“Hang Together” on the Restoration Stage

Yesterday I alluded to a Professor Buzzkill podcast as my spur to look for the statement “We must hang together or separately” in a letter by the Virginia politician Carter Braxton.

That same episode from 2022 stated that the “hang together” wordplay can be traced further back to “John Dryden’s 1717 book, The Spanish Fryar, where it is referred to as a ‘Flemish proverb.’”

Dryden (1631–1700) produced his play The Spanish Fryar, or The Double Discovery in 1681, and it was reprinted often after that. In Act IV, Scene 1, one character says, “I’ll not hang alone, Fryar,” and Friar Dominick eventually replies, “in the Common Cause we are all of a Piece; we hang together.”

Dryden wasn’t the only playwright to play on the phrase “hang together” in 1681, however. Aphra Benn (1640–1689, shown here) wrote this exchange in The Round-Heads; Or, The Good Old Cause (Act III, Scene 1):

Fleet. My Lords and Gentlemen, we are here met together in the Name of the Lard———

Duc. Yea, and I hope we shall hang together as one Man—a Pox upon your Preaching. [Aside.

Unsurprisingly, Dr. Samuel Johnson chose Dryden over Benn to demonstrate the use of “hang together” in his dictionary.

As for Professor Buzzkill’s remark about a “Flemish proverb,” I can’t find any mention of that phrase in three early editions of Dryden’s Spanish Fryar. Perhaps that was an annotation by the editor of a later edition based on the 1717 text. Or perhaps separate references to a “hang together” saying got muddled together.

It would be striking if the “hang together” witticism came from another language because double meanings of that sort are often hard to translate. Indeed, the Rev. E. O. Haven’s 1869 textbook on Rhetoric uses Edouard Laboulaye’s unsuccessful attempt to render the saying (credited to Benjamin Franklin) in French as evidence for his warning “Puns usually Untranslatable.”

Be that as it may, the idea that a “Flemish proverb” was the seed of this American quotation has taken hold and now appears several places—all apparently after 2022. I welcome any earlier reference.

TOMMOROW: A post-Revolutionary reference.

“Ordered to draw his Hand across the Face of his Lieutenant Colonel”

As quoted yesterday, on 15 Apr 1775 a court-martial sentenced Lt. Col. William Walcott to be reprimanded in front of the entire second brigade of the British army in Boston.

Walcott had struck a young officer in his regiment, Ens. Robert Patrick. The military court deemed that behavior “unmilitary & ungentleman like.” Regimental commanders weren’t supposed to slap down that far.

Another possible detail of the sentence didn’t make it into Gen. Thomas Gage’s general orders, however. Some sources say that the court or the brigadier who both presided over it and commanded the brigade, Gen. Robert Pigot, told Ens. Patrick to swipe his hand across Lt. Col. Walcott’s face in return for the lieutenant colonel striking him.

The earliest I’ve found that detail mentioned is a book published in Bristol in 1806: The Singular and Interesting Trial of Henry Stanton, Esq., of the 8th. (or King’s) Regiment: On Charges for Unofficer-like Behaviour, as Preferred Against Him by Lieutenant Colonel Young, Commanding the Said Regiment. Tried by a General Court-Martial Held at Doncaster, August 14, 1805, and several subsequent Days.

In the course of the arguments, someone stated:

Lieutenant Colonel Walcot, of the 5th. Regiment of Foot, encamped in Boston, North America, in 1775, was suspended for Six Months, for striking Ensign Patrick, of the same Regiment; who was ordered to draw his Hand across the Face of his Lieutenant Colonel, before the Whole Garrison, in return for the Insult he received. Notwithstanding he had challenged Colonel Walcot.

This was tried before an Honourable Court Martial, Brigadier General Pigot, President.

Those words appear between quotation marks, but I haven’t found their source.

Ten years later, E. Samuel published An Historical Account of the British Army: And of the Law Military, as Declared by the Ancient and Modern Statutes, and Articles of War for Its Government with a Free Commentary on the Mutiny Act, and the Rules and Articles of War; Illustrated by Various Decisions of Courts Martial.

That book stated in a footnote:

A remarkable instance of this kind occurred in the late war in America. Lieutenant-Colonel Walcot, of the 5th regiment of foot, while encamped near Boston, was so unfortunate, in a hasty and intemperate moment, to be moved to strike a subaltern (Ensign Patrick) under his command; and notwithstanding the latter had challenged him, the lieutenant-colonel was brought to a court martial, of which Brigadier-General Pigot was president, for the offence, when the court, after due consideration, suspended him from pay and allowances for six months, and was further pleased to order that Ensign Patrick should draw his hand across the face of the lieutenant-colonel before the whole garrison, in return for the insult he had received.

Samuel’s publication was authoritative enough that the anecdote appeared in several more histories of the British army, the 5th Regiment, dueling, and courts martial over the next century.

As I said above, the detail of Ens. Patrick touching Lt. Col. Walcott’s face does not appear in the general orders describing the outcome of the case. Furthermore, the court martial officially acquitted Patrick of challenging Walcott, contrary to the later descriptions of the punishment.

Neither of the British army officers who followed this case in their diaries—Lt. John Barker and Lt. Frederick Mackenzie—described seeing Ens. Patrick carry out this action. But perhaps another contemporaneous source will surface.

Paradoxically, this alleged detail of the Walcott case has gotten more discussion in print than the verdict in Gen. Gage’s official announcement. It’s in the literature as an unusual but still precedented measure the British army has taken to encourage good behavior in officers.

TOMORROW: Suspended.

(The picture above shows an officer from an Irish volunteer regiment being manly about 1780.)

The Mysterious Rise of Nathanael Greene

In Massachusetts, the lower house of the General Court published annual detailed journals of what it (officially) discussed each day.

The clerk of the Provincial Congress kept similarly detailed notes, and that record was published in 1838.

