Sgt. George Marsden of His Majesty’s 59th Regiment

To delve into the British army career of George Marsden, I turned to Don Hagist, author of British Soldiers, American War and other books.

Don checked his thorough records and found that Marsden first arrived in New England in 1768 with the 59th Regiment of Foot in a company commanded by Capt. John Willson. They came to Boston, and local Whigs soon made Capt. Willson notorious for supposedly encouraging slaves to revolt.

As Don told me:

Marsden is on the April 1769 roll for the grenadier company, prepared in Boston. On the October 1770 roll for the company he shows up as being appointed serjeant, but in 1774 he’s a private again.

Unfortunately, the regiment did a lousy job in filing its paperwork, so we don’t know about anything the dates in between except that the regiment was in Nova Scotia from 1769 to 1774. (Marsden’s descendants also understood him as coming through Nova Scotia with the British army, but as an officer during the earlier French and Indian War.)

The fact that Marsden (usually written “Marsdin” in the muster rolls) became a sergeant suggests that his officers saw him as intelligent and dependable. Furthermore, while enlisted men often bounced from private to corporal and back depending on the regiment’s needs, a sergeant usually stayed a sergeant. So what’s the significance of Marsden’s demotion? Had he lost his superiors’ confidence? Did he resent losing that rank? We don’t know.

On 24 July 1774, the 59th Regiment prepared to sail from Nova Scotia back to Boston as part of Gen. Thomas Gage’s build-up of troops. And Pvt. George Marsden was no longer with them.

Don tells me that British regiments often suffered a wave of desertions just before they made a big move. Soldiers might have built ties with locals that they were loath to break, or they might have realized that their officers’ departure meant this was a good chance to make a run for it.

After July 1774 Marsden disappears from all records, as far as I can tell, until he enlisted in Col. James Scamman’s Massachusetts regiment on 19 May 1775. That unit was made up of men from southern Maine and New Hampshire. Marsden’s home was then listed as “Londonderry,” which one later researcher interpreted to mean Londonderry in Ireland. However, that same document listed several other men from Londonderry as well, so it probably referred to Londonderry, New Hampshire. Evidently Marsden had found his way to that town.

Marsden became the Scamman regiment’s adjutant, an administrative post, undoubtedly because of his experience as a sergeant in the British army. A month later came the Battle of Bunker Hill. Marsden’s old regiment, the 59th, was fighting on the British side. Had Marsden been captured, he would almost surely have been recognized, tried as a deserter in arms with the enemy, and executed. Nevertheless, he pushed ahead to the front lines faster than his colonel.

Adj. Marsden testified against Col. Scamman in his court-martial the following month, and I can’t imagine that the regimental meetings were smooth after that. At the end of the year, however, it was clear who prevailed. Scamman was left out of the Continental Army. In contrast, Marsden was commissioned as a Lieutenant in Col. William Prescott’s regiment—i.e., the commander who had actually been in the redoubt on Breed’s Hill was ready to fight alongside him. (Similarly, Ens. Joshua Trafton, who also got on Scamman’s bad side, was offered a lieutenant’s commission and eventually became a captain.)

George Marsden is thus like Thomas Machin, Daniel Box, Andrew Brown—deserters from the king’s army who had been recognized for their skills but barred by the British class system from rising into the officer class. In the Continental Army, Marsden became an officer. In the new republic, he was considered a gentleman. Like Machin and Brown, Marsden or his family retroactively came up with a more genteel history for him in Britain, making him an officer of the king who resigned before the war and wiping out any embarrassment about his having deserted.

TOMORROW: Marsden’s mysterious marriage.

George Marsden: “half-way up Bunker’s hill with Col. Scammans”

The last witness in the July 1775 trial of Col. James Scamman for “Backwardness” during the Battle of Bunker Hill was his regimental adjutant, George Marsden.

The record of Scamman’s court martial states:

Adjutant Marsden was sworn at the desire of the complainants and deposed that we were three-quarters of an hour on the little hill and continued about twenty minutes after we heard of the firing on the hill in Charlestown. I went half-way up Bunker’s hill with Col. Scammans when I left him and went to the breastwork, where I got before the enemy forced it; the confusion was so great when we got to Bunker’s-Hill we could not form the regiment.

On Monday, 17 July, precisely one month after the battle, the court-martial board deliberated and acquitted Scamman of the charge against him. The chaos of the battle and the lack of clear lines of command meant there wasn’t enough proof to find him guilty of disobeying orders.

Nonetheless, Scamman’s reputation suffered. Junior officers like Ens. Joshua Trafton treated him with disrespect. At the start of 1776 he wasn’t offered a commission in the reformed Continental Army. His name had even come up in the secret correspondence of Dr. Benjamin Church, who told his contact inside Boston, “the cowardice of the clumsy Col. [Samuel] Gerrish and Col. Scammon, were the lucky occasion of their [the provincials’] defeat.”

After that correspondence became public, Scamman sent the record of his court martial to the New-England Chronicle in the hope of vindicating himself. But he couldn’t let that record speak for itself; he added comments about how particular testimony justified his actions or should be disbelieved.

In regard to Adj. Marsden, Scamman wrote:

It is observable that the Adjutant would insinuate by his deposition that the regiment arrived at Bunker’s-Hill time enough to reinforce the breastwork before it was forced by the enemy, but if the public will only consider that those regiments which were stationed only two miles distance, did not arrive seasonable enough, and that the deponent had heretofore perjured himself by his desertion from the enemy, and by his common deportment discovers no regard to the Deity, his deposition will have but little weight with them.

