Significantly, the owner of that wood sloop, Simeon Wing, later told Massachusetts authorities that ”an indian Fellow on board” had offered information about the other sloop, not “the skipper”—who was Wing’s son Thomas. Scapegoating a man of color?

whereupon the Captain of the Falcon, instead of releasing the wood sloop, armed and manned her, and sent her in search of the West-Indiaman;

Other sources show that the prize crew put onto the wood sloop consisted of Midshipman Richard Lucas (called in some New England sources as mate or lieutenant), surgeon’s mate John Dunkinson, gunner Richard Budd, eight seamen, and three marines.

they found the vessel lying at anchor, but her cargo was landed; however, they seized her and carried her off after putting part of their crew and some guns and ammunition on board.

Notice of this getting on shore, the people fitted out a third sloop, with about 30 men and two swivel guns, and went in pursuit of these royal pirates, whom they come up with at Martha’s Vineyard, where they lay at anchor at about a league’s distance from each other; the first surrendered without firing a gun, our people after putting a number of hands on board, bore down upon the other, which by this time had got under sail, but the people in the Dartmouth sloop coming up with her, the pirates fired upon them; the fire was immediately returned, by which three of the pirates were wounded, among whom was the commanding officer;

Massachusetts Provincial Congress documents preserved the names of the two wounded seamen as Jonathan Lee and Robert Caddy.

our people boarded her immediately, and having retaken both sloops, carried them into Dartmouth, and sent the prisoners to Cambridge, from thence nine of them were yesterday brought to this town.

Other newspapers say those prisoners of war were sent to the jail in Taunton, but that might have been only overnight. Authorities kept the three wounded men in Dartmouth along with the surgeon’s mate “to dress their wounds.”

Capt. Linzee never recorded losing the wood sloop and his prize crew in the log of the Falcon. But according to a report out of New York, he later told a passing ship’s captain that he understood Midn. Lucas had “lost an arm.” Locals involved in the fracas, quoted here, recalled that Lucas was wounded in the head with buckshot and recovered.

The 15 May letter from Newport printed in Pennsylvania Mercury (cited above) said one of the wounded men was “since dead.” That appears to have been another false rumor since follow-up newspaper stories and government sources don’t mention any dead at all.

After the actual fighting there were protracted disputes on the provincial side. What to do with the prisoners? What to do with the ships? I discussed those debates back here.

“He engages in the fight which was the beginning of the end”

The printer Isaiah Thomas’s family understood him to have been very active on the first day of the Revolutionary War.

As stated in the preface to the 1874 edition of Thomas’s History of Printing in America:

He went out on the night of the 18th of April, to assist in giving notice that the troops were crossing the Charles river. He returned, but was out again by daylight. Crossing the ferry with Dr. [Joseph] Warren he went into a public meeting at Charlestown and urged the arming of the people, and was opposed by one Mr. [James?] Russell “on principles of prudence.”

Gen. Thomas Gage ordered his forces to stop anyone trying to leave Boston via the Neck or the ferry on the night of 18 April, so as to prevent the sort of “notice” Thomas supposedly spread.

Not only did the printer get out of town, this family lore said, but he then got back in. Even though one of the main points of this passage was that Thomas was on the royal authorities’ enemies list.

We know Dr. Warren did get out of Boston early on the morning of 19 April. Richard Frothingham’s 1865 biography of the doctor quoted witnesses saying he rode the ferry to Charlestown, then headed west on horseback.

We also know there was debate in Charlestown about whether to oppose the British army by force. Ultimately most of the townspeople decided to hunker down because they were too vulnerable to counterattack from the army and navy.

As to what Isaiah Thomas did in those busy hours, I’m not sure. He definitely did thrust himself into events at other times, so I’m sure he would have spread the alarm and urged opposition to the troops if he could. I’m just not sure the opportunities were available.

For a couple of paragraphs, the 1874 account slips into a breathless present tense.

As one of the minute men, he [Thomas] engages in the fight which was the beginning of the end. At night he goes to Medford. On the morning of the 20th, he makes a flying visit to his family at Watertown, and then starts on foot for Worcester.

He is constantly met on his journey by bodies of armed men on their way to Cambridge, anxious to learn even the minutest details of yesterday’s fight. After traveling on foot some miles, he meets with a friend who procures him the loan of a horse. Late at night, weary and travel worn, he arrives at Worcester to begin life anew; a good head and stout heart his only capital. . . .

The presses and types sent before him were all that were left as the fruit of five years’ toil and peril. A sum exceeding three thousand dollars (and a dollar meant something then, though soon to lose its meaning) was due him from subscribers, scattered over the continent.

The printer may well have had debts due him, but he was also being sued for debt he owed. The war, a new government, and a new town offered the possibility of a new start.

Isaiah Thomas struggled through the war years but prospered in the new republic. He settled in Worcester, publishing the Massachusetts Spy and many books from that town, and also invested in other print shops and newspapers. Ultimately his estate was solid enough that he set up the American Antiquarian Society to maintain his printing archive and tell his story his way.

TOMORROW: How another printer left Boston.

“Packed up his presses and types”

Back in 2011, I quoted Isaiah Thomas’s own account from October 1775 of how he’d slipped his printing press out of Boston just a couple of days before the outbreak of war.

For his 1810 History of Printing in America, Thomas wrote a bare-bones version of this event. The 1874 reissue of that book included a descendant’s longer telling, drawn mostly from family lore but also citing that 1775 letter.

According to this account, early in 1775 Timothy Bigelow invited Thomas to start a Whig newspaper in Worcester. That would have been an addition to the Massachusetts Spy in Boston.

It’s not clear whether that venture had gotten anywhere beyond the talking stage, but it meant that Thomas had already thought about moving a press and type to Worcester.

Actions in Boston sped up that process. A mysterious note and a parade by the 47th Regiment threatened the town’s radical printers. Rumors went around that the government in London had told Gov. Thomas Gage to start arresting people. (It had, but the ministers wanted him to start with politicians, not printers.)

According to the 1874 account, Thomas ”sent his family to Watertown to be safe from the perils to which he was daily exposed.” It doesn’t mention that at the time Thomas was breaking up with his wife Mary because she had had an affair with Benjamin Thompson.

The later version continued:

…his friends insisted upon his keeping himself secluded. He went to Concord to consult with Mr. [John] Hancock and other leading members of the Provincial Congress. He opened to them his situation, which indeed the Boston members well understood. Mr. Hancock and his other friends advised and urged him to remove from Boston immediately; in a few days, they said, it would be too late. They seemed to understand well what a few days would bring forth.

He came back to Boston, packed up his presses and types, and on the 16th of April, to use his own phrase, ”stole them out of town in the dead of night.” Thomas was aided in their removal by General [Joseph] Warren and Colonel Bigelow. They were carried across the ferry to Charlestown and thence put on their way to Worcester.

Two nights after, the royal troops were on their way to Lexington, and the next evening after, Boston was entirely shut up. Mr. Thomas did not go with his presses and types to Worcester. Having seen them on their way he returned to the city. The conversation at Concord, as well as his own observation, had satisfied him that important events were at hand.