Rhode Island’s assembly, in contrast, issued a bare-bones record of each legislative session: lists of elected and appointed officials, texts of resolutions and new laws. No specific dates between the day the assembly convened and when the session ended. No mention of failed petitions, disagreements with the upper house, committee reports, or the like.

As a result, Rhode Island’s legislative process is opaque. We know a session started on 22 April to wrap up the fiscal year and, in response to news from Massachusetts, to form a 1,500-man “army of observation.” But the only official clue to the date of that crucial resolution was how Gov. Joseph Wanton and Lt. Gov. Darius Sessions’s protest against it was dated 25 April.

Among the last actions of that legislature was:

IT is Voted and Resolved, That Mr. Nathaniel Greene be, and he is hereby, appointed in the Room of the Honorable Samuel Ward, Esq; (who is going to the Continental Congress) to wait on the General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut, to consult upon Measures for the common Defence of the Four New-England Governments.

A new assembly convened on “the First Wednesday in May,” or 3 May. The legislature continued to build up the army. With Gov. Wanton staying home, lawmakers established a committee of safety to oversee that process.

Nathanael Greene and fellow delegate William Bradford were reimbursed for “their Service, Horse-Hire and Expences” on that Connecticut trip. Simeon Potter, Greene, and Daniel Owen were made a committee to audit the accounts of a man making “Six Gun-Carriages” for the colony. There was more activity.

And then suddenly the records shows a long list of new appointments. Simeon Potter was elevated to the upper house. William Bradford went onto the committee of safety. And atop the first list of “Officers of the Army of Observation” was:

Nathaniel Greene, jun. Esq; Brigadier-General.

Greene’s commission was dated 8 May, so the discussion that led to the creation of that handsome formal document must have taken place over the preceding week. But we know next to nothing about it.

We know Greene had represented the town of Coventry in the assembly for a few years. (For a while historians thought this was a different man, and indeed there were other Nathaniel Greenes active in Rhode Island affairs, but documents came to light to confirm his service.) The Greene family was enmeshed in the colony‘s politics.

We know Greene was particularly involved in the formation and training of the Kentish Guards, in Rhode Islanders’ initial response to the Lexington Alarm, and on the military committees listed above.

On the other hand, Nathanael Greene didn’t have a high rank in the colony militia. Indeed, he was only a private in the Kentish Guards, as I’ll discuss tomorrow.

Nonetheless, when the time came to go to war, the legislature promoted Greene above that unit’s captain, James Mitchell Varnum, and all other militia colonels to command its army. How that happened is an enduring mystery.

TOMORROW: Other candidates.

“Alarmed that the Regulars were advancing towards Our Entrencment”

Among the presentations at this Saturday’s commemoration of Gen. George Washington’s arrival in Cambridge is a talk by Longfellow House archivist Kate Hanson Plass on the diary of Moses Sleeper.

Hanson Plass and her team have recently shared the diary online: transcription with annotations and illustrations, plus a link to page images on Archive.org.

The introduction explains:

In the museum collection of the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site is a diary written by a soldier who participated in the early days of the American Revolution. No one knows how the diary got to the house, though it seems likely that a collector in the Longfellow family acquired it for its Revolutionary War connection in the early 20th century.

The book itself is small (5” by 8”), pocket size; its cover and the first and last three pages are missing. There is no indication of the identity of the writer of the diary; at first reading it seems to be anonymous. Using clues inside the diary – references to family members and locations of military service – the author has been established as Corporal Moses Sleeper of Newburyport, Massachusetts, who served for 19 months in Colonel Moses Little’s Regiment (later the 12th Continental Regiment).

Sleeper and Sgt. Paul Lunt of the same regiment obviously shared their diaries since many of their entries are the same. They weren’t keeping private, personal notes but making a record of their military service for people back home and in the future.

Cpl. Sleeper’s surviving pages start right before the Bunker Hill battle, which his regiment wasn’t involved in. Here’s his terse account of those days:

Friday 16 our Men went to Charlestown and Intrenched on a hill beyond Bunker hill they fired from the Ships and Copps hill all the time.

Saturday 17 1775 the Regulars Came out upon the Back of Charlestown and Set fire to It & burnt It down & Came to our Entrenen[?] forced It with the Loss 896 of the Regulars and about 50 of ours The fire began at 3 o Clock and held till 6

Sund 18 we Entrinched on prospect hill alarmed that the Regulars were advancing towards Our Entrencment but found It to be false Returned to Quarters

Mondy 19 Wee killed Some of there Guard

T 20 Went upon Picquet

W 21 past musters

Thirsday 22 Received our month pay

You wouldn’t know from those entries that Capt. Benjamin Perkins’s company, including Cpl. Sleeper, went onto the Charlestown peninsula on 17 June and saw combat. I’ve quoted later recollections of the Bunker Hill fight from other men in that company: Lt. Joseph Whitmore and Pvt. Philip Johnson.

Sgt. Lunt’s description of the battle offered a little more detail:

Saturday, 17th. - The Regulars landed a number of troops, and we engaged them. They drove us off the hill, and burnt Charlestown. Dr. [Joseph] Warren was lost in the battle: the siege lasted about three hours. They killed about 50 of our men, wounded about 80: we killed of the king’s troops 896, - 92 officers, 104 sergeants.

Both Sleeper and Lunt listed an exact number of enemy casualties—a piece of intelligence it usually takes days or weeks to acquire. In Sleeper’s case, we can see that number was written right into the entry, not inserted later. That suggests these provincial soldiers didn’t write their diary entries on the evening after the battle but after time had passed, they had recovered, and they might have had less to do.

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.

The Islands of Elisha Leavitt

Elisha Leavitt (1713–1790) was a blacksmith in Hingham, and a lot more. He also traded in goods, “engaged in navigation,” and owned part of a fishing company.

In the 1760s Leavitt started to amass a particular sort of real estate: Boston harbor islands. He bought Georges Island in 1765, Lovells Island in 1767, Grape Island just off Hingham, and half of Gallops Island. All told that was over 150 acres of land useful for raising hay and pasturing livestock.

