“I do therefore...free him and discharge him”

The New England Historic Genealogical Society is offering an online look at the 28 May 1776 document by which John Hoar of Lincoln emancipated his enslaved worker Cuff. (This article is in the N.E.G.H.S. collection, but was discussed at a Massachusetts Historical Society meeting in 1894. Hmmm.) In the transcription, “the P. Cuff” and “his P. master” should be “the s[ai]d. Cuff” and “his s[ai]d. master.”

I Googled to see if some of the phrases in this document—“he now desiring to be made Free”; “without the denial or contradiction of me”—show up in other manumissions, and didn’t find examples. The term “free [him] and discharge him” has precedents, but in laws covering debts. So it appears that a manumission was still rare enough that Hoar didn’t have formulaic language to follow.

The Seth Kaller documents firm is displaying another manumission document, this one from Stephen Hopkins, chief justice of Rhode Island, in 1772. If anyone would know the legal formulas, Hopkins would. But the language he used to free “a certain Negro Man Named Saint Jago” was mostly religious.

As for the man freed in Lincoln, John C. MacLean describes what few other things we know about him in “Resources for Researching Massachusetts Slaves and Slaveholders”:

Cuff Hoar...was paying a poll tax by 1778. Like many freed slaves, Cuff would soon change his name. In the 1780 tax list the name “Cuff Hoar” was written and then crossed out. His new name of “Cuff Kneeland” was written below. Vital records show that Cuff Kneeland married Sudbury’s Dinah Young on 1 February 1781, but regrettably he died the following month.

Dinah Kneeland, Nealon, or Nealen of Sudbury then married another former slave, Cato Walker of Worcester, on 22 Jan 1783. Dinah was Walker’s third wife, after Dido Chandler in 1771 and Prudence Williams in 1778. He had a son named Cato, born in 1779.

In 1784, the Worcester town meeting authorized its selectmen “to provide a Black Smiths anvel” for Cato Walker as either a loan or a grant—evidently a small-business stimulus to allow him to support his family. That year the town was reimbursing people for food they gave Walker. By 1785, however, Walker was on the tax rolls, though he could pay only a portion of what he owed.

According to their introduction to From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives, by B. Eugene McCarthy and Thomas L. Doughton, Walker was one of five African-American heads of household on Worcester tax lists in the late 1780s. His name also appears in Stephen Salisbury’s accounts from the 1790s. Cato Walker apparently died in 1816.

Inspiring? Excessively Diverting?

John Fea at The Way of Improvement Leads Home has listed Boston 1775 as one of five “inspiring” blogs.

And the Widow Black at Slightly Obsessed named Boston 1775 as one of seven “excessively diverting” blogs.

I want to acknowledge both designations with thanks, and particular gratitude in that they helped me find other interesting blogs I didn’t know about.

Now I need to put more thought into which further blogs I might apply the same adjectives to.

Memory Creep in Action

The story of Maj. John Pitcairn’s death—like a lot of other dubious stories I write about here on Boston 1775—demonstrates a phenomenon I call “memory creep.” Legends grow not because people set out to tell false stories, but because as time goes on they let their stories become a little clearer and more meaningful, their ancestors’ actions braver and more determined, their home town heroes more significant.

A recent email from the New England Historic Genealogical Society brought my attention to an essay from Dr. John Agnew of Fort Myers, Florida, pleading for truth in obituaries, which shows memory creep at work today:

I read an obituary of a man described as a veteran of World War II, and the dates supplied indicated that he was 12 years old when the war ended. There are two possibilities: he really was in the war at that age, therefore his death should be reported in detail on the front page, or the family should check those numbers again. (A Marine won a Medal of Honor at age 14, but that was hardly an everyday event.)

The next area involves placing a person’s life in Historical Perspective. Another News-Press obituary related that a man enlisted in the Navy the day after Pearl Harbor and fought in the Battle of Wake Island, which events actually began concurrently. Family legends tend to grow like that, a trend that began long before World War II and should be rectified, or at least reconsidered. . . .

When it comes to Interpersonal Relationships, particularly of the marital sort, one should be especially careful. I first thought about this several years ago, when a television newsman died. A lengthy magazine obituary reported that he was “a devoted husband and father,” and also that he had been married four times and had many affairs, during and between. I thought then that “devoted husband” must have some alternative meaning that I had missed.

Similarly, it sometimes appears that almost everyone who lived through the American Revolution and died in the U.S. of A. had been a staunch Patriot throughout that conflict. Well over half the men who served in the Continental Army around Boston in 1775-76 appear to have fought in the actual Battle of Bunker Hill (a surprising number of them shooting Maj. Pitcairn). And it’s hard to find Patriots in Boston who’ve never been placed at the Tea Party.

Making Meaning of Major Pitcairn

So what’s the right question about the story of Maj. John Pitcairn’s death in the Battle of Bunker Hill? I think it’s why so many stories—some quite dubious—have grown up around that fatally wounded Marine when he was only one of 226 British men killed that day (including nineteen officers).

We humans want stories with meaning. That instinct might be especially strong when it comes to boiling down big, chaotic events such as battles, and even stronger when they’re battles our side has lost—and, really, everybody lost the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Pitcairn was the officer in charge of the British troops that fired on the militia at Lexington. Though he didn’t order those soldiers to fire, many Americans in the early republic believed he did. Therefore, his death two months later was bound to be treated by American chroniclers as historic justice.

As a result, a lot of stories about killing British officers at Bunker Hill appear to have gravitated toward Pitcairn. So a man who shot an officer (such as Phinehas Whitney and Benjamin Webber) was eventually credited with shooting Pitcairn. Men who simply aimed at an officer (such as Joseph Spalding) were said to have shot Pitcairn.

And as the decades passed, that shooting became the battle in miniature. The proud British officer mounts the embattled redoubt, boasts too loudly (saying the provincials have fled, “The day is ours”), and is shot down. And shot not just by any soldier, but by a “boy” or “black,” the most common of common men. How republican is that! (It’s not surprising that people whose idea of a republic included equal rights for all citizens were most vigorous in promoting the story of an individual soldier shooting Pitcairn.)

For Pitcairn to have been shot as he moved forward in a body with his Marines—to have been shot by multiple soldiers, impossible to identify for certain—to have been shot without having a memorable verbal exchange with his killer—that just wasn’t meaningful enough. It might even get too close to the truth, which was that two groups of close to three thousand men were trying to kill each other, all in the name of British values, over a small peninsula that turned out to be virtually meaningless in the war.

(On the other side of the battle line, Pitcairn’s comrades also sought meaning in his death. Gen. John Burgoyne praised how Pitcairn’s son had carried him from the battlefield and bade farewell, saying the incident belonged “in the hands of a good painter or historian.” A story arose that many of Pitcairn’s Marines wailed with his son that they, too, had lost a father, demonstrating the loyalty of his men. And then there’s the legend of the major’s stoic death somewhere in the North End.)

So did any of the Massachusetts men who’ve been credited with killing Pitcairn have a hand in doing so? I suspect the most commonly named shooter, Peter Salem, got linked to Pitcairn’s death only because Emory Washburn read about that “black soldier named Salem” in Samuel Swett’s history, recalled a black veteran of the battle named Salem from Leicester, and put 2 and 2 together to make 5 for the glory of his home town. Washburn never cited any more specific evidence for his claim about Peter Salem.

