“Fifty Pompions in Arms”

In 1774 the bricklayer William Bell (1731-1804) was elected captain of Boston’s Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. That group wasn’t an official company of the Massachusetts militia, but rather a private organization that functioned as a sort of militia officers’ training school.

Like the town’s official companies, the Ancient and Honorables usually drilled on Boston Common. But in the fall of 1774, there were British army tents on much of that land. So Bell led his comrades to the biggest stretch of open space in the North End, on Copp’s Hill.

Merchant John Andrews had a fun time describing what happened in a 4 Oct 1774 letter to a relative in Philadelphia:

Yesterday afternoon our honorable and ancient Artillery company turn’d out, and for want of a better place they march’d down to Cop’s hill, where they went through their several manoeuvres to the satisfaction of every one, and really made a much more respectable appearance than they formerly us’d to.

Their fifes and drums, when near the hill, alarm’d the [warship] Lively, which lays near the ferry [to Charlestown]; and when they had got upon the hill, in sight of the Ship, the Boatswain’s whistle call’d all hands upon deck, the marines with their firelocks were fix’d upon the quarter, the ports open’d with a spring upon their cables, the round tops man’d, and a boat man’d and sent out upon each side to reconnoitre.

Such was the terror they were in, from the appearance of about fifty pompions [i.e., pumpkins, and metaphorical ones at that] in arms. At about five o’clock they remarched into King street, where they perform’d their evolutions with the greatest propriety and exactness; much more so, in my opinion, than any performances of the [regular] troops since they’ve been here.

Andrews’s letter is the main evidence of this event; the organization’s contemporaneous records don’t mention it. His sardonic tone seems to reflect a conviction that the British authorities weren’t up for a real military confrontation, and would back down before things got that bad.

The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company met next, according to its records, on 3 Apr 1775, planning for their big annual parade and election of new officers in May. But then the war started, and the organization basically went dormant until 1782.

“It came my turn to stand Sentury”

Daniel Granger (1762-1853) of Andover enlisted in the Continental Army during the winter of 1775-76, replacing his older brother, who was sick. Daniel was thirteen. In a memoir he finished five years before he died, Granger recalled the routine of his duties on Winter Hill beside the Mystic River:

The work of calling out the guard, was, that when any Guard or Detachment was wanted, a certain Number from each Company was given to the sargent major of the Regiment every Night & he went around to every Company & notified each Soldier, and the non Commissioned Officers, on what guard or duty he was so detailed, and to be ready at such an Hour, in the Morning.

The Sergent Major whose name was Bell, would be out at the time with his Rattan and rap on the Barracks & halloo, turn out quarter Guard, & he had a stantorian Voice, When each Officer & Soldier would turn out, who were so detailed for that Guard & there would be a Commissioned Officer to receive them on the parade. The Roll was called. If no one was missing: they were marched off to the place appointed to relieve the Guard of the preceeding Morning. . . .

The first time that I was detached, was on the main guard and I prepared my breakfast the Night before, so as to be ready, at the call of the little Bell, and not to get a caneing from him for negligence, as some others did, for when he began to wrap and to ball, the Soldiers would call out “there is the Bell, don’t you hear the Bell?”

It came my turn to stand Sentury, until about ten oclock at Night, and it was the most stormy and bitter cold Night that I ever felt, and I had to stand on the N.E. side of the Hill, where the Wind flew extremely cold, two long hours, altho I had a watch box to stand in yet I was obliged to go out for I could not see any one approaching when in the Box. I stood out my two hours and then was released. . . .

We were then marched to the Guard-house, where was a good fire, & as soon as I got warm, I wraped my Blanket round me, lie down on the cold wet floor, my Pack for a Pillow, and then slept, but some scuffled and wrassled all night rather than to sleep on a wet floor.

Eventually, Granger reported, “My Brother returned in good health, and I went home about the last of February 1776.”

The thumbnail above, courtesy of the Library of Congress, shows the Continental fortifications on Prospect Hill and Winter Hill.

Author Events at the A.A.S. in April

The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester has a couple of free public programs coming up featuring
authors on Revolutionary Boston:

• Tuesday, 7 April: Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore discuss their historical novel Blindspot.
• Tuesday, 21 April: Ira Stoll, author of Samuel Adams: A Life, discusses “Why Samuel Adams Matters.”

