“Except these boats all in a hurry”

Continental surgeon general Benjamin Church’s secret letter to Maj. Edward Cane of the British army contained three warnings about attacks on the British forces by water.

Early on in that 24 Sept 1775 missive, Dr. Church wrote:

The distroying the Ships in the manner I wrote you before they began to dispair of tho’ the former of the Machine is full of faith that he can do it, Works on hardly and so let him, I say.

This is probably the same “mashine” that engineer Jeduthan Baldwin wrote about in December:

went in the afternoon to Dotchester point to See the mashine to blow up Shiping, but as it was not finished, it was not put into the water.

Church’s letter suggests that the man forming that machine was at work months earlier, in September.

But what was the machine? David Bushnell’s submarine is one possibility. We know he was at work on that invention by August 1775, and that in October people in the American camp were hoping to see it soon. But the dates don’t quite match up; Bushnell was still toiling in the Connecticut River on 7 December, so what did Baldwin see kept out of the water one week later? The machine at Dorchester Point might never have been finished while Bushnell’s Turtle actually went into battle in September 1776.

Church alerted his Crown contacts to other water-borne threats:

This day a floating battery hid herself under Mr Tempels Wharf, from Mistick bridge.

One hundred 50 flat bottom boats are ordered to be Compleated within 30 days they are building them as fast as they can at Water town and Cambrige I see them every day, this you may depend on. And I am not a little Surprised to find them so Engaged in making these boats, for I know the people in general think it impossible ever to go into Boston, you in it. ————. . . .

Our Assembly has been sitting 3 days they have been debating by what means they can keep the Coast Clear of tenders, but have not yet Concluded.

No News from the Congress some days things look as if our General intended to do something soon, than again I am strongly persuaded that nothing will be done, in fact war you out you could not satisfy yourself there is nothing that looks like matters Except these boats all in a hurry.

“Mr. Tempels Wharf” meant the wharf on the Mystic River that led to Robert Temple’s farm in Medford, shown above in a detail from Henry Pelham’s map of the siege.

In October, a couple of weeks after Dr. Church wrote, the Continental troops did try to attack the British in Boston with floating batteries. It didn’t go well, as these posts describe.

Gen. George Washington was indeed eager for an amphibious assault on Boston, but his council of war kept voting down his plans. Even the move onto Dorchester Heights included a contingency attack across the Charles River if the British tried to counterattack. But in the end all those flat-bottomed boats were never used in battle.

TOMORRROW: The flag-raising. 

Visiting the World of Ignatius Sancho

This spring, a team at Northeastern University launched a web project called “Ignatius Sancho’s London.”

The opening page explains:

This project showcases evidence about the life and times of Ignatius Sancho, one of the eighteenth century’s most important Black Britons. Born enslaved, Sancho came to occupy a unique position in London society that straddled the elite social worlds of the aristocracy and the everyday life of the city. These experiences are narrated in The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782), an amazing collection that reveals a man who was at once a husband, father, entrepreneur, musician, abolitionist, literary writer - and the first documented Black person to vote in a parliamentary election.

The interactive maps below reveal Sancho’s world as never before. It is a close-knit place, with Sancho observing events from his shop in the heart of Westminster and occupying a prominent role on London’s streets and social scene. But his life and letters show how Black people and voices travelled throughout the country, permeating society at every layer. The maps reveal a world connected to other transformative events shaping the life of the nation and the rest of the globe - from slavery and abolition to the rise of industry and empire…

An article about the project reports that one challenge for the professors and students working on it arose from a section of Sancho’s own book, published posthumously:

The page-and-a-half-long biography has long been accepted as fact when it comes to Sancho’s life. However, the team found, the account is largely based on stereotypes and riddled with inaccuracies.

“The biography that was written at the time basically conformed to the genre of what an amazing Black life should have been,” [Prof. Olly] Ayers says.

That means the team had little foundation on which to build their timeline, and were instead tasked with disproving what was there. According to the biography, Sancho was born on a slave ship in the Middle Passage, but, Ayers says, the group found that “it’s highly unlikely.” They also question the portion of his biography that says he gambled away his inheritance, as he was still working for the Montagus during the period in question.

Use the toggles in the upper right corner of the map to reveal the locations of events in Ignatius Sancho and his family’s lives, and the lives of other prominent black Londoners. Or read the storymap to learn more about him, the people and places he encountered, and the development of this project.

Seeking John Morey in Roxbury

There were two generations of men named John Morey (also spelled Mory) in Roxbury.

The first John Morey was born in 1687 and married a woman named Hannah. They had several children, including a baby named John in 1736 who died early and another named John born on 23 Jan 1738. The couple’s daughters married into the Pierpoint and Turrell families.

This John Morey became prominent and wealthy. In 1734 he served as one of the two coroners of Suffolk County. As of 1741, he was using the suffix “Esq.” in a newspaper advertisement. In 1745 and 1753, Morey took in poor teenagers under indenture from the Boston Overseers of the Poor.

Morey also owned enslaved people. According to Hannah Mather Crocker, he was the owner of a mason named John Marcy, whom he hired out for jobs in Boston. Marcy was evangelized by hearing the Rev. George Whitefield, joined the Rev. John Moorhead’s church, married an enslaved servant of Lt. Gov. William Dummer, and eventually gained his freedom.

That John Morey died in 1771. He left an estate valued at almost £3,400. It included a large farm and lots of livestock, but also an eight-day clock, a map of the city of London, and five books—more luxury goods than an ordinary farmer had. He was labeled a “Gentleman” in his son’s newspaper advertisement settling the estate.