I think Salem Poor is more likely the man whom John Winslow recalled as the “black soldier named Salem.” Salem Poor might also be the “negro man belonging to Groton” whom the Rev. Dr. Jeremy Belknap wrote about. He wasn’t from Groton, but Col. William Prescott—who tried to get Poor special recognition from the Massachusetts legislature—was from that town, and people might have assumed it was Poor’s home as well. Whether Winslow correctly reported what Poor did to be commended is another question, but I think the earliest sources put him on top of the list of Pitcairn’s likeliest killers.

As for the other guys, their stories imply that they killed other officers in different circumstances—somebody had to have done so, after all. However, some of those stories appeared in print so late, and were shaped by the growing legend of Maj. Pitcairn’s death, that they might not be reliable.

But when it comes to assigning credit, I think we have to remember Pitcairn died in a pitched battle which involved thousands of men. Most of the provincial soldiers probably never had a clear shot at the Marines major, but by staying in the redoubt and manning the rail fence they held off two British advances while inflicting the worst casualties that army would suffer in the entire war. In the middle of that chaos, Maj. John Pitcairn was fatally wounded—which isn’t that surprising. All the provincial soldiers at Bunker Hill helped to kill Maj. Pitcairn.

COMING UP: Sooner or later, what happened to Maj. John Pitcairn’s body? (But first, another break from CSI: Colonial Boston.)

“He received four balls in his body.”

And at last it’s time to unveil the Boston 1775 answer to that burning question: Which provincial soldier killed Maj. John Pitcairn of the British Marines as he led the final assault on the provincial redoubt atop Breed’s Hill? Was it—

• Peter Salem, as most historians have written since the mid-1800s?
• Salem Poor, commended for his conduct in that battle?
• Joseph Spalding, credited in his 1820 obituary?
• Benjamin Webber of Gloucester?
• Phinehas Whitney of Maine?
• An unnamed boy who became a shoemaker by 1807?

Do we even have enough information to hazard an answer? How much longer can I draw this out?

Okay, okay. My answer to that question is:

Wrong question.

Let’s go back and look at the earliest description of how Pitcairn was shot, the Rev. Dr. John Eliot’s note in his almanac for 1775:

He had been wounded twice; then putting himself at the head of his forces, he faced danger, calling out, “Now for the glory of the marines!” He received four balls in his body.

So according to someone who was actually in Boston when Pitcairn died, the major was struck at least four times, perhaps six. Even if he was wounded twice with a single shot (a possibility with eighteenth-century muskets), that still means there were multiple shooters.

Furthermore, the June 1775 letters of Lt. John Waller cast doubt on Samuel Swett’s 1819 story of Maj. Pitcairn being shot as he “mounted [the works]...and exultingly cried ‘the day is ours’.” And on the 1807 battlefield guide’s tale that “the major called to his soldiers to hasten their speed, as the enemy had abandoned the fort.”

According to Waller, Pitcairn was fatally shot at “the Talus of the Redoubt”—at the bottom of the rise and the wall the provincials had built the night before. Between the Marines and the redoubt were “Hedges,” “the Talus,” “the Ditch,” and “the Parapet.” Furthermore, those British troops were suffering a “very heavy and severe Fire from the Enemy in the Redoubt,” so no one would have considered it empty.

Waller recalled that his men were pinned down in that spot for “Ten Minutes or near a Quarter of an Hour”—in which time Maj. Pitcairn was shot and his son started to carry him back to the waterside. It probably took more minutes for Waller to regain command of that unit and coordinate the final attack with two superior officers as he described. Maj. Pitcairn wasn’t shot during the final storming of the redoubt, as the stories have come down to us, but a significant period before.

TOMORROW: So, jeez already, which provincial soldiers were responsible for Maj. Pitcairn’s death?

The Growing Memory of Peter Salem

As I noted a couple of days ago, the first history of Framingham published after Peter Salem died there said nothing about the town native fighting at Bunker Hill, much less shooting Maj. John Pitcairn. Elsewhere in New England, other men or families appear to have been making their own claims to having killed the British Marines commander.

Within a couple decades, however, histories were not only naming Salem as Pitcairn’s slayer, but they were illustrating his feat. The picture above first appeared in William Cooper Nell’s The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855), though this version comes from Edward A. Johnson’s A School History of the Negro Race in America (1890). It’s clearly derived from John Trumbull’s painting The Death of General Warren, with the dramatic young white man standing in front of Salem on the canvas shooed out of sight.

Nell’s book was not only a pioneering work of African-American history; it was also part of the Abolitionist argument for emancipation and equal rights for black Americans. Nell and other authors used the story of Peter Salem as evidence of black contributions to the U.S. of A.

Abolitionists worked, against some indifference or hostility, to preserve the memory of that soldier. For example, Theodore Parker wrote to the historian George Bancroft on 16 Mar 1858:

In the engravings of the battle when I was a boy, the black man, Peter Salem, appears in the act of shooting Major Pitcairn; but now-a-days a white man is put in his place. Richard Frothingham, in his account of Bunker Hill battle, makes no mention of Peter. He appears, however, on some of the bills [i.e., currency] of the Monument, Freeman’s and Charlestown Banks.

Eventually, in the same way that Crispus Attucks became better known than other Boston Massacre victims, so Peter Salem became better known than most other veterans of Bunker Hill. They served as defiant symbols of African-American patriotism.

The engraving below, captioned “The shooting of Major Pitcairn (who had shed the first blood at Lexington),” was published by Benson J. Lossing in the late 1800s. Lossing was selling books, not promoting Abolitionism, but by that point he and his engraver had to depict the man who shot Pitcairn as black. It was part of standard American history.
Abolitionists also pointed to Salem Poor, an African-American recognized in 1775 as having fought especially well at Bunker Hill. But because it’s not clear what Poor had actually done to earn officers’ praise, his story never gained as much traction. (No doubt because of that vacuum, a story much like Peter Salem’s developed around Salem Poor, as I described back here.)

Those two men became symbols for many more non-white men who fought with the provincial forces early in the Revolutionary War—over a hundred documented in George Quintal’s report Patriots of Color. It’s easier for us to remember individuals with names than to remember large groups.

Finally, while researching this series of postings, I realized that a third name has become linked to the death of Maj. Pitcairn. In a footnote in The First Year of the American Revolution (1934), Allen French suggested that the American with the best claim to having killed Pitcairn was “Salem Prince, a negro.” That name appeared subsequently in Richard Ketchum’s Decisive Day, John Jakes’s Rebels, David H. Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride, and A. J. Langguth’s Patriots. Some websites now say that Salem Prince was, like Salem Middlesex, simply another name for Peter Salem.

However, Quintal found no record of any soldier named Salem Prince in the provincial army in 1775. And I can’t rouse any mention of a “Salem Prince” through Google Books before French’s footnote. I fear it was a simple error that’s now muddied the waters, which were never clear to begin with.

TOMORROW: My conclusions about who killed Maj. John Pitcairn.