So Marsden was a deserter? (As well as having “no regard to the Deity,” whatever that might have meant to New England Congregationalists.) That’s interesting.

A genealogy titled George Marsden, Revolutionary Patriot; His Family, Friends & Descendants, published in 1961, states this family understanding:

George Marsden was born in Leeds, England in the year 1737, the youngest son of an English gentleman. Upon the death of his father, his older brother inherited the estate, titles, etc., and George was procured a commission in the British army as was customary at that time for the younger sons of an English family. Soon thereafter, he was sent to the Colonies by way of Nova Scotia, to fight the French and Indians. He performed his duties with exceptional valor and bravery, and it was a great disappointment to his fellow officers when, early in 1775, he tendered his resignation as an officer in the British army, joined the Colonies against, the motherland and thereby became a rebel in the eyes of his friends and his family.

Was that what Scamman meant by referring to Marsden’s “desertion from the enemy”?

TOMORROW: How George Marsden really came to the American army.

“Backwardness in Colonel Scammans”?

On 12 July 1775, five days after confirming the court-martial sentence of Capt. John Callender, Gen. George Washington issued orders for the trial of another Continental Army officer:

A General Court Martial of the Line to sit at Head Quarters, in Cambridge, to morrow morning at Nine OClock, to try Col. Scammons of the Massachusetts Forces accused of “Backwardness in the execution of his duty in the late Action upon Bunkers-hill”. The Adjutant of Col. Scammon’s regiment, to warn all Evidences [i.e., witnesses], and persons concern’d to attend the court.

The regimental adjutant was a man named George Marsden.

Col. James Scamman (also spelled Scammans, Scammon, and Scammons) commanded a regiment made up of men from Maine and New Hampshire. While the fight raged on Breed’s Hill in Charlestown, he had led his men to Cobble Hill, on the west side of the Charlestown Neck, and stayed there for a while. Then when he finally moved them onto the Charlestown peninsula, Scamman went no farther than the brow of the taller Bunker’s Hill before ordering everyone to turn around and retreat.

In his defense, Scamman said had been ordered “to the hill,” and at first he thought that meant Cobble Hill because people feared British regulars would land at nearby Lechmere’s Point. Some of his witnesses, such as Drummer Henry Foss, backed him up on that.

However, it’s clear that other men in Scamman’s regiment supported the complaints against him. Those soldiers were already split over whom they’d signed up to fight under—Scamman or his lieutenant colonel, Johnson Moulton. In their testimony, some junior officers hinted that the colonel didn’t move as quickly as he should have, or noted that other provincials moved on to Breed’s Hill even as Scamman said that was too dangerous. For example:

Ensign Joshua Trafton deposed, about two of the clock (afternoon) we marched from Cambridge to Lechmere’s-Point, where we found Gen. [John] Whitcomb who expressed much surprise at finding Col. Scammans take post there. We remained on the Point fifteen minutes and then marched to a small hill below Prospect-Hill. We continued on the small hill about half an hour or more; during which time Col. Scammans sent two Serjeants to Bunker’s-Hill, to know if his regiment was wanted.

We took the nearest road to Bunker’s-Hill, as I suppose; and before we got to the top of the hill, Colonel ordered a retreat. I cannot say whether the breastwork was forced or not at that time. We saw many men retreating down the hill who said they had spent all their ammunition; some told us that the enemy had retreated and begged us to push on. As we turned off the small hill, a regiment marched by us towards Bunker’s-Hill. As we marched from Cambridge we heard the regulars were landing at Lechmere’s Point and at Charlestown. Col. Scammans made the greatest despatch from the small hill to Bunker’s-Hill.

I saw no other instance of backwardness in Colonel Scammans, except his long stay at the small hill, which appeared to me unnecessary. As we retreated a number of men advanced up in an irregular manner.

Shortly after this Scamman accused Trafton of “abusive Language” and later of “offering to strike his Colo,” both charges apparently involving Trafton’s disdain for the colonel. But the court-martial boards went easy on the junior officer—suggesting they thought his disrespect for Scamman had a solid basis.

TOMORROW: The main witness accusing Col. Scamman of backwardness was none other than the regimental adjutant, George Marsden.

“Capt. John Callender is accordingly cashiered”

After the British won the Battle of Bunker Hill, there was a great deal of finger-pointing on the American side. Eventually New Englanders decided the battle had actually been a Good Thing, but they still blamed several officers for behaving poorly.

As I related back here, Gen. Israel Putnam insisted that an artillery captain he had met on the battlefield be court-martialed for abandoning his cannon. That process had a false start, but by the time Gen. George Washington settled into his new job in Cambridge the verdict was awaiting his approval.

On 7 July 1775, the commander-in-chief’s general orders made a big deal of his decsion:

It is with inexpressible Concern that the General upon his first Arrival in the army, should find an Officer sentenced by a General Court Martial to be cashier’d for Cowardice—A Crime of all others, the most infamous in a Soldier, the most injurious to an Army, and the last to be forgiven; inasmuch as it may, and often does happen, that the Cowardice of a single Officer may prove the Distruction of the whole Army:

The General therefore (tho’ with great Concern, and more especially, as the Transaction happened before he had the Command of the Troops) thinks himself obliged for the good of the service, to approve the Judgment of the Court Martial with respect to Capt. John Callender, who is hereby sentenced to be cashiered. Capt. John Callender is accordingly cashiered and dismissd from all farther service in the Continental Army as an Officer.