Also on that 1771 estate inventory were:

• …a Nego [sic] Boy Named Cato about 12 Years Old…[valued at £]32.0.0
• …a Negro Garl About 11 Years Old…26.13.4
• …Ditto Named Bino About 7 Years Old…16.0.0
• …Ditto Named Zippra an Inferm garl…6.0.0

It looks like the clock went to the West Roxbury meetinghouse. At least, the publication of an 1853 sermon referred to the meetinghouse having that clock with Morey’s name as donor on it. The church also received a silver baptismal basin in 1774; I’m guessing that was given by the younger John Morey but at the behest of his father.

Back in 1768, that second-generation John Morey had turned thirty and married Mary Cheney, born in 1743. The following year, that couple had their first baby, a son they naturally named John. He was followed by Hannah in 1771, Ebenezer Cheaney in 1774, and Susannah in 1776.

Mary’s father was Ebenezer Cheney (1699–1780) of Roxbury. His will left her considerable real estate in Middleborough. The couple prepared to move south. On 2 Oct 1783 John Morey advertised in the Independent Chronicle to sell “A very valuable Farm in Roxbury…containing one hundred and fifty Acres,” plus “Salt Marsh” and “near twenty Acres of good Wood Land.” Interested parties could speak with Morey or three of his neighbors, one being Eleazer Weld, Esq. Morey also called in his debts.

In March and April 1785, four Boston newspapers ran identically worded advertisements announcing the sale “By Publick Vendue [i.e., auction], on the premises, the Monday the 25th day of April next, The valuable FARM of Mr. John Morey, lying in Roxbury.” Reflecting the postwar economic situation, this ad said:

N.B. The payment will be made easy to purchasers, as the whole sum will not be immediately wanted, and government securities will be taken at their common rate of discount.

This time people could inquire of Weld and two other neighbors, but Morey was no longer said to be living on the property.

The facts of John Morey’s life shed a little light on the sale/indenture of the boy named Dick Morey in July 1785, discussed yesterday. For one thing, Morey was leaving that child behind in Roxbury as he moved to a new farm in Middleborough. David Stoddard Greenough paid him £5 for Dick’s next sixteen years, less than the value of a seven-year-old girl for life back in 1771. 

More ominously, it looks like that enslaved girl named Bino whom Morey inherited in 1771 was probably the mother he called “my Negro servant Binah” in 1785. She had given birth around 1780 when she was about sixteen years old. We don’t know who the father was, but he was white since Bino was listed as “a Negro Garl” and her son as “a Molatto Boy.” The list of possible fathers has to start with John Morey himself.

Finally, the Eleazer Weld who helped in selling the Morey farm was also one of the magistrates who affirmed Dick Morey’s indenture in 1787.

John Morey died in Middleborough in 1800, his widow Mary in 1821.

David S. Greenough and his wife Anna had a son (shown above) in the Loring Greenough House in 1787. Anna also had one surviving child from her first marriage. Those boys presumably grew up with Dick Morey as a household servant or farm hand in between their ages but not in their class.

However, I haven’t found any record of Dick Morey past those two documents from 1785–1787.

Maps to Explore from Your Desk

The Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library is offering an “Unrest in Boston 1765–1776” collection of digital images from its collection for educators in grades 3 through 8.

The maps to explore are:

• William Price’s 1769 update of John Bonner’s 1722 map of the town, showing just the Shawmut peninsula. (I have a print of this on my wall.)
• Lt. Richard Williams’s map of wartime Boston, the provincial siege lines, and the inner harbor.
• London publishers Robert Sayer and John Bennett’s “Seat of War, in New England” map of eastern Massachusetts, featuring a little train of figures escorting Gen. George Washington toward Boston.
• Boston native Isaac de Costa’s map of eastern Massachusetts showing locations from the Battle of Lexington and Concord, including provincial cannon in the countryside.

These maps come with geographic inquiries, supporting documents, and questions for class discussions.

I noted that the overview starts, “Colonial Boston was a flourishing city of 20,000 by the 1760s.” In fact, the 1765 census found 15,520 people in Boston. The surrounding towns, now incorporated into the city, added more people to the area, as did the short-term population of sailors and (at times) soldiers. But this essay makes clear that it counts those soldiers as separate from the town inhabitants.

That census figure is significant not just because of accuracy but also because it hadn’t changed much in decades. Boston was stuck at about 16,000 people while Philadelphia and New York grew larger. What once was Britain’s biggest and busiest port in North America became number three. A frustrating stagnation might have been one reason Bostonians were so easily worked up about imperial taxes in the 1760s.

Before leaving the Leventhal Center, I want to highlight another digitized item from the same decade: This map of the travels of the Qianlong Emperor of China in the fall of 1778.

As an object, this diagram of the imperial route unfolds into an image nearly twenty feet long. (It’s appropriate, therefore, that the interactive feature demands a screen of a certain size before it will show you anything.) The digital presentation comes with helpful explanations by Prof. Anne-Sophie Pratte.

Britain’s Forty American Colonies

This month I listened in on some of the sessions of the American Philosophical Society’s “Meanings of Independence” conference.

One of the panelists was Prof. Holly Brewer of the University of Maryland, author of By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, published in 2005 and winner of three major prizes in the specialty of legal history.

Brewer mentioned her growing website on “Slavery, Law, and Power” in the Revolutionary period. As a taste of the features on that site, here’s a map of the British Empire in the Americas at the time of the Revolution, labeling all the colonies.

In recent years it’s become common to note that there were twenty-six British colonies in North America, so the thirteen mainland colonies that broke away were only half of the total. I’ve used the number twenty-six myself. It came up in the debate between Woody Holton and Gordon Wood that I also listened to this month and will discuss later.