In 1771 Leavitt bought the big old Thaxter house, shown above in a stereograph from the New York Public Library. By that time his son Martin was at Harvard College, preparing to be a doctor. The family was edging into gentility.

A Hingham tradition held that Leavitt was “a bitter Tory.” However, his name doesn’t appear in the newspapers or in Massachusetts Provincial Congress records as a suspected Loyalist. Aside from one election as a constable decades before, he wasn’t politically visible.

Likewise, there’s a tradition that Leavitt let “Nathaniel Ray Thomas and other tories of Marshfield” into his mansion through a “secret door” in September 1774 and hid them until they could make their way to Boston. But no one claimed to have actually seen this hidden room in the Leavitt house before it was demolished. It doesn’t appear to have been an isolated estate, safe from prying eyes. 

I find it hard to believe Leavitt could be well known for supporting the royal government and continue to live peacefully in Hingham from 1774 into 1777 (when his name first appeared in the Boston papers in an advertisement for an until-recently-enslaved man named Primus) and beyond. Massachusetts towns weren’t very forgiving of “bitter Tories” in those years. I suspect Leavitt may have been less militant than his neighbors but was probably more neutral than Loyalist.

In The Islands of Boston Harbor (1935), Edward Rowe Snow wrote: “Realizing that the British officers needed hay for their horses quartered in Boston, [Leavitt] sent word for them to come down to Grape Island and gather the hay.” But Snow offered no documentary evidence for such an offer.

As men like William Harris, Elijah Shaw, and Henry Howell Williams found out in May 1775, the Royal Navy and army was collecting food and forage as they needed, paying owners who cooperated and just taking the supplies otherwise. After all, there was a war on. Given those alternatives, Leavitt may very well have preferred to take the money.

In any event, on 20 May Lt. John Barker of the 4th Regiment inside Boston wrote in his diary:

A Detachment of 1 Subaltern and 30 [men] sent to Crape Island, about 9 miles from Town in the Bay, to bring up hay.

Barker meant Grape Island, Elisha Leavitt’s nearest island property.

TOMORROW: The alarm.

The Cipher in Thomas Newell’s Diary

Last month I went to a one-day display of interesting Revolutionary documents from the Boston Public Library’s Archives & Special Collections department.

Among the items I saw for the first time was the diary of Thomas Newell (1749–1827), nephew and either protégé or employee of merchant and selectman Timothy Newell.

I’d read the text of that diary as published by the Massachusetts Historical Society and even quoted it for crucial details in The Road to Concord, but I didn’t know that the document still survived at the B.P.L.

Even more eye-catching, the archivists had opened it to a page about the lead-up to the Boston Tea Party, and one entry contains two lines of mysterious writing. Here’s a clip from the digitized version.

On 2 Dec 1773, Capt. James Bruce arrived in Boston harbor with the second shipment of East India Company tea. Thomas Newell did or saw something that evening. And the next day he joined two dozen other men in patrolling the docks to ensure no tea was landed.

I spoke to the archivists about the writing. Was it a cipher? An attempt to write in Hebrew? I put this diary on my list of things to investigate.

Now I can’t take all the credit for what I found because none other than the statesman Edward Everett worked out the cipher in the mid-1800s. He didn’t explain it, but he translated what Newell had written, and those translations are in the published transcript. That let me reverse-engineer the method.

As I suspected, Newell used a type of pigpen cipher, in which letters are written into tic-tac-toe grids and the boundaries of each cell stand in for the letter within. Newell’s cipher treats I and J as the same letter, and U and V as the same letter. So the grids are:

No dots over a symbol mean the letter is in the left-hand grid, one dot the middle grid, and two dots the right-hand grid. Thus, a square (all four boundaries) with no dot is an E, with one dot an O, and with two dots a Y.

That system let me decipher Newell’s secret lines. Or, rather, it let me confirm what Everett deciphered about a century and a half ago.

TOMORROW: So what did Thomas Newell write?

Aritfacts Lost, Strayed, or Stolen

The Journal of the American Revolution regularly asks its contributors to share a short answer to an intriguing question—a favorite event or person, a what-if possibility, a little-known example.

Usually I get intrigued, think about possible answers, often type up something to edit down to the requisite length. And then other things land on top of the task pile and I end up never sending in an answer.

But I was able to muster a reply to the latest challenge for contributors: “an artifact from the 1765–1805 era known to have existed well into the nineteenth century, that has since been stolen or gone missing.”

The various answers include one painting and three medals stolen in the second half of the twentieth century, several items of clothing that have probably been tossed out or disintegrated, and an entire financial archive.

Plus, Elias Boudinot’s handwritten memoir (which was, thankfully, transcribed and published before disappearing from archive shelves), two cannon captured at Saratoga and recaptured one war later, and possibly an entire Hessian colonel.

Another example occurs to me now, but I’m not sure it meets the criterion of having “existed well into the nineteenth century.”

On 16 Feb 1836, the printer Peter Edes, son of Benjamin Edes of the Boston Gazette and the Loyall Nine, wrote to his grandson:

It is a little surprising that the names of the tea-party were never made public: my father, I believe, was the only person who had a list of them, and he always kept it locked up in his desk while living. After his death Benj. Austin called upon my mother, and told her there was in his possession when living some very important papers belonging to the Whig party, which he wished not to be publicly known, and asked her to let him have the keys of the desk to examine it, which she delivered to him; he then examined it, and took out several papers, among which it was supposed he took away the list of the names of the tea-party, and they have not been known since.

Benjamin Edes died in 1803, his widow Martha in 1809, and this encounter would have happened between those dates, probably earlier. There were two politically active Benjamin Austins in Boston, father and son; the first died in 1806, the second in 1820.

Did Benjamin Edes really keep such a list, and why? Did Benjamin Austin do away with that document? If so, did he act because of the names that were on it or the names that weren’t on it?