Both programs take place at 7:30 P.M. in the big hall, 185 Salisbury Street.

John Shubael Bell: housewright, under-sheriff

At the end of last year I corresponded with Don Shelton about the subject of this miniature, John Shubael Bell (1766-1819). Don has shared the information he’s accumulated about this art object and Bell at this website.

Bell followed his father, John Bell, into the profession of housewright, or carpenter. But he soon became a public servant, and that was how people remembered him when he died. This is an extract from the eulogy that Samuel L. Knapp delivered at Old North Church for the St. John’s Lodge of Freemasons ten days after Bell died.

Early in life the merits of Mr. Bell became known, and he was appointed to the command of a [militia] company which was composed of all ranks in society and of all ages proper to bear arms. His demeanour, his intelligence, and his humanity made him, in the opinion of the discriminating and the good, a proper person to take the laborious office of under-sheriff, which he did at the age of thirty.

This executive office had, in most parts of New England, been filled by coarse, boisterous, and iron-hearted men. Violence and insensibility seemed to be considered at that time by most people to be indispensable in the character of such an officer.

The conduct of Mr. Bell produced a general revolution in public sentiment upon this subject. He stood like the spirit of justice in the form of the angel of mercy between debtor and creditor, softening the severity of the latter and rousing the hopes and encouraging the exertions of the former. Delays were obtained, that he who owed might have time to struggle to pay, and, by his influence, terms were proposed to make payment practicable; and these arrangements frequently prevented much misery and restored confidence among men.

I was pleased to see Knapp state that a militia command was a way for a mechanic to attract favorable attention and rise in society. I think that’s the route that Henry Knox, Nathanael Greene, Thomas Crafts, David Mason, and other men of the previous generations came to prominence. In addition, Knapp’s picture of how the credit system functioned in the years of debtor’s prison carries some resonance for us today.

In addition to checking out Don Shelton’s investigation of the Shubael Bell portrait, check out his extensive online gallery of other miniatures.

Minute Man National Historical Park to Grow

Today’s Boston Globe brought the welcome news that Congress and the President have made a new law to extend the boundaries of Minute Man National Historical Park to include the homestead of Col. James Barrett. That 1705 farmhouse and the five acres around it are now owned by Save Our Heritage, a local preservation group. The next step will be an appraisal of the property’s market value, and then the federal government would need to authorize the actual purchase.

Barrett’s farm was the ultimate goal of the British march to Concord on 18-19 Apr 1775 because Gen. Thomas Gage had good intelligence that the colonel was storing cannons, mortars, gunpowder, and other ordnance there for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. But the provincials also had good intelligence, and Barrett, his family, and his militia men started moving and hiding that material before the troops arrived. Col. Barrett was also nominally in charge of the Middlesex County militia that massed above the North Bridge, though, because he was trying to monitor so many places while avoiding arrest, he couldn’t really exercise command.

Even though there was no shooting on Barrett’s property, it’s a crucial part of the Battle of Lexington and Concord—the reason there was a battle at all. It therefore makes sense to incorporate this land into the National Park Service site. And this cause is of special interest to Boston 1775 since some of my research helped to establish what was out there.

The same law also established the Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area in forty-five communities in north-central Massachusetts and New Hampshire, as discussed back here.

(Photo by Dominic Chavez/Boston Globe Staff.)

Rasselas “Printed for Every Purchaser”

In March the Times Literary Supplement ran Thomas Keymer’s essay on Samuel Johnson’s novel The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia:

It was published 250 years ago next month, but no early edition so well reflects the practical as well as philosophical importance that early readers found in Johnson’s theme as the first American edition, published in 1768 by Robert Bell, a radical Irish [actually Glaswegian by birth] bookseller who had moved to Philadelphia following the bankruptcy of his business in Dublin.

Bell’s Rasselas was a noisily transatlantic, democratizing affair (“AMERICA: PRINTED FOR EVERY PURCHASER”, screams the imprint), and his title page makes a further appeal to common readers with a tag from La Rochefoucauld: “The Labour or Exercise of the Body, freeth Men from Pains of the Mind; and ’tis this that constitutes the Happiness of the Poor”. . . .