However, Brewer counts forty British colonies, large and small, on that map. Her explanation of that count, which appears under the teal button with the horizontal line segments, begins: “Note that it is surrounded by a question of whether to count each colony separately or to count administrative units. I vote for the latter, since the 13 colonies that rebelled would be only 9 administrative units if counted separately. If we count them as 13, then the entire number should be 40.” 

And those forty colonies are—

The thirteen colonies that rebelled (if going by administrative units, the four New England colonies are one, and Delaware disappears into Pennsylvania)

• Massachusetts (including Maine, of course)
• New Hampshire
• Connecticut
• Rhode Island
• New York (including Vermont, though New Hampshire would disagree)
• New Jersey (East and West Jersey were united in 1702)
• Pennsylvania
• Delaware (had its own legislature but shared a governor with Pennsylvania and was considered part of that unit until 1776)
• Maryland
• Virginia
• North Carolina
• South Carolina
• Georgia

Canada: six

• Cape Breton Island
• Newfoundland
• Nova Scotia
• Prince Edward Island
• Quebec
• Rupert’s Land

Other North American mainland (Brewer counted only the two Floridas as colonies since the West was supposed to be off-limits to British settlers) 

• East Florida
• West Florida
• West (Indian Territory), after 1763 a separate unit

Leeward Islands (based on administrative structure it’s possible to group these islands, but each had a separate assembly)

• St. Christophers
• Antigua
• Barbuda
• British Virgin Islands
• Montserrat
• Nevis

South Caribbean Islands

• St. Vincent and the Grenadines
• Tobago
• Dominica
• Grenada

Jamaica & Islands

• Jamaica
• Bay Islands (administered by Jamaica)
• British Honduras (administered by Jamaica)
• Cayman Islands (administered by Jamaica)

Bahamas

Barbados

Mosquito Coast

St. Lucia

Bermuda

Bahne on “Cradle of Liberty,” 5 May

For folks intrigued by Ens. Henry DeBerniere’s map of the Massachusetts countryside in early 1775, I hope you caught the comments from Charles Bahne about it—particularly sites I couldn’t identify.

In addition to being a practiced tour guide and teacher, Charlie has a degree from M.I.T. in Urban Planning and an interest in transportation routes and maps, so he’s just the guy to tackle mysteries like the “Nineteen Mile Tavern.”

Next week, Charles Bahne will teach an online class on the topic “Cradle of Liberty: How Boston Started the American Revolution” through the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

This is a single two-hour webinar, and the description says:

The first shots of the American Revolution, fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, were the culmination of a decade and a half of political unrest in and around Boston. Why was Massachusetts such a fertile ground for the seeds of rebellion? This class will explore how events and issues such as the Writs of Assistance, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the Boston Massacre, and the Boston Tea Party set the stage for the War for Independence. The roles of James Otis, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Thomas Hutchinson will all be discussed.

This online event will take place on Wednesday, 5 May, from 5:30 to 7:30 P.M. Registration costs $50. Space is limited.

The Cambridge Center for Adult Education is the present owner of the house from which William Brattle launched Gov. Thomas Gage’s move against the provincial gunpowder storehouse on 1 Sept 1774 and, inadvertently, the “Powder Alarm” of the following day.

“A view or plan of the battle of Bunker’s hill”

On 10 May 1816, the Wilkesbarre Gleaner newspaper, published by Charles Miner, announced a discovery about the Battle of Bunker Hill, more than forty years earlier.

According to a reprint in Niles’s Weekly Register the following month, it said:

I stepped into the house of a friend the other evening, and he told me, that in rummaging over some old drawers he found a curiosity. It was indeed very interesting and curious, to me at least, I dare say it would be so to you, reader.

The thing referred to was a view or plan of the battle of Bunker’s hill, taken by a British officer at the time, who was in the engagement. The execution was in a style of uncommon neatness; and as far as it was possible for me to judge, extremely and minutely accurate.

The references were numerous and particular. The place of landing of the British was laid down—each regiment numbered—the artillery and light infantry particularly designated—the precise line of march pointed out—the situation of the American posts of defence, even to a barn, and the particular force that attacked the barn, laid down.

The place of the greatest carnage or loss of the British—the two vessels that were moored to annoy our people—the battery that played upon our fortifications—the line of retreat and the situation of the craft stationed to cut off our troops, the situation of the commanding officer of the British; and indeed every thing that could tend to give a full and clear idea of the situation and movements of the parties.

On looking over this map deep and strong emotions were excited—pride at the glorious defence made by our undisciplined American yeomanry, against the best regular forces of the old world—patriotism, by considering the spirit and devotion of our militia in defence of freedom and their country—pity for the suffering of the number who fell, and admiration of the dauntless spirit of the assailants and the assailed.

At the same time it was impossible to repress the smile, half in anger and half in mirth at the repetition of the word “Rebels” which occurred so often in the delineation. It brought to our minds the battle of the kegs, where the frequent use of the odious and contemptible expression is so handsomely ridiculed.

This probably is the only accurate plan of that memorable battle, in existence. It ought certainly to be engraved, and the copies multiplied, together with a correct account of the engagement, and to be in the possession of every friend to the liberties of the country.

Publishers were intrigued. Some made inquiry and discovered the man who possessed the hand-drawn map was Jacob Cist of Wilkes-Barre, a postmaster, artist, naturalist, and promoter of anthracite coal (shown above).

A man named I. A. Chapham copied Cist’s map and brought it to Philadelphia, where an engraving firm produced prints for the February issue of the Analectic Magazine. Here’s a digitized image from the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.

