“Genuine Copies of the Intercepted Letters” in the Press

For the royal authorities in Boston, the letters that Benjamin Hichborn had carried from Philadelphia were the equivalent of today’s intercepted radio communications.

Those papers contained some sensitive information about the enemy’s army—for example, Virginia delegate Benjamin Harrison hinted that Gen. George Washington wasn’t fully impressed by his chief engineer, Col. Richard Gridley. And they laid bare the Continental Congress’s secret factionalism.

The British authorities decided to get even more value out of the documents by publicizing them. There was one newspaper left in Boston, the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter published by Margaret Draper and John Howe (shown above, over four decades later). Its 17 August issue printed all three “Intercepted Letters,” noting that the first was signed by Harrison while the second was unsigned but in the same handwriting as the third, to Abigail Adams from her husband.

The documents offered Loyalists and British observers evidence to confirm the most dire warnings about the American radicals: Adams’s clear statement that he believed his side should already have “arrested every Friend to Government on the Continent and held them as Hostages.”

There were also hints of private misdeeds. On the way to the press, someone apparently juiced up the Harrison letter by adding lines about an interrupted dalliance with “pretty little Kate the Washer-woman’s Daughter over the Way,” and a hint that Harrison was happy to share her with Washington himself. I discussed that passage back here. It was probably included to embarrass and discredit the commander-in-chief.

Finally, the published letters let everyone in America see John Adams writing about his colleagues with contempt, especially “A certain great Fortune and piddling Genius.” I don’t know if folks in Massachusetts realized that meant John Dickinson, but politicians in Philadelphia certainly did. And the British evidently didn’t have to change a word of Adams’s prose to get that point across.

TOMORROW: Dr. Hope shares the news with the folks back home.

“Treason! Rebellion! Massacre!”

To be fair to Benjamin Hichborn, there’s no evidence that he’d read the letters he was delivering to Massachusetts for John Adams and Benjamin Harrison (and delivered right into the hands of the Royal Navy on 31 July 1775).

Hichborn no doubt hoped those documents were important, because that would make himself more important. But he probably thought their rhetoric was typical for American Patriots in mid-1775.

Hichborn was therefore shocked by Capt. James Ayscough’s reaction to what he’d been carrying. Here’s how he described it months later [with paragraph breaks thrown in]:

My first interview with Ayscough, after his discovery of the Letters, I think worth relating—(if I had been subject to fits, I am sure he wou’d have thrown me into the most violent Convulsions)— “Oh the damn’d, black, hellish, bloody Plots contained in these Letters!

Pray Capt. Ayscough what do they contain?

Oh too shocking to relate! Treason! Rebellion! Massacre! (then beating his breast, with the most unnatural distortions of his face and body) O my God! It makes my blood run cold to think on it.

For God’s sake, Capt: Ayscough, if you have any compassion for my feelings, tell me what you mean.

Oh! (beating his breast again) it chilled the very blood in my veins when I read them. There is a plan laid to seize and massacre all the Officers and Friends of Goverment and all the Churchmen [i.e., Anglicans] upon the Continent in one Night. Pray Gentlemen is it a fair question, to ask if you are Churchmen?

(Mr. [Anthony Walton?] White said he was, I told him I was not.)

Such cruel, black designs, never before entered the heart of Man!

But Capt. Ayscough, are you not mistaken?

Oh I read them over and over again.

I am not disposed to question your veracity, but if I had read it myself I woud not believe it. Pray Sir, whose signature do they bear?

They are all signed John Adams.

In fact Adams had not written about a plan “seize and massacre all the Officers and Friends of Goverment and all the Churchmen upon the Continent in one Night.” He had merely written that the Patriots should “have arrested every Friend to Government on the Continent and held them as Hostages for the poor Victims in Boston.” So the captain did have a reason to feel alarmed.

Ayscough brought Hichborn around Cape Cod and into Boston harbor (shown above in 1764). On 5 August 1775, Gen. George Washington wrote to the Continental Congress:

I have this Morning been alarmed with an Information that two Gentlemen from Philada [(]Mr Hitchbourn & Capt. White) with Letters for General [Charles] Lee & mylf have been taken by Capt. Ayscough at Rhode Island, the Letters intercepted & sent forward to Boston with the Bearers as Prisoners. That the Captain exulted much in the Discoveries he had made & my Informer who was also in the Boat but released understood them to be the Letters of Consequence. . . . I shall be anxious till I am relieved from the Suspence I am in as to the Contents of those Letters.

Alas, I don’t know who Washington’s informant “also in the Boat but released” was.

In fact, the letters Ayscough turned over to his superiors weren’t that important, in the sense of containing vital orders or intelligence that Washington needed. But they did have consequences.

TOMORROW: Mrs. Draper’s press.

“By such a mere accident as this”

Yesterday we left Benjamin Hichborn on the Royal Navy ship Swan, commanded by Capt. James Ayscough, on the way to Rhode Island. Hichborn had taken it upon himself to carry letters to Massachusetts for two Continental Congress delegates, and he didn’t want the British authorities to find them.

Of course, Hichborn had already passed by opportunities to keep quiet about those letters, to travel more safely by land, and to toss the letters overboard at the first sign of trouble. But he didn’t want to let go of those letters, which would be proof of how reliable he was.

At first, Hichborn later wrote, things seemed to be all right. Capt. Ayscough treated him and his traveling companion, Anthony Walton (?) White, with polite deference. But the next day, the captain had become suspicious and hostile. Hichborn guessed that another traveler, clerk to a Loyalist merchant, had reported that he and White were traveling to aid the rebel cause—which they were, and had probably boasted about. By the second evening, the captain put a guard over those two young men.

Hichborn could still have kept the letters secret. Nobody had yet searched him or his belongings. He came up with what he thought was a clever ruse:

my plan I thought was compleat and ensured me success; I had provided a couple of blank letters directed to General [George] Washington and Coll. [James] Warren, which in Case [the clerk] Stone shoud acknowledge himself the Informer and confront me with his declaration, I intended to deliver them up with seeming reluctance and pretend I had concealed them through fear.

But he never put that plan into action.

Instead, Capt. Ayscough rendezvoused with H.M.S. Rose under Capt. James Wallace, which was patrolling Narragansett Bay. As Ayscough prepared to transfer his two prisoners and their baggage onto Wallace’s ship, Hichborn had another brainstorm:

Just as the boat was preparing to carry our baggage on board Capt. Wallace for examination a Gentleman who came passenger with us from New York sent on board for a trunk which we thro’ mistake had taken for our own, this circumstance looked so favourable that I coud not avoid seizing [it] to get the letters on shore. I opened the trunk with my own key, put the letters in the folds of the Gentlemans Linen and with some difficulty locked it again, when the trunk came upon deck the Lieutenant mistook it for mine put it into the boat with the rest of our things and rowed off immediately on board the other Ship. By such a mere accident as this did the letters fall into their Hands.