Thomas was using his old master and partner Zechariah Fowle’s press, made in London in 1747. It remains today at the American Antiquarian Society, which recently celebrated the 250th anniversary of its flight from Boston.

TOMORROW: Important events.

Raphael on “The Massachusetts Revolution of 1774,” 10 Sept.

On Tuesday, 10 September, the Paul Revere House will host an online talk by Ray Raphael on “The Massachusetts Revolution of 1774.”

Ray is based in California and doesn’t come to Massachusetts as often as he once did [I’ve asked him twice this year!], so this is the best opportunity to hear him speak about the momentous events 250 years ago this month.

The event description says:

In response to the Boston Tea Party, Parliament not only shut down the port of Boston but also revoked the Massachusetts Charter of 1691, which guaranteed the people considerable say in their government. Their sacred rights withdrawn, the people rose up as a body and rebelled. They forced all crown-appointed officers to resign. Everywhere except Boston, where British troops were stationed, they shut down county courts, which administered British authority, executive as well as judicial, on the local level. To fill the vacuum, they formed a Provincial Congress that levied taxes, gathered arms, and raised an army.

When British soldiers marched on Lexington and Concord the following spring, they were trying to take back a province they had just lost. That’s when other colonies joined in, broadening the Massachusetts Revolution of 1774 into the American Revolution of 1775.

Ray wrote about these events in The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord and with his wife Marie in The Spirit of ’74: How the American Revolution Began. He’s written many other books on the Revolutionary period, including A People’s History of the American Revolution, Founding Myths, and Founders.

The Paul Revere House says its lectures this season will focus on the silversmith’s lesser-known express assignments. Speakers will share the importance of Revere’s courier work not only as an individual act of patriotism but also as part of communications systems.

Ray Raphael’s lecture will be livestreamed by the GBH forum network here on YouTube. Though not every webpage agrees, this event will start at 6:30 P.M. Anyone can log on.

“On the Conduct of the Comittee of Correspondence”

When John Andrews complained to his out-of-town relative about the Solemn League and Covenant, he didn’t know what he was talking about. And that was part of his complaint.

The Boston committee of correspondence sent its draft non-consumption agreement to all towns in Massachusetts and to allies outside of the colony on 8 June. But it didn’t make those documents public within Boston.

Andrews later wrote:

it was not known to be in being in this town (but by the few who promoted it) till near a month after it had been circulated through the country: in which time it went through whole towns with the greatest avidity, every adult of both sexes putting their names to it, saving a very few.

It was sent out in printed copies by the Clerk to the Committee. W[illiam]. Cooper, who accompanied it with a letter intimating that the measure was in general adopted here, whereas upon enquiry I can’t find that a single person in the town has signed it—and the only excuse they now make for so absurd a piece of conduct is, that it originated altogether from the country, without any of their advice or interposition; thinking so palpable a falsehood will remove the just prejudices of the more rational and judicious people among us.

By the time Andrews composed that letter, Boston’s Loyalist-leaning newspapers had published the text of the Solemn League and Covenant. But, as I concluded back here, that 23 June publication reflected the Worcester version. The Boston committee would thus have been accurate to say “it originated…from the country.”

“Altogether” would have been misleading to say since most of the Worcester text echoed Boston’s. But I rather suspect that Andrews inserted that adverb. He tended to exaggerate details, such as that it took “near a month” for the non-consumption agreement to appear in Boston rather than fifteen days.

Still, Andrews was far from alone in his anger at the committee of correspondence. On 17–18 June, as I recounted back here, Boston had a town meeting to hash out the situation. Voters ended up endorsing the committee, but that was before people had read its work.

A week later, everyone in Boston had been able to see the Solemn League and Covenant (Worcester edition) and the letter Cooper had sent. The Loyalists and merchants demanded another session of the ongoing town meeting on the morning of Monday, 27 June.

As described back here, that meeting brought in so many people it moved to Old South.

The complaints led to a motion “that some Censure be now passed By the Town on the Conduct of the Comittee of Correspondence; and that said Committee be annihilated.” Some leading politicians and traders spoke for and against that proposal.

In fact, the discussion went on for so long that the day grew “dark” (in late June!). And still the proponents of the motion said “they had farther to offer.” Cooper as town clerk put on record that those men had been “patiently heard.” The meeting voted to adjourn for the day and pick up their discussion on Tuesday at 10:00 A.M.

TOMORROW: The final vote.

“They came to hear my Sentiments of the Covenant”

The town of Westboro provides a good look at how one rural community responded to the invitations from Boston and Worcester to join the Solemn League and Covenant boycott in the summer of 1774.

The Boston committee of correspondence sent out its call on 8 June. Five days later, the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman (shown here) wrote in his diary:

Town Meeting to consider a Letter from the Town Clerk of Boston and there is come also a printed Covenant for them to Sign, in which they are to join with Others, and Solemnly bind themselves to renounce all Trade with Great Britain till the Bill for blocking up the Harbour of Boston Shall be repealed.

N.B. Little is said about supplicating the Throne of Grace on this Great Occasion. But they Chose a Committee to consider what is best to be done, and report to the Town.

The town meeting record for that day shows that Westboro set up a committee of correspondence. Legally, the warrant for that meeting didn’t mention the proposed non-consumption agreement, only Boston’s 12 May plea for support. But Parkman’s diary shows the Solemn League and Covenant was part of the discussion.

It’s notable that most of that 13 June meeting addressed military preparation, approving the purchase of a “4 Pounder and 4 Hundred Wt of Ball,” a carriage for that artillery piece, and gunpowder, and generally getting ready for “an allarum.” In “this dark and distressing Time of Perplexity,” the town majority already saw armed defense as worth spending money on.

Westboro didn’t record another town meeting until October, when men chose representatives to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. But Parkman’s diary shows how his parishioners continued to discuss the non-consumption agreement—two committee members visited him the next day. 

On 17 June, the minister wrote that six of the town’s committee came to him:

They came to hear my Sentiments of the Covenant which they had received from Boston and another from Worcester, which I, in part gave them. It was Said from among the Committee that they Should be glad I would be at the Town meeting, when they were to report.

Parkman then stated—and underscored—that on the afternoon of 20 June “The Town Meet on the Affair of Signing a Covenant of Non-importation etc.” That gathering didn’t make it into the official record. Perhaps it was deemed a committee meeting, or perhaps conversations without votes weren’t thought to need an official record.

Jonathan Bond, the first man designated for the town’s committee of correspondence, visited Parkman on 27 June:

Deacon Bond came and delivered me 4 Papers of the public affairs relative to Signing a Covenant etc. I copyed the Covenant with alterations.

Parkman probably diluted the text, given his reluctance for confrontation. The next day, the deacon’s son came by:

Thomas Bond here about the Boston papers, Covenant etc. Read him my Draughts: he Seems to fall in with them. He carrys back those I borrowed.