The next month, the Port Folio published a second engraving copied from the competing magazine with red marks overlaid to show corrections by Gen. Henry Dearborn, a veteran of the battle. Here’s an image of that map. Dearborn’s accompanying article ignited a feud with descendants of Gen. Israel Putnam and others that lasted for years.

The publication of the Analectic engraving revealed the name of the British officer who had sketched the map: Lt. Henry DeBerniere, misidentified as an officer of the 14th (rather than 10th) Regiment.

The manuscript sketch doesn’t survive. Neither does any clue about how DeBerniere’s sketch came into the hands of Jacob Cist. He was born in Philadelphia in 1782, and we know DeBerniere was in that city with the British army in 1777-78. Had the officer left the sketch behind, just as he had left his written manuscripts in Boston?

Cist also worked for the U.S. Post Office Department in Washington, D.C., from 1800 to 1808 before settling in Wilkes-Barre. Did he collect the map as a curiosity? Was he really just “rummaging over some old drawers” when he realized what it was?

The provenance will remain a mystery. Similarly, we have no idea how the historian Peter Force came by DeBerniere’s map of the Massachusetts countryside now in the Library of Congress collection. But Lt. DeBerniere’s map has been one of the main sources for every printed map of the Battle of Bunker Hill since 1818.

COMING UP: The post-Revolutionary career of Henry DeBerniere.

The Lost DeBerniere Manuscripts

On 30 June 1775, Ens. Henry DeBerniere was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in the 10th Regiment of Foot.

Nine months later, on 17 March 1776, he evacuated Boston with the rest of the British military.

That departure was rushed enough that Lt. DeBerniere left behind some of his papers, which locals eventually found. Exactly which locals remains a mystery.

In 1779 the printer John Gill issued a collection of those documents, described on the title page as “Left in town by a British Officer previous to the evacuation of it by the enemy, and now printed for the information and amusement of the curious.”

That title page (shown here) rendered the ensign’s name as “D’Bernicre.” Which is only one of the many ways it was spelled at the time.

The documents in that booklet were:

• Gen. Thomas Gage’s orders to DeBerniere and Capt. William Brown to scout the countryside—thus giving the publication the title General Gage’s Instructions.
• DeBerniere’s detailed and dramatic narrative of how he and Brown visited Worcester, Framingham, Marlborough, and Weston, barely making it back home in a snowstorm.
• A much shorter report on the officers’ similar trek to Concord.
• DeBerniere’s account of the expedition to Concord and the return to Boston under fire on 19 April.
• A list of the casualties from that action, naming each killed or wounded officer but giving simple body counts for the enlisted men.

The Massachusetts Historical Society has shared scanned and transcribed pages here.

The year before Gill published, the Massachusetts General Court had passed laws banishing Loyalists and empowering the state to confiscate their property. Citizens who read DeBerniere’s narratives could easily recognize the Loyalists who offered them assistance. Most had left the country, but Isaac Jones of Weston was still at the Golden Ball Tavern. By then, though, he had apparently worked his way back into his neighbors’ graces.

The Massachusetts Historical Society reprinted the text of John Gill’s booklet in a volume of its Collections series in 1815, which is how it shared material before the internet.

That reprint was probably the source for another version of the story told in the voice of Brown and DeBerniere’s servant and published as The Journal Kept by Mr. John Howe While He Was Employed as a British Spy; Also, While He Was Engaged in the Smuggling Business by Luther Roby in 1827.

There was a young printer named John Howe working in Boston in 1775. A Sandemanian and partner of Margaret Draper in the last months of the Boston News-Letter, he evacuated Boston at the same time as Lt. DeBerniere. Eventually he settled in Nova Scotia, and his son became an important figure in early Canadian politics. So he wasn’t the “John Howe” narrating that “Journal.”

In fact, the “Journal” was just a hyped-up version of DeBerniere’s original report, using all the dramatic bits and adding to them, eventually reaching the point of implausibility. Nonetheless, extracts can seem credible, and many authors have been fooled into thinking that 1827 publication is an authentic historical source.

TOMORROW: Another DeBerniere manuscript, and another mystery.

Concord “fit for ENCAMPMENTS”

When Capt. William Brown and Ens. Henry DeBerniere first ventured out into the Massachusetts countryside in civilian clothes, from 23 February to 2 March 1775, their focus was Worcester.

Gen. Thomas Gage’s spy on the provincial congress’s committee of safety and supplies, Dr. Benjamin Church, had told him that the Patriots were collecting most of their cannon in Worcester.

Brown and DeBerniere confirmed that. They also confirmed that the people of Middlesex and Worcester Counties were on high alert, with multiple people suspecting correctly that they were army spies.

During that first trip the officers also visited Weston, Framingham, and Marlborough. It wasn’t until their next scouting mission starting on 20 March that they visited Concord. That was after some local person started sending Gen. Gage secret messages about James Barrett gathering cannon for the congress in that town, as I relate in The Road to Concord.

Because Concord is such a prominent feature on the hand-drawn map from the Library of Congress collection that I’ve been discussing, DeBerniere must have drawn it after the second foray.

The map is also notable for what its text says about Concord, as shown above:

This Town is well Inhabited and on an entire plain

a Shire Town and great thorough-fare, the roads wide and fit for
ENCAMPMENTS

That label indicates that some officers in the British army in Boston were thinking about occupying Concord for at least one night.

In the end, of course, Gage decided on a one-day expedition, in and out, using a road not on this map.

TOMORROW: Ens. DeBerniere’s second visit to Concord.

Dots on the Ensign’s Map

Yesterday I started to discuss a hand-drawn map from the Library of Congress that Ed Redmond has identified as likely coming from British army spy Ens. Henry DeBeniere weeks before the march to Concord.