Simply because Hichborn had claimed that trunk as his own, had control of it belowdecks, and even had a key that opened it, the naval officers wouldn’t just send it off to the man from New York as Hichborn asked them to. Really the whole situation was unforeseeable.

Soon naval officers searched that trunk and found letters from two Continental Congress delegates, one from Benjamin Harrison speaking in detail about troops, gunpowder, and fighting in Virginia and one from John Adams saying:

We ought to have had in our Hands a Month ago, the whole Legislative, Executive and Judicial of the whole Continent, and have compleatly moddelled a Constitution, to have raised a Naval Power and opened all our Ports wide, to have arrested every Friend to Government on the Continent and held them as Hostages for the poor Victims in Boston.

Not surprisingly, the British authorities thought that was treasonous. They put Hichborn under arrest and confined him to a warship in Boston harbor.

TOMORROW: And royal officials decided to make use of those letters.

Benjamin Hichborn’s Delivery Service

In late July 1775, twenty-nine-year-old lawyer Benjamin Hichborn set off from Philadelphia for his home province of Massachusetts, proudly carrying three letters from Continental Congress delegates. Those letters would, he’d insisted, show that he had the confidence of Patriot leaders.

I suspect that Hichborn met up with Anthony Walton White (1750-1803, shown here), son of a New Jersey merchant who was seeking an appointment in the Continental Army. On 27 July, White obtained a recommendation letter from George Clinton of New York addressed to the new commander-in-chief, George Washington, so the timing fits. Hichborn later referred to his traveling companion only as “Mr. White.”

In the summer of 1775 it was very easy for a gentleman of means to travel in the American colonies. The royal army was almost entirely concentrated in Boston. The land war hadn’t spread beyond that region to make the roads treacherous. The Royal Navy had unchallenged control of the sea, but Hichborn could simply have stuck to a land route.

Which he didn’t.

Instead, as he wrote later that year:

When we came to New York, contrary to our expectations, we found a packet-boat waiting for Passengers, and in the opinion of every one there was not the least danger in crossing the [Long Island] Sound, we accordingly took passage for New-Port…

Hichborn could probably still have made his way to Rhode Island by sea unmolested if he kept a low profile, not telling anyone about the documents he was carrying. As a gentleman, he wasn’t likely to be subjected to close scrutiny.

But he didn’t.

Instead, Hichborn let on to a man named “Stone, (a person who formerly was Clerk to Henry Lloyd, and came passenger with us from New York),” that he had letters to Gen. Washington and James Warren, leader of Massachusetts legislature. Stone’s employer, Lloyd, was widely known as a Boston Loyalist. (Interestingly, two months earlier Lloyd had been worried about the security of his own mail.)

Sure enough, the packet boat carrying Hichborn, White, and Stone was stopped by the British warship Swan under the command of Capt. James Ayscough. However, the captain assured the young gentlemen that he was simply impressing sailors. Hichborn could still have kept the letters away from the British authorities by tossing them overboard in the night, and indeed he wrote of how he later “loaded them with money of the least value I had about me intending to drop them over board in the Evening.”

But he never did.

After all, if Hichborn were to come back to Massachusetts with no letters, he’d have no evidence that the Congress delegates trusted him.

TOMORROW: Benjamin Hichborn’s clever schemes.

“It would give him the Appearance of having my Confidence”

When John Adams wrote those cranky letters from Philadelphia that I quoted yesterday, he had someone looking over his shoulder: a young lawyer named Benjamin Hichborn (1746-1817).

Hichborn was a cousin of Paul Revere, but he came from a branch of the family that was already upwardly mobile. He had attended Harvard, graduating in 1768, and then gone to work as a clerk for the Boston lawyer Samuel Fitch.

Fitch was a Loyalist. This should not have been a surprise to Hichborn since Fitch was already accepting royal appointments in the Vice Admiralty courts in 1768. Then he signed the complimentary farewell address to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson in 1774 and stayed in Boston during the siege.

Fitch’s actions made Hichborn’s political allegiance suspect. Or at least he said so. It might have helped if he’d been politically active before the war, like a couple of his older relatives, but I don’t see his name anywhere prominent. So Hichborn went to Philadelphia to prove his dedication to liberty.

As Adams remembered the situation decades later:

A young Gentleman from Boston, Mr. Hitchbourne, whom I had known as a Clerk in Mr. Fitch’s office, but with whom I had no Particular connection or Acquaintance, had been for some days soliciting me, to give him Letters to my Friends in the Massachusetts. I was so much engaged in the Business of Congress in the day time and in consultations with the Members on Evenings and Mornings that I could not find time to write a Line.

He came to me at last and said he was immediately to sett off, on his Journey home, and begged I would give him some Letters. I told him I had not been able to write any. He prayed I would write if it were only a Line to my Family, for he said, as he had served his Clerkship with Mr. Fitch he was suspected and represented as a Tory, and this Reputation would be his ruin, if it could not [be] corrected, for nobody would employ him at the Bar. If I would only give him, the slightest Letters to any of my Friends, it would give him the Appearance of having my Confidence, and would assist him in acquiring what he truly deserved the Character of a Whigg.

To get rid of his importunity, I took my Penn, and wrote a very few Lines to my Wife and about an equal Number to General James Warren.

Actually, Adams also included Hichborn on a short list of young Massachusetts men he hoped Warren could find appointments for.

One might think that Adams, facing a young man whom he barely knew and whose political loyalty was so debatable, would send him off with some innocuous correspondence. Adams had just written to his wife and his friend Warren, so he didn’t really have to say more to them. But maybe that was the trouble—trying to think of stuff he hadn’t already written.

In any event, in his “very few Lines” for Hichborn to carry, Adams managed to say impolitic things about John Dickinson, Charles Lee, and most of his colleagues in the Continental Congress, and also to advocate for radical measures that he and his Massachusetts colleagues were still publicly disavowing.

Adams wasn’t the only delegate to entrust Hichborn with letters. Benjamin Harrison (shown above in a miniature owned by the Virginia Historical Society) also gave him a letter to carry to Massachusetts, in his case to his fellow Virginian Gen. George Washington.

TOMORROW: And how did Hichborn carry out that task?

John Adams and “the Oddity of a great Man”

Abigail Adams wasn’t the only person reporting to her husband John about public reaction in Massachusetts to the arrival of Gen. George Washington and Gen. Charles Lee in early July 1775.

Legislative leader James Warren was another Adams confidant. On 7 July he wrote:

General Lee I have seen but a Minute. He appears to me a Genius in his way. He had the Marks about him of haveing been in the Trenches. I heartily rejoice at the Appointment of these two Generals, and I dare say it will give you pleasure to hear that every Body seems to be satisfied with it. I have not heard a single word Uttered against it. This is more than I Expected with regard to the second, since their Arrival everything goes well in the Army.