Observing Presidents’ Day at Washington’s Headquarters

For nearly the whole time Gen. George Washington was in Massachusetts overseeing the siege of Boston, he lived and worked at the Cambridge mansion owned by John Vassall. A supporter of the royal government, Vassall had moved into Boston in September 1774 to be under the protection of the British army, and didn’t have any say in how the Massachusetts Provincial Congress chose to use his house.

That mansion is now a National Park Service site, named after its most famous nineteenth-century owner and inhabitant, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The federal budget doesn’t allow the site to open for drop-in tours until May, but next week there are special events:

• On 18-21 February, Wednesday through Saturday, there will be guided house tours focusing on Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and the family’s connections to other Presidents. Those tours will start at 11:30 A.M. and 1:00, 2:00, and 3:00 P.M. There’s a fee of $3 per person over age sixteen, and each tour can accommodate about a dozen people.
  
• On Saturday, 21 February, at 2:00 P.M., Robert Cameron Mitchell, emeritus professor from Clark University, will give a talk on “Faded Memory: Longfellow House as Washington’s Most Important Headquarters.” Come hear what makes the Vassall house more significant than Valley Forge, Morristown, or Newburgh. This talk is free and open to the public.
  

To reserve space at any of these events, call Longfellow National Historic Site at 617-876-4491.

There will also be tours of Longfellow House on Friday, 27 February, in honor of the poet’s birthday. At 10:00 A.M. on Saturday, 28 February, retiring Park Service ranger Paul Blandford will speak on “Longfellow—From the Heart” at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Two More Suspects in the Death of Maj. Pitcairn

And here are two more claimants to the honor of having killed Maj. John Pitcairn at the Battle of Bunker Hill. The last two I stumbled across on my own. For these two names I’m indebted to the research of Mark Nichipor of the National Park Service, as reported in George Quintal’s Patriots of Color.

David Noyes’s History of Norway, Maine (1852) recorded this story from a man named Phinehas Whitney, who died in 1830 at age eighty:

He was in the battle of Bunker Hill, and I have often heard him tell the story of that memorable contest. He said that just as he had put his last charge into his gun, the British forces had about reached their rude breastwork; a British officer mounted the embankment, and cried out to his soldiers to “rush on, as the fort was their own;” Whitney then took deliberate aim at him, and, to use his own language, “let him have it,” and he fell into the entrenchment. He [Whitney] then clubbed his musket, and cleared his way the best he could, and finally made good his retreat.

That account doesn’t single out Pitcairn, but Charles F. Whitman made the connection in his own 1924 history of the Maine town. Whitney’s story dovetailed so nicely with what Samuel Swett had first printed in 1819—except for the anecdote involving another provincial soldier.

But that’s not all! James R. Pringle’s History of the Town and City of Gloucester (1892) credited local son Benjamin Webber with shooting Pitcairn:

At the rail fence, young Webber’s attention was drawn to a British officer on horseback actively engaged in directing the movements of his troops. It was Major Pitcairn, brave, but somewhat boastful. “Do you see that officer on horseback?” remarked Webber to a comrade, “Well, I am going to try and bring him down.” Raising on his knee, the young farmer took unerring aim, fired with deadly effect and Major Pitcairn fell mortally wounded. . . .

Such is the story told the writer some eight years ago by the late Mr. Benjamin Webber, a man of the highest respectability and veracity, whose descendents still occupy the old homestead erected on the land granted to their ancestor Michael, at Fresh Water Cove. This account is here given to the public for the first time

This story greatly resembles an incident in Gen. Henry Dearborn’s account of the battle, published in 1818:

An officer was discovered to mount near the position of Gen. [William] Howe, on the left of the British line, and ride towards our left; which a column was endeavoring to turn. This was the only officer on horseback during the day, and as he approached the rail fence, I heard a number of our men observe, “there,” “there,” “see that officer on horseback”—“let us fire,” “no, not yet,”—“wait until he Sets to that little knoll,”—“now”—when they fired and he instantly fell dead from his horse. It proved to be Major Pitcairn, a distinguished officer.

However, the letters of Lt. John Waller show that Pitcairn was with his Marines, not near Howe; on foot, not mounted; and killed at the redoubt, not along the rail fence.

Furthermore, if I read Pringle’s words correctly, he spoke to Benjamin Webber in 1884, or more than a century after the battle. Perhaps the author meant a descendant of the same name, in which case the story came to him second- or third-hand. All in all, I find Webber’s account less than convincing.

TOMORROW: Why we remember Peter Salem instead of all these other guys.

“Supposed to be the man who killed Maj. Pitcairn”?

A couple of days ago I noted a series of early reports that the American soldier who killed Maj. John Pitcairn at the Battle of Bunker Hill was a black man named Salem. Was that man Peter Salem or Salem Poor? Or should we be looking at other men entirely?

Here’s the account recorded by Charles William Janson in The Stranger in America, published in 1807, as he described touring the site of the battle in Charlestown a couple of years before:

By a man whom we met on the road, we were informed, that when the British forces rallied, and again ascended the hill, led on by Major Pitcairn, they had advanced near to the redoubt, when the major called to his soldiers to hasten their speed, as the enemy had abandoned the fort. A boy, who, he observed, was then [i.e., in 1807?] a shoemaker in Boston, replied from behind a trench: “We are not all gone,” and instantly fired his musket, which proved the death of Major Pitcairn.

Richard Ketchum picked up the cry of “We are not all gone!” in his 1962 history of the battle, Decisive Day. However, he implies that boy wasn’t the shooter.

Next, here’s an obituary from the Boston Gazette on 3 Aug 1820:

At Chelmsford, Mr. Joseph Spalding, aged 64.—He was one of the heroes of Bunker Hill;—he fired the first gun, and was supposed to be the man who killed Maj. Pitcairn, having frequently declared he took deliberate aim at him.

Spalding would have been nineteen years old in 1775, the right age for military service. As for firing the first gun and shooting Pitcairn, that seems like a big claim. In fact, most of the time Spalding didn’t talk about shooting the major. His local epitaph said:

He was among the brave asserters & defenders of the liberties of his country at Bunker Hill, where he opened the battle by firing upon the enemy before orders were given...

Hang on—at that battle the American officers supposedly said, “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes!” And here Spalding boasted about firing early. Apparently, some people asked him about that discrepancy. According to Abram E. Brown’s Beside Old Hearth-stones (1897), Spalding told his grandson:

I fired ahead of time, and [Gen. Israel] Putnam rushed up and struck at me for violating orders. I suppose I deserved it, but I was anxious to get another good shot at [Gen. Thomas] Gage’s men ever since our affair at Concord. The blow from “Old Put” hit me on the head, made a hole in my hat, and left this scar.

Yes, Grandpa, we’re proud of you.

TOMORROW: Yet more suspects.

Nelson on Washington’s Navy in Boston, 18 Feb

Last year James L. Nelson of Maine published George Washington’s Secret Navy: How the American Revolution Went to Sea, which offers a detailed account of the first American navy, launched shortly before independence.

After overseeing the siege of Boston for a few months, Gen. George Washington realized that, although the provincial troops had trapped nearly the entire British army in North America inside Boston, they’d also left the back door open. The Royal Navy had the run of the seas to the east, so its ships were bringing in food, firewood, ordnance, and other necessary supplies.

