“To-morrow I go on another attack”

We met Thomas James as a major in the Royal Artillery stationed in New York in 1765. After he vowed to protect the stamped paper and said nasty things about the people opposing the new tax, a crowd attacked his home.

Maj. James went home to Britain to report on the situation to Parliament, and he reported on Parliament to royal authorities in New York.

By 1771 James was a lieutenant colonel in the artillery. In that year he published an illustrated two-volume study titled The History of the Herculean Straits, Now Called the Straits of Gibraltar: Including those Ports of Spain and Barbary that Lie Contiguous Thereto.

The “authour,” as he’s called on the title pages, had served in Gibraltar in 1749–1755. He’d been working on this book for years, and is credited with being the first Englishman to publish observations on the area’s geography.

In 1775 Lt. Col. James was inside besieged Boston. Here’s his brief report on the aftermath of the Bunker Hill battle in a letter to Lt. Col. Francis Downman in London dated 23 June 1775:

We are in thickness of war, we have had two battles already, in the last we carried our point, took the lines and a strong redoubt, with 2,500 men against 7,000.

We have upwards of 80 officers killed and wounded, and the flower of the grenadiers and light infantry; some regiments have but five grenadiers left. We had at one gun the officer and volunteer wounded, and but one man without a wound. [Capt.-Lt. John] Lemoine is wounded, so are [Capt. W. Oren] Huddlestone and [Lt. Ashton] Shuttleworth. We are well. My volunteer hands have been full.

To-morrow I go on another attack, covering the left in my gondolas, which I have made, viz., three with a heavy 12-pr. in each prow. Adieu.

James’s “gondolas” seem to have gone down in American records as the Crown’s “floating batteries.”

It’s notable that both sides of the Bunker Hill battle insisted they were heavily outnumbered by the enemy.

“The only one now living of those who acted as aids-de-camp to General Howe”

Thomas Hyde Page (1746–1821) graduated top in his class from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1769, winning a gold medal from the king.

Page became a lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers and arrived in Boston in the spring of 1775. During the Battle of Bunker Hill he served as one of Gen. William Howe’s aides.

Richard Frothingham quoted the 11 Jan 1776 London Chronicle as saying:

A few days ago arrived in town, from Boston, Lieutenant Page, of his majesty’s corps of engineers, on account of the wounds he received the 17th of June, in the action of Charlestown. This gentleman is the only one now living of those who acted as aids-de-camp to General Howe, so great was the slaughter of officers that day. He particularly distinguished himself in the storming of the redoubt, for which he received General Howe’s thanks.

Page was back in London because he had been wounded in the leg, badly enough to require some sort of amputation.

Capt. John Montresor wrote to Page from Philadelphia on 17 June 1778 noting the “disagreeable memory” of the date. “I hope you are able to saunter without a stick.”

In his journal, however, Montresor grumped about his lack of a pension and wrote, “Page served Eleven days and was then wounded and return’d home and had ten shillings per diem settled for life.” (Of course, Montresor still had both his legs.)

Page continued to work on various engineering projects for the British military. Promotion was slow in that branch of the service, but between 1781 and 1783 he became a captain. That summer he received a double honor: he was elected to the Royal Society and knighted. A couple of years later he shifted to the invalid corps.

In 1790, Lt. Col. John Small, who had been Gen. Robert Pigot’s brigade major, wrote to Page:

The interesting position we were placed in side by side at the memorable Battle of Bunker’s Hill will never be forgotten, and will ever excite the most anxious emotions in the breast of the fellow campaigner who has now the honor of addressing you; who witnessed in the most trying moments, your innate worth, your professional Intrepidity and skill, and was most seriously affected when at your side he saw you ffall from a very dangerous wound, receiv’d when displaying your exertions in the ffield, when your cool and manly example, and sound judicious advice, contributed much to acquire success and victory.

I wish I had more of that letter to understand who was asking what favor.

Using surveys by Montresor and others, Page published very good maps of Boston harbor and the town of Boston. His 1793 “Plan of the Action at Bunkers Hill” is still the most useful source on the topography of the Charlestown peninsula in 1775—though it’s also notable in switching the labels of Bunker’s Hill and Breed’s Hill.

Most of Page’s engineering work involved drainage, harbors, canals, and other civil projects rather than fortifications. James Northcote’s portrait of Page above shows him “holding a Plan of Fort Landguard and seen in the distance.” Page didn’t build that fort, but he engineered its tricky well. (Once apparently at Boston, that painting is now on display at the Tyntesfield estate in North Somerset.)

Sir Thomas Hyde Page remained active all around Great Britain for decades and finally retired to Boulogne, France, where he died.

A Closer Look at the Landscape of Bunker’s Hill

Back in 2017, I shared a map of the Battle of Bunker Hill that Gen. Henry Clinton had drawn himself on the back of some sheet music (permalink).

I wrote:

One eye-catching detail is that Clinton sketched a small fortification on top of Bunker’s Hill . . . There are even lines indicating that one of the warships in the Charles River fired at that site. . . .

evidently on 17 June, Clinton perceived the provincials as having fortified themselves there

This spring Boston 1775 reader Adam Derenne sent an email shedding some light on that mystery:

I believe that Clinton misinterpreted the site — it wasn’t a partial fortification but a gravel pit operated by Charlestown resident Peter Edes.

As Mr. Derenne pointed out, Edes’s gravel pit is mentioned in Charlestown’s 1767 land survey:

Then we measurd a Gravel Pitt Enclos’d & Improv’d by Mr. Peter Edes with his land lying Bounded on the way leading over Bunker’s Hill just opposite to Temple’s Barn. We began about 8 Feet below the easterly part of his Mr. Edes’s Stone Wall, said Wall being on the Way from Temples leading over Bunker’s Hill…

This owner was probably the Peter Edes (1705–1787) whose son Benjamin became a printer of the Boston Gazette (and had a son named Peter).