Lee’s appointment had been more controversial in Philadelphia than Washington’s. Though he had become well known as a pamphleteer for the American colonial cause and as a military expert, he was still widely considered an Englishman and therefore a curious choice to be third-in-command of the Continental Army. And Lee’s eccentric personal style didn’t help.

On 24 July, Adams sat down to write back to Warren. He had written just the previous day, but a young man was pressing him to write some more. So he wrote a bunch more, including this about Gen. Lee:

You observe in your Letter the Oddity of a great Man—He is a queer Creature—But you must love his Dogs if you love him, and forgive a Thousand Whims for the Sake of the Soldier and the Scholar.

Warren hadn’t actually said much about Lee’s “Oddity,” but it’s possible that by then Adams had received Abigail’s letter of the 16th and had her comments about his lack of outward “Elegance” on his mind. (According to the editors of the Adams Papers, William Tudor’s 19 July letter from Cambridge had reached Adams four days later, so it was possible for mail to move that quickly.)

In any event, Adams wrote about Lee with admiration but what some might consider an impolite frankness. But that’s no surprise since he’d started his message to Warren:

In Confidence,—I am determined to write freely to you this Time.—A certain great Fortune and piddling Genius whose Fame has been trumpeted so loudly, has given a silly Cast to our whole Doings…

That comment was about John Dickinson, a wealthy and well regarded Pennsylvania delegate resisting more radical measures.

That same day, Adams also sent a reply to Abigail, which managed to remain polite all the way until the postscript:

I wish I had given you a compleat History from the Beginning to the End of the Journey, of the Behaviour of my Compatriots.—No Mortal Tale could equal it.—I will tell you in Future, but you shall keep it secret.—The Fidgets, the Whims, the Caprice, the Vanity, the Superstition, the Irritability of some of us, is enough to—

He didn’t need to finish that sentence for her.

And then John Adams gave those two letters to Benjamin Hichborn, a young lawyer, to carry back home to Massachusetts.

TOMORROW: And how did that go?

A Request to John Adams

In the same long letter from Abigail Adams that I quoted yesterday, she included these personal messages from the children to their father:

Our little ones send Duty to pappa. You would smile to see them all gather round mamma upon the reception of a letter to hear from pappa, and Charls with open mouth, What does par say—did not he write no more. And little Tom says I wish I could see par.

Upon Mr. [Nathan] Rice’s going into the army he asked Charls if he should get him a place, he catchd at it with great eagerness and insisted upon going. We could not put him of, he cryed and beged, no obstical we could raise was sufficent to satisfy him, till I told him he must first obtain your consent. Then he insisted that I must write about it, and has been every day these 3 weeks insisting upon my asking your consent. At last I have promised to write to you, and am obliged to be as good as my word.

At this time, Charles was five. (He’s shown above, considerably older though still in his youth.)

John Adams sent “Love to the children” in some of his letters home that month, but never specifically addressed this request.

Gen. Washington in Cambridge, 19 July

This Saturday, 19 July, Gen. George Washington will return to his Cambridge headquarters, at least in the form of reenactor John Koopman. He’s scheduled to be at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site from noon to 4:00 P.M., and that federal site is free to all visitors.

Abigail Adams had met the new commander a few days before he moved into that mansion, and on 16 July wrote to her husband John, assuring him that the Continental Congress had made the right choices:

The appointment of the Generals Washington and [Charles] Lee, gives universal satisfaction. The people have the highest opinion of Lees abilities, but you know the continuation of the popular Breath, depends much upon favorable events.

I had the pleasure of seeing both the Generals and their Aid de camps soon after their arrival and of being personally made known to them. They very politely express their regard for you. Major [Thomas] Miflin said he had orders from you to visit me at Braintree. I told him I should be very happy to see him there, and accordingly sent Mr. [John] Thaxter to Cambridge with a card to him and Mr. [Joseph] Read to dine with me. Mrs. [Mercy] Warren and her Son were to be with me. They very politely received the Message and lamented that they were not able to upon account of Expresses which they were that day to get in readiness to send of.

I was struck with General Washington. You had prepaired me to entertain a favorable opinion of him, but I thought the one half was not told me. Dignity with ease, and complacency, the Gentleman and Soldier look agreably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feture of his face. Those lines of Dryden instantly occurd to me

“Mark his Majestick fabrick! he’s a temple
Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine
His Souls the Deity that lodges there.
Nor is the pile unworthy of the God.”

General Lee looks like a careless hardy Veteran and from his appear­ence brought to my mind his namesake Charls the 12, king of Sweeden. The Elegance of his pen far exceeds that of his person.

Washington and his retinue never made it out to the Adamses’ home at Braintree, and it doesn’t look like Abigail ever visited the Cambridge headquarters, though John did. This letter did, however, eventually lead Abigail to a second meeting with Gen. Lee.

TOMORROW: Abigail Adams passes on a request for a commission.

Ebenezer Fox on the Sea Serpent?

We have one more detailed memoir of life aboard the Protector, the Massachusetts navy vessel that, three of its officers later reported, encountered a sea serpent in May 1780. That memoir was written by Ebenezer Fox of Roxbury, shown here.

Fox recalled the ship’s first lieutenant, George Little. He said Lt. Little had “a powerful speaking voice,” and described him several times using a spyglass to peer at potential enemy ships.

Fox also recalled the ship’s third lieutenant, Luther Little. He described how this Lt. Little was wounded by “a charge of grapeshot [that] came in at one of our port-holes” during the ship’s fatal fight with the Admiral Duff. In an appendix he described visiting Luther Little again in Marshfield in August 1838.

Fox did not, however, mention Midn. Edward Preble, despite his later fame. It’s possible Preble just didn’t stand out. However, later biographers agree that he had a bad temper all his life. (“With advancing years, Edward Preble’s childhood temper tantrums matured into fits of uncontrolled rage…” —Christopher McKee, Edward Preble: A Naval Biography, 1761-1807.) I therefore suspect the young midshipman was simply unpopular.

In his memoir Fox clearly described how the Protector went into the harbor at Broad Bay, Maine, to leave some sick men in the care of a farmer there, just as in Luther Little’s recollections. Both the younger Little and Fox told the same anecdote about a certain sailor trying to steal a calf from that farmer, getting caught by the first lieutenant, and being severely punished.

Yet Fox’s memoir says nothing about a sea serpent. He described encountering a giant snake later on the island of Jamaica. But he didn’t discuss the giant snake that dozens of the Protector’s men saw in the water off Maine, even though it must have been the talk of the ship for days.

Why? I think two factors played into Fox’s decision. First, he shaped his manuscript for publication. In contrast, George Little put his account of the sea serpent into a private letter to a scholar. Luther Little left his story with a relative. Edward Preble told the tale to friends, apparently with care; James Fenimore Cooper wrote that he “probably saw that he was relating a fact that most persons would be disposed to doubt, and self-respect prevented his making frequent allusions to it.” None of those stories were put into print until after the men telling them had died.