With Parkman’s blessing Westboro observed a fast on Thursday, 30 June. The Rev. Nathan Stone came from Southborough to preach. Parkman wrote:

Mr. Stone preached a.m. on Deut. 29.24.25. [Even all nations shall say, Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this great anger? Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of Egypt]

N.B. At the End of the Sermon he delivered his Mind concerning the Covenant that is going about the Country to be Signed in all places by all persons, on highest Penalty. May God add His Blessing!

Discussions continued on 1 July:

N.B. Mr. Daniel Forbes one of the Committee of Correspondence here. Shewed him my Remarks on the Covenant etc. He desires me to let Dr. [James] Hawes (who is another) See some of my papers concerning those Matters.

But then another voice entered the conversation.

TOMORROW: Here comes the general.

Sorting Out the Solemn League and Covenants

In his 1915 study of the Solemn League and Covenant for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Albert Matthews concluded that the text of that boycott agreement he called Form A was the original text from the Boston committee of correspondence, and Form B the variation from Worcester.

Matthews based that conclusion on several points:

(1) As the form sent out from Boston was frequently, if not generally, regarded as too drastic, it is reasonable to infer that the more drastic of the two forms was the one sent out from Boston, and of the two forms A and B, A is the more drastic.

(2) Every town in Massachusetts received a copy of the Boston form. Westford is in Middlesex County and so presumably would have received only the Boston form. The document [from Westford] exhibited to-day is form A.

(3) Every town in Worcester County received a copy of the Boston form and also a copy of the Worcester form. At the bottom of the broadside (form B) owned by the American Antiquarian Society is written, in the hand of Isaiah Thomas, the words “This came from Sutton.” Since Sutton is in Worcester County, the Sutton document might conceivably be either the Boston form or the Worcester form; but as a matter of fact the Sutton document is form B, and so presumably is the Worcester form.

(4) Five newspapers were published in Boston in 1774, but only two of these printed the Solemn League and Covenant,…and this is form A. It is reasonable to assume that the only form printed in the Boston papers was the form sent out by the Boston Committee of Correspondence.

When I started this series of postings, I thought that was convincing. But as I looked at Matthews’s sources and others, I found myself coming to the opposite conclusion.

Here are some points Matthews missed. First, he assumed that people objected to the Boston committee’s draft as “too drastic,” and indeed the merchants of the town did make that complaint. But in a footnote Matthews acknowledged that organizers in Worcester had circulated “even more drastic” language, so we have to consider the possibility that those men thought the Boston draft wasn’t drastic enough.

Matthews assumed that the Worcester committee sent its draft only to other towns in Worcester County. But he quoted evidence that Braintree considered text “much like the Worcester covenant” on 27 June and Falmouth (now Portland, Maine) had received “the non-importation Agreement form’d at Worcester” by 30 June.

The Boston News-Letter did indeed print Form A, but it prefaced it this way: “The foregoing is a Copy of a Covenant, which I am told great Pains are now taking to promote in the Country.” The newspaper didn’t specify the agreement that followed was the Boston committee’s proposal. Rather, the phrase “in the Country” hinted at a rural origin.

The 22 June Pennsylvania Journal printed Form B below “a Circular Letter, written by the Committee of the Town of BOSTON,” suggesting that printer William Bradford had received them together. The Boston text sent on 8 June most likely reached Bradford days before the Worcester text sent on 13 June. Even if he had both in hand, Bradford clearly cited documents from Boston.

We know that the Boston committee spread its text outside of Massachusetts. Silas Deane wrote a letter responding to a copy in Wethersfield, Connecticut, on 13 June, before he could have received the Worcester committee’s version. That appears to have been Form B. [Deane’s letter casts doubt on that book’s assertion that Wethersfield actually adopted the Solemn League on 15 June; I’ve found no official town action.] Form B was also the basis of the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, variation (Form C).

In contrast, we don’t know that the Worcester committee sent its text outside Massachusetts. Its letter referred to recipients as “fellow-countrymen,” which in this period usually meant people from the same colony.

Finally, here are two facts that Matthews acknowledged but set aside. A copy of Form A at the Massachusetts Historical Society is labeled “Worcester Covenant.” The printer’s type and watermark of that copy match the printed letter issued by Worcester’s committee on 13 June—though Matthews explained that away by saying all these documents must have been printed in Boston since Isaiah Thomas hadn’t yet set up the first press in Worcester.

Looking at all that evidence, I reconstruct the sequence of events this way:

• late May and early June: The Boston committee of correspondence and Worcester County radicals both drafted calls for a stronger boycott on British goods until the Boston Port Bill was repealed.
• 8 June: The Boston committee sent out its printed circular letter and suggested Solemn League and Covenant (Form B) to all towns in Massachusetts and to allies in other colonies.
• by 10 June: After feedback from Worcester, if not other places, the Boston committee sent a second printed circular letter approving other language as long as it led to the same broad boycott.
• 13 June: The Worcester committee of correspondence wrote a new Solemn League and Covenant (Form A) based mostly on the Boston text but incorporating some of its earlier draft and sent that out with a printed circular letter to all towns in Massachusetts.
• 20 June: Worcester formally adopted its form of the Solemn League and Covenant.
• 22 June: The Pennsylvania Journal printed the Boston committee’s draft.
• 23 June: The Boston News-Letter printed the Worcester committee’s draft, saying it was being promoted “in the Country.”
• 27 June: Braintree adopted the Solemn League and Covenant in a form “much like the Worcester covenant,” according to the 30 June Massachusetts Spy.
• before 28 June: The Portsmouth, New Hampshire, committee of correspondence sent out its variation on the Boston draft (Form C).
• 30 June: Falmouth considered “the non-importation Agreement form’d at Worcester” and decided to ask other towns what they were doing.
• 4 July: Westford adopted the Solemn League and Covenant with the Worcester text and started gathering signatures.
• 14 July: Attleboro adopted the Solemn League and Covenant with the Worcester text and started gathering signatures.

In sum, Worcester’s version of the Solemn League and Covenant became the standard text within Massachusetts while Boston’s version spread outside the colony. This was an early example of Worcester’s radicals (who were, of course, not living under military occupation) being more confrontational than the usual troublemakers in Boston.

TOMORROW: One town’s debate.

“The enclosed covenant is by no means inconsistent”

Having returned from a busy convention in California, I’m going back to the Solemn League and Covenant of June 1774.

Or, more accurately, the multiple overlapping boycott covenants that appeared in print that month, first in broadsides and then in the 22 June Pennsylvania Journal and the 23 June Boston News-Letter.

Albert Matthews discussed two texts in 1915, calling them Form B and Form A, respectively.

He briefly mentioned a third variation, which I’ll call Form C. This was a revision of Form B created and distributed by the committee of correspondence in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, by the end of June 1774. The Library of Congress displays a copy here.

Another copy of Form C survives in the papers of the Rev. Jeremy Belknap at the Massachusetts Historical Society; he cautioned his parishioners in Dover, New Hampshire, against signing on until they’d heard from what would be the Continental Congress.

According to Frederick Chase’s History of Dartmouth College and the Town of Hanover, the voters of Plainfield, New Hampshire, did adopt the text of Form C on 28 July. Town histories of Mason and Wilton, New Hampshire, show those towns adopted Form C while adding a proviso that signers could vote to revise its terms.