Esther Sewall and “the female Connections”

In the fall of 1774 and winter of 1775, Massachusetts attorney general Jonathan Sewall appears to have worked as an advisor to the royal governor, Thomas Gage.

With the courts closed by crowds and Gage’s authority confined to Boston, there wasn’t much else for Sewall to do.

There’s a renewed debate about whether Sewall wrote the “Massachusettensis” essays published in those months. Patriots of the time believed he did, but his former law trainee Ward Chipman described copying them out for another Loyalist lawyer, Daniel Leonard. In 2018 a team led by Colin Nicolson reported in the New England Quarterly that their linguistic analysis pointed the finger back at Sewall.

In early April 1775, a dispatch from Lord Dartmouth brought instructions to arrest the leaders of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Gen. Gage might well have discussed the legalities of such arrests with his attorney general.

The president of that congress was John Hancock. His fiancée, Dorothy Quincy, was the sister of Esther Sewall, the attorney general’s wife. On 7 April, James Warren wrote to his own wife:

The Inhabitants of Boston are on the move. H[ancock] and A[dams] go no more into that Garrison, the female Connections of the first come out early this morning and measures are taken relative to those of the last.

Dorothy Quincy was soon staying with Hancock and Samuel Adams at the parsonage in Lexington.

As discussed yesterday, though Esther Sewall was married to a leading Massachusetts Loyalist, she was still emotionally attached to her family, friends, and neighbors on the Patriot side. She might have heard her husband talk of Hancock and Adams being arrested. Any military operation to do that could put her sister in danger.

Esther Sewall therefore had a motive and possible means to be the “daughter of liberty, unequally yoked in point of politics,” who sent a warning that British soldiers might arrest Hancock and Adams, as the Rev. William Gordon later wrote. When I first discussed that question, I didn’t see how Esther would have had access to inside information. Jonathan’s work with Gov. Gage offers a possible answer. (And, we must remember, this “daughter of liberty” did not have information on Concord as Gage’s real target.)

A few months into the siege of Boston, Jonathan and Esther Sewall sailed for London. They remained yoked together for the rest of his life. But neither of them was happy. For most of those years Jonathan was seriously depressed, often confined to his bedroom. Esther was terribly homesick. Jonathan blamed Esther for his difficulties. Yet she stayed with him.

Esther Sewall made two trips back to Massachusetts, first in 1789 and then in 1797, the year after she became a widow. Her grown sons Jonathan and Stephen became important lawyers in Canada, and she settled in Montreal.

In 1809, Esther sued in Massachusetts court for her dower property, confiscated thirty years before as part of Jonathan’s assets. Though she didn’t live to hear about it, the state’s highest judges decided in her favor. Then the Massachusetts General Court passed a special law to compensate the man who’d bought that property for what he had to pay her estate. So the Massachusetts government ended up paying Esther Sewall money.

“A daughter of liberty, unequally yoked in point of politics”?

In his 1788 history of the American Revolution, the Rev. William Gordon shared this anecdote about what led up to the British army march on Concord:

A daughter of liberty, unequally yoked in point of politics, sent word, by a trusty hand, to Mr. Samuel Adams, residing in company with Mr. [John] Hancock at Lexington, about thirteen miles from Charlestown, that the troops were coming out in a few days.

Gordon was close to Adams, as other stories in his book indicate. Adams clearly knew the identity of this “daughter of liberty,” and Gordon might have known as well, but the book kept her name secret. Presumably she was still expected to appear loyal to a husband whose politics she didn’t share.

Some authors have taken this early statement as evidence that Margaret Gage might have leaked her husband’s plan for the march on Concord to Dr. Joseph Warren just before he dispatched William Dawes to Lexington. I don’t think that holds up to scrutiny, from several angles.

First, this “daughter of liberty” provided information to Adams, not Warren, and “a few days” before the march, not the evening it began. There’s no reason to believe those two informants were the same person—nor any indication that Warren’s source was a woman. (Once again, I think the doctor got the dope from William Jasper.)

Second, this “daughter of liberty” was worried that Hancock and Adams would be arrested, as was Warren, but someone truly privy to Gen. Thomas Gage’s plan would have known he was focused on the military supplies in Concord.

Third, while Margaret Gage expressed sadness at the prospect of war between Britain and the American colonies, she never showed any affinity for the Patriot cause. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence she ever even met Patriot leaders.

I think there are many stronger candidates to be this “daughter of liberty, unequally yoked in point of politics.” (Gordon took that phrase “unequally yoked” from Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians.)

In my talk to the Colonial Society of Massachusetts last week, now viewable online, I shared my current idea of the most likely candidate.

TOMORROW: Gosh, this is suspenseful, isn’t it?

Yesterday’s Posts

I’m home from Battle Road 250, at which I watched the Parker’s Revenge tactical demonstration, said hello to several excellent local reenactors, heard a fine talk by Matthew Keagle of Fort Ticonderoga, and chatted with the Emerging Revolutionary War crew.

I capped that off with dinner with Lee Wright of The Pursuit of History, discussing different possible future projects, including upcoming weekend events.

During the day I was gratified to see two big newspapers air two of my pet theories about the start of the Revolutionary War.

The Washington Post published David Kindy’s article “Who really fired the shot that started the American Revolution?” in its Retropolis section. That delves into the mysterious first shot at Lexington.

(I suspect Kindy’s editor was responsible for the subhead referring to that as “the shot heard round the world,” which was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s term for the first return fire at Concord.)

Following up on a tip from me, Kindy focused on young Lexington militia man Solomon Brown.

“It’s not that I think he is definitely the man who fired first,” states historian and author J.L. Bell, who writes the daily blog Boston 1775 about the American Revolution. “But if I could go back in time, he’s the first person on my list that I would want to interrogate.”