Johnson was quick to grasp the implications of Bell’s edition when he was sent a copy five years later, and expressed pleasure “because the Printer seems to have expected that it would be scattered among the People”. He would have deplored any attempt to find common ground, however, between Rasselas and the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, with its well-known insistence “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness”.

Duties, not rights, were at the centre of Johnson’s ethics, and as a staunch conservative (though also a vocal abolitionist) he became the foremost British polemicist against the American Continental Congress in the 1770s. Pieties about equality for all enraged him especially, and in his most scathing denunciation of congressional proceedings, Taxation No Tyranny, he demands to know, with thunderous frankness, “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”.

Yet Johnson and [Thomas] Jefferson may have been closer in their thinking about the pursuit of happiness, if not about equality or slavery, than either would have cared to admit.

(Thanks to Philobiblos for the pointer to this article. I’ve adapted the British newspaper style to something approaching clarity.)

In his History of Printing, Isaiah Thomas wrote of Bell:

Bell was the publisher of the celebrated pamphlet entitled Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine. He employed Paine some time afterwards as a clerk, etc. . . . He was a thorough bookseller, punctual and fair in his dealings; and, as a companion, he was sensible, social and witty.

Bell died in Richmond, Virginia, on a bookselling trip in 1784, aged fifty-nine.

Getting on the Road to Revolution!

Publishers Weekly brings word of a new comics treatment of the American Revolution, from the team of Stan Mack and Susan Champlin. It’s part of a series on American history for kids aged 10 to 14 which Bloomsbury will start to publish this August, just before the new school year.

The magazine states:

Like the other books that will follow in the series, Road to Revolution! is set during a tumultuous social period in American history and readers can follow the adventures of a young boy and girl who team-up when they find themselves in midst of important and exciting historical events.

Set in Boston in 1775, Road to Revolution! focuses on the adventures of Nick, a fun-loving orphan boy and petty street-thief, and Penny, the spunky and headstrong daughter of a Boston Inn keeper that serves the British soldiers by day and plots against them at night.

Fifteen years ago, Mack created Stan Mack’s Real Life American Revolution for adults, looking at the same political movement with ironic detachment and political convictions. I’m interested in seeing how his and Champlin’s interest in history plays out in this story for today’s students. The notion of a “spunky” girl and a “fun-loving orphan boy” teaming up seems designed to please our modern tastes and values.

How Not to Do Counterintelligence

Christopher Marshall (1709-1797) was an Irish-born Philadelphia merchant active in Revolutionary politics, for which he was eventually expelled from his Quaker meeting.

Here’s the entry from his diary on 9 Jan 1776, which begins as Marshall hears some disturbing news about a valet to a member of the Continental Congress—James Duane, shown here courtesy of the New York Public Library. At the time the royal governor of New York, William Tryon, had chosen to move onto a ship in New York harbor for better security:

At breakfast, I was visited by Paul Fooks’s housekeeper, who informed that their boy, Neal, had heard his sister Rosanna Thompson, who lived at [Richard] Bache’s, [state] that James Brattle, servant man to James Duane, one of [the New] York delegates, was employed by Governor Tryon, to collect and send him all the news he could find, on board the Asia, for which he should be well rewarded and also be preferred to some post, in consequence of which, he had written to him, and in particular the day our fleet sailed with their number, &c.

On this information, I called upon some of our Committee at the Coffee-House. Joseph Dean went with me, but could gain nothing. We returned. Then John Bayard went with me to Joseph Reed’s he not at home; thence to see him at the Committee of Safety; not there; thence to the Court-House; found him.

After taking his advice, went to Halls printing-office; took Richard Bache home with us; called his maid; examined her. She seemed confounded, but, on the whole, denied it. From thence to the Coffee-House, where, consulting Major Cox, he joined us two.

We went to the State-House; called out Mr. Duane informed him; he seemed confounded; requested us to attend him to his house. We did. He called his man, examined him; took him up stairs and made search, all to no purpose.

We then went, took him with us to Paul Fooks’s; examined the boy who persisted. We brought the boy back to Duane’s lodgings; sent for the young woman, who, upon seeing her brother, confessed that what he had said was true.

James was called and interrogated, but all to no purpose. Then Major Cox and Mr. Duane took him upstairs again, and while they were employed at that business, he slipped down stairs, out through the yard, and have seen no more of him. Major Bayard and myself waited for them in the parlor. Thus he escaped.