Mr. Derenne also noted that the City of Boston’s G.I.S. website shows what properties Peter Edes owned in 1775, covering the odd spot in Clinton’s map. Thomas Hyde Page’s map of the battle, published in 1793, showed a blob where Clinton drew that second fortification, presumably the gravel pit.

I then went looking for a mention of this pit in accounts of the battle. Did provincials use it to shelter themselves from the Royal Navy shelling that side of Charlestown? Did British engineers incorporate it into their fortifications on Bunker’s Hill, either the quick barriers made on the evening of 19 April or the sturdy fort built over time after 17 June? But I couldn’t find any account mentioning the gravel pit. So there’s still a mystery to solve.

Earl Percy’s Map of the Route to Safety

American Heritage just shared a scoop in Edwin S. Grosvenor‘s article “Discovered: First Maps of the American Revolution.”

It’s based on a return visit to the seat of the Dukes of Northumberland, a title bestowed on Earl Percy’s father and inherited by him after his return from the American war.

Grosvenor writes about one document:

On the newly found map, Percy had drawn his route from Lexington to Menotomy and back to Boston. “He's sketching the line of march,” observed local historian Michael Ruderman, studying the new Percy map. “It's the theatre of battle, the hostile territory he had to travel during the afternoon. And he's sketching the landmarks that were significant to him like the Old Powder House tower that he passed on his left."

The Percy map provides many details about the landscape, roads, taverns, and houses that existed in 1775.

Percy averted an even greater disaster by marching his 1,700 men by an unexpected route. Rather than continuing straight to Cambridge, he took a left turn to head to the Charlestown neck, where the ships of the Royal Navy could protect his force with their guns and ferry him across the Charles River, back to Boston.

For nearly 250 years, the maps lay forgotten in a box with dozens of other maps of Revolutionary war battles and encampments brought back by Gen. Percy.

The caption explains: “When rotated with north facing up, the town of Medford is in the upper left, with the home of ‘Col. [Isaac] Royal’ marked outside the town.” At the center, looking like rude high-school graffiti, is the Charlestown powderhouse.

In the lower right corner is Cambridge. Along the bottom is the road from Menotomy village into central Cambridge with several landmarks labeled: “Menotomy mill:g House,” “Adams’s Tavern,” “Brook,” “Grove of Locust Trees,” and “Tavern.”

The last stands at the crucial corner where Col. Percy turned his column onto “Kent’s Lane through which the Troops return’d from Concord” to Charlestown.”

“Secrets on the Road to Concord” in Scituate, 15 May

On Saturday I attended the “Spies Among Us” event in Concord, described back here.

Top highlights:

• Seeing the Wright Tavern sprucing up as it prepares to reopen to the public next month, including the Pursuit of History weekend on “The Outbreak of War” that I’m helping to organize there (a couple of seats may still be available).
• Enjoying all the special touches the National Park Service staff and volunteers brought to this event, including a full-size replica of Ens. Henry DeBerniere’s map from the Library of Congress and a Concord role-playing game.
• Hearing details about what brought the British troops to Concord and remembering back during the 2000 commemoration when many of those were still little beads I was trying to string together into a narrative that became The Road to Concord.

So I’m eager to keep spreading the word at my upcoming speaking engagement for the Scituate Historical Society. [This event was originally scheduled for March and postponed.]

Thursday, 15 May, 7–8:30 P.M.
Secrets on the Road to Concord
G.A.R. Hall, 353 Country Way, Scituate

Early in the spring of 1775, British army spies located four brass cannon belonging to Boston’s colonial militia that had gone missing months before. British general Thomas Gage devised plans to regain the cannon. Massachusetts Patriots prepared to thwart the general’s hopes. Each side wanted control of those weapons, but each also had reasons to keep their existence a secret. That conflict would end with blood on the road to Concord.

Admission is $15, or $10 for society members. Reservations are recommended, but payment will be accepted at the door.

I look forward to meeting more folks in shoreside Plymouth County.

(The picture above is a page from one of Scituate Historical Society’s artifacts of the 1770s: Caleb Litchfield’s notebook from when he was a teenager studying mathematics and navigation. Litchfield served in the Continental forces on land and sea during the war. After a brief time as a merchant ship’s master, he retired inland to Milton and then Weathersfield, Vermont.)

Reading the Map of Rhode Island with Andrew Middleton

In December, Andrew Middleton went viral on Bluesky. This was unknown territory for him—ironic, since he’s an expert on maps.

Middleton had written: “Hi. I’m Andrew. I own New England’s oldest map store because last year I moved across the country after an old guy retired and gave it to me Willy Wonka-style. Visit my store in Rhode Island. www.mapcenter.com.”

The Map Center not only sells maps, atlases, and related products, but offers research, classes, and connections to cartographers around the country.

I’m going to link to Middleton’s online presentation “Eight Interesting Aspects: Narragansett Bay and the Invention of Rhode Island” at Pixeum.

Built around Charles Blaskowitz’s 1777 chart “Topographical Chart of the Bay of Narraganset,” this online offering is somewhere between a video and a slide show.

Pointing out details on the chart, Middleton shows how to read it as Royal Navy officers did:

These numbers (or soundings) measure the depth of the channels in fathoms (a fathom is about six feet). The water needed to be deep enough for British warships.

While Blaskowitz fills in the topography around the islands and coasts, he leaves places farther inland blank.

The Navy only cared about the places from which those pesky American rebels could fire on their ships: high ground close to the water.

Perhaps because he’s come from California, Middleton can tease Rhode Islanders for their fondness for this map. It was, he points out, created to facilitate an invasion by the British military! He recommends a French rip-off instead.

Online Talk about Henry Pelham and His Map, 15 Jan.

On Wednesday, 15 January, the National Parks of Boston, in partnership with the Boston Public Library, will present a virtual lecture on the topic “Mapping a City Under Siege: Henry Pelham.”