That map marks several individual homes. Some of those are places where DeBerniere and his fellow scout, Capt. William Brown, visited on their two treks into the Massachusetts countryside in early 1775.

Others aren’t mentioned in the officers’ report but were the estates of Loyalists, and therefore potential safe houses or places for troops to camp.

Here’s a list of all those marked properties:

“Hatch’s”: Nathaniel Hatch of Dorchester, Loyalist.

“Davis’s”: This site is a bit of a mystery. My best guess is that this is Dr. Jonathan Davies, who bought half of the old Auchmuty estate in the 1750s. Unlike almost all the other homeowners named on the map, Davies wasn’t a Loyalist. Another possibility is that this is the house of Aaron Davis, which ended up on the front lines of the siege.

“Auchmuty’s”: Robert Auchmuty of Roxbury, attorney and Vice Admiralty Court judge, Loyalist.

“Hollowel’s”: Benjamin Hallowell, Jr., in Jamaica Plain, Commissioner of Customs.

“Comm. Loring”: Joshua Loring, Sr., in Jamaica Plain, Loyalist. His mansion remains as the Loring-Greenough House.

“Mr. Fanuil”: Benjamin Faneuil, merchant, Loyalist.

“Mr. Greenleaf”: I’m guessing this home was managed by Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf, who normally lived in Boston. In 1765 his daughter Hannah married John Apthorp, who inherited his father’s Little Cambridge mansion. John and Hannah Apthorp sailed to Charleston, South Carolina, for his health in late 1772, but their ship was lost at sea. Sheriff Greenleaf became the guardian for their young children, and thus probably the custodian of the Apthorp property. Sheriff Greenleaf was seen as a stalwart of the royal government before the war, but he remained in Boston after the siege.

“Brewers”: Jonathan Brewer’s tavern on the Watertown-Waltham line. Unlike the other people named on the map, Brewer was a Whig, as DeBerniere wrote in his report. But the officers did make a memorable stop there, so it was worth mapping.

“Major Goldthwaits”: Joseph Goldthwait of Weston, Loyalist.

“Colonl: Jone’s”: Isaac Jones of Weston, a Loyalist before the war and a supporter of the Continental Army during it. Brown and DeBerniere used his Golden Ball Tavern as a base, and it’s still standing.

“Doctor Russell”: Dr. Charles Russell of Lincoln, Loyalist. His house survives in altered form as the Codman House.

“Nineteen Mile Tavern”: This establishment appears to be in Sudbury, but I haven’t found any mention of such a place. The most famous surviving tavern in Sudbury is the Wayside Inn, but this appears to have been closer to the center of town.

TOMORROW: The map’s proposition.

The Ensign’s Map of a Road to Concord

In 2016, Ed Redmond of the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division shared an interesting discovery about an item in that collection.

Redmond wrote:

Several years ago, I stumbled across an unsigned manuscript map with the supplied title of “Roxbury to Concord. Roads & distances, &c.”

This unique map was acquired by the Library of Congress in 1867 as a part of the Peter Force Collection, which includes more than 750 Revolutionary era printed and manuscript maps transferred to the Geography and Map Division. . . .

According to General Gage’s Instructions printed by Boston publisher J[ohn]. Gill in 1779, General Thomas Gage, the commander of all British troops in North America at the time, ordered two British soldiers, Captain [William] Brown and Ensign [Henry] De Berniere, to discretely survey the roads in the vicinity of Boston.

“We set out from Boston on Thursday night, disguised like Gentlemen in brown clothes and reddish handkerchiefs round our necks; at the ferry of Charlestown we met a sentry of the 52nd regiment but Capt. Brown’s servant, whom we took along with us, bid him not to take any notice of us so that we passed unknown to Charlestown. From that we went to Cambridge, a pretty town with a college built of brick. We next went to Watertown and were not suspected. A little out of this town we went into a tavern, a Mr. [Jonathan] Brewer’s, a whig, [and] we called for dinner…”

All of the towns mentioned in the text, including “Brewers” tavern, appear on the manuscript map. The two British “surveyors” then sent their various large scale surveys back to Boston with their servant and returned separately to avoid being discovered as spies.

A few weeks later, on March 20, 1775, roughly one month before the events of April 18-19, 1775, Captain Brown and Ensign De Berniere received additional instructions from General Gage to survey the road to Concord:

“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 mainroad. The town of Concord lies between hills that command it entirely; there is a river runs through it, with two bridges over it.” . . .

Following their reconnaissance of Concord and vicinity the spies continued on [actually back] to Lexington:

“We dined at the house of a Mr. [Daniel] Bliss, a friend to government; [who] told us he could shew us another road, called the Lexington road. We set out and crossed the bridge in the town. 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, Cambridge, and so to Charlestown…”

Once again, all of the towns mentioned in the text (with the exception of Lexington) appear on our map. Additionally, the distances between the towns are laid down on the map and correlate with the figures given in the text, even though the map is not drawn completely to scale.

All that said, this map does not show the road from Cambridge to Concord that the British expedition followed on 18-19 April. Though the officers reported returning from Concord on “the Lexington road [through] Menotomy, Cambridge, and so to Charlestown,” they didn’t add that route to this chart.

Did that affect the British expedition’s level of preparation in April 1775? 

TOMORROW: More on this map.

Online Lectures about Maps, Soldiers, and Constitutions

This month I’ve listed online events to commemorate the 19th of April, and then more of those, and then another along with two events about tavern culture.

And yet here are three more online historical events scheduled in the next week.