An 1857 volume of Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York says in a footnote:

James Brattle, who had formerly lived with [i.e., was a servant for] Governor Tryon, was at this time servant to James Duane, a member of Congress, whose minutes he was in the habit of purloining, on his master retiring to bed, and afterwards sending them and other information to Governor Tryon. On being discovered he absconded, and was sent to England by his employer.

Among the intelligence Brattle was able to supply was news of the Americans’ top-secret submarine—which was promptly ignored by the Royal Navy.

“May woud be much plasenter time than April”

In March of 1767, George Washington went to Williamsburg for a legislative session. He wrote back to Mount Vernon that he was going to be there longer than he’d expected, or perhaps that he’d visit the Dismal Swamp before returning.

On 30 March, Martha Washington wrote back, in a postscript to a letter by plantation manager Lund Washington:

My Dearest

It was with very great pleasure I see in your letter that you got safely down. We are all very well at this time but it still is rainney and wett. I am sorry you will not be at home soon as I expected you. I had reather my sister woud not come up so soon as May woud be much plasenter time than April. We wrote you last post as I have nothing new to tell you I must conclude myself

Your most Affectionate
Martha Washington

Fascinating stuff, huh? You might well wonder why Boston 1775 is devoting a whole entry to this letter. That’s because this is the only signed letter from Martha Washington to George that’s known to have survived. (There’s also an unsigned note, now owned by the Virginia Historical Society.)

In 1994, when Joseph E. Fields published a volume of Martha Washington’s papers, he knew the text of this letter but didn’t know where it was. In 2003 the document resurfaced at a Christie’s auction, and Mount Vernon bought it. The image above comes from a report in Antiques and the Arts.

The Desertion I’d Most Like to See Reenacted

From Daniel McCurtin’s “Journal of the Times at the Siege of Boston Since Our Arrival at Cambridge, near Boston,” printed in Papers Chiefly Relating to the Maryland Line during the Revolution (1857), the entry dated 29 Dec 1775:

This day five Regular soldiers skated over the Bay on the ice to us, and landed on Brookline, there were several small arms fired after, but they came safe to us.

David Humphreys Bids Adieu

According to sonnets.org, the first American poet to write sonnets was Col. David Humphreys of the Continental Army. And one of his earliest efforts was:

Addressed to my Friends at Yale College, on my Leaving them to join the Army.

Adieu! thou Yale! where youthful poets dwell,
No more I linger by thy classic stream.
Inglorious ease and sportive songs farewell!
Thou startling clarion! break the sleeper’s dream!

And sing, ye bards! the war-inspiring theme.
Heard ye the din of battle? clang of arms?
Saw ye the steel ’mid starry banners beam?
Quick throbs my breast at war’s untried alarms,
Unknown pulsations stirr’d by glory’s charms.

While dear Columbia calls, no danger awes,
Though certain death to threaten’d chains be join’d.
Though fails this flesh devote to freedom’s cause,
Can death subdue th’ unconquerable mind?
Or adamantine chains ethereal substance bind?

For more on Humphreys’s long and busy life, here’s a biography from the Connecticut Sons of the American Revolution.

“Commodities belonging to the late garrison at Boston”

Back on Evacuation Day, I quoted a letter printed in Britain from an American who observed the departure of the British fleet from Boston. That same letter went on to this detail.

Cambridge, March 27. Among other commodities belonging to the late garrison at Boston, we have got their orderly book, by which it appears, that General [William] Howe had 7575 effective men, exclusive of the staff, so that with the marines and sailors, he might be considered as 10,000 strong.

The following is a true list of the stores, &c. left in Boston by the ministerial troops on evacuating that place:

• 100 pieces of cannon in town, from 9 to 32 pounders.
• 100 ditto, at the castle.
• 4 mortars, 13 and a half inches, two of them with beds weighing 5 tons each.
• 2500 chaldron of sea coal.
• 25,000 bushels of wheat.
• 2300 bushels of barley.
• 600 bushels of oats in one store.
• 100 jars of oil, containing 1 barrel each.
• 150 horses marked G. R.

The marking, short for “Georgius Rex,” signified that those horses had been claimed by the king’s army.