The event description says:

In 1775, Henry Pelham, aspiring artist and half-brother of the famed John Singleton Copley, found himself inside a city under siege. A loyalist with ample time and nowhere to go, Pelham gained permission from the British military to map the war developing around him. Though many other engineers mapped Boston in 1775 and 1776, Pelham’s artistic eye and intimate loyalist connections resulted in something unparalleled in how it depicts the landscape of the first chapter of a civil war. Today, his work is immensely valuable in helping us understand and reconstruct a Boston under siege 250 years ago.

The N.P.S. ethos apparently precludes naming who on the interpretive staff will speak about this map, but of course the agency has high standards for accuracy.

This Zoom program begins at 6:00 P.M. Anyone who registers can tune in for free.

For more on places that appear Henry Pelham’s map of Boston, and how they appear today, check out the sunny video I made with Lee Wright of The History List.

To tie this event together with my talk at Gore Place on Sunday, in the summer of 1788 the painter and paint merchant Samuel Gore was advertising:

A few elegant Plans of Boston, and its environs, including Milton, Dorchester, Roxbury, Brookline, Cambridge, Medford, Charlestown, parts of Malden and Chelsea, with the military works constructed in those places, in the years 1775 and 76, by Mr. H. PELHAM.

That was shortly after Samuel’s father John Gore had returned from Loyalist exile, probably bringing the first copies of Pelham’s siege map to be sold in Boston. The Gore and Copley/Pelham families had done business before the war, and they did business after the war, too.

Mapping Boston in 1795

ARGO (American Revolutionary Geographies Online) offers a new article by John W. Mackey titled “Practical Knowledge and the New Republic.”

It begins:

Perhaps what is most visually striking about Osgood Carleton’s recently rediscovered 1795 map of Boston is its sheer size. At approximately seven feet by six and a half feet, this wall map dwarfs many other Boston maps of the late eighteenth century, including Carleton’s own 1797 work, which until recently was considered the largest Boston map from this period known to be extant in a collection.

This isn’t a printed map but a drawing. The Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association donated it to the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library in 2021. Based on a cartouche dedicating the map “To the Select-Men of the Town of Boston,” curators deduced it was originally town, then city property.

Indeed, volume III of a report on Documents of the City of Boston, for the Year 1879 (published 1880) had an appendix listing “Plans of Boston in the City Surveyor’s Department,” and that included:

Boston, 1795.—An original map. Surveyed by Osgood Carleton for the Select-men.

As for the cartographer:

Osgood Carleton was born to a New England farming family in 1742 and had little schooling. At age 16, he began military service in Nova Scotia during the Seven Years’ War, and he later served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. While he was born in New Hampshire and appears to have lived for a time in Haverhill, Massachusetts and in Maine, it was in Boston that Carleton made his mark and built the bulk of his career. Armed with mathematical skills presumably gained during his military service, Carleton earned his living putting these skills to practical use: he became a surveyor, a contributor to the ubiquitous almanacs of the era, and the leading cartographer in Massachusetts during his lifetime. . . .

he also left a legacy in his role as a teacher of young men in the City of Boston. . . . he offered on an array of practical mathematical skills from navigation to surveying and mensuration to gunnery, bookkeeping, and the projection of spheres and maps.

Mackey’s article discusses and displays Carleton’s maps of Massachusetts, one of which was eventually printed with state approval, as discussed back here.

The 1795 Boston map captures the town’s post-war transition. Carleton marked the place for the “New State-house” on “State Land.” That new government building would be dedicated that year.

Mackey also discusses how this map didn’t label Oliver’s Dock, though Carleton had used that as a landmark in advertising his school. By 1795 he may have moved to “an unfinished building in Merchant’s Row,” where Robert Bailey Thomas remembered studying under him. Nonetheless, “Oliver’s Dock” was still the official name of that location, preserving the memory of the unpopular royal appointee Andrew Oliver.

“There is one very bad place in this five miles”

A few days back, I linked again to a hand-drawn map at the Library of Congress that appears to be the work of Ens. Henry DeBerniere. The locations on that map match DeBerniere’s first spying trip to the west with Capt. William Brown in February 1775.

Gen. Thomas Gage had those two British officers make a second foray into the countryside starting on 20 March, this time to look for cannon and other military supplies in Concord.

We know the two officers went out to Concord on roads that appear on this map, as shown in the detail above. DeBerniere wrote:

We went through Roxbury and Brookline, and came into the main road between the thirteen and fourteen mile-stones in the township of Weston; we went through part of the pass at the eleven mile-stone, took the Concord road, which is seven miles from the main road.

But Brown and DeBerniere came back by a different route:

Mr. [Daniel] Bliss…told us he could shew us another road, called the Lexington road. We set out and crossed the bridge in the town, and of consequence left the town on the contrary side of the river to what we entered it. The road continued very open and good for six miles, the next five a little inclosed, (there is one very bad place in this five miles) the road good to Lexington.

You then come to Menotomy, the road still good; a pond or lake at Menotomy. You then leave Cambridge on your right, and fall into the main road a little below Cambridge, and so to Charlestown; the road is very good almost all the way.

That “Lexington road” doesn’t appear on the hand-drawn map. It’s possible that DeBerniere produced another map to show it. That would have been useful since that’s the road that Lt. Col. Francis Smith followed to Concord on 18–19 April and then withdrew along.

Donald L. Hafner of Boston College drew my attention to that omission when he left this comment to my recent posting:

It is unfortunate that the surviving map attributed to Ensign DeBerniere does not include the alternate route through Lexington and Menotomy that he and Capt William Brown took on their return to Boston, because it leaves a puzzle about where on that route was the "one very bad place" that DeBerniere describes in his written report to Gage. DeBerniere's sentence is a bit garbled, but he is referring to some location between Lexington and Menotomy center. A good guess would be those locations where the main road is hemmed in to the south by sharply-rising hills, and on the north by wetlands and the Mill Brook. A good candidate would be near the current Lexington/Arlington border. But that is just a guess. Are there better candidates that a soldier would describe as "one very bad place"?