The Continental Congress hadn’t authorized the creation of an American navy, which would be a big financial undertaking. Some New England states were licensing privateers—basically, privatized warships. Washington took a further step by authorizing Col. John Glover of Marblehead to take his soldiers, many of them experienced fishermen and sailors, and launch ships out of Beverly to hinder Britain’s supply effort. Only afterwards did Washington ask Congress to authorize this.

Nelson will speak about this story on Wednesday, 18 February, at 6:00 P.M. at the invitation of the Shirley-Eustis House Association, dedicated to preserving Gov. William Shirley’s mansion in Roxbury. The Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati is supporting this event as well. It will take place at the William Hickling Prescott House at 55 Beacon Street in Boston, local headquarters of the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America. R.S.V.P. to the Shirley-Eustis House.

Salem Poor: “a Brave & gallant Soldier”

Starting in 1826, or more than half a century after the Battle of Bunker Hill, Peter Salem of Framingham and Leicester has been most often identified as the black soldier who killed Maj. John Pitcairn of the British Marines.

However, another African-American soldier named Salem was singled out for special commendation in the same year as the battle. This was Salem Poor of Andover, who had purchased his own freedom for £27 in 1769.

On 5 Dec 1775, thirteen Continental Army officers and a brigade surgeon sent the following petition to the Massachusetts General Court:

The Subscribers begg leave to Report to your Honble. House, (which wee do in Justice to the Character of So Brave a Man) that under Our Own observation, Wee declare that A Negro Man Called Salem Poor of Col. Fryes Regiment Capt. Ames. Company in the late Battle at Charlestown, behaved like an Experienced officer, as Well as an Excellent Soldier, to Set forth Particulars of his Conduct Would be Tedious, Wee Would Only begg leave to Say in the Person of this Sd. Negro Centers a Brave & gallant Soldier. The Reward due to so great and Distinguisht a Caracter, Wee Submit to the Congress—

Among the signers were Col. William Prescott, commander in the redoubt; Col. Jonathan Brewer; and Lt.-Col. Thomas Nixon, who had links to Peter Salem.

If only those men had “Set forth Particulars” of what Salem Poor had done! Because it’s absolutely extraordinary to see high-ranking white gentlemen in 1775 compare a black man to “an Experienced officer.”

This special recognition might have been what John Winslow was recalling when he told historian Samuel Swett that the black soldier who killed Pitcairn was presented to Gen. George Washington and given a financial prize by provincial officers. Or perhaps Poor had done something else entirely, also worthy of notice.

In any event, the legislature gave the men who submitted this petition “leave to withdraw it”—the period’s way of saying no. Salem Poor didn’t receive any special official recognition in his lifetime.

By 1880, the stories of Salem Poor and Peter Salem were converging. Sarah Loring Bailey then wrote in her Historical Sketches of Andover:

The story goes that “Salem Poor,” a slave, owned by Mr. John Poor, shot Lieutenant-colonel [James] Abercrombie. As that officer sprang on the redoubt, while our men were in retreat, and exclaimed, “The day is ours,” Salem turned and took aim and fired. He saw the officer fall.

This is the very same story, down to the words the British officer yelled, that other writers were telling about Peter Salem. (But of course the Andover tradition said Salem Poor shot a higher-ranking officer.)

What’s more, other men also claimed to have shot Maj. Pitcairn.

TOMORROW: Two more early identifications of Maj. Pitcairn’s killer.

Identifying the Soldier Named “Salem”

In 1819, Samuel Swett identified the American soldier who shot Maj. John Pitcairn of the British Marines as “a black soldier named Salem.” It didn’t take long for a local historian to claim that man for his town.

Gov. Emory Washburn (shown here) wrote this in his Topographical and Historical Sketches of the Town of Leicester, published in the Worcester Magazine in 1826:

There was residing here, till within a few years, a black man, who, we have good reason to believe, was the one who shot Maj. Pitcairn, whose death forms so affecting an incident in that bloody affray. History relates that he was shot by a negro, and from the story of the one we allude to, and many corroborating circumstances, we are led to conclude that he was the person who did the deed.

The person to whom we refer was named Peter Salem; he was a servant of Gen. [John] Nixon during the revolution, was a native of Framingham, and removed here a few years since, where he died. Major Pitcairn was shot as he was mounting the redoubt, and fell into the arms of his son.

William Barry followed up that lead with more information in his A History of Framingham, Massachusetts, published in 1847. He wrote:

Peter Salem—alias Salem Middlesex—was originally the slave of Capt. Jeremiah Belknap, and was sold by him to Maj. Lawson Buckminster. He married in 1783, Katy Benson, a grand daughter of Nero [Benson], and lived for a time, where is now a cellar hole on the farm of the late Mr. Richard Fiske, near the pond. He served in the war of the Revolution as waiter to Col. Thomas Nixon, of Framingham; and at the opening of the war was present at the battle of Bunker Hill.

Barry then quoted Washburn’s passage and concluded: “Peter died in Fram., Aug. 16, 1816.” Other sources say he died in Framingham’s poorhouse, having been forced to return to his native town when he could no longer support himself.

Washburn and Barry disagreed about which of the Nixon brothers Salem worked for—Gen. John of Sudbury or Col. Thomas of Framingham. But he could have worked for each in turn. More troubling about Washburn’s identification of Peter Salem as the soldier who shot Pitcairn is that he didn’t describe any of his evidence: no remarks about people having heard Salem describe the battle, for example. Washburn wrote at length about Salem as an older man in his 1860 Historical Sketches of the Town of Leicester, describing how he’d told his “stories of the war”—but again the only clear link from him to shooting Pitcairn is the name “Salem.”

A Sketch of the History of Framingham, published in 1827, says nothing about Peter Salem/Salem Middlesex being at Bunker Hill, though it does list the name of at least one other black private, Cato Hart. Salem is on the rolls of the Nixon regiment, and that unit was in the battle, so there’s no reason to doubt he was there. But somehow those earlier Framingham chroniclers didn’t find him significant enough to name.

By a strange coincidence, Peter Salem had been owned in youth by the father of the Rev. Dr. Jeremy Belknap, the historian who first recorded that Maj. Pitcairn had been shot by a black man. But Belknap didn’t write down anything about such a family connection, which he surely would have mentioned if he knew. He also believed the shooter had come from Groton. So either he and his sources didn’t know about Peter Salem’s past, or they were discussing another man named Salem.

TOMORROW: Another man named Salem.

“A black soldier named Salem, shot him thro’ the head”

In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, Bostonians were particularly interested in knowing who killed Maj. John Pitcairn during the Battle of Bunker Hill. No other British officer killed that day seems to have attracted the same interest.

In 1786, John Trumbull painted The Death of General Warren at Bunker Hill. Though the dying Dr. Joseph Warren is naturally the focus of that painting, the artist showed Pitcairn wounded close by, even though eyewitnesses indicated the two men weren’t wounded within sight of each other or at the same time. Also in that painting, though hidden and somewhat out of the action at the lower right, is a musket-carrying young black man.