The copy of Howe’s orderly book wasn’t the only sensitive document left behind. Locals also discovered Ens. Henry De Berniere’s report of his scouting trips out to Worcester and Concord in early 1775, which John Gill printed for public consumption. (The orderly book from Gen. Howe printed in 1890 came from a copy in London, and I don’t know what happened to the one reportedly found in Boston in 1776.)

As for all those cannons, Gen. George Washington told the Continental Congress on 24 March:

They left a great Number of the Cannon, but have rendered all of them, except a very few, entirely useless by breaking off the Trunnions, and those they spiked up, but may be made serviceable again; some are already done.

So the Americans didn’t get quite the bounty of supplies that this letter implied.

“So as to give me a sight of my own brain.”

George Harris (1746-1829) was a captain in His Majesty’s 5th Regiment of Foot during the siege of Boston. He was badly wounded in the Battle of Bunker Hill, as he described in this letter:

We had made a breach in their fortifications, which I had twice mounted, encouraging the men to follow me, and was ascending a third time, when a ball grazed the top of my head, and I fell deprived of sense and motion.

My lieutenant, Lord Rawdon, caught me in his arms, and, believing me dead, endeavoured to remove me from the spot, to save my body from being trampled on. The motion, while it hurt me, restored my senses, and I articulated, “For God’s sake, let me die in peace.”

The hope of preserving my life induced Lord Rawdon to order four soldiers to take me up, and carry me to a place of safety. Three of them were wounded while performing this office (one afterwards died of his wounds), but they succeeded in placing me under some trees out of the reach of the balls.

A retreat having been sounded, poor Holmes [Harris’s servant] was running about, like a madman, in search of me, and luckily came to the place where I lay just in time to prevent my being left behind; for when they brought me to the water’s edge, the last boat was put off, the men calling out they “would take no more.”

On Holmes hallooing out, “It is Captain Harris,” they put back, and took me in. I was very weak and faint, and seized with a severe shivering; our blankets had been flung away during the engagement; luckily there was one belonging to a man in the boat, in which wrapping me up, and laying me in the bottom, they conveyed me safely to my quarters.

The surgeons did not at first apprehend danger from the contusion, notwithstanding the extreme pain I felt, which increased very much if I attempted to lie down. A worthy woman, seeing this, lent me an easy chair, but this being full of bugs, only added to my sufferings.

My agonies increasing, and the surgeons observing symptoms of matter forming (which, had it fallen on the brain, must have produced instant death, or at least distraction), performed the operation of trepanning, from which time the pain abated, and I began to recover; but before the callous was formed, they indulged me with the gratification of a singular curiosity—fixing looking-glasses so as to give me a sight of my own brain.

The heat of the weather, and the scarcity of fresh provisions, added greatly to the sufferings of the wounded. As patience was the only remedy for the former, I trusted to it for relief; and for the latter, the attention of the surgeon, and a truly benevolent family in Boston, who supplied me with mutton-broth, when no money could purchase it, was a blessing for which I can never be sufficiently thankful.

The aide who edited Harris’s memoir added: “He also preserved, and afterwards presented to his eldest daughter, in memorial of the owner’s devoted zeal and affection, a silver button which had belonged to the grenadier who lost his life in attempting to save his captain’s.” Wouldn’t it have been more noble to present some silver to the grenadier’s daughter?

Harris survived to fight in more campaigns of the war, including the conflict over the Caribbean island of Santa Lucia. His career really took off during the British conquest of India, and he was made the first Baron Harris when he retired.

Back here is another glimpse of Lord Rawdon at Bunker Hill, from another future general in the British army, Martin Hunter.

“The Character of a Colony”

During the Revolutionary period, the big north-south divide within the future U.S. of A. was not at the relatively recent Mason-Dixon line defining the southern border of Pennsylvania. Rather, it was at the border between New England and New York.

East of that border, the colonies had been settled by Puritans, and were still dominated by the Congregationalist orthodoxy. Only small minorities adhered to the Church of England and Society of Friends, the largest and/or most influential religions in colonies to the south.

Landholdings in New England were relatively small and equal. The climate didn’t allow for the big cash crops of tobacco, indigo, and rice, meaning plantation slavery hadn’t taken hold. New York grants blocked expansion to the west, so the Proclamation of 1763 didn’t matter so much as it did to whites in the southern colonies.