DeBerniere wasn’t clear about where in Concord he started estimating distances, but it is about six miles from the center of Concord to Lexington common, and about five from Lexington common to the modern Arlington town hall. So that does suggest somewhere in the second stretch the officers judged the road “good” but “a little inclosed” with “one very bad place.” The area between Liberty Heights and the Mill Brook in east Lexington indeed seems to be the best candidate—about where Wicked Bagel sits, in fact.

Notably, Smith’s column had its worst experiences before reaching Lexington center at places like Merriam’s Corner, Elm Brook Hill, and the “Parker’s Revenge” site—other spots where the road turned and/or narrowed, but not so much as to make DeBerniere worry.

Looking at Lexington and Concord through Eighteenth-Century Eyes

Last month Alexander Cain at Historical Nerdery announced a resource for people researching the Battle of Lexington and Concord ahead of next spring’s Sestercentennial: a list of links to eyewitness accounts of the day.

That listing will be very useful, and it can grow. Perforce these are texts that have been digitized in one way or another. I’m sure that more lurk within books, newspapers, and letters. It’s a matter of ferreting them out and/or digitizing them in usable forms.

For instance, here is the list’s link to Gen. Thomas Gage’s instructions to Lt. Col. Francis Smith for the march to Concord on 18–19 April.

We also have what appears to be Gage’s notes or first draft of those instructions, quoted in General Gage’s Informers (1932) by Allan French. A digital version of that book can be borrowed from the Internet Archive, at least for now. Look on pages 29–30.

Since the Massachusetts Historical Society has scanned merchant John Rowe’s diaries, we can see his response to the news coming into Boston here. A transcription of what a descendant thought were the most important parts of that diary was published a century ago. Among the details one can find only in the handwritten journal is that on 20 April Capt. John Linzee, R.N., dined and spent the evening at Rowe’s house after fending off an attack on his ship on the Charles River.

It’s possible to identify the sources of some anonymous accounts. One resource on the list, Ezekiel Russell’s “Bloody Butchery by the British Troops” broadside, includes text headlined “SALEM, April 25.” Those paragraphs commence: “LAST Wednesday, the nineteenth of April, the troops of his Britannic Majesty commenced hostilities upon the people of this province…”

The preceding paragraphs come with a source citation—not coincidentally, to Russell’s own Salem Gazette newspaper. But Russell didn’t give his competition publicity by revealing that he took the second and longer passage from Samuel Hall’s Essex Gazette for 25 April. That text was later imperfectly transcribed in Peter Force’s American Archives.

The 3 May Massachusetts Spy on the list includes an unsourced story about what happened “When the expresses [from Boston] got about a mile beyond Lexington.” That story matches one that William Dawes’s family recalled hearing from him, revealing that Dawes was probably printer Isaiah Thomas’s source.

Among the lately revealed visual resources is this hand-drawn map in the Library of Congress. I’m convinced by Ed Redmond’s hypothesis that Ens. Henry DeBerniere created this map ahead of the march to Concord. It thus offers a look at what British army officers knew of the countryside west of Boston. (I discussed details of that map starting here.)

TOMORROW: A source from May 1775.

Where Was the Charlestown Powderhouse?

Before departing from the “Powder Alarm” entirely, I’ll draw on guest blogger Charles Bahne to address a pertinent question: Where was the powderhouse?

That may seem like a silly question since it’s a stone building that has stood atop the same hill since it was built shortly after 1700.

But some of our sources from 1774 refer to that location in different ways:

• William Brattle: “This morning the Select Men of Medford, came and received their Town Stock of Powder, which was in the Arsenal on Quarry-Hill.”
• Boston Gazette: “the powder house on quarry hill in Charleston bounds”
• Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper: “You have heard of the taking ye. Windmill, at Cambridg with the Province Powder.”
• Rev. Ebenezer Parkman: “The Contents Magazine of Powder at Winter Hill had been carryed off.”
• John Adams: “the Provincial Powder from the Magazine at Cambridge”

Charles Bahne wrote in an email:

Legally, the powder house was in Charlestown. But it was closer (both crow-flies distance, and actual roads) to the populated centers of either Medford or Cambridge, or even Menotomy, than it was to Charlestown.

• Powder House Sq. to Medford Sq. = 1.23 miles airline, 1.47 miles by road, according to Google Maps
• Powder House Sq. to Harvard Sq. = 1.90 miles airline, 2.14 miles by road
• Powder House Sq. to Menotomy [Arlington Center] = 2.13 miles airline, 2.17 miles by road
• Powder House Sq. to Charlestown Neck [Sullivan Sq.] = 2.47 miles airline, 2.49 miles by road

Once you got "beyond the Neck", Charlestown got long and skinny. And hardly anyone lived there. . . . While the powder house itself was in the town of Charlestown, the property just across the street was in Medford. The town/city boundaries in that area were adjusted at some point in the 1800s.

I suspect that one reason for choosing that site for a powder house—besides the fact that the old windmill was available—was that the area was unpopulated. If by chance it blew up, there was no one nearby to be killed or injured, no other property that might be destroyed.

But it was conveniently at a crossroads. Broadway was a straight line road between Charlestown Neck and Menotomy, although I suspect that it was a lightly used, poorly maintained thoroughfare, and not a highway. . . . The other crossroad was more important, the road from Medford to Cambridge, present day Harvard St., Warner St., and College Ave.

The picture above is a detail from an 1833 map, before the western arm of Charlestown became Somerville. The arrow points to the powderhouse. The circles show the population centers of Medford, Cambridge, and (at the lower right) Charlestown.