The General having made all due inquiries, and maturely consider’d this matter is led to the above determination not only from the particular Guilt of Capt. Callenders, but the fatal Consequences of such Conduct to the army and to the cause of america.

He now therefore most earnestly exhorts Officers of all Ranks to shew an Example of Bravery and Courage to their men; assuring them that such as do their duty in the day of Battle, as brave and good Officers, shall be honor’d with every mark of distinction and regard; their names and merits made known to the General Congress and all America: while on the other hand, he positively declares that every Officer, be his rank what it may, who shall betray his Country, dishonour the Army and his General, by basely keeping back and shrinking from his duty in any engagement; shall be held up as an infamous Coward and punish’d as such, with the utmost martial severity; and no Connections, Interest or Intercessions in his behalf will avail to prevent the strict execution of justice.

Was Washington trying to make an example of Capt. John Callender? He certainly was. His language, especially at the end, closely followed the suggestion of the respected Massachusetts legislator Joseph Hawley, who on 5 July had written to him:

…I suggest, that although in the Massachusetts part of the Army there are divers brave and intrepid officers, yet there are too many, and even several Colonels, whose characters, to say the least, are very equivocal with respect to courage. There is much more cause to fear that the officers will fail in a day of trial, than the privates. I may venture to say, that if the officers will do their duty, there is no fear of the soldiery.

I therefore most humbly propose to your consideration the propriety and advantage of your making immediately a most solemn and peremptory declaration to all the officers of the Army, in general orders, or otherwise, as your wisdom shall direct, assuring them that every officer who, in the day of battle, shall fully do his duty, shall not fail of your kindest notices and highest marks of your favour; but, on the other hand, that every officer who, on such a day, shall act the poltron, dishonour his General, and by failing of his duty, betray his Country, shall infallibly meet his deserts, whatever his rank, connexions, or interest may be; and that no intercessions on his behalf will be likely to be of any avail for his pardon.

Of course, it’s one thing to say the system was going to be strict with everyone—it’s another thing to carry that out. Callender wasn’t the only Massachusetts artillery officer who had performed below expectations at Bunker Hill. But the other two were the son and nephew of the artillery regiment’s commander. It took months before they faced courts-martial. “No Connections, Interest or Intercessions” indeed!

Calendar eventually returned to the army. Of the Gridley cousins, Scarborough was convicted and cashiered, Samuel acquitted, but neither was in the Continental Army at the start of 1776.

The Story Behind “Warren’s Address”

A few days ago I mentioned the poem “Warren’s Address to the American Soldiers, before the Battle of Bunker Hill,” which N. C. Wyeth illustrated in 1922.

Those lines were written by the Rev. John Pierpont (1785-1866). After graduating from Yale, he became minister at the Hollis Street Meeting in Boston, originally established for the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, Sr.

Pierpont stayed at that church for over twenty-five years, becoming increasingly controversial as he became increasingly active in the temperance and abolition movements. Later Pierpont was a minister in Medford and ran for office in a couple of those fringe parties that actually wanted to end slavery.

Pierpont was also heavily involved in efforts at education, and in 1827 he published a school book called The National Reader. It collected examples of both prose and poetry for students to read or recite. Lessons 127 to 132 were all about Bunker Hill—excerpts from Carlo Botta’s history in translation and Daniel Webster’s oration at the dedication of the monument, a hymn that Pierpont had written for that ceremony, and “Warren’s Address.”

Which reads:

Stand! the ground’s your own, my braves!
Will ye give it up to slaves?
Will ye look for greener graves?
Hope ye mercy still?
What’s the mercy despots feel?
Hear it in that battle-peal!
Read it on yon bristling steel!
Ask it,—ye who will.

Fear ye foes who kill for hire?
Will ye to your homes retire?
Look behind you!—they’re afire!
And, before you, see
Who have done it! From the vale
On they come!—and will ye quail?
Leaden rain and iron hail
Let their welcome be!

In the God of battles trust!
Die we may,—and die we must:
But, O, where can dust to dust
Be consigned so well,
As where heaven its dews shall shed
On the martyred patriot’s bed,
And the rocks shall raise their head,
Of his deeds to tell?

We must remember that Dr. Joseph Warren declined to command in the Breed’s Hill redoubt and never delivered such a speech, in rhyme or not. Also, Pierpont composed this for use in schools, so we should imagine it being recited by an emotive, squeaky-voiced fourteen-year-old in an assembly hall.

One of Pierpont’s sons wrote “Jingle Bells.” One of his grandsons, named after him, was J. Pierpont Morgan.

Benjamin Pierce’s Story of Bunker Hill

In March 1818, the Port-Folio magazine published Henry Dearborn’s account of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Dearborn was a veteran of that battle and the war that followed, later a Secretary of War, and finally a general during the War of 1812. So of course people respected his version of history, right?

Certainly not! Dearborn bluntly criticized Gen. Israel Putnam (shown here). Among other things, he wrote that the Connecticut general “remained at or near the top of Bunker Hill until the retreat. . . . He not only continued at that distance himself during the whole of the action, but had a force with him nearly as large as that engaged.” Within weeks Putnam’s son Daniel and others leapt to the late general’s defense.