“Mapping and Placing 18th Century Roxbury, New England and the Imperial Atlantic”
Saturday, 17 April, 6:30 P.M.
The Shirley-Eustis House Association

Explore how eighteenth-century maps were vital to governing and expanding the British Empire, starting at Governor William Shirley’s Roxbury mansion. Garret Dash Nelson, curator of the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center explores just how Boston, New England, and the historic Shirley-Eustis House were suited in the British Empire’s Northern Atlantic ambitions. Beautifully rendered and detailed historic maps from the 1700s reveal how Governor Shirley and others tried to shape those ambitions.

Free through the sponsorship of the Massachusetts Chapter of the Society of Cincinnati. Currently filled out, though it’s possible some slots will open up. Information and registration here.

“Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution”
Tuesday, 20 April, 12 noon
The Boston Athenaeum

Dispelling long-held myths about the Revolutionary War, Don Hagist shines light on the diversity of the British soldiers—many of whom had joined the army as a peacetime career, only to find themselves fighting a war on another continent in often brutal conditions.

$5, or free for members. Registration starts here. Don Hagist’s book.

“The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World”
Wednesday, 21 April, 6:00 P.M.
The Boston Athenaeum

Tracing the global history of written constitutions from the 1750s to the twentieth century, Linda Colley focuses on how constitutions crossed geographical boundaries and aided the rise of empires as well as nations, illuminating their intimate connections with print, literary creativity, and the rise of the novel.

$5, or free for members. Registration starts here. Linda Colley’s book.

Digital Databases to Stay Home For

Here are four digital resources that caught my attention over the past few months.

The British Library has digitized George III’s Topographical Library and put the scans on Flickr, each linked back to its own catalogue for full information. There are 17,908 images in this album, many appearing to come from Germany. As I clicked through, I saw maps, landscape prints, pages from books, gravestone rubbings, printed maps, elevations of fortifications and other buildings, garden plans, bird’s-eye views of towns, architectural drawings, harbor charts, elevation of canals, hand-drawn maps, maps, and maps. Finding specific items may mean starting from the British Library catalogue and then running a search for a title on Flickr.

The American Philosophical Society transcribed three ledgers from Benjamin and Deborah Franklin’s Philadelphia print shop in Philadelphia in the 1730s and ’40s. Alongside images of those financial records, researchers can now find the data in spreadsheets totaling over 15,000 rows, ready to download and study. The transcribers also handled the task of linking people entered into the books with different spellings of their names. These transcriptions expand an earlier project on Franklin’s post office records. Learn more here.

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University and the Center for Digital Editing at the University of Virginia announced the publication of the Jefferson Weather & Climate Records. For nearly fifty years, starting when he was in the exotic city of Philadelphia at the Continental Congress, Jefferson recorded observations about the weather. These included temperature and general conditions, sometimes barometric pressure, moisture, wind direction and force, and precipitation. Occasionally he mentioned the appearance of particular birds or the first harvest of peas. Visitors to the website can view images of Jefferson’s meteorological manuscripts, drawn from the collections of five different repositories, alongside the transcriptions.

Finally, if you’re frustrated that the Leventhal Center’s handsome Atlascope site overlaying maps of Boston goes back only to 1868, check out Bill Warner’s Mapjunction. Its images go back to 1769, plus more recent renderings of the town as far back at 1630. Of course, some of those have to be stretched a bit as cartography has become more exact. Atlascope works like Superman’s X-ray vision while MapJunction has a nifty slider interface.

Atlas of Boston History Wins Historic New England Book Prize

Historic New England (formerly the Society for the Protection of New England Antiquities) has awarded its 2020 Book Prize to The Atlas of Boston History, edited by Nancy S. Seasholes and written by her and a bevy of contributors, including me.

The society honors “a book that advances the understanding of life in New England from the past to today by examining its architecture, landscape, and material culture.”

About this year’s winner it says:

The book traces the city’s history and geography from the last ice age to the present with fifty-seven beautifully rendered maps. Thirty-five experts in a variety of fields contributed to the publication. From ancient glaciers to landmaking schemes and modern infrastructure projects, the city has been transformed almost constantly over the centuries. The Atlas of Boston History explores the history of the city through its physical, economic, and demographic changes, and social and cultural developments.

Historic New England also named two titles as Honor Books for the year:

• Connecticut Architecture: Stories of 100 Places by Christopher Wigren of Preservation Connecticut.
• The Paintings of J.O.J. Frost: An American Story by Bethe Lee Moulton.

All three could of course make good holiday gifts for the right people.

In other present-day news, last week I spoke to Bradley Jay and Prof. Robert Allison for the Revolution 250 podcast. I was prepared to speak about the Boston Massacre trials and other Sestercentennial events. But Bob and Bradley wanted to talk mostly about my projects, so you’ll learn more about the background to this blog. Find the episode here or wherever you download podcasts.

“Material Culture of Sugar” Webinar from Historic Deerfield, 26 Sept.

Way back in April, Historic Deerfield was going to host a one-day forum on sugar in early New England culture. But then people recognized the Covid-19 virus had started to spread in this country, and institutions postponed their public events for a few months.

The virus is still spreading, the national government hasn’t committed to an effective strategy to stop it, and even in parts of the country where the pandemic seems more under control we have to be careful. Responsible institutions have therefore reconciled themselves to smaller gatherings and online events.

Historic Deerfield has now announced that “The Bitter and the Sweet: The Material Culture of Sugar in Early New England” will be a digital event on Saturday, 26 September. Here’s the event announcement:

I own I am shocked at the purchase of slaves…
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
—William Cowper, Bristol Gazette, June 12, 1788

Sugar is a sweet part of our everyday lives, but one with a bitter history. The insatiable demand for sugar transformed the global economy, generated new sources of commercial wealth, and fueled an unprecedented human diaspora. Domesticated in New Guinea more than 10,000 years ago and first processed in India and the Middle East, sugar emerged as a New World commodity in the 15th century. At first a rare and expensive luxury restricted to the elite, demand for sugar as an indispensable product increased exponentially during the 17th and 18th centuries in tandem with the rising popularity of the tea, coffee, chocolate, and punch it sweetened.