Proximity helps to explain why the man who “for a Number of Years had the Care of [the gunpowder] as to sunning and turning it,” William Gamage, lived in Cambridge. Proximity might explain why the Medford selectmen were the last to remove their town’s powder from the tower in August 1774; it was, after all, quite convenient where it was.

As for Winter Hill, that was fairly nearby and large. But the powderhouse stood atop its own drumlin, called Quarry Hill for decades because locals had taken stone from it, including the stone used to build the tower itself. That spot is now known as Powder House Hill.

The Flight of the Cambridge Loyalists, part 2

One direct target of the “Powder Alarm” protest in Cambridge on 2 Sept 1774 was Joseph Lee, a judge and appointee to the mandamus Council.

He tried to get ahead of the crowd’s demands by writing out a resignation from that Council in the morning, then reading it aloud on Cambridge common at midday.

But Lee and his wife Rebecca were still nervous. Her brother, Sheriff David Phips, and her niece’s husband, Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, took refuge in Boston, as recounted yesterday. Toward the middle of the month, the Lees decided to leave town, too.

Instead of seeking the protection of the troops, the Lees headed south. To make their journey secure, they obtained this certificate from Isaac Foster, Jr., on 16 September:

To our Bretheren the Friends of Liberty

Whereas the honourable Joseph Lee Esqr has proposed to take a Tour through the Country for his [insert: Ladys] health, and it is possible that some Persons unacquainted with the Transactions at Cambridge on the 2d. instant, (when so great a Part of this County were collected there) may still be uneasy at his having taken the Oath as Councellor, on the intended new and unconstitutional Plan; these may certify that the said honourable Joseph Lee Esqr. had voluntarily, before he was called upon, and as we trust from a Conviction of the unconstitutionality of his Appointments, resigned his seat at the Council Board; which resignation he publickly and politely declared to the respectable Inhabitants of this County, with a promise that in future he would accept of no Office inconsistent with the Charter of this Province; and that the said Declaration and Promise was by the People assembled as aforesaid, unanimously voted satisfactory, having given such ample Satisfaction, we doubt not he will be treated by all the Friends of our happy Constitution, with such Civility and Respect, as shall do honour to our common Cause.

By order of the Committee of Correspondence for Charlstown

That’s another document from the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts collection.

During Monday’s commemoration of the “Powder Alarm” in Charlestown, Karen Falb alerted me to a glimpse of Joseph and Rebecca Lee on their journey south. It appears in a letter from Henry Pelham to his half-brother John Singleton Copley, dated 2 November from Philadelphia. Pelham wrote:

I wish I had a more satisfactory account to give than that I have taken this Journey in search of lost Health; but still Happy should I be could I say I had entirely recovered it. I have been for near 10 Months [i.e., pretty much since the Tea Party] past very subject to nervous complaints which shewed themselves in an almost continued Dizziness, Headack, Loss of Appetite, Trembling of the Nerves, and Lowness of Spiritts. for these I early put myself under the Care of Doct’r [William Lee or Nathaniel] Perkins, who ordered me a course of Steel and frequent Riding, and recommended a long journey in the fall which my friends much advised too.

Mr. and Mrs. [Charles and Sarah] Startin [Susanna Copley’s sister and her husband] returning home, I thought it a favourable time for the excursion, and have come thus far in Company with them and Judge Lee and Lady, our Cambridge Friends, who propose passing the winter here. In a few days I intend to sett out for home, stoping for about a fortnight at New Haven, where Mr. [Adam] Babcock has engaged me to do two or three minature Pictures.

This letter shows that Pelham was friendly with the Lees before he drew his monumental map of the siege of Boston. (Another letter in the collection shows that Copley had visited Judge Lee at his home.) That has a bearing on the question of how much accuracy we can assign to Pelham’s rendering of the “Tory Row” estates, shown above.

Joseph and Rebecca Lee sat out the first years of the war in New Jersey and returned to their Cambridge home in 1777. Since they were no longer ”absentees,” Massachusetts did not confiscate that property.

The next mansion west from the Lees belonged to George and Susanna Ruggles. She was a Vassall by birth, thus a paternal aunt to Elizabeth Oliver.

George Ruggles made a unique arrangement for leaving the neighborhood: he swapped houses with the Boston merchant Thomas Fayerweather. On 31 October, Fayerweather deeded his house on Summer Street to Ruggles, and Ruggles deeded his estate on the Watertown road to Fayerweather. That estate included more than fifty acres of land, and Fayerweather paid Ruggles £2,000 to make an even swap.

That’s why Henry Pelham’s map of the siege of Boston labels that property as belonging to “Mr. Fairwather”—the one “Tory Row” estate no longer legally owned by a Loyalist at the start of the war.

TOMORROW: John Vassall’s secret.

A City Project to Reconstruct Charlestown in June 1775

Last month, on the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Boston’s Archaeology Program announced the release of research on the people who lived in Charlestown at that time.

During the battle, most of the town burned to the ground. That event provided a physical marker in the ground, and also a documentary milestone as inhabitants filed claims for their losses. However, the department notes, “Despite multiple attempts over half a century, no funds were ever granted.”

Using real estate records compiled by Thomas Bellows Wyman in The Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown (two volumes, 1879), the City Archaeology Team produced a map of property ownership in June 1775 that can be viewed here. The announcement says, “Each property is clickable, with details including a direct link to the property deed (via free familysearch.org account).”

The next step: “property descriptions based on deeds and claims documents to better understand the layout of buildings, structures, wharves, agricultural spaces, fences, and other landscape features for a future 3D landscape reconstruction of 1775 Charlestown.”

Another product of this effort is a reconstructed “census” for Charlestown in 1775, here in spreadsheet form.

Finally, there are multiple databases about the claims themselves, now housed in the Boston Public Library. Those documents have been scanned and are being transcribed, but the index is already available.