Dearborn fought back, gathering recollections from other veterans of the battle who didn’t recall “Old Put” as a leader that day. One was Benjamin Pierce. In a letter dated 17 May 1818 he told Dearborn:

I have read your “Account of the Battle of Bunker’s-hill,” and consider it to be more like the thing itself, than any statement I have ever seen.

I think our Army broke ground on the evening of the 16th of June; and the Battle was on the 17th. I went on to the Hill about eleven o’clock, A. M., on the 17th; when I arrived at the summit of Bunker’s hill, I saw two pieces of cannon there standing, with two or three soldiers standing by them, who observed they belonged to Captain [John] Callender’s Company, and said that the Captain and his officers were cowards, and that they had run away.

General Putnam there sat upon a horse; I saw nobody at that place when I arrived there, but the General and those two or three soldiers. General Putnam requested our Company, which was commanded by Captain John Ford of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, to take those two pieces of cannon, and draw them down; our men utterly refused, and said they had no knowledge of the use of artillery, and that they were ready to fight with their own arms.

Captain Ford then addressed his Company in a very animated, patriotic, and brave strain, which is the characteristic of the man; the Company then seized the drag-ropes and soon drew them to the rail-fence, according to my recollection, about half the distance from the redoubt on Breed’s-hill to Mystic-river. I think I saw General Putnam at that place, looking for some part of his sword; I did not hear him give any orders nor assume any command, except at the top of Bunker’s-hill, when I was going to the field of battle.

I remained at the rail-fence, until all the powder and ball were spent. I had a full view of the movements of the enemy; and I think your statement of the order of the day and of the two contending armies, is correct and cannot be denied with the semblance of truth.

Excuse an old soldier.

Other soldiers described Putnam being much more active, almost frenetic, especially in regard to other abandoned cannon—but not at the rail fence, where Pierce’s and Dearborn’s companies stationed themselves. Thus, they didn’t see Putnam exercise much authority, but other men did, and were still fond of “Old Put.”

According to Liz Covart’s article in the Journal of the American Revolution, the controversy over Dearborn’s attack on Putnam helped to cost him the race for governor of Massachusetts. Ironically, a few years later Benjamin Pierce won two terms as governor of New Hampshire. (In between those terms he lost once to a candidate named John Bell. Pierce’s son Franklin would later win an even bigger election.)

Pierce’s letter is typical of a lot of first-person accounts of the Bunker Hill battle written in the midst of the Dearborn-Putnam controversy: so focused on the question of whether Putnam was in the fight and/or in command that it omits most of the writer’s own experience. Did Ford’s men fire the cannon they took to the fence, and how effectively? What was it like to fight there “until all the powder and ball were spent”? Alas, Pierce didn’t say.

The Broken Officer of Bunker Hill

This is a detail of a print titled “An Exact View of the Late Battle at Charlestown, June 17th, 1775.”

Versions of this image are on display right now in both the Boston Public Library’s “We Are One” exhibit and the Massachusetts Historical Society’s “God Save the People” exhibit. Here’s a link to the B.P.L.’s page for the full picture.

The engraving is credited to Bernard Romans, a native of Holland who had emigrated to Britain and then to North America in the 1750s. He explored parts of Florida and the southern frontier, then journeyed north on business.

When the Revolutionary War broke out, Romans was in Connecticut. He raised a small force to attack Fort George in New York, enjoying the same success as Ethan Allen in seizing Fort Ticonderoga but not the same fame.

In his “Exact View” of the battle we know best as Bunker Hill, Romans took a perspective from a point west of the Charlestown neck, putting the Breed’s Hill redoubt on the left of his frame as shown above and Charlestown in flames farther back toward the right. As shown in the detail, he or his colorist depicted the provincial soldiers in unlikely blue uniforms.

“General [Israel] Putnam” was the only individual Romans’s key identified by name, but that Connecticut officer wasn’t the picture’s biggest figure. There are two men in the left foreground, gesticulating on either side of a cannon. A number 8 hovers over one of their heads. The key at the top identifies that man as “Broken Officer.”

Yes, that’s Maj. Scarborough Gridley, youngest son of the artillery regiment’s commander, who chose to trade potshots with a British warship from Cobble Hill rather than go onto the peninsula where the real battle was.

Scar Gridley wasn’t cashiered from the Continental Army until September 1775, meaning Romans must have created this engraving after that date. The prominence he gave to that embarrassing detail of the battle suggests that his American public was interested in Maj. Gridley’s removal.

Deborah M. Child on the Life of Richard Brunton, 17 June

On Wednesday, 17 June, Deborah M. Child will speak at the New England Historical and Genealogical Society about her new illustrated biography Soldier, Engraver, Forger: Richard Brunton’s Life on the Fringe in America’s New Republic.

Child’s talk will take place on the anniversary of Bunker Hill, appropriate because Brunton fought in that battle. As a British soldier.

Brunton later deserted and used his skill as an engraver to make a living in the U.S. of A. Unfortunately, at times the most lucrative engravings he could turn out were forged bank notes. He died in Groton in 1832.

I played a very small role in the creation of this book. A couple of years back, Child got in touch with me because she was trying to reconcile her sources about Brunton’s army and post-army careers. I did the smart thing and put her in touch with Don Hagist, author of British Soldiers, American War, who quickly cleared up the biggest mystery by alerting Child that her sources in London were reading the army muster rolls wrong. Once that artificial barrier fell, she was able to piece the evidence together to create this unusual biography.