We can thus think of Form C as the New Hampshire variation on a document that originated in Massachusetts. But the big question remains: Which of Form A and Form B was the Boston original?

In early June, as the Boston committee of correspondence finalized its text, Whigs in Worcester County were also thinking about a boycott. In a footnote, Matthews shared evidence that William Henshaw (1735-1820, shown above) of Leicester and Timothy Bigelow (1739–1790) of Worcester privately circulated a draft non-consumption agreement. At the bottom of a copy at the American Antiquarian Society, Henshaw wrote: “It is thought best not to sign any agreement yet, as it is expected we shall have the plan of a General one from Boston very soon.”

We thus know that there was a text in Worcester before the town received the Boston committee’s Solemn League and Covenant broadsides, mailed on 8 June. Furthermore, Matthews deemed that draft text to be “still more drastic” in wording than either Form A or Form B.

On 10 June, as I discussed back here, the Boston committee sent out a second circular letter saying they didn’t mean to suggest that all towns adopt their language. Some organizers must have asked to use other language—but we don’t know if those people wanted the pledge to be more strident or less.

Three days later, Worcester’s committee of correspondence issued its own printed letter, signed by chairman William Young. The state archives shares a copy received by the selectmen in Southboro. The Worcester committee noted how “the committee of Boston in their last letter have informed us that they do not mean to dictate to us,” and concluded “the enclosed covenant is by no means inconsistent with the spirit or intention of the form sent out by them.”

Thus, on 18 June Worcester sent out its own text, different in some respects from Boston’s. A week later, the town formally adopted that language.

But was that Form A or Form B?

TOMORROW: Who’s pushing who?

“Like a torrent are rushing upon it with increasing violence”

As I wrote yesterday, the text of the Solemn League and Covenant that towns like Westford and Attleboro approved was not the first version of that document printed in an American newspaper.

On 22 June 1774, one day before Margaret Draper published the agreement in Boston, William Bradford’s Pennsylvania Journal issued a “Postscript” or supplement that included an article datelined “Philadelphia.” It began:

The following is a Circular Letter, written by the Committee of the Town of BOSTON, to the neighbouring towns with a copy of an agreement, which was to begin signing in every town in that government nearly at the same time.

The newspaper then printed William Cooper’s 8 June letter followed by a text that started the same way as what would appear in Draper’s Boston News-Letter.

But at the end of the second point, this text added the phrase “and never to renew any commerce or trade with them.”

Then it went on in a different direction. This text didn’t include an oath for retailers to swear. It included language not seen in the News-Letter version:

And, Whereas the promoting of industry, œconomy, arts and manufactures among ourselves is of the last importance to the civil and religious welfare of a community; we engage,

3dly, That from and after the first day of October next ensuing, we will, not by ourselves, or any for, by, or under us, purchase or use any goods, wares, manufactures or merchandize, whensoever or howsoever imported from Great Britain, until the harbour of Boston shall be opened, and our charter rights restored. And,

Lastly, As a refusal to come into any agreement which promises the deliverance of our country from the calamities it now feels, and which, like a torrent are rushing upon it with increasing violence, must evidence a disposition enimical to, or criminally negligent of, the common safety…

Both versions conclude with similar promises to shun doing business with any “contumacious importers.” The News-Letter text said signers wouldn’t buy “any article whatever” from those people. The Pennsylvania Journal text said they would be shunned “forever.” Both absolutes, but in different dimensions.

In comparing these two texts in 1915, Albert Matthews called the version that first surfaced in Philadelphia “Form B.” He didn’t cite that newspaper article but rather drew on a broadside at the American Antiquarian Society.

Matthews concluded that Form A was Boston’s proposed text and Form B originated in Worcester, created because Boston’s was “too drastic.” More recent scholars disagree.

COMING UP: The Worcester connection.

How the Massachusetts Press Responded to the 1783 Earthquake

Prompted by Karen Kleemann’s article quoted yesterday, I looked at how Massachusetts newspapers treated the 29 Nov 1783 earthquake and found some interesting details.

First, we’re used to a standard time extending across an entire time zone. But before railroads, every town had its own noon, and therefore its own perception of when something big happened.

The Massachusetts Gazette and General Advertiser in Springfield said this earthquake was felt “at 40 minutes past 10 o’clock.” The Boston Gazette reported it at “about six minutes before eleven o’clock.” And the Salem Gazette pegged it “at about 11 o’clock.” Of course, it took a few seconds for the shock to travel between those places. The big difference in those times came from how the Earth spins.

All those reports appeared in the first week of December. Starting on 8 December, Massachusetts newspapers began reporting on other places people detected the quake. Printers wondered if it wasn’t as small an event as it first seemed. On 12 December, the Salem Gazette said the shaking was definitely worse in Connecticut and New York.

By 18 December, the newspapers from Philadelphia had arrived, and Massachusetts printers could share details from nearer the epicenter in New Jersey. China and pewter thrown off shelves! People woken from sleep! Aftershocks later the same night!

Still, there were no deaths. Earlier in the year, American newspapers had reprinted news of many people dying from earthquakes in Italy, and similar reports from China.

Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy editorialized:

This year must make a conspicuous figure in the instructive records of Time: Great revolutions have occured in the natural and political world.

In Europe the convulsions of nature have destroyed a great part of Sicily, &c. with about one hundred thousand inhabitants. In America such events have taken place, as were before unknown to its civilized inhabitants.

What gratitude is due from us to heaven for its Benedictions—Independence, as a Nation, with the blessings of Peace; and that we have not in the first transports of our national existence met with those calamities that might in a moment have reduced our Continent to its original Chaos!

The Salem Gazette’s 12 December follow-up to its first report ran just above a local disaster with real damage: A fire in John Piemont’s barn in Ipswich had killed one cow and consumed all his hay for the winter.

Back in 1770, Piemont was a hair stylist at the center of Boston, and at the center of Boston events, as I discussed back here. He was able to bounce back from this fire, and in 1784 advertised that he once more offered a stable for horses.

(The broadside shown above dates from almost thirty years after this quake.)

How Many British Soldiers Are Buried beside the North Bridge?

How many British soldiers are buried beside the North Bridge in Concord?

On some night late in 1891, George R. Brooks and other local worthies took a cranium given up by the Worcester Society of Antiquity and interred it in the patch of ground beside the bridge long marked as the grave of two redcoats.

In doing so, they believed they were restoring one of two skulls that had been removed from that grave decades before.

That would have left slightly less than two British soldiers buried there.

Those men were convinced that the phrenologist Walton Felch had dug up those skulls with the permission of the Concord selectmen back around 1840, shortly after the town had erected its obelisk monument to the fighting on 19 Apr 1775.

They were also convinced that the skull they had failed to return was damaged, based on a series of musts:

• If the two skulls were unearthed in Concord, they must have come from the grave beside the North Bridge because that was the only grave of British soldiers in town with two bodies.
• If the skulls came from the grave at the North Bridge, they must have belonged to the soldiers killed at that bridge, including the one Ammi White hit in the head with a hatchet.
• If one of those skulls came from a man killed by a hatchet blow to the head, that skull must have shown severe damage.