John Adams expressed these differences to Joseph Hawley, the most prominent Patriot politician in western Massachusetts, in a letter dated 25 Nov 1775:

The Characters of Gentlemen in the four New England Colonies, differ as much from those in the others, as that of the Common People differs, that is as much as several distinct Nations almost.

Gentlemen, Men of Sense, or any Kind of Education in the other Colonies are much fewer in Proportion than in N. England. Gentlemen in the other Colonies have large Plantations of slaves, and the common People among them are very ignorant and very poor. These Gentlemen are accustomed, habituated to higher Notions of themselves and the distinction between them and the common People, than We are. And an instantaneous alteration of the Character of a Colony, and that Temper and those Sentiments which its Inhabitants imbibed with their Mothers Milk, and which have grown with their Growth and strengthened with their Strength, cannot be made without a Miracle.

I dread the Consequences of this Disimilitude of Character, and without the Utmost Caution on both sides, and the most considerate Forbearance with one another and prudent Condescention on both sides, they will certainly be fatal. An Alteration of the Southern Constitutions, which must certainly take Place if this War continues[,] will gradually bring all the Continent nearer and nearer to each other in all Respects. But this is the Most Critical Moment, We have yet seen. This Winter will cast the Die.

I should note that Adams hadn’t actually traveled south of Philadelphia yet. Fortunately for him, this was not one of his letters that fell into British hands that season, or it would probably have cost him even more allies in the Continental Congress.

The thumbnail above shows a 1775 map of New England and Long Island, available from Colonial Williamsburg.

George Washington’s Pistols

I recently wrote about Capt. Nathan Barrett offering Gen. George Washington two ornate pistols that had been captured with a British officer’s runaway horse on 19 Apr 1775. (Also see Nat Taylor’s further research on the likely identity of that officer, squeezed in while the Taylor family grew by one.)

Why, we might ask, would Capt. Barrett have thought the generalissimo needed pistols? Couldn’t a Virginia gentleman acquire his own weapons? Well, there’s a curious entry in Washington’s personal accounts on 1 Sept 1775:

To Cash for recovering my Pistols which had been stolen, & for repairing them afterwards...£1.10s.

I haven’t found any other information about this moment, alas.

And what might those pistols have looked like? Here’s an entry in Col. William Henshaw’s orderly book for 9 Mar 1776; it didn’t appear in Washington’s general orders, and was therefore probably meant only for troops in the southern wing of the army:

His Excellency the General lost one of his pistols yesterday upon Dorchester Neck, whoever will bring it to him or leave it with General [John] Thomas shall receive two dollars reward and no questions asked. It is a skrew’d barrel’d pistol, mounted with silver, and a head resembling a pugg dog at the butt.

The commander-in-chief was “upon Dorchester Neck,” of course, to see how the final bombardment of Boston was going.

Image above courtesy of the Pug Dog Encephalitis Project.

Toss Up? Pitch and Hustle?

One of the best ways to find out what soldiers were really up to, especially in their spare time, is to find out what their commanders forbade them from doing. Gen. George Washington’s orders to the Continental Army outside Boston on 3 Oct 1775 contain these instructions:

Any Officer, Non-Commissioned Officer, or Soldier, who shall hereafter be detected playing at toss up, pitch and hustle, or any other games of chance, in or near the camp and villages bordering on the encampments, shall, without delay, be confined and punished for disobedience of orders. . . .

The General does not mean, by the above order, to discourage sports of exercise and recreation; he only means to discountenance and punish gaming.

The George Washington Papers in the Library of Congress’s American Memory collections defines the first game this way: “Toss-up was played with a coin and heads or tails called while the coin was in the air.” Which is what we now do before we start to play some games. But those were simpler times.

“Pitch and hustle” was based on a game also called “chuck-farthing,” “pitch-ha’penny,” “pinch,” and, these days, “pitching pennies.” But the “hustle” part was new to me. The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England explained it this way:

This is a game commonly played in the fields by the lowest classes of the people. It requires two or more antagonists, who pitch or cast an equal number of halfpence at a mark set up at a short distance; and the owner of the nearest halfpenny claims the privilege to hustle first; the next nearest halfpenny entitles the owner to a second claim; and so on to as many as play.