In 1787 the Rev. Dr. Jeremy Belknap, founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, set this down in his notebook along with other details of the battle:

A negro man belonging to Groton, took aim at Major Pitcairne, as he was rallying the dispersed British Troops, & shot him thro’ the head, he was brought over to Boston & died as he was landing on the ferry ways.

Those notes weren’t published until 1875, so they probably didn’t influence Samuel Swett, who wrote the first major retrospective study of the battle. In 1818, he wrote:

Young [Lt. William] Richardson of the royal Irish [or 18th Regiment], was the first to mount the works, and was instantly shot down; the front rank which succeeded shared the same fate. Among these mounted the gallant Major Pitcairn, and exultingly cried “the day is ours,” when a black soldier named Salem, shot him through and he fell. His agonized son received him in his arms and tenderly bore him to the boats.

A few years later, in his History of Bunker Hill Battle, Swett named his source, now dead:

Gen. [John] Winslow [1753-1819] stated, a contribution was made in the army for Salem and he was presented to [George] Washington as having slain Pitcairn, who was killed on the British left, according to all authorities.

But there are some difficulties with those details. In a recent study for the National Park Service titled Patriots of Color, George Quintal, Jr., found no African-American soldier from Groton named “Salem.” The only black soldier documented as being in the battle with a connection to that town was named Barzillai Lew, and detailed accounts of his military service say nothing about killing Pitcairn. In addition, there’s no record of any black soldier being presented to Gen. Washington as Winslow stated.

TOMORROW: Identifying the “black soldier named Salem.”

“Now for the glory of the marines!”

Here are some immediate reactions to the death of Maj. John Pitcairn at the Battle of Bunker Hill, as described by Marines comrade Lt. John Waller in yesterday’s post.

The Rev. Dr. John Eliot reportedly made this note about Pitcairn in his 1775 almanac:

This amiable and gallant officer was slain entering the intrenchments. He had been wounded twice; then putting himself at the head of his forces, he faced danger, calling out, “Now for the glory of the marines!” He received four balls in his body.

Around the same time, Gen. John Burgoyne (shown above, courtesy of the University of Houston’s Digital History site) described Pitcairn’s loss in a letter to Lord Palmerston:

Major Pitcairn was a brave and good man. His son, an officer in the same corps, and near him when he fell, carried his expiring father upon his back to the boats, about a quarter of a mile, kissed him, and instantly returned to his duty. This circumstance in the hands of a good painter or historian, would equal most that can be found in antiquity.

This letter was printed in an 1876 volume with the fine title Political and Military Episodes in the Latter Half of the Eighteenth Century Derived from the Life and Correspondence of the Right Hon. John Burgoyne.

Finally, here’s a letter published in the 22 June 1775 New-England Chronicle, one of the newspapers outside of Boston. This document was, the printers wrote, “thought by many judicious Persons to contain Accounts not far from the Truth.” [How reassuring.]

Hingham, June 19.

Yesterday I came out of Boston at 2 o’Clock P.M. I heard the Officers and Soldiers say that they were sure that they had a Thousand or more killed and wounded; that they were carrying the wounded Men from 4 o’Clock on Saturday until I came away.

General [William] Howe commanded the Troops. They buried their Dead at Charlestown. Among the Dead was Major Pitcairn. A great many other Officers are dead. There were 5000 soldiers went from Boston. The Soldiers and Officers exult very much upon taking our Lines.

J.B.

It seems significant that the only dead officer this refugee named was Pitcairn. That might have been because at the time he was the British forces’ highest-ranking casualty. (Lt.-Col. James Abercrombie succumbed from his wounds a few days later.) But I think it also reflects Pitcairn’s visibility in the town, and his notoriety in the countryside after the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

TOMORROW: More details about who killed Maj. Pitcairn surface after the war.

“Major Pitcairne was killed close by me”

CSI: Colonial Boston returns with a series I’m calling “The Mysterious Death of Major Pitcairn.” That’s him dying at the right, a small detail in John Trumbull’s The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Maj. John Pitcairn was the highest-ranking British Marine in Boston in 1774-75. He was in charge of the British troops who confronted the Lexington militia at dawn on 19 Apr 1775. And in the Battle of Bunker Hill, he was one of the highest-ranking British officers killed.

How did Pitcairn die? The sources closest to the event seem to be two letters from Lt. John Waller, adjutant (i.e., administrative officer) of the first Marines battalion. A copy of the first, dated 21 June 1775, is available online from the Massachusetts Historical Society in two forms:

As soon as our Battalion were in the Boats Major Pitcairn gave directions to be landed, as near the Redoubt as possible, as the Light Infantry had then (tho’ at a great distance) began the Attack. we Landed accordingly where we were attack’d before I cou’d get those in the first Boat form’d, however, we soon form’d into tolerable order with the Loss of one Man only, and then March’d into a Field where we form’d in Line with the 43rd. & 47th. Regts. and were then order’d to shelter ourselves by laying on the Grass.

We were soon order’d to advance and attack the natural defences of the Redoubt and to storm that also at all Events. we gain’d Ground on the Enemy but slowly, as the Rails Hedges & stone walls, broke at every time we got over them and several Men were shot, in the Act of climbing them, we at length overcame these difficulties with very little loss till we came to the Talus of the Redoubt at the bottom of which was a Road with Hedges & Trees on each side besides a low stone wall, on the part we were Jumbled together.

I say Jumbled, as the March over the Rails &c. had shifted the 47th Regt. (that was on our Right on leaving the low Ground) in such a manner as to divide the 2 Companies on the right of our Battalion from the other 6 on the Left; but as they were nearly in a Column of Files we were not far asunder: in this situation we received a Check (tho’ with retreating an Inch) from the very heavy and severe Fire from the Enemy in the Redoubt, and in this Spot we lost a number of Men, besides the irreparable loss of poor Major Pitcairne, whose worth I never was sensible of till that day

we remaind about Ten Minutes or near a Quarter of an Hour in this dangerous situation, where the poor Fellows were kill’d as I was directing the Files how to level their Fire, at length half mad with standing in this situation & doing nothing towards Reducing the Redoubt, I requested Colnel [William] Nesbit [of the 47th] to form upon our Left in order that we might advance to the Enemy with our Bayonets without firing: this was with difficulty perform’d and Captain [Archibald] Campbell [of the Marines light infantry] coming up at this Instant, and forming upon our Right we mounted the Hedges without firing a Shot, and ran directly up the Talus, got into the Ditch and mounted the Parapet. . . .

I cannot pretend to describe the Horror of the Scene within the Redoubt when we enter’d it, ’twas streaming with Blood & strew’d with dead & dying Men the Soldiers stabbing some and dashing out the Brains of others was a sight too dreadful for me to dwell any longer on

The next day, Waller wrote to his brother:

We landed close under Charlestown, and formed with the 47th Regiment close under the natural defences of the redoubt, which we drove the enemy from, climbing over rails and hedges. So we closed upon them; but when we came immediately under the work, we were checked by the severe fire of the enemy, but did not retreat an inch.

We were now in confusion, after being broke several times in getting over the rails, etc. I did all I could to form the two companies on our right, which at last I effected, losing many of them while it was performing. Major Pitcairne was killed close by me, with a captain and a subaltern, also a serjeant, and many of the privates, and had we stopped there much longer, the enemy would have picked us all off.