And thus, even though no one reported actually seeing a damaged second skull in the latter half of the 1800s, people became convinced that it was “demoralized.”

But what if the initial premise of that logical chain was wrong? Because that’s what the evidence from ante-bellum Concord says.

First of all, in 1840 schoolboy Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., went to hear the phrenologist Walton Felch at the Concord Lyceum. Right afterward, Edmund wrote in his diary that the man had the top part of the skull of a British soldier with a bullet hole through it, and that cranium had been “dug up in Lincoln,” not Concord.

Second, in 1850 Henry David Thoreau spoke with William Wheeler, who described seeing Felch dig up two skulls years before in an “almost unused graveyard in Lincoln.” Wheeler’s description of a bullet hole through one cranium matched young Edmund’s.

Third, in 1836 the town of Concord chose to erect its monument near where two soldiers had been shot and buried. Lots of people paid attention to that spot, including the Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other town leaders. There was also a contingent in Concord who had wanted the monument built elsewhere. The selectmen couldn’t have authorized opening the soldiers’ graves without people in town knowing, and at least some of them criticizing the idea. There would have been no secrets.

In contrast, Lincoln had had a lot more British soldiers to bury back in April 1775. So many that local men simply carted those bodies to the town burying-ground and placed them in a single grave in the paupers’ section. By the 1830s that old cemetery was largely ignored. Lincoln didn’t put up any marker for those bodies until 1884. In sum, few people in Lincoln probably cared whether those bodies were disturbed.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Lincoln’s town records from the late 1830s show the selectmen granting Felch permission to explore the cemetery. And I wouldn’t be surprised if those records say nothing about Felch’s request; the selectmen may not have cared enough to take formal action. Unlike in Concord, how to treat the remains of British soldiers in Lincoln wasn’t a monumental decision.

In the following years Felch described his skulls as those of soldiers killed in the “Battle of Concord.” Some listeners heard, or remembered, that as meaning the soldiers had died in the town of Concord. By the time Albert Tyler and Daniel Seagrave were asking his widow about the skulls, Felch wasn’t around to correct that idea. So those men and their Worcester Society of Antiquity colleagues understood the skulls as having come from Concord.

That mistaken belief led to museum labels and newspaper articles about the remaining skull from Concord—reportedly unearthed with the selectmen’s approval. Men from Concord started to whisper about how that reflected on them and their forefathers. They constructed the logical chain above. And ultimately we reach the moment in 1891 when Concord antiquarians were secretly digging in the dirt beside the North Bridge, not to investigate but to partially rectify a breach of etiquette from fifty years before.

But that wasn’t really necessary. The last time that skull had been in Concord, it was still healthy, even if its owner might have come under fire. That soldier didn’t die until a bullet pierced his brain in Lincoln. In 1891 the rest of that man’s body was still in Lincoln, and whatever remains of it is there now.

Buried in the grave beside Concord’s North Bridge are slightly more than two British soldiers.

“The skulls of those two British Soldiers killed at the bridge”

James H. Stark (1847–1919) was born in Britain and brought to Boston at the age of nine.

Stark became an American citizen but maintained ties with his native country, promoting immigration and friendly relations.

Like Isaiah Thomas, the Rev. Albert Tyler, Daniel Seagrave, and other men who took up studying and preserving history without a college education, Stark started out in the printing business. In his case, he mastered the new technology of electrotyping and ran the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston.

In the late 1800s Stark published several guides to the British West Indies illustrated with photographs by himself and others.

He also published books on local history through his firm: Illustrated History of Boston Harbor (1880) and Antique Views of ye Towne of Boston (1882) both reproduced many historic images of the town.

Stark might have made the biggest splash with his thick book The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution, published in 1910. Coming at the end of the Colonial Revival, he challenged the accepted American view of the Loyalists as aristocrats and traitors, highlighting their complaints of being mistreated. For this, critics charged that Stark was a historical muckraker and a controversialist, and indeed he probably was.

Among the stories Stark examined was the tale of the two British soldiers’ skulls dug up by a phrenologist. In doing so, however, he spread misinformation about that tale.

This chapter of the story started in 1908 with a man named Albert Webb coming from Worcester, England, to Worcester, Massachusetts, on a sister city project. On 31 March 1909, Webb wrote to the Boston Transcript suggesting that someone should place a larger marker near the North Bridge in Concord, commemorating the two British soldiers killed and buried nearby with some lines by James Russell Lowell.

The editor of the Transcript wrote a response endorsing the idea but also insisting that the grave had been maintained with “old New England reverence.”

Stark replied with a letter to the newspaper’s “Notes and Queries” department asking:

1. Can anyone give the names of the two British soldiers killed at Concord Bridge, or inform me it there were any papers taken from their bodies that would identify them? I have been informed that there were.

2. One of the soldiers was left wounded on the bridge; what was the name of the “young American that killed him with a hatchet”?

3. When did the selectmen of Concord give Professor Fowler permission to dig up the two bodies of the British soldiers and remove the skulls to be used for exhibition purposes?

The only response to the newspaper was: “before the alleged action of the selectmen excites the Concord people, they should insist upon his producing adequate evidence.”

But in The Loyalists of Massachusetts, Stark published this 12 April letter from Ellery B. Crane, librarian of the Worcester Society of Antiquity, as what he deemed adequate evidence:

Mr. Barton has handed your letter to me and I write to say that the skulls of those two British Soldiers killed at the bridge in Concord were once the property of this Society, we having purchased them of the Widow of Prof. Fowler, the phrenologist, who some years ago went about the country giving lectures and illustrating his subjects.

Prof. Fowler got permission to dig up those skulls from the Selectmen of Concord, and he carried them about with him and used them in his lecturing. After his death one of the members learned of them and we purchased the skulls and they were in our museum some time.

The late Senator [George F.] Hoar learning that we had them, came to know if we would be willing to return them to Concord that they might be put back in the ground from whence they were taken. As he seemed quite anxious about it, consent was given, and they were sent to Concord to be placed in their original resting place. Presume they are there at the present time.

This letter offers yet another version of our story, with two skulls returned to the grave in Concord. Otherwise, it accords with what Hoar wrote in his 1891 letter returning one skull, and with what people in Concord gossiped about according to an 1895 Boston Sunday Globe article.

But that account doesn’t match what the Rev. Albert Tyler wrote out for the Worcester Society of Antiquity in 1905, in a paper read to members by none other than Ellery B. Crane. Nor what Crane had told society members during an excursion to Concord in April 1906. Both of those accounts had recently been printed in the society’s Proceedings, presumably under Crane’s direction.

Nor does the belief that the Worcester Society of Antiquity owned two British soldiers’ skulls match the intermittent newspaper accounts in the late 1800s about its display of a single skull.