Grown and processed by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, sugar formed one of the three legs of the trans-Atlantic triangular trade that flourished from the 16th through the 19th centuries. New England merchants sent barrel staves, building materials, provisions, and livestock to the West Indies enabling plantation owners to convert every available acre to sugar cultivation. Ships carried sugar and molasses from the plantation colonies of the Caribbean to New England rum distilleries. Merchants then shipped rum to Africa in exchange for ever-larger numbers of enslaved people carried back to the Caribbean to produce more and more sugar.

This one-day forum brings together a diverse group of historians, curators, and archaeologists to focus on the material culture and history of sugar in New England, including issues of wealth, power, refinement, status, social justice, and politics.

The speakers will include:

• Mark Peterson on how the rise of large-scale sugar production in Barbados rescued the New England colonies from economic collapse and provided dynamic growth through the colonial period.
• Brandy S. Culp on the material world fueled and shaped by sugar, encompassing the history of the trade and its human impact to the goods generated around its use.
• Justin DiVirgilio on the social and political context in which rum distilleries operated, using archeological evidence about a distillery in mid-18th-century Albany.
• Amanda Lange on the varieties of cane sugar used in 18th- and 19th-century New England households and the objects associated with tea, coffee, chocolate, and punch.
• Dan Sousa on the museum’s newly acquired group of anti-slavery ceramics, reflecting how sugar production was intimately bound up with slavery.
• Barbara Mathews on maps and artifacts demonstrating the relationships between Brazil, the Sugar Islands, New England, and the leading European powers.

The cost for the all-day program is $60—less than for the in-person forum, but then you’re providing your own lunch and there’s no hearth-cooking demonstration to produce a snack at the end of the day.

See the event announcement for more details, including the exact schedule, biographies of the speakers, and how to register.

Big News for Boston History Fans

The Atlas of Boston History is a big book. I just got my copy, and it’s 14 inches tall and 11 inches wide, 224 full-color pages of maps, charts, and other illustrations of Boston history.

I got a copy because I worked with editor Nancy S. Seasholes on the page spread about Revolutionary Boston. You can see the whole list of topics and contributors, and several sample spreads, at the website for the book. Needless to say, a project this big has been several years in the making.

The Atlas of Boston History will be officially launched at the Boston Public Library’s central building on Thursday, 24 October, at 6:30 P.M. Nancy will speak about the project, and there will be a question-and-answer session with her and contributors. (I hope to participate, but I’ll have to come from another event in Cambridge.)

Other Atlas events include:

• Wednesday, 30 October, 7:00 P.M.: Porter Square Books, Cambridge, author talk
• Thursday, 14 November, 5:30 P.M.: Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, author talk and panel

Why Do We Pronounce “Gerrymander” with a Soft G?

The story of the gerrymander is well known. In 1812, the Massachusetts General Court drew a state senate district that collected the large south Essex County towns of Marblehead and Salem and then snaked up through Andover and along the northern bank of the Merrimack River to Salisbury.

An artist at Russell and Cutler’s Boston Gazette saw that map and said the district shape resembled a salamander. To heighten the resemblance, he drew wings extending west out of Methuen—because salamanders have wings.

The Boston Gazette was a Federalist newspaper. The legislature was then in the hands of the Jeffersonians, and the governor who signed this districting plan, Elbridge Gerry, was also a Jeffersonian. So the newspaper decided to dub that supposedly monstrous district a “gerry-mander.”

A term spread a bit. In the seventh edition of The Olive Branch: or, Faults on Both Sides, Federal and Democratic (1815), Mathew Carey expounded on it and the practice it lampooned:

The senates, in almost every case, are composed of members chosen by districts, formed of two or more counties, which districts elect a number of senators in proportion to their population. . . .

The above arrangement and the adjustment of these districts opens a door to a considerable degree of intrigue and management, and invites to chicane and fraud—in one word, to the political sin, which I have styled Gerrymanderism. . . .

To accomplish this sinister purpose, counties are frequently united to form a senatorial district, which have no territorial connexion, being separated from each other by an intervening county, sometimes by two or three. Of this heinous political sin, both federalists and democrats, as I have said, have been guilty.

The state of Massachusetts was depicted, two or three years since, as a sort of monstrous figure, with the counties forming the senatorial districts, displayed on this unprincipled plan. It was called a Gerrymander, in allusion to the name of the late vice-president of the United States, then governor of that state. Hence I derive the term Gerrymanderism. To those who gave the title of Gerrymander, it might not unaptly be said—“men of glass; throw no stones.”

As that last paragraph makes clear, Elbridge Gerry had become a national figure, not just a regional one. He had been elected Vice President under James Madison and even served a year and a half before dying. So politically savvy people—the type of people who would use the term Gerrymanderism—knew about him. And knew that he pronounced his name with a hard G, as in glass.

Why, then, do we now all pronounce the word gerrymander with a soft G, as in Elbridge?

On a hunch, I ran the term through Google Books Ngram Viewer, and this is what it showed.

Although the term gerrymander was coined in the early republic, it really became popular around 1890, with additional booms after 1910, 1945, and 1960.

By the time the word really took hold, Americans had largely forgotten Elbridge Gerry, despite his career as a Signer of the Declaration of Independence, skeptical member of the Constitutional Convention, diplomat, Congressman, governor, and Vice President. Or at least people knew him only from the printed page, not from political discussions. Nobody was practiced in pronouncing his name.