The previous day, the same Washington Post section ran “Was a woman the informant who helped launch the American Revolution?” by Petula Dvorak. That article went over the theory advanced in the newspaper’s editorial a century ago (and circulating at least sixty years before that): that Margaret Gage leaked her husband’s plans for the Concord march to Patriot leaders.

That article prompted Dana Kennedy to write “Inside one of the biggest conspiracy theories of the American Revolution: That a woman may have kick-started the whole thing” for the New York Post.

Kennedy gave me a chance to spout off on weak points in the theory:

“I don’t think anybody actually leaked it,” Bell, who also runs the blog Boston 1775, told The Post. He believes that Joseph Warren and others had been gleaning information about British troop movements from a variety of sources and events.

“For one thing, Gage’s plan was to send troops to Concord, but Warren told them to just go to Lexington. Revere and Dawes went on to Concord on their own accord.”

If anything, Bell thinks the spy might have well been a pragmatic British-born knifemaker named William Jasper. He was renting a room to a British sergeant who may have unwittingly trusted him with the army’s plans.

“Unfortunately, that story is a lot less sexy and about a person we’ve never heard of,” Bell said.

Kennedy also quotes Alexander Cain of Historical Nerdery and Emily Murphy of the Salem Maritime National Historical Site. Sensible people who, of course, are on the same side of the debate as me.

[The photo above shows a British army reenacting unit in the Lexington town parade and comes from the Pursuit of History Twitter feed.]

Revisiting the Spies of 1775

I recently spoke in the Acton 250 series of talks on the start of the Revolutionary War.

My topic was “The Spies of 1775,” reeling off stories of disparate people drawn into intelligence-gathering efforts on both sides of the siege lines around Boston.

Since I didn’t want to go back over the spies at the center of The Road to Concord, I talked about:

• Henry Knox
• William Jasper
• Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr.
• Benjamin Thompson
• Julien-Alexandre Achard de Bonvouloir et Loyauté
• Rev. John Carnes
• Thomas Machin
• Mary Wenwood
• John Skey Eustace

The Acton Exchange just reported on the event:

Speaking to a capacity audience in the Francis Falkner Hearing Room on March 31, author and historian John L. Bell related a fascinating story of the spies used by the commanders on both sides of the conflict. While many informants chose to provide information due to loyalty to their cause, others were primarily driven by money, property, revenge, or self-promotion.

Acton 250 television has now posted its video recording of the event, neatly edited to remove evidence of some technical difficulties.

And here’s a postscript to that evening. On Friday I participated in the conference “1775: A Society on the Brink of War and Revolution” hosted by the Concord Museum and organized by the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society and and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

That program included Iris de Rode from the University of Virginia presenting on “French Observers of Early American Unrest: How Lexington and Concord Shaped France’s Entry into the American Revolution.” Among other people she discussed Bonvouloir, one of the spies I’d described in Acton, so I gossiped with her afterwards.

Bonvouloir and his companion, the Chevalier d’Amboise, were in London in the late summer of 1775. A British government agent pumped them for information. The Frenchmen described witnessing “the Affair of Lexington, and the Affair of the 17th [Bunker Hill].” They claimed to have met “Putnam and Ward.”

But Dr. de Rode said that there’s no evidence of similar reports in French government sources. Even though Bonvouloir lobbied to become his government’s agent to the American rebels, which would make his experience with the war relevant, he doesn’t appear to have told those stories to the French ambassador to pass on to the Foreign Ministry. So she thinks he was just talking through his no doubt fashionable hat.

The British intelligence service was definitely shadowing Bonvouloir in London, and he was definitely involved in a secret mission to Philadelphia at the end of 1775. So he fits into a talk on spies. But whether he was in New England in 1775 is in question. I must consider the possibility that in London he engaged in a disinformation campaign—not to help the Americans or the French but to make himself look more important.

Afternoon Talks in Lexington and Boston

Next week I have two afternoon speaking engagements that will also be available online to people in the know.

Monday, 14 April, 1:15 P.M.
Secrets on the Road to Concord
Lexington Veterans Association

In April 1775, British general Thomas Gage drew up plans for his troops to march nineteen miles into unfriendly territory. The Massachusetts Patriots, meanwhile, prepared to thwart the general’s mission. There was one goal Gage and his enemies shared: for different reasons, they all wanted to keep secret just what those troops would look for in Concord.

This will be the latest variation of my talk on Gen. Gage’s fateful mission. I continue to investigate that event, particularly the identity of the spy in Concord who sent him very good intelligence in very bad French. Alas, I don’t have any new discoveries to debut here.

The Zoom link for this talk is on this page. Other speakers in this series appear here.

Thursday, 17 April, 3 P.M.
The Mystery of Joseph Warren’s Informants
Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 87 Mount Vernon Street, Boston

According to one early source, as the last step before sending William Dawes and Paul Revere off to Lexington, Dr. Joseph Warren consulted with one crucial informant. Was that Margaret Gage? William Jasper? Another individual? Or is that story simply unreliable?

I’ll retrace my thinking on those questions and discuss the historiography around that issue. When did historians begin to investigate that person? How did the campaign for women’s suffrage color the discussion? And what does it mean that Dr. Warren’s intelligence was wrong?

This talk can be watched online by following the instructions at the bottom of this page.

Marriages in the Mortimer Household

According to the story Charles Collard Adams told in Middletown Upper Houses (1908), young William Keith was supposed to marry his mentor’s niece Martha soon after she arrived from Ireland in the early 1770s.

That mentor, Philip Mortimer, sent Keith off to Boston with a coach to pick up Martha and bring her back Middletown, Connecticut.

But things didn’t go according to Mortimer’s plans. On 10 May 1775, William Keith (c. 1749–1811) married Mary Lions Callahan (c. 1748–1820) of Cork, remembered as the niece’s maid Polly.

Other records say that on 25 June 1775 Philip Mortimer’s Irish-born niece, Ann Catharine Carnall (c. 1745–1817), married another Middletown businessman, George Starr (1740–1820).