Furthermore, Stark and Crane got the name of the phrenologist wrong. Orson Squire Fowler (1809–1887) and Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1810–1896) were prominent proponents of that new science in the mid-1800s. (Lest we think of the Fowler brothers as total loons who did nothing for American society, they also quietly paid Walt Whitman’s costs for printing the second edition of Leaves of Grass.) But all other sources are clear that the phrenologist who lectured with British soldiers’ skulls was Walton Felch.

Stark’s Loyalists of Massachusetts was widely distributed. It’s useful on some points of genealogy and real estate, notoriously misleading on others, such as the engraving of Paul Revere as a bearded rider with a coonskin cap and a pistol. Stark’s book and Ellen P. Chase’s Beginnings of the American Revolution, also published in 1910, appear to be the first books to print the name of Ammi White as the young man who killed a wounded soldier at the North Bridge.

A thick book, especially one in lots of local libraries for genealogists to consult, is harder to ignore than a gossipy newspaper story. The Loyalists of Massachusetts turned the tale of Concord’s selectmen letting a phrenologist make off with the two soldiers’ skulls into a long-lasting part of the town’s local lore.

Even though that lore was based on a mistake.

TOMORROW: Back to the disinterment.

The Rumor of a “Demoralized” Skull

When Sen. George Frisbie Hoar sent the Worcester Society of Antiquity’s skull of a British soldier to friends in his home town of Concord, he also wrote about the other soldier’s skull that phrenologist Walton Felch had collected.

Once again I’m relying on the summary of Hoar’s 27 Nov 1891 letter to George M. Brooks in Douglas Sabin’s April 19, 1775: A Historiographical Study.

Hoar’s understanding was that:

In his letter to Mr. Brooks, Senator Hoar further explained that the skull was purchased from the widow of Walton Felch along with another skull. Both skulls were subsequently donated to the Worcester Antiquarian Society by the purchasers, a Mr. [Daniel] Seagrave and others. One of the skulls featured a bullet hole which passed through the head “from side to side”. The other skull, in the words of Mr. Seagrave, was much “demoralized”.

That term apparently meant “damaged,” with an overlay of disapproval.

Furthermore:

According to Hoar’s 1891 letter to Brooks, the “demoralized” skull passed into the hands of a Dr. Bates, who died without leaving a family. Apparently, Mr. Seagrave tried to locate the “demoralized” skull without success.

The Concord gossip published in the Boston Sunday Globe in 1895 offered a somewhat different story. According to this article, evidently based on conversations with people in Concord rather than documentary sources and not checked with men in Worcester, Seagrave and the phrenologist Felch (misspelled “Felt”) knew each other from “a lodge.” (Both men were Freemasons, but from different eras.) Seagrave bought both skulls from Felch’s widow, one showing bullet holes and the other “shattered as if with an axe.” Seagrave then gave the second skull “to a surgeon in Worcester,” and it got lost.

The Rev. Albert Tyler contradicted the major points of both Hoar’s private letter and the Globe article (which he’d probably seen) when he wrote out his own recollection for the Worcester Society of Antiquity in 1905. Tyler had been Seagrave’s business partner for years. Tyler was also, as he told it, a crucial actor in the effort to locate the soldiers’ skulls: he remembered seeing a phrenologist named Felch display those skulls, and he spotted Felch’s name decades later around 1875. But when he and Seagrave met the man’s widow, she had only one skull in her possession.

According to Tyler, Dr. Joseph N. Bates later disclosed that he had received that second skull from Felch back in 1872, when the phrenologist/hydrotherapist was dying. After Bates himself died in 1883, nobody could locate it. What’s more, Tyler never indicated that Seagrave nor anyone else saw that second skull in Bates’s custody, and Tyler wrote nothing about it being damaged. Hoar evidently believed that Daniel Seagrave had seen and helped to buy that skull, but by Tyler’s telling that was impossible.

Only three people left descriptions of seeing Felch with his skulls and casts:

• Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., in 1840 described the bullet hole through one cranium but wrote nothing about another skull being damaged.
• William Wheeler in 1850, as recorded by Henry David Thoreau, related how he “saw a bullet hole through & through one of the [two] skulls” when Felch dug them up, but said nothing about damage to the other.
• Albert Tyler in 1905, recalling a lecture he attended around 1840, wrote down no specific details about the skulls he saw.

Thus, there’s very little solid evidence that the second British soldier’s skull Felch owned was badly damaged. Regardless, the men of Concord convinced themselves that the Worcester Society of Antiquity or its members had at one point owned just such a “demoralized” artifact but then let it get away.

TOMORROW: A historical muckraker.

(The picture of Daniel Seagrave above was made by Travis Simpkins, a professional artist who specializes in, among other things, portraits of Freemasons.)

“Grave of British Soldiers Opened”

In the late 1800s, the Google Book Ngram Viewer shows, there was a spike in the use of the phrase “Old Concord.” That seems to be an effect of the Colonial Revival and nostalgia for pre-industrial America, including not only the Revolution but the “American Renaissance.” Margaret Sidney wrote a book with that title.

On 25 Aug 1895, the Boston Sunday Globe played off that newish trope with an anonymous article headlined “IN NEW CONCORD.”

The subheads were:

Only Pilgrims Preserve its Old Traditions.
“Immortals” Seem as Remote as Actors in Revolutionary Drama.
Grave of British Soldiers Opened—Changes Among Inhabitants.

The article was gossipy, not easy to follow unless one already knew a bit about Concord already. There were inside anecdotes about the Hoar family. After discussing the 1889 attempt to break into Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grave, the journalist segued to:

There was another and more successful violation of a grave in Concord a long time ago, the story of which has never been published, and which will be interesting to the recent visitors to the revolutionary sites there. . . .

Somewhat more than 50 years ago a phrenologist named Felt [sic] was lecturing upon his science in Concord. The story runs that he obtained permission from some authority to open and examine the soldiers’ grave, which he interpreted as a license to make what professional use he pleased of the remains therein.

At all events, Felt took the two skulls from the spot and carried them off, and as far as is known, nobody in Concord was any the wiser for nearly half a century!

Only five or six years since Mr George Tolman of the Concord historical society heard to his surprise that a skull marked as one of the British soldiers buried at Concord was in the museum of antiquities at Worcester.

Investigation showed that it was given by Mr Daniel Seagrave, a member of the society, and a worthy citizen of that town, still living. He had been a fellow-member of a lodge with Felt, and when the latter died at Natick [sic] many years ago he had assisted the widow with the funeral expenses, and had bought these two skulls, one of which was pierced with a musket shot and the other shattered as if with an axe. The shattered skull had been given to a surgeon in Worcester, and had been placed with other bones, so that it was not recognizable.

The other was courteously and promptly given up by the Worcester society, and was reverently restored to its resting place by Judge [George M.] Brooks, the president of the Concord antiquarian society.

As a verification of the story of the abstraction of the heads, which seemed perfectly coherent and plausible, it may be said that, though the other bones were distinctly seen, no traces of the skulls, the most enduring portion of the human skeleton, were found.