When they hustle, all the halfpence pitched at the mark are thrown into a hat held by the player who claims the first chance; after shaking them together, he turns the hat down upon the ground; and as many of them as lie with the impression of the head upwards belong to him; the remainder are then put into the hat a second time, and the second claimant performs the same kind of operation; and so it passes in succession to all the players, or until all the halfpence appear with the heads upwards.

Sometimes they are put into the hands of the player, instead of a hat, who shakes them, and casts them up into the air; but in both instances the heads become his property: but if it should so happen, that, after all of them have hustled, there remain some of the half-pence that have not come with the heads uppermost, the first player then hustles again, and the others in succession, until they do come so.

The image above is from the Ormskirk and West Lancashire Numismatic Society’s article on coinage. It’s an “evasion” half-penny of the late 1700s, looking close enough to actual British money to circulate, but bearing a meaningless inscription so that the authorities could not charge the maker with forgery.

Clearing the Brush in Northwest Passage

Northwest Passage is a comic saga by Scott Chantler, published in 2005-06 and then collected in 2007. It seems to be an attempt to create the Great Canadian Graphic Novel, or at least to rival Seth’s Clyde Fans for that honor.

The story starts in 1755, at a Hudson’s Bay Company fort and trading post in Canada. Can you see what’s wrong with this picture?

This gentleman is far from “neat in appearance” by eighteenth-century British standards. He’s wearing a bushy beard of a sort acceptable in the 1700s only if he’d just been rescued from the wilderness or a shipwreck.

And this isn’t the only character in Northwest Passage to sport facial hair that would be more appropriate for an early silent-movie comedian. It’s part of several character designs.
I’d like to see more graphic storytelling about the past, but I don’t recognize this eighteenth century. Different periods had different fashions and etiquette, and Chantler is basically drawing men from nineteenth-century North America dressed up in the previous century’s clothing.

How Those Pistols Really Got Here

At the risk of turning Boston 1775 into “all Major Pitcairn, all the time” (and we still haven’t addressed the whereabouts of his body), I return once more to the question of the pistols on display in Lexington that were said to belong to that British Marines officer.

As I reported earlier this week, the heraldic emblem on those pistols is actually that of the Crosbie family, and a Capt. William Crosbie was listed among the British army’s wounded officers that spring.

Nat Taylor, who’s been trying to nail down the family history of Capt. Crosbie, asked about the story behind the pistols. How good is the evidence that they really came from a British officer unhorsed on 19 Apr 1775? How did they come into the hands of descendants of Gen. Israel Putnam, who wasn’t in Massachusetts that day? How did they come back to Lexington?

The evidence for the traditional provenance looks quite solid. The first mention of those pistols that I could find appeared in Samuel Swett’s 1818 addition to David Humphreys’s An Essay on the Life of the Honourable Major General Israel Putnam. The very same paragraph that discusses how “a black soldier named Salem” killed Pitcairn then goes on to say:

It was he [Pitcairn] who caused the first effusion of blood at Lexington. In that battle his horse was shot under him, while he was separated from his troops; with presence of mind he feigned himself slain; his pistols were taken from his holsters, and he was left for dead, when he seized the opportunity and escaped.

A footnote then adds, “This trophy afterwards belonged to General Putnam, and yet remains in his family, from whom we have the above anecdote.”

Nine years later, Ezra Ripley supplied more detail in A History of the Fight at Concord:

From this time, there was a general though not entire cessation of firing, until the enemy had entered the bounds of Lexington, when Capt. [John] Parker’s company attacked the British from the woods on the south of the road. When the enemy were rising Fiske’s hill in the west part of Lexington, they were very hardly pressed, the Americans having run forward and placed themselves advantageously behind trees and fences. The British faced about, and a very spirited and bloody contest ensued. Here Maj. Pitcairn was wounded and unhorsed: his horse, pistols, &c. were taken.

And Ripley has his own footnote:

The horse was taken to Concord and sold at Auction. Capt. Nathan Barrett bought the pistols, and afterwards offered them to Gen. [George] Washington, but he not accepting them, they were given to Gen. Putnam.