One name that stood out for researchers and myself was Margaret Thomas, filing for the loss of a house and furnishings worth £68.9, as shown here.

Wyman listed Margaret Thomas as “Spinster,” house owner, and “negro of Bartholomew Trow,” a Charlestown militia officer. Perhaps she had been enslaved in the Trow family, and anxious authorities still recorded that link even after she was buying real estate of her own.

Was this the same Margaret Thomas who worked at Gen. George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters by February 1776, joined the general’s traveling domestic staff, and married William Lee before the end of the war? We know that other people who came to work at the commander’s headquarters in 1775–76 had been burned out of Charlestown.

The handwriting on the “Summary Accompt.” filed with the town doesn’t match the signature on a receipt Margaret Thomas signed in Valley Forge in April 1778. But it’s possible that the claim was filed by someone else on Thomas’s behalf, or that this summary was copied by someone else. It’s definitely a lead worth following up.

The Launch of Concord’s Arrowhead Ridge

As Patriots’ Day season continues, Boston 1775 is pleased to welcome back our old friend Christopher Lenney, author of Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England, as a guest blogger.

In this posting, Chris discusses the origin of a name that has come to appear in maps and descriptions of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but which the locals of 1775 didn’t use.

The mile-long ridge running parallel to Lexington Road from Meriam’s Corner to the center of Concord has long been a looming presence in the landscape and the history of the town. However, until the mid-twentieth century, it had no single, well-established name. At various times, various parts have been known as ye Hill above ye Meeting house, Meriam’s Hill, Heywood’s Hill, or simply the hill (or hills).

Its present name, Revolutionary Ridge, likely first appeared about 1915 and was popularized as the original name of Ridge Road. It was officially adopted by the U.S. Geological Survey on the 1943 Concord quadrangle map and has become widely accepted.

So anachronistic a name as Revolutionary Ridge has obvious drawbacks when recounting the events of April 19, 1775. It presupposes what hasn’t yet occurred. Something less glaringly modern, please!

Since the 1960s, Arrowhead Ridge, a name of even more recent coinage and one borrowed from another war, has come to fill the void. While a few arrowheads have coincidentally been found there, this is not how the name came about.

Arrowhead Ridge originated almost accidentally with military historian John R. Galvin, who brought a shrewd eye for terrain to the study of the battle. In the text of his book The Minute Men (1967), he employs the term purely descriptively—lowercase—four times:

• “A long ridge, shaped like an arrowhead, runs eastward from the center…The arrowhead points directly at Lexington”
• “At Meriam’s Corner, just below the east tip of the arrowhead ridge”
• “the British were preparing to march out along the arrowhead ridge”
• “climbing up the slope of the arrowhead ridge”

Gen. Galvin was a Massachusetts native (Melrose and Wakefield) who had a lifelong interest in the battle. The term could only have occurred to someone studying a U.S.G.S. topographical map, and then perhaps only to a military topographer. It is inconceivable that Galvin, who was a cadet at West Point from 1950 to 1954, could have been unaware that Arrowhead Ridge (uppercase) was also the name of a fierce October 1952 battle of the Korean War.

To illustrate Galvin’s account, Arrowhead Ridge was understandably, but misleadingly, given equal weight with other place names on the endpaper map of the first edition of his book. From there it slowly spread. A decade later Arrowhead Ridge resurfaced on a map in The Minute Men 1775–1975, a booklet published locally by the Council of Minute Men in 1977.

Relatively few have ever seen the original Galvin map, as most copies of the 1967 edition are now locked away in local history rooms and the map was omitted altogether from the much-revised and more widely available 1989 edition (although use of “arrowhead ridge” persisted in the text). Still fewer have seen the Council of Minute Men publication, which is something of a rarity.

However, virtually everyone interested in the events of April 19, 1775, has seen Arrowhead Ridge where it truly came into its own: on the map of the British retreat on page 223 of David Hackett Fischer’s now classic Paul Revere’s Ride (1994). Although not original to Paul Revere’s Ride, the influence of that book has assured that use of the term would survive and thrive: notably in Time-Life’s The Revolutionaries (1996). Nathaniel Philbrick’s Bunker Hill (2013), and Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming (2019). It has even made its way into a 2005 National Park Service report.

While Fischer refers to Galvin at least twenty-four times, the term Arrowhead Ridge never actually appears in the text of Paul Revere’s Ride. It was perhaps introduced by the cartographer, who compiled the map from Galvin and other sources. Its use is somewhat surprising in that Fischer twice takes exception to anachronistic terminology in his footnotes: Hardy’s Hill for Brooks Hill and, more famously, Bloody Angle for Bloody Curve. The latter is especially singled out for criticism as a Civil War name being reused for a battle in the Revolutionary War.

Ironically, in the use of Arrowhead Ridge we can see an example of much the same thing. Only in this case it was not a Civil War name that was borrowed, but one with ultimate origins in the Korean War.

We might ask whether Concordians of 1775 ever thought of that high ground as arrowhead-shaped since they weren’t used to picturing the world from above, the way we are in this era of widespread maps, plane travel, and satellite views.

Thanks, Chris!

James Smither, Engraver of Philadelphia

The 18 Apr 1768 Pennsylvania Chronicle included this advertisement:

James Smither, Engraver,
At the first house in Third Street, from the Cross Keys, Corner of Chestnut-Street, Philadelphia,
PERFORMS all manner of ENGRAVING in Gold, Silver, Copper, Steel, and all other Metals—Coats of Arms, and Seals, done in the neatest Manner. Likewise cuts Stamps, Brands, and metal Cuts for Printers, and ornamental Tools for Bookbinders. He also ornaments Guns and Pistols, both engraving and inlaying Silver, at the most REASONABLE RATES.

Smither had come from Britain, where he reportedly worked for a while in the Tower of London engraving guns for the government.

In January 1769, Smither proposed to start a drawing school for “young gentlemen and ladies.”