The Keiths had their first child, named John after his paternal grandfather, who had died suddenly in February, on 4 December. That was about eight months after the marriage. In his book, Adams pushed the wedding date back to a more respectable January.

I suspect the account in Middletown Upper Houses, delicious as it is, had been massaged into more dramatic shape over the decades. It looks like Adams had the wrong name for the niece, and that woman probably arrived in New England years before the marriages, perhaps as early as 1760.

But I also suspect there’s a seed of truth in this tradition. As a teenager William joined the Mortimer household, which might already have included Ann. People might have expected the two young people to marry.

Instead, William married Polly, and a few weeks later Ann married George.

Were those couples happy? William and Polly Keith had five more children between 1777 and 1786. They remained prosperous as William opened his own ropewalk in Middletown.

George and Ann Starr had two children, Martha Mortimer (1777–1848) and Philip Mortimer (1783–1857), named after her aunt and uncle. He also remained wealthy, and he also owned a ropewalk in Middletown.

TOMORROW: What they did in the war.

Walking in Prince Mortimer’s Footsteps

Last week Connecticut Public reported how Middletown, Connecticut, renamed a street after Prince Mortimer, a man enslaved in that town before and after the Revolutionary War.

Prince Mortimer Avenue was once a walkway connecting the Irish-born trader Philip Mortimer’s mansion and his ropewalk, where he assigned his bondsman Prince to work as a spinner.

In 2006, Denis R. Caron published a book about the enslaved ropemaker: A Century in Captivity: The Life and Trials of Prince Mortimer, a Connecticut Slave.

More recently, John Mills has delved into Prince Mortimer’s life, sharing his work on his nonprofit website and at Enslaved.org. Mills led the push for memorializing Prince Mortimer, as the Middletown Press reported in 2023.

In a Commonplace review, Watson Dennison complained that Caron’s book about Prince Mortimer actually had very little to say about him, and a lot more about the Connecticut prison system in which he spent the last years of his life after being convicted of attempted murder. Dennison also felt that Caron mistakenly portrayed slavery in Connecticut as “a benign institution,” based on outdated analyses.

Studying the latest scholarship is something an author can control. Having detailed sources isn’t. For example, Caron found that no record of Prince Mortimer’s criminal trial survives. So unfortunately there’s no way to recount, much less assess, the evidence in that case.

The sources we do have can also be shaky. The earliest author to write about Prince Mortimer was Richard H. Phelps, who in 1844 published the first edition of his Newgate of Connecticut. Having grown up near that notorious prison made from the Simsbury copper mine, Phelps seems to have created this book for the edification of tourists.

Apparently Phelps conversed with Prince Mortimer himself before his death in 1834. He said the aged inmate was “supposed to be 110 years old,” having been born in Guinea and kidnapped to America as a child. But of course we don’t have records to corroborate that age.

Phelps also described Prince Mortimer as an a war veteran:

He was a servant to different officers in the Revolutionary War—had been sent on errands by General [George] Washington, and said he had “straddled many a cannon when fired by the Americans at the British troops.”

Again, there’s no other record of such service. (And that’s not a safe way to fire a cannon.)

On the one hand, we want to respect the personal statements of Prince Mortimer, wrenched away from his family and terribly victimized through life. On the other hand, exaggerating one’s age, military service, and proximity to the beloved Washington were common fibs for old men in the early 1800s, white or black. Such claims might be most understandable coming from an old man forced into prison after a lifetime of slave labor who needed all the sympathy he could get. 

The earliest contemporaneous evidence about Prince Mortimer appears to be Philip Mortimer’s will, signed in 1792. That document makes clear that “my Negro Prince” was a valuable asset. While the merchant bequeathed freedom to most of the people he enslaved on his death, he wanted Prince and another man, Peter, to “be kept at spinning” in the ropewalk for the benefit of his niece’s husband, George Starr, for another three years.

It might be a mistake to accept Phelps’s 1844 statements as facts and anchor all other evidence about Prince Mortimer’s life to them. Caron and Mills describe Philip Mortimer sending his enslaved man Prince to war in 1780. Even though that man’s skills would probably have made him more valuable, to both his owner and the American cause, in the ropewalk. And even though he was, in their analysis, in his fifties and in poor health. And even though there’s no record of such an action.

At the same time, there’s solid contemporaneous evidence that Philip Mortimer enslaved Prince Mortimer in Middleton, making him work in the ropewalk. He did walk the path now known as Prince Mortimer Avenue as an enforced laborer.

TOMORROW: The Mortimers of Boston.

Who Wrote the “Account of Lexington”?

In 1953 J. E. Tyler published an article in the William and Mary Quarterly titled “An Account of Lexington in the Rockingham Mss. at Sheffield.” 

This account appeared in two letters, the first dated 23 Apr 1775 and the second written a short time later. They were addressed to a friend named “Rogers,” with whom the writer had served “at Jamaica,” and offered news and good wishes for “the Admiral.”

That appears to have been Adm. Augustus Keppel (1725–1786, shown here), who brought the letters (or copies of them) to the Marquess of Rockingham’s cottage in Wimbledon. Ultimately the marchioness filed those copies or further copies.

Tyler wrote: “it is the more unfortunate that the signatures, though copied along with the main text of the letters, have been heavily cancelled, since it is now virtually impossible to establish the identity of the writer.” The clues that remain show that that person:

• wrote from “Empress of Russia Boston April 23th.”
• signed “what appears to be the initial letter ‘J’” at the start of his name.
• described himself as “an Old Valiant.”
• planned also to write “to my precious Girls.”
• promised to show Rogers’s letter to “The General [Thomas Gage] and Earl Percy.”

Tyler then hazards a guess that the letter writer was the master of the troop transport Empress of Russia, listed in an Admiralty Office record from 1776 as John Crozier.

However, as reported yesterday, Crozier died in November 1774. He had been in command of the Empress of Russia, and his name might have lingered in some naval records, but he didn’t see the start of the war.