Child’s talk at the N.E.H.G.S. headquarters, 99-101 Newbury Street in Boston, is scheduled to start at 6:00 P.M. It will be followed by a signing. The event is free and open to the public. Register here.

Serving Parker’s Revenge Warm

Yesterday I attended an event at Minute Man National Historical Park announcing major support for the Parker’s Revenge project from Campaign 1776.

The term “Parker’s Revenge,” which Brandeis professor David Hackett Fischer pointed out was probably coined by John Galvin in his 1967 book The Minute Men, refers to one point in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, when Capt. John Parker and his Lexington militiamen attacked the British army column as it withdrew east from Concord. By tradition, those provincials were on or behind a particular granite outcrop—probably a good choice, as that’s said to be the highest point between Boston and Concord.

Parker’s Revenge is thus an event, and an area, and an idea—the idea of the Lexington company that had been hurt that dawn picking themselves up and fighting back.

A couple of years ago, the park and the non-profit Friends of Minute Man Park convened a group to study Parker’s Revenge in more depth. As Bob Morris of the Friends explained, the project has four phases:

• research into maps, tax and real estate records, and historic accounts to determine what land to focus on and what to look for there.
• archeology. Project Archeologist Meg Watters didn’t dig; rather, she oversaw a careful survey of the land with lasers, ground-probing radar, metal detectors, and other technology. In addition, military experts will walk through the area to give their opinions about how the opposing armies would have reacted to the site. Watters’s report is due this summer.
• interpretation and education with the findings and artifacts discovered during the investigation. Plans include traditional displays and signage, and also the possibility of an app depicting the 1775 terrain (as we understand it) that people could use while walking the area today.
• land rehabilitation under the guidance of the National Park Service’s Olmsted Center. It’s unclear whether there will be a recommendation or resources to return the whole tract to a semblance of its 1775 appearance, but right now it’s wooded and unwelcomingly overgrown.

The Parker’s Revenge project caught the attention of folks at the Civil War Trust. That foundation has been around for over fifteen years, having grown out of smaller groups. Its leaders now have lots of experience in preserving battlefield land, and they’re expanding their scope to the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 with an initiative called Campaign 1776. That push uses the minute man as part of its symbol, and of course its organizers are interested in the iconic Lexington and Concord battle.

Campaign 1776 has now contributed to the Parker’s Revenge project in two ways. It agreed to buy an acre of adjacent land with the plan of eventually donating that to the park. People think that British flankers moved across that area as they circled north to drive Parker’s men off their high ground. The property was owned by the town of Lincoln but not necessarily set aside for preservation.

In addition, Campaign 1776 and the Society of the Cincinnati’s American Revolution Institute helped to fund the archeology with a $25,000 grant, the Civil War Trust’s first archeology project. That donation was represented at the event by one of those symbolic oversized checks proudly held up by several people in suits.

Meanwhile, no fewer than four school groups passed by on field trips, peering with more or less curiosity at what the grownups were doing. That shows how big an attraction Minute Man Park already is. With more depth and detail in its Parker’s Revenge interpretation, just a short distance from the visitor center in Lexington, the park may soon have more solid stories to tell.

N. C. Wyeth’s History Paintings in Sandwich

Heritage Museums and Gardens in Sandwich is hosting an exhibit titled “The Wyeths: America Reflected” through 27 September.

Of the forty-five paintings on display, sixteen were created by N. C. Wyeth for a book titled Poems of American Patriotism, published in 1922. Those originals are now owned by the Hill School in Pennsylvania.

That collection included many poems about the Revolutionary War. Wyeth made paintings based on Guy Humphrey McMaster’s “The Old Continentals” (shown here), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Francis Miles Finch’s “Nathan Hale,” and James Russell Lowell’s “Washington,” as well as a title page image of Washington on horseback.

Another of the Revolutionary images is “Warren’s Address,” based on a poem by John Pierpont. At first I assumed this refers to Dr. Joseph Warren’s oration in remembrance of the Boston Massacre in March 1775. But no, that canvas (shown here) depicts the doctor orating to the provincial troops on Bunker Hill—which never happened. Still, there’s a poem about it.

In the eighteenth century, these would be considered “history paintings,” one of the more distinguished branches of that visual art. John Singleton Copley settled in Britain in part because he could do the history paintings he dreamed of rather than just portraits.

In the early twentieth century, with mass reproduction making such pictures widely available, work like Wyeth’s was deemed mere illustration. But it’s once again being seen as worthy of museum display, at least alongside the painter’s fine-art descendants.

The Wyeth paintings are in the Heritage Museum’s Special Exhibitions Gallery, which itself is “a replica of a Revolutionary War fort originally located in New Windsor, New York.” Who knew one could find that in Sandwich?

(Thanks to Patrick Flaherty for calling this exhibit to my attention.)

Keep Your Feet on the Ground at Bunker Hill

Last night I heard that the stairs inside the Bunker Hill Monument are closed to visitors because of a loose railing. Loose as in “lying on the floor.”

So if you were planning to spend the next couple of 80°F-degree days climbing those 294 steps to the top of the stone tower, you’ll have to adjust your plans. Some high-level repairs will have to take place before the monument interior becomes accessible again.

From 1843 until last year, one reward for climbing those stairs was to see the “Adams” cannon from Boston’s pre-Revolutionary militia artillery company. But, as I reported in 2014, that cannon has been removed for preservation. So there’s now less to be missed at the top of the tower.