Meanwhile, he was also doing a wide range of engraving jobs, including:

• book plates, bill heads, and illustrations for the printer Robert Bell.
• a portrait of John Dickinson during his fame as the author of the Farmer’s Letters (shown above).
• a map of “the CITY and LIBERTIES of PHILADELPHIA,” advertised by John Reed in 1773.
• currency for the colony of Pennsylvania in 1772.
• this hot water urn made by silversmith Robert Humphrey in 1774, presented to Charles Thomson in thanks for his services to the First Continental Congress.

In October 1775, the colony was at war, and it needed to print more money. Pennsylvania hired Smither to engrave another series of notes, issued through April 1776.

In the fall of 1777, the British army took Philadelphia.

By May 1778, Smither was engraving the tickets for the Meschianza, Maj. John André’s elaborate ball and theatrical tournament for army officers and wealthy Loyalists.

But that may not have been the only job James Smither did for the royal authorities in Philadelphia. On 11 April, Thomas Paine wrote to Henry Laurens, then president of the Second Continental Congress, about counterfeiters. He made this proposal:

As Forgery is a Sin against all men alike and reprobated by all Civil Nations. Query, would it not be right to require of General [William] Howe, the Persons of Smithers and others in Philadelphia suspected of this Crime; and if he or any other Commander, continues to conceal or protect them in such practices, that in such case the Congress will Consider the Crime as the Act of the Commander in Chief.

The idea that the Congress could ask Gen. Howe to hand over anyone suspected of forging Continental or state notes was ludicrous, but no one ever said Thomas Paine wasn’t visionary.

On 18 June, the British army pulled out of Philadelphia, heading across New Jersey back to New York. James Smither probably went with them. In 1778 the Pennsylvania council put him on a long list of people who had “willingly aided and assisted the enemies of this state,” and at the end of the war it seized his property.

TOMORROW: Meeting Maj. Donkin.

Bates “at the Bottom of the Mall in Boston”

When we last checked in with equestrian Jacob Bates, on 27 Aug 1773 the Boston selectmen denied his request “to erect a Fence in the Common which will inclose about 160 feet of Ground in order to show his feats in Horsmanship.”

Nonetheless, on 6 September, the Boston Gazette ran this notice:

Mr. BATES, (allowed by the greatest Judges in the Manly Art he professes, to excel any HORSEMAN that ever attempted any Thing of the Kind) on Wednesday next, if good Weather, if not the Friday following, will perform on one, two, and three Horses, at the Bottom of the Mall in Boston.

TICKETS for the first Place at one Dollar each, and for the second Three Shillings, to be had at Col. Ingersol’s, Mr. Bracket’s, and at the Place of Performance.

An even larger advertisement appeared the same day in the Boston Post-Boy:

HORSEMANSHIP,
By Mr. BATES,
The Original PERFORMER;
Who has had the Honour of performing before
THE Emperor of Germany, the Empress of Russia, and King of Great-Britain, the French King, the Kings of Prussia, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, and Poland, and the Prince of Orange; Also, at the Courts of Saxony, Bavaria, Brunswick, Mecklenburgh, Saxe-Gotha, Hilbourghausen, Anspach, and every other Court in Germany; at all which he received the greatest APPLAUSE, as can be made manifest by the Certificates from the several Courts, now in his Possession, and is allowed, by the greatest judges in the MANLY ART he professes, to excel any Horseman that ever attempted any Thing of the Kind.

On WEDNESDAY,
the 8th September Instant,
If good Weather, if not, the Friday following,
He will perform on ONE, TWO, and THREE HORSES, at the Bottom of the MALL, in BOSTON.

The Doors will be opened at Three o’Clock, and he will mount precisely at Four.

The Seats are made proper for LADIES and GENTLEMEN.

He will take it as a particular Favour, if Gentlement will not suffer any Dogs to come with them.

TICKETS for the First Place at One Dollar each, and for the Second, Three Shillings Lawful Money, to be had at Colonel INGERSOL’s, in King-street, Mr. BRACKETT’s in School-street, and at the Place of Performance.

No Money will be taken at the Doors, nor Admittance without Tickets.

Obviously Bates had found a place to erect his fence anyway. The Mall was part of the Common, defined since the early 1700s by two rows of trees planted by the selectmen’s order along Tremont Street (then also called Common Street). The “Bottom of the Mall” was most likely privately owned land at the southern end of those trees in an area of town still not densely populated.

On Wednesday, 8 September, two and a half centuries ago today, the weather in Boston was good. Bates and his horses performed their show.

TOMORROW: Mr. Bates apologizes.

Black Reviews White’s Revolutionary Things

H-Early-America has just shared Jennifer M. Black’s review of Ashli White’s new book, Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

White looks at “the material culture that shaped French, American, and Haitian political contests between 1770 and 1810,” covering “diverse objects such as military clothing, maps, ceramics, wax figures, and politically charged accessories.”

Black writes:

Part 1 examines everyday items that became politically charged due to who procured them, where, how, and why. . . .

Part 2 examines clothing and accessories to show how revolutionary individuals understood, demonstrated, and interpreted their own political alignments and those of others. . . .

Part 3 turns to visual culture, especially maps, prints, and wax figures, to understand how contemporaries shared news about the ongoing revolutions.

The review sums up:

In her focus on the objects’ production, distribution, use, and context, White departs from typical material culture histories of this period, which tend to focus on how certain objects conveyed status or represented cultural and intellectual themes for contemporaries. In this way, White provides a fresh and interesting discussion of these highly politicized objects. But the approach may be somewhat frustrating for material culture scholars accustomed to close readings of particular objects’ attributes and symbolism—there are few of these, and mostly toward the end of the book. . . .