Following the usual rule, folks assumed a G followed by an E was soft. Hence, gerrymander.

Harvard Digital Collections from the Colonial Period

Last month the Harvard Gazette featured some treasures from the university’s Colonial North America collection, “approximately 650,000 digitized pages of handmade materials from the 17th and 18th centuries.”

Most of that material consists of manuscripts, but highlighted in this article are:

• a Charles Willson Peale miniature portrait of George Washington on ivory, slightly over an inch wide, shown here.
• Prof. John Winthtrop’s almanac for 1772, its frontispiece Paul Revere’s woodcut version of his Boston Massacre copperplate engraving.
• a globe three inches across, made in 1757 and encased in a spherical case covered in shark skin that doubled as a celestial globe.

As I type, the collection’s front page features documents created by Dr. John Jeffries and the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, two men from Revolutionary Massachusetts I don’t fully trust. But I can’t hold that against the university.

This week the university announced the launch of the larger Harvard Digital Collections, which contains the material from Colonial North America. That “provides free, public access to over 6 million objects digitized from our collections—from ancient art to modern manuscripts and audio visual materials.”

What’s more, this is the policy on copyright governing this material:

In order to foster creative reuse of digitized content, Harvard Library allows free use of openly available digital reproductions of items from its collections that are not under copyright, except where other rights or restrictions apply.

Harvard Library asserts no copyright over digital reproductions of works in its collections which are in the public domain, where those digital reproductions are made openly available on Harvard Library websites.

So if a person wanted an image of a certificate of initiation into the African Lodge of Freemasons, signed by Prince Hall, George Middleton, and other officers, one has merely to click.

A New Tavern Opened in Brunswick Town

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

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

LiveScience reports:

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

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

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

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

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

Schoolmasters with the Initials “J.L.”

As quoted yesterday, in the summer of 1775 London newspapers reported that letters found on the body of Dr. Joseph Warren after the Battle of Bunker Hill implicated some people in Boston as “spies.”

The newspapers disagreed on how many letters the royal authorities had found on Warren’s body—three or six. I don’t believe the text of any letter survives. But those documents prompted the arrest of schoolteachers James Lovell and John Leach on 29 June, twelve days after the battle.

This article from the Essex Institute Historical Collections shows James Lovell writing to friends outside the siege lines throughout May and June. In a 10 May letter, Lovell even told Oliver Wendell about the dangers of sharing sensitive information:

You must however give us no State Matters; for ’tis but “you are the General’s Prisoner,” and whip! away to the Man of War; as is the Case of poor John Peck. I carry’d him Breakfast to the main Guard yesterday, and again this Morning but he was carry’d off last Evening and put on Board Ship. Inquisitorial this!

The royal authorities released John Peck in a prisoner exchange on 6 June. However, the heavy losses at Bunker Hill made the royal authorities far less forgiving.

Lovell was a strong Patriot, known for orating on the memory of the Boston Massacre back in 1771. On 3 May he told Wendell that he was trying to get his wife and children out of Boston, but

I shall tarry if 10 Sieges take place. I have determined it to be a Duty which I owe the Cause & the Friends of it, and am perfectly fearless of the Consequences. An ill Turn, a most violent Diarhea, from being too long in a damp place, has confirm’d Doctr. [Joseph? Silvester?] Gardners advice to me not to go into the Trenches, where my whole Soul lodges nightly. How then can I be more actively serviceable to the Friends who think with me, than by keeping disagreeable post among a Set of Villains who would willingly destroy what those Friends leave behind them.

Lovell was probably writing in a similar vein to Dr. Warren and perhaps indeed sending out information useful to the provincial military. He took elementary precautions. As Sam Forman notes and the E.I.H.C. article shows, Lovell already often signed his letters with just his initials. In addition, he asked Wendell to be sure to seal all their correspondence. But there was no protection for the documents that Dr. Warren chose to carry onto the battlefield.

As for John Leach, he appears to have been dragged into this situation simply because he had the same initials as Lovell. It’s also possible that the letters mentioned teaching school. Boston had three schoolteachers with the initials “J.L.” One, John Lovell of the South Latin School, was a staunch Loyalist. The other two got hauled off to jail.

Then Leach’s specialty as a teacher of navigation became a liability. Lovell taught Latin and Greek—hardly sensitive subjects. But royal officers found “Drawings” in Leach’s home when they arrested him. Those probably included detailed nautical maps and sketches of the harbor.

On 19 July, after three weeks in jail, the schoolteachers and other prisoners were taken into a military court presided over by Maj. Thomas Moncrieffe. According to Leach, the proceeding confirmed how little evidence the authorities had on them:

Till this Time we did not know our Crimes, on what account we were committed, but now we found Mr. Lovell was charged with “being a Spy, and giving intelligence to the Rebels.” And my charge, “being a spy, and suspected of taking plans.” When Capt. [Richard] Symmes appeared, he knew so little of us, that he called me Mr. Lovell; he knew so little of us, that instead of being a just Evidence [i.e., witness], he appeared ashamed and confounded, and went off.

Nevertheless, Leach wasn’t released until 3 October.

In late August, Lovell told a friend “that he expects to be out soon, tryumphant over his Enemies,” and was ready to give up “idlely schooling the children of a pack of Villains” in Boston. Instead, the royal authorities kept him locked up through the end of the siege and then carried him off to Halifax. Eventually he was exchanged.

Lovell never did go back to teaching school. Instead, he became a delegate to the Continental Congress, where he managed the correspondence with America’s diplomats—this time using a code.