Documents in Gage’s papers confirm that the Empress of Russia was in Boston harbor from April 1775 to the end of the year, when it sailed to the Caribbean for supplies. The commander of the vessel in those months was Lt. John Bourmaster (1736–1807), agent for all the transports to Boston and thus a liaison between navy and army.

Bourmaster was a merchant seaman for most of the 1750s, passing the exam to become a Royal Navy lieutenant in late 1759. His first assignment was H.M.S. Valiant, commanded by Adm. Keppel from 1759 to 1764. Starting in late 1762, Keppel was in command of the Jamaica station. Keppel’s secretary was George Rogers, who would be on the Admiralty Board by the end of the war.

After a slow start, Bourmaster’s Royal Navy career also took off. He became a captain in 1777, a rear admiral in 1794, and a full admiral in 1804. The year 1797 saw the marriage of “Harriet, youngest daughter of Admiral John Bourmaster, of Titchfield”—meaning he had more than one daughter.

Thus, all the clues in those letters are consistent with the writer being Lt. John Bourmaster. 

Identifying John Adams’s Mystery Correspondent

Sometime in 1778, John Adams, on his first diplomatic mission for the U.S. of A., passed on a bunch of reading material to Edmé Jacques Genet, director of the French Foreign Ministry’s bureau for translation.

Genet was assembling items for Affaires de l’Angleterre et de l’Amérique (Affairs of England and America), a surreptitious propaganda effort by the French government. (This Genet was the father of Edmond-Charles Genet, the French diplomat whose activities in America irked George Washington while Adams was Vice President.)

Among the material that Adams turned over was the 1775 volume of The Remembrancer, a round-up of the year’s news published in London by John Almon. And in that book Adams discovered a couple of letters he had written himself:

Looking over the Remembrancer, for the Year 1775, found to my Surprize, having never seen this Remembrancer before, two Letters from a Gentleman in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, to his Friend in London, one dated Feb. 10 1775 and the other Jany 21. 1775. They are found in Pages 10.11 and 12 of the Remembrancer for that Year.

Genet never had those letters translated, but many American authors have reprinted the two letters from The Remembrancer, not knowing who wrote them.

Accepting Adams’s claim, the editors of the John Adams Papers included those two letters from early 1775 in their 1977 volume of his correspondence. At the time they lamented, “he failed to mention the intended recipient.”

One clue might be that the letters were published as sent “to his Friend in London” as opposed to “to a Gentleman in London.”

The answer started to become clear when scholars spotted the second of those letters in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. Adams’s correspondent was the British historian Catharine Macaulay. His exchange with her went on longer than previously recognized.

There appear to be some unanswered questions still. The letter published with the date of 10 Feb 1775 (250 years ago today) was actually dated 28 Dec 1774. Did Almon assign the February date from when that text was published in a British newspaper?

That full letter was published in 2020 in The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay. The part that appeared in The Remembrancer was just part of the complete text.

Finally, the letter that Almon dated to 21 Jan 1775 isn’t part of the Macaulay Papers, at the Gilder Lehrman Institute or published. It’s possible that Adams sent it to someone else in London. But he knew hardly anyone there, and there’s no hint in The Remembrancer or Adams’s letter to Genet that the two letters went to different people. So probably the missing letter went to Macaulay but just hasn’t been found.

Judging by the 10 February/28 December letter, that 21 January letter probably:

• contained more material than Almon printed.
• wasn’t dated 21 January.

“Secrets on the Road to Concord” via Fort Ti, 9 Feb.

On Sunday, 9 February, at 2:00 P.M., I’ll deliver an online talk about “Secrets on the Road to Concord” in Fort Ticonderoga’s Author Series.

The event description says:

The British march to Concord in April 1775 set off the Revolutionary War, but what exactly were the redcoats looking for? Looking at General Thomas Gage’s papers reveals that his main goal was to destroy four brass cannon that Patriots had spirited out of Boston months before. In the early months of 1775, while the provincials worked to build an artillery force, General Gage used military spies and paid agents to locate those weapons. Those maneuvers led to a fatal clash on the road to Concord.

This event is free for Fort Ti members, $10 for others. The webpage asks people to register by 5:00 P.M. on Friday, 7 February, in order to receive the link.

Fort Ticonderoga has a long history, but many people know it as the source of artillery pieces that Col. Henry Knox brought back to the siege of Boston in 1776. (He also collected cannon from Crown Point and other sites along Lake Champlain.)

Years later, as secretary of war, Knox returned two of Boston’s four brass cannon to Massachusetts. But first he had them engraved with the names “HANCOCK” and “ADAMS,” and this story:

Sacred to Liberty.
This is one of four cannon,
which constituted the whole train
of Field Artillery,
possessed by the British colonies of
North America,
at the commencement of the war.
on the 19th of april 1775.

This cannon
and its fellow
belonging to a number of citizens of
Boston,
were used in many engagements
during the war.

The other two, the property of the
Government of Massachusetts
were taken by the enemy.
By order of the United States
in Congress assembled
May 19th, 1788.

Those engravings made those two cannon unique and easily traceable, which helped my research immensely. At the same time, the words promulgated a false picture of the provincials’ artillery force.

The Massachusetts committee of safety had far more than “four cannon” under its control in April 1775—more than three dozen, in fact. It had only four small brass (bronze) cannon, but it had a bunch of iron guns suitable as “Field Artillery.” Six of those cannon went onto Bunker Hill, and five were lost.

In addition, if we’re talking about “the British colonies of North America,” Rhode Island sent brass field-pieces to the siege under Capt. John Crane—who became one of Knox’s top artillery officers. New Hampshire had artillery from the raid on Fort William and Mary. And I’m not even bothering to count what other colonies had for their militia companies and shore fortifications.

I’m not sure why Knox told the history that way, especially since his audience included veterans and insiders like himself who knew the whole story. That telling does enhance the importance of his own mission to New York.