Still, this book makes several important contributions to the extant literature. White’s transnational and comparative focus allows her to isolate racial difference as a factor that shaped individual experience and, for example, affected contemporaries’ reactions to revolutionary violence. . . . Moreover, White’s transnational focus allows her to trace objects that moved across the Atlantic and circulated among varied revolutionaries. Thus, the book is as much a history of material culture in the military as it is about politics and revolutions.

Some of the most knowledgable and diligent researchers into Revolutionary-era material culture I know are reenactors since they literally use the objects of the time or the closest replicas they can make or obtain. It sounds like this book might be useful for exploring the cultural context of those goods and how that changed with events.

Replaying the Revolutionary War with Twenty-Sided Dice

This month I noticed a Kickstarter page for a table-top role-playing game called “Nations & Cannons: The American Crisis,” set during the Revolutionary War.

The crowdfunding campaign by Flagbearer Games is well over its target goal, but there are still a few days to sign up for different rewards.

I confess I’ve found Dungeons and Dragons mystifying ever since I saw another kid at summer camp surreptitiously pirating an entire manual on the office photocopier. In high school some friends played the game, but they invited me along only once (I made some unorthodox suggestion about stealing armor, as I recall).

All that means is that I have no idea what this jargon means:

Nations & Cannons is a complete historical campaign setting for D&D 5e, equipped with a brand new base class, the Firebrand, and six new subclass options for the core classes. It also includes new character creation options for a game where everyone is human. Roles, such as Officer, Scout, and Pioneer, mechanically replace the fantasy races. Heritages, such as Québécois, Colonial, and Haudenosaunee, determine your cultural background and provide an opportunity to showcase all of the different peoples and languages spoken in North America in the 1700s. Last, but certainly not least, Nations & Cannons comes with complete rules for black powder firearms, grenades, and of course, cannons! . . .

Nations & Cannons replaces spells with Gambits—extraordinary acts of ingenuity, guile, or gumption. Gambits function identically to spellcasting so that they are compatible with games that use traditional magic rules for 5e. While there aren't any Wizards, Rangers and Firebrands are casters that use gambits to create dynamic moments in combat, while exploring, or in a social encounter.

But I’m sure there are people happily in the intersection of T.T.R.P.G. and RevWar hobbies.

And the cloth hanging of Henry Pelham’s map of the siege of Boston is very tempting.

“More of a spectacle than a science”

Lily Ford’s Public Domain Review article “‘For the Sake of the Prospect’: Experiencing the World from Above in the Late 18th Century” drifted across my vision a while back.

She made an interesting observation about different national experiences of ballooning:

The first successful manned balloon flights were conducted in France with state support. The ascents themselves became known as “experiments”, and were concerned with an exploration of the upper air. In Britain, the Royal Society withheld support from such endeavours, so the first British ascents were underwritten, in the words of one early balloonist, by “a tax on the curiosity of the public”. This affected the cultural profile of ballooning in England: it was always more of a spectacle than a science.

British balloonists, including the Boston-born Dr. John Jeffries, nonetheless tried to do science in the air. Ford’s focus was one such man, the first to try to convey the experience of human flight through graphic design:

Thomas Baldwin, an early balloonist who hired [Vincent] Lunardi’s balloon for an ascent over Chester in 1785, inscribed a long book about his one day in the air to "the principal inhabitants of Chester" who had covered his costs. Uniquely in this period, Baldwin attempted to describe his experience not only verbally, but using images: three expensively produced plates depicting the view from the balloon, the balloon in the view, and the charted passage of the balloon over the landscape.

The first image in his Airopaidia, “A Circular View from the Balloon at its greatest Elevation”, departs from established conventions of landscape representation. At a quick glance it resembles an eyeball in its spherical regularity. . . . “The Spectator is supposed to be in the Car of the Balloon, suspended above the Center of the View” (Baldwin:iv). The ground is visible in the “iris”, a central roundel which contains, upon inspection, the plan view of a town and its river. This is Chester, fondly placed at the centre of this entirely new kind of view. The town is framed by a thick “Amphitheatre, or white Floor of Clouds” (Baldwin:iv). Drawing clouds was clearly not one of Baldwin’s strengths.

Baldwin even recommended laying the book on the floor or ground and looking straight down on this picture to understand it.

A later image is closer to the aerial views that have become entirely familiar in an age of airplanes and satellites.

The main point of this picture was the path of the balloon over the landscape, as shown by the looping black thread across the landscape.

Indeed, I suspect Baldwin created this image using a map of the area around Chester rather than sketching what he actually saw from the air. Cartographers had actually produced aerial views simply through mental effort.

“Frenchmen at the Siege of Boston,” 23 Mar.

On Thursday, 23 March, I’ll speak at the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site on the topic “Frenchmen at the Siege of Boston.”

This is the site’s annual Evacuation Day lecture, presented in partnership with the Friends of the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters. It honors the successful end of the siege of Boston, which Gen. George Washington oversaw from that Cambridge mansion.

Our description of this talk says:

Histories of the French government’s support for the American Revolution usually begin with Lafayette, the secret supply chain organized by Beaumarchais, and the formal alliance in 1778.

But French gentlemen were actually at the siege of Boston in 1775—observing the armies, meeting Gen. George Washington at his headquarters, and even briefly overseeing the provincial artillery force. Washington and his generals were also trying to win over the francophone subjects of Canada.

In this talk, author J. L. Bell will explore the first secret and tentative steps toward French-American friendship in Cambridge in 1775.

I’ll share some of my research about French noblemen and merchants who visited Massachusetts in 1775. I’ll also rely on Rick Detwiller’s excellent research about two more men who went beyond visiting to participate in the siege itself. As shown above, they left their mark on the landscape, or at least on Henry Pelham’s map of Boston: a fortified site labeled “French redoubt.”

I’ll speak in the Longfellow carriage house. Seating is limited, so please reserve seats through this link. This will also be our first attempt at livestreaming a talk through the site’s YouTube page.