George Tolman (1836–1909) was secretary of the Concord Antiquarian Society and wrote many articles for that organization. Here’s a collection of his work and others catalogued under the title of one paper only. Though Tolman’s name didn’t come up in yesterday’s source, he may well have been involved in an effort to get the skull from Worcester.

Like George F. Hoar, Tolman appears to have been protective of his town’s reputation. This page shows him stating that a British soldier whom militiaman Amos Barrett described as “almost dead” was “quite dead a few moments later” without reporting that the change was brought about by a young local striking that wounded soldier’s head with a hatchet.

Whoever wrote the Boston Sunday Globe article wasn’t so reticent. In fact, that journalist didn’t just describe how a young man delivered “a coup de grace with an axe.” He or she was also, so far as I can tell, the first person to name that man in print as Ammi White.

The upshot of this article is that the secret reburial of the British soldier’s skull in 1891 was a matter of public record, or at least public gossip, in 1895.

TOMORROW: A “demoralized” skull?

(The photo above, courtesy of the New York Public Library and Lost New England, shows Concord’s North Bridge as it looked around 1885, before it was pared back to look like the bridge in the Amos Doolittle print.)

“The skull should be returned secretly to the grave”

For this part of the story of the British soldier’s skull I’m relying on Douglas Sabin’s April 19, 1775: A Historiographical Study, prepared for Minute Man National Historical Park and more widely published by Sinclair Street Publishing in 2011.

Sabin’s appendix, “The British Skull Controversy,” reviews a great deal of evidence. In this series I’m quoting additional sources, and my conclusion will be somewhat different.

In particular, Sabin summarized a 27 Nov 1891 letter from George Frisbie Hoar to George M. Brooks (1824–1893, shown here), president of the Concord Antiquarian Society. That organization operates the fine Concord Museum.

As I described yesterday, at that time Hoar was a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, living in Worcester after growing up in Concord. He was a past president of the American Antiquarian Society. He had clout.

As for Brooks, he was a probate judge and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives. The two men also had a personal tie: Brooks’s half-sister Caroline had married Hoar’s older brother Ebenezer. In fact, all three of those men had served in the U.S. House, two at a time.

According to Sabin:

In his letter to Mr. Brooks, Senator Hoar stated that he was forwarding to Mr. Brooks a box containing a skull sent to him by the president of the Worcester Society of Antiquity. Senator Hoar went on to explain that the Worcester Society of Antiquity felt that the skull should be returned to the grave in Concord from which they believed it had been taken years before.

Other sources clarify that the Worcester Society of Antiquity came to that decision only under pressure from Hoar. He was a member but “never an active member.” The Rev. Albert Tyler wrote that the senator “interested himself” in the skull. In 1906 society librarian Ellery B. Crane said “the late Hon. George F. Hoar induced its return to the authorities at Concord,” and three years later wrote that Hoar asked “if we would be willing to return [the skulls] to Concord. . . . he seemed quite anxious about it.” And, as I said, Hoar had clout.

Sabin’s appendix continued:

Hoar sent the skull with the bullet hole through it to Mr. Brooks under the condition that the skull be restored to its burial place. In the closing paragraph of his letter to Brooks, Hoar expressed his belief that the skull should be returned secretly to the grave without public notice or newspaper coverage. He feared that if the newspapers learned of the skull business the subject would become a topic of ridicule.

In fact, I suspect avoiding ridicule was Hoar’s major motivation from the start. Not jokes about the current action but derision for the Concord selectmen and town leaders back in the 1830s—in other words, Hoar’s revered father and his friends.

What would people say if the public found out that, shortly after erecting a monument near the two soldiers’ grave, Concord had authorized a a quack scientist to dig up those bodies and go off with their skulls? How many thousands of people had visited that monument, including the President of the U.S. of A. in 1875, without being told the full story?

Sabin wrote:

According to the late Lincoln amateur archeologist, Roland Wells Robbins, Senator Hoar’s original 1891 letter to Mr. Brooks contained a notation at the bottom which said “Returned to the grave, December the fifth, 1891”. This notation was signed by E.R. Hoar [the senator’s brother] and Henry L. Shattuck.

However, the Concord Museum couldn’t locate that document for Sabin when he wrote, and the copy of the letter at Minute Man Park doesn’t show the note.

But let’s assume that detail is accurate. In December 1891, some of Concord’s leading men quietly dug into the soldiers’ grave near the Concord Monument, inserted the partial skull sent from Worcester, and covered it up. Nobody would ever know, right?

There were three problems with George F. Hoar’s plan for dealing with this skull. First, he was mistaken about many significant details, starting with what grave it had actually come from.

Second, the lack of public documentation produced a vacuum that sucked in even more misinformation.

And third, Concord’s cranial reinterment stayed out of the newspapers for less than four years.

TOMORROW: Cover blown.

G. F. Hoar and “stories of the Battle of Concord”

George Frisbie Hoar (1826–1904, shown here) was born in Concord. His father, Samuel Hoar, represented the area in the U.S. Congress and contributed to the wording of the town’s monument at the North Bridge.

In his autobiography Hoar wrote fondly about growing up in Concord, and particularly about living reminders of the Revolutionary War:

Scattered about the church were the good gray heads of many survivors of the Revolution—the men who had been at the bridge on the 19th of April, and who made the first armed resistance to the British power. They were very striking and venerable figures, with their queues and knee-breeches and shoes with shining buckles. Men were more particular about their apparel in those days than we are now. They had great stateliness of behavior, and admitted of little familiarity.

They had heard John Buttrick’s order to fire, which marked the moment when our country was born. The order was given to British subjects. It was obeyed by American citizens. Among them was old Master [Thaddeus] Blood, who saw a ball strike the water when the British fired their first volley. I heard many of the old men tell their stories of the Battle of Concord, and of the capture of Burgoyne.

I lay down on the grass one summer afternoon, when old Amos Baker of Lincoln, who was in the Lincoln Company on the 19th of April, told me the whole story. He was very indignant at the claim that the Acton men marched first to attack the British because the others hesitated. He said, “It was because they had bagnets [bayonets]. The rest of us hadn’t no bagnets.”

One day a few years later, when I was in college, I walked up from Cambridge to Concord, through Lexington, and had a chat with old Jonathan Harrington by the roadside. He told me he was on the Common when the British Regulars fired upon the Lexington men.

He did not tell me then the story which he told afterward at the great celebration at Concord in 1850. He and Amos Baker were the only survivors who were there that day. He said he was a boy about fifteen years old on April 19, 1775. He was a fifer in the company. He had been up the greater part of the night helping get the stores out of the way of the British, who were expected, and went to bed about three o’clock, very tired and sleepy. His mother came and pounded with her fist on the door of his chamber, and said, “Git up, Jonathan! The Reg’lars are comin’ and somethin’ must be done!” . . .

A very curious and amusing incident is said, and I have no doubt truly, to have happened at this celebration. It shows how carefully the great orator, Edward Everett, looked out for the striking effects in his speech. He turned in the midst of his speech to the seat where Amos Baker and Jonathan Harrington sat, and addressed them. At once they both stood up, and Mr. Everett said, with fine dramatic effect, “Sit, venerable friends. It is for us to stand in your presence.”