I also don’t get the distinction Knox made between one pair owned by “a number of citizens of Boston” and the other by “the Government of Massachusetts” since they were all considered Massachusetts militia guns and he was returning the “citizens” guns to the state.

“Died leaving a memory respected”

In the fall of 1845, as I described yesterday, New Hampshire newspapers published a pair of articles printing Cochran family lore, particularly the story of young James Cochran’s brief and bloody captivity by Natives.

Neither article named its source, but both contained clues.

The first, published in the Exeter News-Letter, described a daughter of James Cochran this way:

well remembered by many of the surviving inhabitants of Derry and Londonderry. She is particularly recollected as a “maiden lady,” highly celebrated as a beauty and a wit, when at an age she was not averse to own, and even delicate and shrewd when far advanced in the “sear and yellow leaf.” Her tongue was a two edged sword, and woe to him who recklessly called forth its exercise. She was for many years a distinguished Mistress of the rod and ferule and died leaving a memory respected, and was gathered to her fathers—for, husband, ”she ne’er had ony.”

I take that as a hint that the writer “G.” had personally known this woman as a schoolteacher (“Mistress of the rod and ferule”). He may well have heard the family stories from her but didn’t write them down until after her death and thus had no way of assaying this ”tradition.”

In contrast, the editors of the Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics dropped that character sketch entirely from their version. Perhaps it didn’t sit right with their new source: a living granddaughter of James Cochran through his son John, and thus a niece of the teacher.

That granddaughter said she had known her grandfather in his old age:

Capt. James Cochran removed to St. Johns, New-Brunswick, where he closed his life in 1795, at 84 years of age. This lady was with him several years, watched over him in his declining years, and attended his dying bed. She says, he never used to speak of the Indian adventure with exultation. The anniversary of that day he ever observed with a melancholy, grateful feeling—regarding it as a merciful providence, than as an achievement of personal heroism.

Thus, she might have heard James Cochran’s story of captivity and escape from the man himself, decades later.

However, instead of getting that granddaughter to tell the story as she had heard it, the Portsmouth Journal mostly reprinted the earlier article, now with her endorsement. The second version includes a little more detail about James getting out of his bonds and his canoe sinking, but that’s it. Otherwise, the second account is a word-for-word replication of the first.

We’re thus presented with a story that appears to be one remove from James Cochran (James —> granddaughter), but was actually in some respects multiple steps away (James —> daughter —> “G.” —> granddaughter?).

The Portsmouth Journal also ran an expanded version of the Exeter News-Letter’s anecdote about James Cochran’s son at Fort William and Mary. It offered important corrections like:

• That man was John Cochran, not a second James.
• He “was a cousin and not the father, as has been stated, of Lord Admiral Cochran.”

(That had to be a distant cousinage at best.)

Nonetheless, the second telling once again adopted some sentences word for word from the first. John Cochran’s daughter told her own story in part through the voice of “G.,” whom she had apparently never met.

TOMORROW: Those anecdotes from the fort.

(The picture above, courtesy of Find a Grave, shows a stone in East Derry, New Hampshire, carved “In Memory of James Cochran…,” who died in 1795 “in ye. 85th. year.” Given the granddaughter’s description of his death in St. John, this would be a cenotaph, not a gravestone.)

Christopher Machell: Not Wounded at Bunker Hill

Earlier this month I saw a Bluesky posting about a disabled artist named Christopher Machell, who had lost an arm at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Perhaps because the name was unfamiliar to me, I assumed that was an enlisted man. I sought more information since sources on the experiences of British privates are hard to come by.

I soon realized that Machell was an officer, not a private. The Annual Report of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society for 1907 stated:

Christopher Machell was born in 1747. He was Lt.-Colonel in the 15th Regiment of Foot, and served with the British Forces under General [Thomas] Gage in the American War of Independence. the 17th June, 1775, he was present at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, and in that fiercely contested and sanguinary engagement the gallant Colonel lost an arm.

The source of this information was Machell’s grandson. Unfortunately, he was wrong on several counts.

First, the 15th Regiment wasn’t in Boston in 1775.

Second, Machell wasn’t a lieutenant-colonel during the war. British Army Lists show that he was a lieutenant when the fighting began and promoted to captain on 9 Oct 1775.

In the 1775 Army List, Machell was the least senior captain in the regiment. In 1783 he was the most senior captain because all of the others had been promoted, died, or retired.

According to Robert John Jones’s History of the 15th (East Yorkshire) Regiment, Machell received a promotion to major in June 1783 and retired at that rank in 1789.

So how did Machell come by the rank of lieutenant colonel? Because in 1807 he was on the War Office’s list of “Persons appointed INSPECTING FIELD OFFICERS of Yeomanry and Volunteer Corps in GREAT BRITAIN, with the Rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Army while so employed.” In other words, he was an army veteran called in to inspect militia units. I don’t know whether there was any actual work in that appointment or it was just a courtesy.

What about that wound? According to Burke’s Landed Gentry, Capt. Machell “lost his arm in the battle of New York.” The 15th Regiment was indeed part of the Crown’s New York campaign in 1776, fighting in the Battles of Brooklyn, White Plains, and Fort Washington.

When Machell was wounded is unclear. He wasn’t listed among the casualties in Gen. Sir William Howe’s 27 August report, and the British army and press were much better at reporting wounded officers than wounded privates. It’s conceivable Machell was wounded not in any of the big memorable battles but in the ongoing skirmishing around New York.

The 15th Regiment remained in North America through 1778, when it was moved to the Caribbean. In 1781 the French captured the 15th on St. Eustatius, setting them free the next year. The brief profiles of Machell don’t say anything about him being a prisoner or war, hinting he may not have been with the regiment then.

All that raises the question of why, if Capt. Machell actually lost an arm in the first three years of the war, he remained on the regiment’s roll through the end. Jones’s History of the 15th may contain an answer, but I don’t have access to the whole book.

TOMORROW: Arguing over Crackenthorpe.