Fortunately, the fine Bunker Hill Museum is nearby, and National Park Service rangers give talks on the grounds. On the afternoon of Sunday, 14 June, Charlestown will celebrate the battle and the modern community with its annual Bunker Hill Day Parade.

Gore Place’s Open Carriage House, 14 June

On Sunday, 14 June, Gore Place in Waltham is inviting the public to view its newly renovated (and recently relocated) carriage house.

This structure dates to 1793, thus making it even older than the brick mansion that defines the Gore Place estate.

Christopher and Rebecca Gore bought that property starting in 1789, then tore down the existing house and had their first mansion and outbuildings erected in 1793. After their wooden house burned while they were in Europe in 1799, they replaced it with the grander, more modern brick mansion in 1806.

The carriage house strikes me as particularly symbolic given Christopher Gore’s rise to wealth. His father, John Gore, was a decorative painter in pre-Revolutionary Boston. The Gore shop specialized in heraldic devices, so the elder Gore and his apprentices and at least one son, Samuel, no doubt painted coats of arms on richer men’s carriages. In particular, the Gores were close to Adino Paddock, a coachmaker with a large workshop opposite the Granary Burying-Ground, and Paddock’s customers included John Hancock.

After a Harvard education, training in the law, and lucrative investments in Continental bonds and many of Massachusetts’s earliest corporations, Christopher Gore could afford a grand carriage himself. His equipage even became a campaign issue when he ran for governor in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

In a 1790 letter to Samuel Adams, John Adams used the Gores as one of four examples of Boston families that had risen from the ranks of mechanics into genteel status as a “natural aristocracy.” Rebecca Gore’s family, the Paynes, was another.

The Gore Place open house, or open carriage house, is scheduled to take place from 3:00 to 5:00 P.M. It is free, and light refreshments will be served. To know about how many people to expect, the site asks visitors to reserve a space through goreplace@goreplace.org.

Spelling a Cast over Turn

Last night, just after the season finale of Turn: Washington’s Spies, Den of Geek published my review of the episode. This link will take you to all my episode reviews from both seasons of the series and a couple of auxiliary articles about its historical background.

I must confess to having trouble getting all the actors’ names right, especially in season 1. I got to watch episodes on a website a couple of days before they were broadcast, but I didn’t receive any press material listing the cast. Therefore, I used I.M.D.B. as a reference.

Unfortunately, that website gets updated unsystematically around the same time I was writing. I struggled to match modern head shots of the actors with how they looked on the show in eighteenth-century coiffures. (Which, in some cases, weren’t eighteenth-century coiffures at all.)

Then there were discrepancies between the site and the show’s credits. The actor playing Judge Richard Woodhull is Kevin T. McNally on Turn, Kevin McNally on I.M.D.B. The opening credits list the actor who plays Robert Rogers in all-caps as “ANGUS MacFADYEN.” I.M.D.B. calls him Angus Macfadyen. And for the first season I usually called him Angus Macfayden because that seemed more familiar.

Likewise, on some tight deadlines I turned Burn Gorman into Burn Gorham and Samuel Roukin into Simon Roukin—probably miscued by his character’s name, Simcoe. Those were my careless mistakes.

But the actors’ names really didn’t help. Mary Woodhull is played by Meegan Warner, not Megan Warner. Jordan/Akinbode is played by Aldis Hodge, not Hodges. And then there’s the man who plays Maj. John Andre:

JJ Feild

Not J.J. Not Jayjay. And not Fields or even Field. Feild. My spellcheck changes it every time.

I resolved to be more careful the second season. I knew it would be a bigger challenge as Turn added more regular characters, including Benedict Arnold and Margaret Shippen. As portrayed by:

Owain Yeoman and Ksenia Solo

Oh, come on!

Massachusetts Issues Invitations for a Stamp Act Congress—in New York

Two hundred fifty years ago on this date, the Massachusetts General Court took its first step to counter the new Stamp Act.

The process started two days earlier when James Otis, Jr., of Boston, proposed that the assembly respond to “the many difficulties to which the colonies are and must be reduced by the operation of some late acts of Parliament.”

To do that, the legislature chose a committee of:

• Samuel White of Taunton, the speaker.
• Timothy Ruggles of Hardwick, a former speaker.
• Oliver Partridge of Hatfield.
• John Worthington of Springfield.
• John Winslow of Marshfield.
• Otis of Boston.
• Thomas Cushing of Boston.
• Richard Saltonstall of Haverhill.
• Edward Sheafe of Charlestown.

Other colonies were also preparing responses to the Stamp Act. Virginia’s House of Burgesses had issued some bold resolutions, as I recently discussed, but that news hadn’t reached Boston yet. And early in the year, even before Parliament passed the new law, the New York Assembly had raised the idea of a convention of delegates from different colonies—like the Albany Congress of 1754.

In her history of the Revolution, Mercy Warren gave credit for the same idea to someone closer:

All remonstrances against this innovating system had hitherto been without effect; and in this period of suspense, apprehension and anxiety, a general congress of delegates from the several provinces was proposed by the honorable James Otis, of Barnstable, in the Massachusetts. He was a gentleman of great probity, experience, and parliamentary abilities, whose religious adherence to the rights of his country had distinguished him through a long course of years, in which he had sustained some of the first offices in government.

“The honorable James Otis, of Barnstable,” was also Mercy Warren’s father. (According to Benson J. Lossing, he made this proposal while visiting the Warrens in Plymouth with her brother James; however, I’ve found no confirmation for that.)