I saw this, and begged Colonel Nesbitt of the 47th to form on our left, in order that we might advance with our bayonets to the parapet. I ran from right to left, and stopped our men from firing, while this was doing, and when we had got in tolerable order, we rushed on, leaped the ditch, and climbed the parapet, under a most sore and heavy fire. . . .

One captain and one subaltern fell in getting up, and one captain and one subaltern was wounded of our corps; three captains of the 52nd were killed on the parapet, and others that I know nothing of. God bless you! I did not think, at one time, that I should ever have been able to write this, though in the heat of the action I thought nothing of the matter.

This letter was published in 1845 in Historical Record of the Royal Marine Forces, by Paul Harris Nicolas. The text also appears here.

TOMORROW: Immediate reactions to Pitcairn’s death in Boston.

“Wrecked on the Back Side of Provincetown”

Boston 1775 takes a short break from CSI: Colonial Boston for this important message—not that we’re trying to sell anything.

The Somerset was the Royal Navy warship anchored in the ferryway between Boston and Charlestown when Paul Revere rowed across the Charles River to start his ride to Lexington. Its firepower later shielded the British troops on their return from Concord. That warship also fired the first cannon shots of the Battle of Bunker Hill, aiming for the provincial soldiers digging a redoubt on the rise called Breed’s Hill.

Later in the war, the Somerset patrolled the New England coast, trying to hinder arms shipments coming into America and privateers leaving America. This description of its ultimate fate comes from Charles Francis Swift’s Cape Cod, the Right Arm of Massachusetts (1897):

Nov. 2-3, 1778, the British war ship Somerset, Capt. Aurey [actually George Ourry], was wrecked on the back side of Provincetown, having, while in pursuit of the French fleet, struck on Peaked Hill bars, and, like many a good craft before and since, was unable to extricate herself. After unavailing efforts to lighten the vessel by throwing over guns and ammunition, a succession of great waves lilted her over the bar and landed her, a helpless wreck, a long way up the beach. There was a rush of people to the wreck to plunder whatever might come ashore.

Twenty-one British sailors died. The rest became prisoners of war. More details here.

His Majesty’s Ship Somerset is a group of Revolutionary-War reenactors. They don’t actually have a 1746 three-masted man-of-war, though they give the impression that if they did they’d know what to do with it. (Be warned: their website plays music at you.)

The latest addition to the group’s website is a gallery of photographs from Bob Conrad of the wreck of the original Somerset, as the tides revealed it in 1973. The National Park Service’s report on the wreck (P.D.F. file here) says that was only the second time that the Somerset’s remains have surfaced in the last two centuries.

Martha Washington, Then and Now

Brigid Schulte of the Washington Post filed a story this week about Mount Vernon’s effort to update the public image of Martha Washington. The Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, and other newspapers have picked it up.

The main visual hook of those articles is Michael Deas’s modernized portrait of Washington (detail shown here, courtesy of the Globe; click on it to go to Deas’s webpage). The Post’s caption says:

This is...based on an image that forensic anthropologists at LSU’s famous Faces Lab constructed of her by taking the bone structure of a miniature painted of Martha in middle age and putting it through a process of age regression. The image, along with a handful of letters and artifacts like her wild purple wedding slippers, that historians are using to revamp the erroneous but persistent modern image of Martha as a fat, crabby old frump that Washington only married for money.

I’ve never seen anyone refer to Martha Washington as “crabby.” (George’s mother is another story.) But the mention of “forensic anthropologists” and “bone structure” gives me an excuse to discuss this painting as part of CSI: Colonial Boston.

Deas’s painting is old enough to have appeared on the cover of Patricia Brady’s 2005 biography of Washington, where I first saw it. And right away it struck me as weird. The colors, the angularity, the sinews—none of that seemed to come from the eighteenth century. I was reassured to find the cover art credit and realize this was a modern image. It’s a fine portrait of a beautiful woman, but is that woman Martha Washington?

In fact, we have a portrait of young Martha Washington, painted by John Wollaston in 1757 when she was twenty-six. It now belongs to Washington & Lee University. And its face isn’t terribly attractive—by modern standards.

However, by the standards of the eighteenth century (and bearing in mind the limits of colonial American portrait technique before Copley), this painting shows an attractive young woman. On the 18cWoman email list Jane Pease wrote:

The Wollaston portrait and the computer-aged Deas portrait have little in common, at least on the surface. But as an indicator of cultural preferences they have very much in common indeed. Each is an image of the same young woman, but stylized to fit the fashion and tastes of the time.

The Wollaston portrait (once you can get past the protuberant Wollaston eyes, which show up on many of his subjects) reflects what society thought a young 18th-century lady ought to be—round face, plump graceful arms and hands, sloping shoulders held well back, elegant S-shape stance, a rib cage shaped by a lifetime in stays.

Deas paints a version of what late 20th-century people considered attractive: thin face, arms, and hands; protuding collarbones; sharp features; modern-day posture; the semi-athletic build of a woman who had never seen the inside of a pair of stays until 20 minutes before the photo shoot—certainly not formed in them from toddlerhood.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see them side by side someday?

Done!

In addition, Wollaston showed Martha holding a flower while Deas portrayed her keeping her place in a book—though she wasn’t known as a writer (like Mercy Warren) or a reader (like Abigail Adams). Another sign of how the new portrait reflects what we now consider ideal.

Within a couple of decades, I suspect the people will recognize the Deas portrait immediately as an artifact of this decade while the Wollaston image will still look like an eighteenth-century woman—and, perhaps, still a little frumpy.

On the Trail of Crispus Attucks

This installment of CSI: Colonial Boston starts with Boston coroner Robert Pierpont summoning a jury on 6 Mar 1770 to investigate the death of a tall man shot by soldiers on King Street. His name, according to their inquest report and that day’s newspapers, was Michael Johnson.

By the following Monday, however, the same man was being identified as Crispus Attucks, and that’s how he’s come down to us in the historical records.

Readex, the company that publishes the Archive of Americana online database that I love to use, has just published my online article “On the Trail of Crispus Attucks: Investigating a Victim of the Boston Massacre.” It describes how students might use the colonial publications and newspaper stories reproduced in that database to learn more about Johnson/Attucks.

I access the Archive of Americana through the Boston Public Library, as can anyone with a card for that system (which any resident of Massachusetts can apply for). Many universities libraries also subscribe. It’s a wonderful way to spend far more time than you expect.

Finding Dr. Joseph Warren’s Head

Yesterday I quoted Abigail Adams’s 31 July 1775 letter complaining that British officers had cut the head off Dr. Joseph Warren’s corpse after they found it on the battlefield of Bunker Hill. Of course, Adams was living in Braintree, and had no firsthand knowledge of what went on in army-occupied Charlestown or Boston. She was angrily recounting what unstated sources told her that a recent British deserter had said. How strong is that letter as evidence that Warren was indeed posthumously beheaded?