Second, unlike those other three men, Fox hadn’t been an officer on the Protector; he was an ordinary seaman. The Littles and Preble all became naval captains, two of them celebrated. Fox became a grocer and town postmaster. As respectable as he was, Fox was never as solid a gentleman as the others. If the three captains were wary of writing publicly about a sea serpent, Fox probably felt even less secure and more vulnerable to ridicule. So he didn’t leave us one word about that creature in the water.

Midshipman Preble Chases a Sea Serpent

Yesterday I quoted the memories of George and Luther Little of the day in May 1780 when their Massachusetts frigate chased a sea serpent off the coast of Maine. But did anyone besides the Little lieutenants leave a record of that giant fish that got away?

One of the youngest officers aboard that ship, the Protector, was Midshipman Edward Preble (1761-1807), later a celebrated U.S. Navy captain. James Fenimore Cooper’s profile of Preble for Graham’s Illustrated Magazine in 1845, republished in Naval Biographies, included his version of the chase:

Preble related the affair substantially as follows: The Protector was lying in one of the bays on the eastern coast, which, has been forgotten, waiting the slow movements of the squadron. The day was clear and calm, when a large serpent was discovered outside the ship. The animal was lying on the water quite motionless. After inspecting it with the glasses for some time, Capt. [John Foster] Williams ordered Preble to man and arm a large boat, and endeavor to destroy the creature; or at least, to go as near to it as he could. The selection of Preble for such a service, proves the standing he occupied among the hardy and daring. The boat thus employed pulled twelve oars, and carried a swivel in its bows, besides having its crew armed as boarders.

Preble shoved off, and pulled directly towards the monster. As the boat neared it, the serpent raised its head about ten feet above the surface of the water, looking about it. It then began to move slowly away from the boat. Preble pushed on, his men pulling with all their force, and the animal being at no great distance, the swivel was discharged loaded with bullets. The discharge produced no other effect than to quicken the speed of the serpent, which soon ran the boat out of sight.

There is no question that in after life, Preble occasionally mentioned this circumstance, to a few of his intimates. He was not loquacious, and probably saw that he was relating a fact that most persons would be disposed to doubt, and self-respect prevented his making frequent allusions to it. . . . Preble stated it as his opinion, that the serpent he saw was from one hundred, to one hundred and fifty feet long, and larger than a barrel.

Preble’s anecdote, filtered through Cooper’s novelistic imagination, left out Lt. George Little as the officer in charge of the boat, putting Preble in his place. Preble’s serpent was three times as long as the Littles’.

In fact, there were such differences between the Little and Preble accounts that some later sea serpent scholars treated them as separate incidents. But Preble was probably just a junior officer who went out in the boat under George Little. His anecdotes of that event, passed along orally to Cooper, offer another, less reliable look of the mysterious creature.

TOMORROW: One more memoir from the Protector.

Lieutenant Little Chases a Sea Serpent

George and Luther Little were two brothers from Marshfield who both served as officers aboard the Massachusetts navy vessel Protector under Capt. John Foster Williams from 1779 to 1781.

Luther, the younger by two years, was badly wounded during a sea battle. Later George was captured, held briefly on the Jersey prison ship, and sent to the Mill Prison in England. He and other officers bribed a guard and escaped to France.

In 1804, George wrote a letter to Alden Bradford about another of his adventures during the war. In 1820 that letter was published in the American Journal of Science as follows:

Marshfield, 13th March, 1804.

Sir,
In answer to yours of the 30th of January last, I observe, that in May, 1780, I was lying in Round Pond, in Broad Bay [off Waldoboro, Maine], in a public armed ship. At sunrise, I discovered a large Serpent, or monster, coming down the bay, on the surface of the water. The Cutter was manned and armed. I went myself in the boat, and proceeded after the Serpent. When within a hundred feet, the marines were ordered to fire on him, but before they could make ready, the Serpent dove. He was not less than from 45 to 50 feet in length; the largest diameter of his body, I should judge, 15 inches; his head nearly of the size of that of a man, which he carried four or five feet above the water. He wore every appearance of a common black snake. When he dove he came up near Muscongus Island—we pursued him, but never came up within a quarter of a mile of him again.

A monster of the above description was seen in the same place, by Joseph Kent, of Marshfield, 1751. Kent said he was longer and larger than the main boom of his sloop, which was 85 tons. He had a fair opportunity of viewing him, as he was within ten or twelve yards of his sloop.

I have the honor to be, sir, Your friend and humble servant,
GEO. LITTLE.

A couple of decades later, Luther Little dictated his memoirs, eventually published in the Journal of American History. Luther corroborated his older brother’s experience:

The Capt. thought it necessary to put into an eastern port for wood and water;—we sail’d for Broad Bay, and arrived at the mouth and anchored in a cove near the shore, called Muscongus. The Capt. made arrangements with a farmer at this place to land our sick, at an out building leaving the surgeons mate to take care of them, making a sort of hospital. I was then sufficiently recovered [from my wound] to be able to walk the deck. The next day, at four in the afternoon, we discovered a large black snake coming down from out the bushes abreast the ship; he took the water and swam by us; we judged him to be 40 feet long, and his middle the size of a man’s body; he carried his head six feet above water. We manned a barge, and went in chase of him; when fired at, he would dive like a sea-fowl. They chased him a mile and a half firing continually. The snake landed at Lowd’s Island, and disappeared in the woods. The barge returned to the ship.

Luther’s account suggests he saw the serpent from the deck of the Protector but didn’t join George in the boat that chased it.

Did anyone outside the Little family tell this odd story?

TOMORROW: Tales from a midshipman.

(The Protector was a 26-gun frigate launched in 1779. The picture above shows H.M.S. Cleopatra, a 32-gun frigate launched the same year; that’s the closest I could find.)

Consequential Questions

The Journal of the American Revolution (AllThingsLiberty.com) has once again asked its contributors, including me, some questions and run the answers over the course of a week. These were the questions last week—

“Greatest consequence of the American Revolution?” My answer leaned toward what Chou En-lai was reported to have said about the consequences of the French Revolution: “It’s too soon to tell.” Alas, that quotation has turned out to be based on a misunderstanding—the Chinese premier was actually speaking about the recent Paris uprising of 1968. But I still think we can screw up the Revolution. As in Abraham Lincoln’s formulation, the American democracy is a proposition, not a proof.

“Aside from John and Abigail, what was the best husband-wife duo of the Revolution? Why?” I consciously avoided what turned out to be the clearly most popular answer, but still was not alone in my choice.

“Most important diplomatic action of the war? Why?” Another example of me trying to be contrarian.

“Favorite RevWar site (battlefield, home, museum, etc.) to visit today? Why?” As another contributor said, this was the question I found hardest to answer. For a while I was thinking of skipping it entirely. A big part of the problem is that, as much as I enjoy visiting historic sites, what really thrills me is working with documents in archives or with books, whether or not they’re located in a historic setting.