The younger Otis was most likely the driving force behind the Massachusetts committee’s report:

The committee appointed to consider what dutiful, loyal, and humble address may be proper to make to our gracious Sovereign and his Parliament, in relation to the several acts passed, for levying duties and taxes on the colonies, have attended that service, and are humbly of opinion:

That it is highly expedient there should be a meeting, as soon as may be, of committees from the Houses of Representatives, or Burgesses, in the several colonies on this continent, to consult together on the present circumstances of the colonies, and the difficulties to which they are and must be reduced by the operation of the late acts of Parliament for levying duties and taxes on the colonies, and to consider of a general and humble address to his Majesty and the Parliament, to implore relief.

And the committee are further of opinion, that a meeting of such committees should be held at New-York, on the first Tuesday of October next, and that a committee of three persons be chosen by this House on the part of this Province, to attend the same.

And that letters be forthwith prepared and transmitted to the respective Speakers of the several Houses of Representatives, or Burgesses in the colonies aforesaid, advising them of the resolution of this House thereon, and inviting such Houses of Representatives, or Burgesses, to join this with their committees, in the meeting, and for the purposes aforesaid.

The legislature unanimously adopted the committee’s proposal. It then chose White, Otis, and [I believe] Joseph Lee of Cambridge to “prepare a draft of letters to be sent to the respective Speakers of the several Houses of Representatives in the colonies.” Again, Otis is usually considered the principal author of the circular letter that resulted:

Province of Massachusetts Bay. Boston, June 8, 1765.

Sir—

The House of Representatives of this Province in the present session of the General Court, have unanimously agreed to propose a meeting, as soon as may be, of committees from the Houses of Representatives, or Burgesses, of the several British colonies on this continent, to consult together on the present circumstances of the colonies, and the difficulties to which they are and must be reduced by the operation of the acts of Parliament for levying duties and taxes on the colonies; and to consider of a general and united, dutiful and humble representation of their condition to his Majesty and the Parliament, to implore relief.

The House of Representatives of this Province have also voted to propose that such meeting be at the city of New-York, on the first Tuesday of October next, and have appointed a committee of three of their members to attend that service, with such as the other Houses of Representatives, or Burgesses, in the several colonies may think fit to appoint to meet him: And the committee of the House of Representatives of this Province are directed to repair to said New-York, on said first Tuesday of October next, accordingly.

If, therefore, your honorable House should agree to this proposal, it would be acceptable, that as early notice of it as possible might be transmitted to the Speaker of the House of Representatives of this Province.

SAMUEL WHITE, Speaker.

The Massachusetts legislature also chose Ruggles, Partridge (a veteran of the Albany Congress), and Otis as delegates to this Stamp Act Congress, if it were actually to take place.

Greenburg on the Revere Court-Martial, 10 June

On Wednesday, 10 June, the U.S.S. Constitution Museum will host a talk by Michael M. Greenburg on his book The Court-Martial of Paul Revere: A Son of Liberty and America’s Forgotten Military Disaster.

During the war, Revere succeeded Thomas Crafts as colonel in charge of Massachusetts’s state artillery regiment. In 1779 Massachusetts assembled an armada of over forty ships plus infantry and artillery to attack the Fort George at Penobscot Bay, Maine.

That didn’t go well. In fact, the usual comparison, based on the number of American ships lost, is to Pearl Harbor.

Revere was among the many men blamed for the bad results. He asked for a court-martial—in eighteenth-century society, that was a common way for military officers to gain public vindication. In fact, Revere asked for a court-martial multiple times. On 20 Jan 1780, for instance, he wrote to the Massachusetts Council:

Twice have I petitioned your Honors and once the House of Representatives for a Court Martial but have not obtained one. I believe that neither the Annals of America, or Old England, can furnish an Instance (except in despotic Reigns) where an Officer was put under an arrest, and he petitioned for a Tryal (altho the Arrest was taken off) that it was not granted. The complaints upon which my arrest was founded, are amongst your Honors papers, and there will remain an everlasting monument of my disgrace if I do not prove they are false; is there any other legal way to prove them false, than by a Court-Martial…

Eventually Revere got his wish.

Greenburg is an attorney from Ashland who has written two previous books about historical incidents from more recent decades.

This talk is co-sponsored by Old South Meeting House, the Paul Revere House, and the U.S.S. Constitution Museum. It begins with a wine and cheese reception at 5:30 P.M. Greenburg is scheduled to start speaking at 6:30, and will sign books afterward. The event is free and open to the public.

Meeting Thomas Dugan in Concord, 7 June

Tomorrow, 7 June, the Concord Museum and the Robbins House will co-sponsor a walking tour that explores Concord’s antislavery history. The route will begin at the museum, which is hosting a special exhibit called “Thomas Dugan, Yeoman of Concord,” and end at the Robbins House, built for the children of Caesar Robbins.

In 1769, when Robbins was in his early twenties, he married a Concord woman named Phillis. They were both enslaved, he to Simon Hunt and she to the Rev. William and Phebe Emerson.

Having fought as a teenager in the French and Indian War, Robbins served in an Acton militia company at the end of the siege of Boston. Caesar Robbins became free during the war. He raised his family in Concord, dying in 1822.

Back in 2009 I noted the effort to save the Robbins family house. That campaign succeeded, and the house is now one of Concord’s historic attractions.