Adams herself knew that a defector’s report might not be reliable. In the paragraph just before the passage about Warren’s head, she wrote:

5 deserters having come into our camp. One of them is gone I hear to Phyladelphia. I think I should be cautious of him—no one can tell the secret designs of such fellows whom no oath binds—he may be sent with assassinating designs. I can credit any viliny that a Ceasar Borgea would have been guilty of—or Satan himself would rejoice in.

Furthermore, it seems significant that I can’t find any mention of Warren’s decapitation in newspapers of the time, in other people’s letters, or in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress report on the battle. Patriots were seizing any opening to complain about British cruelty, including the treatment of prisoners of war captured in Charlestown, so they wouldn’t have kept secret about this event if the evidence were strong.

What’s more, Adams and her family stopped mentioning Dr. Warren’s severed head after this letter, though their letters and memoirs contain many remarks about their late friend and physician. None of the early American histories of the Revolution repeat the report. The Warren family published multiple memoirs in the 1800s without lamenting their honored ancestor’s decapitation. Richard Frothingham didn’t include the detail in his 1865 biography of the doctor, though he did say that Warren’s “coat was sold by a soldier in Boston.”

Furthermore, we have firsthand information about the treatment of Dr. Warren’s body from the man put in charge of burying it. In a letter dated 23 June 1775, Capt. Walter Sloane Laurie described giving the enemy leader a swift and humble burial on the battlefield:

Doctor Warren, President of the Provincial Congress, and Captain General, in the Absence of [John] Hancock and [Samuel] Adams, and next to Adams, in abilities, I found among the Slain, and stuffed the Scoundrel with another Rebel, into one hole, and there he, and his seditious principles may remain

Laurie had no reason to treat Warren’s corpse well, but also no impetus to lie to his friends about how he’d treated it. His letter contradicts what Abigail Adams later heard on two points. Not only did he say nothing about decapitation, but he also said he’d buried the doctor with one other body; Adams understood there were “many bodies over him”—or at least over his headless corpse.

Finally, the most commonly related story about Dr. Warren’s body is that, after the British evacuation, occasional dentist Paul Revere identified it by recognizing a false tooth he had made for the doctor. It would be awfully hard to identify a body by its false teeth if the whole head has been buried separately. Furthermore, in 1776 Bostonians reportedly found Warren’s body in a grave with one other corpse, agreeing with Laurie’s account instead of Adams’s rumor. It had been “stripped of its covering,” which supports the accounts that British soldiers took Warren’s clothing, but not his body parts.

Assessing this rumor offers a chance to highlight one difference between the Massachusetts Historical Society’s two online databases of Adams family letters. The Adams Electronic Archive offers a look at Abigail Adams’s handwritten letter, with a transcript. The Founding Families Adams Papers offers a transcription plus the published edition’s notes, which say: “AA is reporting only a part of the rumors that circulated then and later about British indignities to Joseph Warren after his death in Bunker Hill battle.” Those notes go on to quote the Laurie letter as more reliable.

One odd treatment of this rumor is in John Cary’s 1964 biography of Warren. It says that some British officers wanted to decapitate the doctor, but a Freemason among them stopped them. In essence, Cary decided that the deserter’s story about cutting off Warren’s head was entirely reliable—except for the actual cutting-off-the-head. That seems like an odd way to combine historical evidence. It’s as if one dubious source says George Washington was in Vermont on a particular date, and all other sources say he was in New Hampshire, so an author concludes that he was in New Hampshire but thinking about going to Vermont that whole day.

Looking for Dr. Joseph Warren’s Head

Boston 1775 readers may recall this blog’s unhealthy interest in the physical remains of Dr. Joseph Warren (three successive posts in October 2007 during the last run of CSI: Colonial Boston). Of course, since Dr. Warren kept being dug up and reburied, we can feel confident that other folks were also interested in his body.

I return to this subject now to examine a report that’s resurfaced in recent books: that after finding the doctor’s body on Bunker’s Hill, British officers had his head cut off and delivered to Gen. Thomas Gage. Michael Novak wrote that the British did that in his book On Two Wings and in an essay published in Faith and Public Policy, both arguments for more religion in American government. Novak’s writing in turn apparently prompted Ira Stoll to mention this detail in the preface to his new biography of Samuel Adams.

What’s the basis for this statement? Several histories have mentioned the rumor of Warren’s posthumous decapitation, including Merrill Jensen’s Founding of the American Nation (1968), Kenneth Silverman’s Cultural History of the American Revolution (1976), and Benson Bobrick’s Angel in a Whirlwind (1997).

All those books point to a single source for the report: Abigail Adams’s letter to her husband John dated 31 July 1775:

We learn from one of these Deserters that our ever valued Friend Warren, dear to us even in Death; was [not] treated with any more respect than a common soldier, but the [sav]age wretches call’d officers consulted together and agreed to sever his Head from his body, and carry it in triumph to Gage, who no doubt would have “grin’d horrible a gastly smile,” instead of imitating Ceasar who far from being gratified with so horrid a Spectacle, as the Head even of his Enimy, turned away from Pompeys with disgust and gave vent to his pitty in a flood of tears. “How much does pagan tenderness put christian Benevolence to shame.”

What Humanity could not obtain, the rights and ceremonies of a Mason demanded. An officer who it seems was one of the Brotherwhood requested that as a Mason he might have the body unmangled, and find a decent interment for it. He obtaind his request, but upon returning to secure it, he found it already thrown into the Earth, only with the ceremony of being first placed there, with many bodies over him

But should we take Adams’s secondhand report of what one deserter said as reliable?

TOMORROW: The weight of the evidence.

More Events This Very Week

A couple of local Revolutionary War reenacting units are hosting talks this week which are open to the public—though attendance does put one at risk of being recruited.

Benedict Arnold’s 1775 Campaign against British Quebec
Lincoln Minute Men
Tuesday, 3 February, 7:30 P.M.
Bemis Hall, 15 Bedford Road, Lincoln

Larry Zuelke will recount the hardships of Benedict Arnold’s overland expedition against Canada, launched from Maine in October 1775. Zuelke will also show slides of the 1975 reenactment of this campaign.

18th-Century Gentlemen’s Wigs
Gardner’s Regiment/Charlestown Militia
Saturday, 7 February, 3:00 P.M.
Bunker Hill Museum, 43 Monument Square, Charlestown

Michael Kaplan, who for thirty years has provided hair for reenactors and such dramatic presentations as the John Adams miniseries, will discuss genteel hairstyles and accoutrements for men, and display a variety of wigs.

The Difficulties of Medical Training in 1773

Popular demand indicates that it’s time for another series of CSI: Colonial Boston postings! Which is to say, Revolutionary people mucking about with dead bodies. (The last series started here.)

This image appeared on a broadside printed in 1773 with the title: “An Address to the Inhabitants of Boston (Particularly to the thoughtless Youth) Occasioned by the Execution of Levi Ames, Who so early in Life, as not 22 Years of Age, must quit the Stage of action in this awful Manner.” This was only one of the publications that Ames’s execution inspired. This online exhibit from the Library Company of Philadelphia says:

Levi Ames was perhaps the most written-about criminal in colonial America. His execution called forth two editions of [his] “Last Words,” four sermons in a total of seven editions, and no fewer than ten broadside poems.