“Propaganda was important during the Revolution. What is your favorite propaganda item? Why?” So naturally I chose a set of documents and books I’ve worked with.

“O Burr, O Burr, what hast thou done?”

This is the 210th anniversary of the death of Alexander Hamilton, one day after his duel with Aaron Burr.

In his biography of Burr, James Parton described the winner of that duel reminiscing this way:

He conversed with equal freedom of the duel with Hamilton. He never blamed himself for his conduct in that affair. Despising the out-cry made about the duel, he would indulge, sometimes, in a kind of defiant affectation respecting it. “My friend Hamilton—whom I shot,” he would say, with amazing nonchalance. Usually, however, he alluded to his antagonist with respect, styling him “General Hamilton,” and doing partial justice to his merits. “Was Hamilton a gentleman?” asked a foreigner once in Burr’s hearing. Burr resented the question, and replied with hauteur: “Sir, I met him.”

He told an anecdote relating to the duel, of which the following is the purport. On a journey, while stopping at a tavern to bait his horses, he strolled into the village, and saw a traveling exhibition of wax-works. To amuse an idle moment, he entered. Among the figures were two representing Hamilton and himself in the act of firing. The figures were vilely executed, and the exhibition was made the more ridiculous by some doggerel which the ambitious exhibitor had scrawled underneath. With some difficulty he made it out, as follows:

“O Burr, O Burr, what hast thou done?
Thou hast shooted dead great Hamilton.
You hid behind a bunch of thistle,
And shooted him dead with a great hoss pistol.”

He told this story just as any one would have told it, and laughed at the lines as heartily as any of his auditors.

He was surprised, one day, to receive the following epistle, which is here transcribed from the original: “Aaron Burr: Sir, Please to meet me with the weapon you chuse on the 15 of may where you murdered my father at 1 o’clock with your second. 8 May 1819. J. A. Hamilton.” To which he wrote a reply like this: “Boy, I never injured you: nor wished to injure your father. A. Burr.” On reflection, however, he thought it best not to notice the communication, and tore up his reply. He was afterward informed that the letter was a forgery.

Evidently part of being a gentleman for Burr was what to take notice of and how. Because he saw Hamilton as a fellow gentleman, he was willing to meet him on the dueling field. The “vilely executed” wax figures in a rinkydink tavern didn’t bother him since they were so obviously low-class. And when it came to what he thought was a note from Hamilton’s son, he eventually decided that the wise and genteel course was to act as if it never existed.

Newport’s “Revolution House” Coming in 2015

The Newport Historical Society reports it will reinterpret its Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House as “Revolution House.” Rather than continue to present that building as a standard house museum, it will use it to tell the history of Newport in the American Revolution.

“Revolution House” will open next summer. In the meantime, the society has launched a new “Revolutionary Newport” website. And on Saturday, 23 August, it will commemorate the anniversary of when in 1765 the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House was almost sacked because it was then home to Martin Howard, stamp tax collector. There will be a reenactor-led public “riot” and other programs.

The society’s press release argues that the first violent resistance of the Revolution took place in Rhode Island:

In the wake of the Sugar Act of 1764, violence broke out when colonists took over Fort George on Goat Island, off the far end of Long Wharf, and fired cannon on the British ship St. John whose crew allegedly stole merchandise from Newport businesses but which was also enforcing tax laws against local ships.

More violence erupted in 1765 when a long boat from the British ship the Maidstone was captured by an angry mob, dragged through the streets, and set fire in the square. This ship had been impressing Rhode Islanders into the British Navy, that is, capturing them and forcing them to serve on British ships, a common but highly unpopular practice of the British here and elsewhere.

In 1769 Newporters destroyed the British revenue sloop the Liberty. After harshly questioning the captains of two ships out of Connecticut, the Captain of the Liberty was surrounded by an angry mob of Newporters and forced to bring his crew in from the ship. Locals boarded the empty ship, cut it loose and it floated around the Point where it was stripped and burned. London protested to Rhode Island officials, but decided to let the matter drop.

And lastly there was the burning of the Gaspee, a Royal Navy ship, in 1772, after it had stopped the Hannah, out of Newport.

I’d argue that the 1764 and 1765 events weren’t really part of the Revolution because there was an ongoing conflict between mariners and officers of the Customs service and Royal Navy. In 1747, for example, Boston was shut down by riots over impressment. The Liberty and Gaspee riots are easier to link the new Crown taxes and duties that brought on the Revolution.

Still, Rhode Island deserves credit for destroying three government ships in less than a decade, and getting away with that. The closest Bostonians were able to match that was burning a small boat belonging to Customs official Joseph Harrison in 1768.

But Rhode Island was already known as a hard place to enforce the law. In contrast to Massachusetts, the governor was elected locally, not appointed by the king, and the harbor was much bigger and harder to patrol. I get the impression that Crown officials didn’t try so hard down there because they knew they couldn’t win.

Reenactment by the Shore in Marblehead, 12-13 July

This weekend Glover’s Marblehead Regiment will have its annual summer encampment at Fort Sewall in Marblehead.

The camp opens to the public for tours and demonstrations at 10:00 A.M. on Saturday, 12 July. The last morning tour will be at 11:00 A.M. to allow the reenactors to prepare for their skirmishes at 11:30 and 2:30. The camp will reopen from 3:00 to 5:30 P.M. On Sunday, the camp will be open to the public from 10:00 A.M. to noon.

The skirmishes will take place on Fort Beach. The schedule for the day also includes fifes and drums marching around town and giving concerts, a musket-firing competition, and other events.

(The photo above was taken during the unit’s 2011 encampment.)

Winslow House Events in July

The Winslow House Association in Marshfield has sent information about four events this month with links to Revolutionary times.

Tavern Night
Friday, 11 July, 7:00 P.M.
During the late colonial and early revolutionary periods taverns or ordinaries in Colonial America became increasingly popular. The tavern was a place to gather, have a pint of ale or cider, share a newspaper, engage in political debate, or partake in a game of chance. The Winslow House recreates an 18th-century Publick House with musical entertainment with Three of Cups and colonial card and strategy games. Admission includes our version of 1700s tavern fare (snack-sized) and non-alcoholic beverages. Immerse yourself in the atmosphere and try your hand in colonial games of chance and historical trivia. Admission is $10/person or $25/family or household.

Fort Halifax: Winslow’s Historic Outpost
Tuesday, 15 July, 11:00 A.M.
On July 25, 1754, Gen. John Winslow arrived with a force of 600 soldiers to establish the fort at the confluence of the Kennebec River with the Sebasticook River. Beginning as a French and Indian War garrison and trading post, the fort welcomed historic figures from Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr to Paul Revere and Chief Joseph Orono. This talk is by Daniel Tortora, an assistant professor of history at Colby College and member of the Fort Halifax Park Implementation Committee. Admission is $5, or $3 for Winslow House Association members.

Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Boston History with Paul Della Valle
Thursday, 17 July, 7:00 P.M.
The lives of notorious bad guys, perpetrators of mischief, visionary—if misunderstood—thinkers, and other colorful antiheroes, jerks, and evil doers from Boston history all get their due by author Paul Della Valle. The book’s profiles start with the Rev. Cotton Mather, governor Thomas Hutchinson, and Dr. Benjamin Church, and end in the late twentieth century. Admission is $7, or $5 for members.

Marshfield During the Revolutionary War
Tuesday, 22 July, 10:30 A.M.
With new information researched by Town Historian Cynthia Krusell, Dr. Isaac Winslow’s wife Elizabeth, portrayed by Regina Porter, will reminisce about the life and times in Marshfield during the American Revolution. Who was actually living in the Winslow House? Were we really a “Tory town”? Crossing political and social status, Mistress Winslow will speak on the impact this war had here in Marshfield. Admission is $5, or $3 for members.

Our Declarations

Yet another new book of Revolutionary history that’s been getting a lot of press lately is Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.

And by “a lot of press” I mean that in one week Allen’s work was featured on the front page of the New York Times and reviewed in the Times Book Review.

That review wasn’t entirely laudatory. Steven B. Smith wrote, “This book makes three large claims about the Declaration of Independence, one that is profoundly true, another that is debatable, and a third, I would say, that is false.” In arguing for the falsehood of the last proposition, however, Smith claimed that if Thomas Jefferson’s colleagues had retained his attack on the slave trade (not on slavery), “they would have rendered impossible later misrepresentations of the Declaration as expressing the economic self­interest of the slave owners.” Is that really a misrepresentation?

As for the news article, that concerned one mark of punctuation in the Declaration’s first part. Is there a period after the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? If so, would that elevate the incomplete clause ending there above the other incomplete clauses that follow? Or should all those phrases describing self-evident truths be treated as parallel, growing and building upon themselves in the way of eighteenth-century rhetoric:

We hold these truths to be self-evident,

• that all men are created equal,
• that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
• that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—
• That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed—
• That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

As Joseph Adelman wrote in a blog post responding to the Times article, putting so much weight on a flyspeck period in the Declaration misses some important points.

First, what we all picture as the Declaration—the handsomely handwritten sheet signed by all those Continental Congress delegates—was not the original approved for release on 4 July 1776. Second, punctuation was quite variable in the eighteenth century, with different printers dotting and dashing texts differently. So does that period really matter? Has anyone actually based an argument about the Declaration on the presence or absence of that particular mark?

As Adelman made clear, he took issue with the way the Times had framed Allen’s work, not with her paper on the questionable period or her book. In fact, Allen appears not to be making a historical argument so much as making a philosophical one; her background is in social science, and she’s offering “a reading” of the Declaration that might have shaped and might serve our society, not necessarily the reading(s) of the genteel white men of 1776 who eventually signed that document.

Meanwhile, to the West

Another new book on Revolutionary-era America actually looks at what else was happening on the continent while Britain’s thirteen colonies along the middle Atlantic coast fought for independence.

Claudio Saunt, author of West of the Revolution: An Uncommon Look at 1776, explained his approach in an article for the Boston Globe:

Spanish soldiers and missionaries were establishing the first permanent European colonies on North America’s Pacific Coast. (Native Americans, who observed Spanish schooners emerge on the horizon as if rising from the depths, called the newcomers “people from under the water.”)

Further north, Russians were seizing control of the Aleutian Islands and would soon push into the Alaskan mainland—territory they would not relinquish until 1867.

In the heart of the continent, Native Americans—who were as numerous as the Colonists then in revolution—sought to exploit the economic and geopolitical tumult engendered by European colonization on the coasts.

Specifically, Saunt wrote, “According to one traditional Lakota history, the Lakota (Sioux) Indians discovered the Black Hills in 1775-1776.” That memory was recorded by American Horse (1840-1908) in 1879—earlier than some Revolutionary traditions in textbooks and histories today.

In a short review for the Globe, Kate Tuttle wrote: “One persistent undercurrent to Saunt’s narrative is how much history hinges on misunderstanding and ignorance, along with greed and fear — not a pretty picture, but a necessary and timely addition to the heroic creation story we celebrate on July 4.” Here are other reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus.

Digging for “Heretical” Roots

Matthew Stewart’s new book Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic is getting a lot of attention now. Here are interviews with Stewart in:

• The Boston Globe
• Church & State

And here are reviews of the book in:

• Kirkus
• Christianity Today
• The New Republic
• The Los Angeles Times, which uses a picture of Thomas Young the nineteenth-century British scientist instead of Dr. Thomas Young the eighteenth-century American physician.

As one should expect, the Christianity Review piece by a professor at a Christian college is much more critical than the piece in Church & State, which is the newsletter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Stewart is clearly arguing against claims of our modern religious right that the U.S. of A. was founded on and for Christian beliefs—almost always the beliefs of the people making those claims. As Stewart points out, people of a particular faith tend to assume that when historical figures they admire mention “God,” that means the same God they themselves believe in. But even when people of the past specifically allude to Christianity or Jesus, they may not share the same understanding of those terms and ideas as their modern readers.

That can cut in all directions. “Presbyterian“ was often used as a general derogatory term by eighteenth-century non-Presbyterians. John Adams’s understanding of “Unitarianism” doesn’t map directly onto the modern Unitarian-Universalist creed. And so on.

The interviews and reviews indicate that Stewart has focused his work on certain Revolutionary figures: Young, his friend and coauthor Ethan Allen, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine. But those men were only a narrow slice of a mass movement toward independence and repuhlicanism.

Samuel Adams, for example, appears in those articles above only in the Globe interview as “Sam Adams,” comrade of Young’s. Yet Adams clearly had more influence on the course of the Revolution than Young, who never served in public office and died in 1777. Adams was also a devout Calvinist, and therefore less helpful to Stewart’s thesis.

As much as I’m pleased to see the name of Dr. Young in a Boston newspaper again, I thought the Globe interview didn’t offer an accurate picture of the man. Stewart twice calls him a “street warrior” but doesn’t identify him as a physician. While Young’s free thinking allowed him to imagine political change (he was a true democrat as early as the late 1760s), his deism was a liability to the local Whig movement; friends of the royal government used Young’s unorthodox beliefs to discredit him in heavily Calvinist Boston. Young and Allen were clearly outliers in the spectrum of American religious thought during his lifetime.

Stewart’s academic background is in philosophy, not history, and he’s shining a spotlight on the classical roots of Enlightenment deism. I hope Nature’s God does better at putting those ideas in the full context of Revolutionary history than the short interviews and reviews allow.

Luther Little’s Low Point

Luther Little (1756-1842) was an American naval officer during the War for Independence. He was a lieutenant on the Protector, a Massachusetts ship that was captured by the Royal Navy in 1781.