We know the Barrett family, headed by Col. James Barrett, was deeply involved in the events at Concord that day. And it makes sense that the Putnam family didn’t know or preserve the detail that their ancestor wasn’t the first choice to receive the pistols. We appear, therefore, to have independent sources corroborating each other. (Note, however, that the Ripley account means Putnam did not have the pistols at Bunker Hill, as some later authors say; Washington didn’t arrive in Boston until July 1775, so Barrett couldn’t have tried to give him the guns until then.)

William Cutter’s Life of Israel Putnam, published in 1859, reported of the guns: “They are still in the possession of one of his grandsons, John P. Putnam, Esq., of Western New York. They are represented as being of exquisite workmanship.” So Cutter learned about them but didn’t see them.

John P. Putnam’s widow Elizabeth loaned the pistols to Lexington for its centennial observance of the battle in 1875. According to Mary E. Hudson, writing in 1900, she had no children to pass them on to. The Secretary of War made noises about buying the pistols, and in 1880 the Lexington historian Charles Hudson [father of Mary?] said Elizabeth Putnam had “several liberal offers in coin” to buy the guns. But she decided to donate them to the town of Lexington, and there they remain.

So the only doubtful part of the pistols’ legend was the most questionable part from the start: how people could be so sure that they came from Maj. Pitcairn as opposed to some other, less notorious British officer unhorsed in the battle. After all, the man didn’t stick around to give autographs.

Speaking of autographs, though, I came across another detail of those pistols while researching this post. Yankee Magazine‘s July/August 2007 issue reported: “These foliate-engraved, ram’s-head-butted pistols bear Pitcairn’s monogram or initials amid the scrollwork.” Or is that wishful looking?

Tory Row When the Houses Still Belonged to Tories

My talk last night at Gen. Washington’s 1775-76 headquarters kept coming back to this map of that part of Cambridge in 1776. Some folks wanted yet another look, so here it is.

This is a detail of the wonderful map that Henry Pelham engraved in England after leaving Boston with the British military in 1776. You can explore the whole thing through the Library of Congress’s website of maps from the American Revolution and Its Era. North on this map is at about two o’clock, in case you’re having trouble orienting it with today’s streets and Charles River.

All five mansions that Pelham labeled in the top half of this detail are still standing:

• The house of “Lt. Govr. Oliver” is Elmwood, official residence of Harvard’s president.
• The homes of “Mr. Fairweather” and “Judge Sewall” are in private hands, the latter with a redesigned exterior.
• The house of “Judge Lee” is headquarters of the Cambridge Historical Society.
• The house of “Col. Vassel” is Longfellow National Historic Site, where I was speaking.

And I bet folks can spot a few other buildings in this part of Cambridge in 1776 that are still standing today. How accurately Pelham was able to depict their footprints while he was stuck behind the British lines is another question.

“The Cause of His Being Assaulted”

As a foretaste of my presentation at Longfellow National Historic Site this evening at 6:30, here’s an item from the 6 Oct 1774 New York Journal, reporting news from Providence, Rhode Island, datelined 24 September:

We hear from Bristol, that on Tuesday, night last [i.e., 20 Sept], William Vassal, Esq; of that place, in returning home with his Lady from a visit, was assaulted by a number of men, who threw stones at his chaise, which they much injured, and attempted to stop the carriage; but having a fleet horse, he got safe home, and next morning set out for Boston.—

He was suspected by some to be unfriendly to the liberties of America, which we are told was the cause of his being assaulted.

Vassall was suddenly unpopular with his neighbors because in mid-1774 the London government had appointed him to the Massachusetts Council, which had until then been an elected body. Because of the writ of mandamus that named those men, the new body was called the “mandamus Council” or, by Patriots, the “new-fangled Council.”

It’s a bit odd that Vassall was named to that Council because by 1774 he was living mostly in Rhode Island, on his second wife’s estate. The ministers in London probably didn’t know that. They just knew that he was rich, Anglican, and loyal to the Crown.

Which was also apparently enough for people in Rhode Island to stone William Vassall’s chaise. After all:

• The Massachusetts Council wasn’t really their concern.
• He had already refused the appointment, and never attended a Council meeting.

By this date, in fact, Gov. Thomas Gage had written to London about a replacement for Vassall. What name did he have in mind? That’s one thing I’m going to talk about this evening.