So will this posting be about the horrible murders Ames committed, and how the authorities used forensic medicine to track him down? No, Ames was simply a burglar. He was executed for a series of property crimes.

Under the law of the time, the disposal of Ames’s body was up to the governor: Thomas Hutchinson could order the corpse to be buried, hung in chains, or given to a doctor for dissection. According to a letter from William Eustis to John Warren, written shortly after the execution:

You must know that [Dr. John] Jeffries (as we heard) had applied to the Governor for a warrant to have this body. The Governor told him if he had come a quarter of an hour sooner, he would have given it, but he had just given one to Ames’ friends, alias Stillman’s gang.

Stillman was the Rev. Dr. Samuel Stillman, minister at one of Boston’s two Baptist churches. Among the clergymen who preached about the execution, Stillman was the one Ames actually trusted. The condemned man asked the minister to arrange for his body to be buried so no aspiring surgeons could dissect it.

Which is exactly what Eustis and Warren wanted to do. They were recent Harvard graduates who trained in medicine under Warren’s older brother, Dr. Joseph Warren. At college they had been members of a group called the Anatomical Society or Spunkers Club. The other recent graduates Eustis mentioned in this letter to Warren were Jonathan Norwood; David Townsend; Samuel Adams, only son of the politician; and “One Allen,” perhaps Ebenezer Allen. All but one became physicians; Allen became a minister. Apparently these young men were hoping for a surgical demonstration or lecture by Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr.

Meanwhile, Jeffries had the same hopes for using Ames’s body, along with his medical mentor, Dr. James Lloyd, and Lloyd’s current trainee, John Clarke. All those men were friends of the royal government. The Spunkers knew in advance about Jeffries’s group, but not about Stillman’s.

Eustis described what happened to the body:

as soon as the body of Levi Ames was pronounced dead by Dr. Jeffries, it was delivered by the Sheriff [Stephen Greenleaf] to a person who carried it in a cart to the water side, where it was received into a boat filled with about twelve of Stillman’s crew, who rowed it over to Dorchester Point. . . .

We had heard it surmised that he was to be taken from the gallows in a boat, and when we saw him carried to the water, we concluded it was a deep laid scheme in Jeffries. . . .

However, when we saw the Stillmanites, we were satisfied Jeffries had no hand in it. When we saw the boat land at Dorchester Point, we had a consultation, and Norwood, David, One Allen and myself, took chaise and rode round to the Point, Spunker’s like, but the many obstacles we had to encounter made it eleven o’clock before we reached the Point, where we searched and searched, and rid, hunted, and waded; but alas, in vain! There was no corpse to be found.

Discontented, we sat us down on the beach and groaned, etc., etc. Then rode to [Thomas] Brackett’s [King’s Arms tavern], on the Neck, and endeavored to ’nock ’em up, to give us a dish of coffee; but failing, we backed about to the Punch Bowl, where, after long labors, we raised the house and got our desires gratified, and got home about four o’clock in the morning. Hadn’t much sleep, of course, so we are very lame and cross today. . . .

We have a ——— from another place, so Church shan’t be disappointed.

In a postscript Eustis added: “By the way, we have since heard that Stillman’s gang rowed him back from the Point up to the town, and after laying him out in mode and figure, buried him—God knows where! Clark & Co. went to the Point to look for him, but were disappointed as well as we.”

There’s more about Levi Ames at Bill West’s West in New England.

ADDENDUM: A message from Charlie Bahne convinces me that the medical trainees visited the Punch Bowl tavern in what is now Brookline Village.

Enslaved Labor and Free Labor in the Capital City

Last month the Huffington Post ran an essay by author Fergus M. Bordewich titled “Full Circle: Inaugurating Our Country’s New President in The City Built by Slaves.” It described how enslaved laborers built the Capitol where President Barack Obama was inaugurated, with reference to specific workers.

Bob Arnebeck, author of Through a Fiery Trial: Building Washington, 1790-1800, shared comments about that essay with the H-Slavery email list. I asked Bob if I could rerun his remarks as a contribution from a guest blogger because they showed how complex slavery could be in practice, especially when bosses were also trying to work with skilled free laborers and to manage a very large project. So here’s Bob:

Certainly this is the time to draw a sharp contrast between the scene around the Capitol on January 20, 2009, and, say, June 20, 1795, when work on the buildings in Washington was in full swing. However, in his Huffington Post article Bordewich misses many of the nuances of slave hire in Washington in the 1790s.

Pierre L’Enfant was the first man in charge of the federal building project in the city. Though French by birth, he had a wide acquaintance with slavery, having served in the southern campaign during the Revolution. There is no evidence that he hired slaves to work in Washington. Indeed, he had a group of 75 free workers with high morale as evidenced by their continuing work even after the commissioners ordered them to stop. They took orders only from L’Enfant, which is why the commissioner wanted L’Enfant fired.

The Capitol and White House could have been built by free labor and likely would have been if George Washington had accommodated L’Enfant so that he didn’t leave the project in early 1792. The commissioners left in charge were obsessed with fixing their costs. Slave hire was part of their effort to fix the cost of unskilled labor.

White and free black laborers worked on the same terms as slaves. The commissioners never threatened to replace free skilled workers with slaves. They tried to control the cost of skilled labor by trying to hire on a piecework basis. Scottish masons refused. Then came a crew of Irish masons who were amenable. It was not so much free labor that the commissioners didn’t like—it was wage labor.

That said, the pieceworking Irish flattered the slaveholding commissioners by requiring the commissioners to provide enough hired slaves to assist them—i.e., move the stone into place. The commissioners had perfected their system: the wages of the men moving the stone were fixed as low as possible, and the skilled workers would only get paid for the work they did, not for the time wasted waiting for stone to be hauled up Capitol Hill by slaves with no incentive to work hard. The system didn’t last long: the Irish fussed about the slaves being too slow, but then the masons skimped on mortar and the walls they worked on soon fell down.

As for the working conditions of slaves, Bordewich paints too grim a picture. They lived in camps, but so did many white laborers—there was no city there, after all. The slaves got free medical care. Indeed, when there was a smallpox scare, some slaves requested inoculation, which they received, its cost deducted from the wages paid to their masters. There was a hospital with a visiting white doctor and a resident white nurse.

Slaves worked the same hours as everybody else, and white overseers ate the same food as the slaves, and complained about it. The slaves got paid a shilling for work on Sundays and holidays, and several slave sawyers got incentive wages of a shilling a day, making a pound and ten shillings in August 1795, for example—almost $4.

Ironically, the commissioners who thought slave hire would help control their cost were blindsided by inflation at the end of the decade. Feeding slaves became expensive. So while at one time there were may have been up to 120 slaves working for the government, toward the end of the project they hired fewer slaves.

Finally, in his article Bordewich mentioned a Jerry Holland, a free black who was refused a raise even though his supervisor promised one. Bordewich has Holland disappearing in the yellowing records, a victim of racism. From my research it appears that Holland did continue working in the city. He wound up as the commissioners’ messenger. He never got his raise, though—still paid the same wage as the hired slaves.

Bob Arnebeck has created a website with essays updating Through a Fiery Trial. He was one of the first historians I saw using the web this way, and I’ve been looking for a reason to point to his site.