Little escaped captivity, however, because he’d been assigned to command a vessel the Protector had captured previously on its voyage into a friendly port.

On a later voyage, however, Capt. Little’s ship was wrecked in a storm and he broke his leg. But eventually he made it back to his home town of Marshfield.

In 1841 Little dictated a memoir of his life to a relative, and in the 1910s the Journal of American History published that manuscript. This is the incident he started with:

At the age of ten years, 1766, I recollect going to swim in the North River, a stream that runs between Scituate and Marshfield, accompanied by several boys in the neighbourhood. While we were thus amusing ourselves the tide rose and took off my clothes. Aided by the boys, I chose the least conspicuous path home, two miles and a half; got into a chamber window, and instead of the fig leaves chosen by Adam and Eve for a similar purpose, I took to my bed and feigned myself sick. I lay there quietly until my mother came up, who, hearing my story, gave me herb-tea, &c, and by this means I escaped a good whipping.

The following sketch of my life will show that I have been exposed to danger, and eminently so, both by sea and land, but never have I felt any depression of spirits so sensibly as at the loss of this suit of clothes.

The Bunker Hill Poetic Challenge Winner!

Thanks to all the Boston 1775 readers who took up the Bunker Hill Poetic Challenge! They were Joseph Sullivan, Dr. Sam Forman, Marshall Stack, R. Doctorow, John Johnson, Michael Lynch, Chip O, Facebook’s Committee of Correspondence, and G. Lovely. It was truly gratifying to see that response to a challenge I wasn’t sure anyone would enjoy.

After reviewing the rules, the staff had to eliminate some entries because they didn’t match the announced criteria, but we appreciate those efforts nonetheless.

That left enough verses to make a difficult choice, especially with my fondness for limericks as a way to comment on serious historical events. But in the end the prize goes to this entry:

THE REBEL’S SECRET REVEAL’D

When dawn reveal’d the Rebel fort,
One Abercrom was heard to retort,
“With one advance we shall win the day!”
Alas, it did not turn out that way.

“Another charge and we no doubt win!”
Said Howe. “Let the next advance begin!”
Yet failure again was their reward—
Samuel Paine thought it quite untoward.

Whilst over in Boston, Gage did muse
“What evil trick do these Rebels use?
Oh Mars! Reveal their secret power!
How can they hold out hour ’pon hour?”

In fact, ’twas all due to Snelling’s drinks—
Or so his son would have us thinks.

Those lines from R. Doctorow not only offer some iambic tetrameter to a world that sorely needs it, but they allude to this Boston 1775 posting. Alluding to the judges’ own work is always useful in scholarly competitions.

So R., please send me an email or comment with your surface-mail address, and I’ll ask the publisher of Bunker Hill: A City, A Battle, A Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick to send you a complimentary copy.

Honorable mention goes to Michael Lynch, who took himself out of competition for the book, for this fine five-line overview of the battle:

While stuck inside Boston’s bubble,
The British burned Charlestown to rubble.
They carried the hill,
But so many were killed
That it really was not worth the trouble.

And once again, thanks to all who took part. Happy Independence Day!

A Different Point of View on the “Bunker Hill” Song

As I discussed yesterday, in post-Revolutionary Boston young veterans of the war preserved and passed around the words to a song about the Battle of Bunker Hill written from the British point of view.

They had different things to say, however, about who had written that song:

• The first surviving broadside says it was “Composed by the British Soldiers,” and an 1811 reprint says it was “Composed by the British.”
• A handwritten copy of the verses kept by the merchant John Marston credited “one of the British army.”
• The historian Samuel Swett apparently had a broadside headlined “Composed by a British Officer after the engagement.”
• Either working with more information or splitting the difference between his sources, Swett labeled the lines “Extracts from a song said to be written by a British Serjeant” in his 1826 book.
• Finally, in the 1830s newspaper publisher Benjamin Russell told a visitor that the song had been “written by a common British soldier, who afterwards deserted to the Americans, and used to sing it in the American camp.”

I’m inclined to think the song came from the British enlisted ranks rather than from an officer. Whether or not that lyricist deserted, some deserter may well have carried the lyrics across the siege line. Russell was in the American camp until August 1775 (when his father grabbed him), so he could have heard the song first- or second-hand. But of course there could have been a lot of distortion in memory or oral tradition over the next sixty years.

And there was even more distortion to come! Sometime in the mid-1830s the Boston printer Leonard Deming reprinted the song once more. His broadside said “Battle of Bunker Hill” had been “Composed by a British Officer, the day after the Battle, June 17, 1775.”

And something curious happened as Deming’s shop put the lyrics into print. His text matches the earlier broadsides closely through the bottom of the first column. Then the next stanza is based on lines that had appeared toward the end of the preceding versions, with some changes. It says:

Brave Howe is so considerate,
As to guard against all dangers;
He allow’d each half a gill this day,
To rum we are no strangers.

The earliest printed version said:

Brave Howe is so considerate, as to prevent all danger,
He allows us half a pint each day, to him we are not strangers:

The Deming broadside reproduced two more stanzas intact, but then the American typographers apparently got fed up with all that British boasting. For the rest of the song they rewrote nearly every verse to criticize the British commanders and praise the Americans. The new lines went:

And when the works were got into,
And put them to the flight, sir,
They pepper’d us, poor British elves,
And show’d us they could fight, sir.

And when their works we got into,
With some hard knocks and danger;
Their works we found both firm and strong,
Too strong for British Rangers.

But as for our Artillery,
They gave all way and run,
For while their ammunition held,
They gave us Yankee fun.

But our commander, he got broke,
For his misconduct, sure, sir;
The shot he sent for twelve pound guns,
Were made for twenty-fours, sir.

There’s some in Boston, pleas’d to say,
As we the field were taking,
We went to kill their countrymen,
While they their hay were making.

For such stout whigs I never saw,
To hang them all I’d rather;
By making hay with musket balls,
Lord Howe cursedly did bother.

Bad luck to him by land and sea,
For he’s despis’d by many;
The name of Bunker Hill he dreads,
Where he was flogg’d most plainly.

And now my song is at an end,
And to conclude my ditty;
’Tis only Britons ignorant,
That I most sincerely pity.

As for our King and William Howe,
And General Gage, if they’re taken,
The Yankees will hang their heads up high,
On that fine hill call’d Beacon.

Compare those lines, especially the last, with the original.

There’s no indication on the Deming broadside that it didn’t offer the original lyrics, so later authors took those lines to be authentic. There’s even a lesson plan from the Library of Congress using the 1830s broadside as a Revolutionary text. It says, “within hours of the battle, it also inspired an unknown British officer to set down his own impressions in verse. As you read his account of the bloody day and notice his clear respect for his enemies, you might think about how a different point of view can shed new light on even the most familiar events.”

So here I am shedding new light with a different point of view. We don’t know who wrote the original song, but we know the lyrics on the Deming broadside from the 1830s were not written by a British officer in 1775.