After the proceedings were over, old Amos Baker was heard to say to somebody, “What do you suppose Squire Everett meant? He came to us before his speech and told us to stand up when he spoke to us, and when we stood up he told us to sit down.”

In Concord, George F. Hoar became lifelong friends with Henry David Thoreau. They met as schoolboys at different grades, and George later attended the Thoreau brothers’ Concord Academy for a while. It’s unclear whether he overlapped with Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr.

However, in an 1891 letter Hoar wrote that as a boy he attended a lecture in Concord where the speaker exhibited the skull of a British soldier killed in 1775. That could only have been Walton Felch at the town’s lyceum in the spring of 1840.

After the obligatory years at Harvard, George F. Hoar went into the law, establishing his practice in Worcester. Then he went into politics. He served in the Massachusetts General Court, then the U.S. Congress after the Civil War, and finally the U.S. Senate from 1877 to 1904.

Back home, Hoar helped found what became the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and served as president of the American Antiquarian Society. He also sat on boards of the Smithsonian Institute and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, so he didn’t have a complete aversion to museums holding human remains.

But Sen. Hoar didn’t like the idea of the Worcester Society of Antiquity holding that skull of a British soldier killed on 19 Apr 1775.

TOMORROW: A private arrangement.

“The most prominent addition made to the cabinet”

On 2 Feb 1877, the Boston Daily Advertiser took note of “an exhibition of antiquarian relics” temporarily open “in the rooms of the National History Society of Worcester.”

The article didn’t provide the name of the group that had organized the exhibit, the Worcester Society of Antiquity, which received its state charter that year.

All the objects on display were probably owned by members. Most were items on paper, including books, deeds, commissions, newspapers, and autographs unfortunately clipped out of documents of greater interest. 

The exhibit did include “Spurs worn by General [Artemas] Ward in the Revolutionary war.” And:

the skull of a British soldier from Concord, April 19, 1775.

The Worcester Natural History Society, founded in 1825 as the Worcester Lyceum of Natural History, went on to open the New England Science Center, now called the EcoTarium.

Meanwhile, the Worcester Society of Antiquity started renting its own space in the building of the Worcester National Bank for its meetings and growing collection. On 6 Apr 1881 the Worcester Evening Gazette reported on the group’s monthly gathering, saying:

The most prominent addition made to the cabinet was the skull of a British soldier, shot at Concord Bridge in the first fight of the Revolution. Two were killed and buried where they fell. In 1844 [sic], by permission of the Selectmen, the bodies were exhumed by a resident, whose widow, who is in reduced circumstances transferred the relic to the Society. The members made up quite a collection of money for the donor. The other skull is in possession of Dr. J. N. Bates of this city.

The soldier’s skull had actually been dug up before 1840 because Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., saw Walton Felch display it that year. Sewall also heard that the skull had been dug up in Lincoln, not Concord, and Henry David Thoreau recorded the circumstances later in his journal.

The 1881 article suggests that Daniel Seagraves had just formally donated the skull to the society. As discussed yesterday, Dr. Joseph N. Bates died in 1883, and no one could find the second skull among his effects.

Folks might uncover other newspaper mentions of the British soldier’s skull on display in Worcester in the late 1800s. These are the only two I came across. Notably, they show no squeamishness about displaying human remains.

After a generous gift from a member and some fundraising, the Worcester Society of Antiquity opened its own building on Salisbury Street in 1892. The organization became the Worcester Historical Society in 1919 and the Worcester Historical Museum in 1978. Ten years after that, it moved into its present building on Elm Street.

But the British soldier’s skull was never exhibited in those museums.

Some people didn’t like the thought of that British soldier’s skull being separated from his body.

TOMORROW: Back to Concord.

“A brief historical sketch of the skull of a British Soldier”

At the end of yesterday’s post, the Worcester printers and antiquarians Albert Tyler and Daniel Seagrave confirmed with Nancy Felch that her late husband had lectured about phrenology.

That conversation happened in the mid-1870s, with the men asking about events about thirty-five years before. In the intervening years Walton Felch had been most active as a hydropathic physician (and amateur poet), but he had indeed been a phrenologist.

As related by Tyler in 1905, the two men pressed on to their real interest: Had Felch owned the skulls of two British soldiers killed on 19 Apr 1775?

She answered “Yes.”

“Where are they now?”

She said she had them in possession, and they were packed away among other things useless to her at her old residence in Barre.

The thought of their value to the collection of this then young [Worcester] Society [of Antiquity] instantly occurred, and the writer [Tyler] asked her if she was willing to part with them. She replied that if we wanted them, we could have them in welcome.

So in due time a box containing the whole phrenological outfit was received at our office. . . .

We found in the collection only one of the two skulls—the absence of the other the widow could not explain.

Walton Felch’s phreonological material doesn’t appear on the inventory of his estate, which might reflect its low market value in 1872.

Though Tyler’s reminiscence was silent on this point, it seems clear that the antiquarians offered Nancy Felch some payment for those goods. A local newspaper article from 1881 said, “The members made up quite a collection of money for the donor,” she being “in reduced circumstances.” A Boston article from 1895, while getting several details wrong, stated that Daniel Seagrave “assisted the widow with the funeral expenses.” I suspect Seagrave bought the material, expecting to give the skull to the society when it had a place to keep it.

The widow Felch finally died in Barre in 1896. Her maiden name was Brigham; the Worcester Society of Antiquity’s proceedings credit Dr. F. K. and F. A. Brigham with donating “Pam[phlets], Papers, Hand-Bills and Plaster Casts belonging to the late Walton Felch, phrenologist” in 1897. That suggests she may not have located all her late husband’s phrenological material in the 1870s, but eventually the society got all that survived.

The society’s published record of its meeting on 5 June 1877 says:

Mr. Charles R. Johnson gave a brief historical sketch of the skull of a British Soldier who was killed at the battle of Concord, April 19th, 1775, now in the possession of a member of this Society.

That sketch was not printed with the proceedings, and the member who possessed that relic was still anonymous.

Meanwhile, Tyler was still interested in the other skull. His story went on:

In a casual conversation with the late Dr. Joseph N. Bates [of Barre] there was another “happening.” He was a collector of antique things, and when the discovery of the skull was mentioned to him, and the loss of the other one, he smiled and said, “I have got that one; I attended Mr. Felch in his last sickness and he gave it to me!”

Dr. Bates died; his brother, Dr. George Bates, was his executor; inquiry was made of him concerning the second skull, but nothing ever came of it. It is probably lost beyond recovery.

Dr. Joseph N. Bates (1811–1883) appears above, courtesy of the Roster and Genealogies of the 15th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

Back in 1840, Edmind Quincy Sewall, Jr., had described how one of the skulls ”was only the upper half of the head” displaying a “bullet hole.” He didn’t take note of the other at all. I suspect that it was intact and undistinguished, though I’ll note later statements to the contrary. If I’m right, the skull that Dr. Bates took looked like any other specimen of the cranium and was thus easily overlooked after he died.

TOMORROW: Getting to see the skull.