“It has been copied so many times, for the last fifty years”

It’s no surprise that British soldiers composed a song about the Battle of Bunker Hill, as quoted yesterday. After all, they won the fight, and then they had several months in Boston to fill. What’s surprising is that the song was printed and preserved in American broadsides and archives.

It’s conceivable that the song was first printed inside Boston during the siege by one of the remaining Loyalist printers, and a copy of that remained after the evacuation. However, there’s strong evidence that Massachusetts youths of the Revolutionary generation passed along the song.

Complicating the picture a bit is that in 1811 the Boston printer Nathaniel Coverly reissued the verses on a broadside headlined “BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL. This Song was composed by the British, after the engagement.” That had the same text and punctuation as the earlier printing, but Coverly broke the long rhyming lines in two to produce twenty-four stanzas instead of twelve. That broadside could have reinforced and distorted people’s memory of the song from Revolutionary times, but people don’t seem to have noticed it.

After the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, Samuel Swett began to work on his History of Bunker Hill Battle. On 17 Apr 1826 a Quincy man named John Marston (1756-1846) wrote this to him:

Agreeably to your request, I send you a copy of the British song, on the battle of Bunker Hill. I will not vouch for its perfect correctness. It has been copied so many times, for the last fifty years, there are probably some mistakes and omissions.

You will observe a word is wanting at the end of the fourteenth verse, to rhyme with “danger.” I believe the meaning of the word wanting is, coward or cowardice. It was a favorite object of the British to represent us as cowards, and that we could not fight except behind stone walls and breast-works.

Marston’s handwritten copy was headed, “A song on the battle of Bunker Hill, composed by one of the British army, June, 1775, Tune—‘When Sawney up to London came.’” Compared to the previously printed texts, Marston omitted two stanzas and occasional words, and transposed two other stanzas.

In addition, in 1838 E. C. Wines wrote this about visiting Bunker Hill in A Trip to Boston, in a Series of Letters to the Editor of the United States Gazette:

I considered myself fortunate in having so excellent a guide as Major [Benjamin] Russell, who, he says, was on the spot the day when the battle occurred, and saw the whole of it, though, as he was but a mere stripling, he took no active part in it. Being, however, a “looker-on in Venice,” he is familiar with every locality and with all the incidents of the day. He gave me a minute and graphic account of the battle, specifying all the leading events, and pointing out the place where each one happened.

Among other things, he repeated a doggerel description of the battle, written by a common British soldier, who afterwards deserted to the Americans, and used to sing it in the American camp. It has no poetical merit, but as the Major declares it to be perfectly accurate in its facts, and as it has never yet appeared in print, I venture to transcribe it.

Wines then wrote out a ten-stanza version of the song. Despite being Boston’s leading Federalist publisher, Russell (1761-1845, shown above) apparently didn’t know that those lines had been published at least three times before.

Thus, Bostonians who were teenagers during the Battle of Bunker Hill preserved this British army song about the fight and helped it get into history books over half a century later.

TOMORROW: So who wrote those lines? And why do we remember a different version?

“A SONG Composed by the British Soldiers…”

This is the last day the Boston 1775 staff is accepting entries into the Bunker Hill Poetic Challenge, with the prize of a paperback copy of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Bunker Hill. Many thanks to all who have shared their verses so far.

For inspiration in case you haven’t entered yet, here’s the full text of “A SONG Composed by the British Soldiers, after the Battle at Bunker-Hill, on the 17th of June, 1775.”

The broadside that preserves these lines, in the collection of the Boston Public Library, doesn’t state a publisher or a date. The use of the long S and other typography suggest that it was produced in the eighteenth century, probably after 1775 but within recent memory of the battle.

The lyrics are most definitely from the redcoats’ point of view:

It was on the seventeenth by break of Day, the Yankees did surprise us,
With their strong works they had thrown up, to burn the town and drive us;
But soon we had an order came, an order to defeat them;
Like rebels stout they stood it out, and thought we ne’er could beat them.

About the hour of twelve that day, an order came for marching,
With three good flints and sixty rounds, each man hop’d to discharge them;
We marched down to the long wharf, where boats were ready waiting,
With expedition we embark’d, our ships kept cannonading.

And when our boats all filled were, with officers and soldiers,
With as good troops as England had, to oppose who dare control us;
And when our boats all filled were, we row’d in line of battle,
Where showers of ball like hail did fly, our cannon loud did rattle.

There was Cops-Hill battery near Charlestown, our twenty-fours they play’d;
And the three frigates in the stream, that very well behaved.
The Glasgow frigate clear’d the shore, all at the time of landing,
With her grape shot and cannon balls, no Yankees ne’er could stand them.

And when we landed on the shore, we draw’d up all together,
The Yankees they all man’d their works, & thought we’d ne’er come thither:
But soon they did perceive brave Howe, brave Howe, our bold commander,
With grenadiers and infantry, we made them to surrender.

Brave William Howe on our right wing, cry’d boys fight on like thunder,
You soon will see the rebels flee, with great amaze and wonder;
Now some lay bleeding on the ground, and some fell fast a running,
O’er hills and dales & mountains high, crying zounds brave Howe’s a coming.

They began to play on our left wing, where Pigot he commanded,
But we return’d it back again, with courage most undaunted;
To our grape shot and musquet ball, to which they were but strangers,
They thought to come with sword in hand, but soon they found their danger.

And when the works we got into, and put them to the flight, sir,
Some of them did hide themselves, and others died with fright, sir;
And when their works we got into, without great fear or danger,
Their works were made so firm and strong, the Yankees are great strangers.

But as for our artillery, they all behaved dinty,
For while their ammunition held, we gave it to them plenty;
But our conductor he got broke, for his misconduct sure sir,
The shot he sent for twelve pound guns, was made for twenty-four, sir.

There is some in Boston please to say, as we the field were taking,
We went to kill their countrymen, while they their hay were making;
But such stout whigs I never saw, to hang them all I’d rather,
For making hay with musquet balls, and buck-shot mixed together.

Brave Howe is so considerate, as to prevent all danger,
He allows us half a pint each day, to him we are not strangers:
Long may he live by land and sea, for he’s belov’d by many,
The name of Howe the Yankees dread, we see it very plainly.

And now my song is at an end, and to conclude my ditty;
It is the poor and ignorant, and only them I pity;
And as for their king that John Hancock, and Adams if they’re taken,
Their heads for signs shall hang up high upon the hill call’d Beacon.

This song is thus yet another example of British voices saying that Americans wanted Hancock to be their king.

These lines were passed down and reprinted in the early republic, which raises a couple of questions:

• How did Americans come to know about such an anti-Yankee song popular among British soldiers?
• How did we come to remember the song with different words?

TOMORROW: A tortuous publishing history.

(Photo above by Jerry Callaghan, courtesy of Friends of Minute Man National Park. It shows members of the 63rd Regiment of Foot reenacting unit.)