Thomas Dugan came to Concord by 1791, having been enslaved in Virginia. He was about forty-four years old. He married, raised a family, and worked a seven-acre farm until his death in 1827.

The exhibition “Thomas Dugan, Yeoman of Concord” attempts to visualize the furnishings of Dugan’s house and barn as listed in the probate inventory. The items, for the most part, are drawn from the Concord Museum collection, with additional loans from private collections, and have local histories; one piece—the fowler valued in 1827 at $1.50—is an actual artifact that belonged to Thomas Dugan. . . .

Dugan is referred to as a yeoman on the inventory of his estate; a yeoman is a property-owning farmer. The value of his property indicates that Dugan was a good farmer; he was a land owner—fewer than half of his Concord contemporaries, white or black, could say the same—and he died without any debts, rare at the time when surviving on credit was normal. Long after he died he was recalled as an expert grafter of apple trees, one who “did much to advance the farming interests in Concord; he was industrious and a peace maker.”

Objects in the exhibit include a “rye cradle” (shown above), which was a tool for harvesting grain that people credited Dugan with introducing to Concord. There will be a short gallery talk on Tuesday, 9 June, at 2:00 P.M.

The walking tour will take place on Sunday from 2:00 to 3:30 P.M. The cost is $10 for Concord Museum Members, $15 for others, and includes admission to the museum. Reserve a space by calling 978-369-9763, ext. 216. The sponsors urge participants to wear comfortable shoes. 

“Now for awhile aside I’ll lay my childish trifles and my play…”

This delightful drawing is from the Royal Collection Trust, the art collection of the British monarchs. It reportedly shows Prince George, grandson of George II, drawn from life one July at age nine.

This prince reading under his chair tent would grow up to be George III. In 1745 his first tutor, the Rev. Dr. Francis Ayscough, wrote to the Rev. Dr. Philip Doddridge:

I thank God, I have one great encouragement to quicken me in my duty, which is the good disposition of the children entrusted to me; as an instance of it, I must tell you that Prince George (to his honour, and my shame) had learnt several pages in your little book of verses, without any directions from me.

The “little book of verses” was Doddridge’s Principles of the Christian Religion, in verse for the use of Children and Youth, published in 1743. Here are pages from a New York reprint.

(The Facebook page of the First Oval Office shared this image yesterday on the anniversary of George III’s birth, and I couldn’t resist sharing it again.)

Presidents Out Standing in Their Field

Though I did just visit Virginia, I didn’t go to Presidents Park outside Williamsburg.

That’s because Presidents Park, which opened in 2004, lasted only six years. Never a surefire idea to begin with, the attraction didn’t survive the Great Recession.

Last year Joanne Kimberlin reported in the Virginian-Pilot that “Howard Hankins, a road builder and developer whose company had worked on the original park,” had removed the sculptures to his own property rather than destroy them completely:

To move them, he had to punch a hole in the concrete head of each commander in chief so a chain could be dropped inside its hollows, attached to its steel frame, then hooked to a crane. The sculptures were rocked to break them free from their pedestals. Most cracked around their necklines the moment the crane started to lift.

Hankins isn’t sure how much the monuments weigh. Stories from back in the day put them at 7,500 pounds apiece, but he thinks they’re a lot heavier: His crane is rated for 26,000 pounds, and “it could barely pick them up.”

Height was another problem. Originally shipped in two pieces, with heads separate from shoulders, they range from 16 to 20 feet tall in the assembled state Hankins had to deal with.

Trial and error - the back of Lincoln’s skull took a terrible bashing - combined with careful measuring of overpass clearances and a week’s worth of hauling ultimately landed the sculptures at Hankins’ 400-acre farm, 10 miles from the park.

There, he placed the presidents – from George Washington to George W. Bush – in a field behind the house, hoping to someday return them to the spotlight.

The photograph above by Patrick Joust via Flickr. It’s the best I’ve seen at capturing the broken grandeur of this site today.

Studying Washington at the Fred W. Smith National Library

Yesterday’s new research library was the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon.

As my last dispatch reported, the D.A.R. Library in Washington is open to everyone, and access is surprisingly simple and easy. In contrast, the F.W.S.N.L.S.G.W. (I’m not sure what the short form of its name will turn out to be) is open to researchers only by appointment.

That said, I sent an email early in the morning and asked if I could look at a particular essay, and I received a warm reply welcoming me that afternoon. Everyone was very friendly.

Of course, that warm reply also had to explain how to find the Smith National Library from the entrance of Mount Vernon, get admitted through the locked gate, follow the path through the still-being-landscaped grounds, approach the building’s front entrance, and be admitted through that locked door. So I still have to give the D.A.R. Library more points for accessibility.

The Library for the Study of Washington offers visitors a type of locker I’d never seen before. There are no keys. Each has a numeric keypad which the researcher uses to establish his or her personal combination for the day before closing the door. And for added security, I learned at the end of my visit, the keypads have to be tapped in just the right way.

Both the D.A.R. and Mount Vernon libraries have open stacks for researchers once they’re admitted. But the Smith stacks are a lot smaller (for now, at least). The collection’s seed was the research materials that the Mount Vernon staff gathered as they improved the site and dealt with visitor questions. Now it’s being expanded into a broader research collection.

I didn’t have enough time to puzzle out how the shelves are arranged. I came across my report on Gen. George Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge one shelf below Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Age of Homespun, which was on the same shelf as Dick Cheney’s autobiography.

In addition to facilitating the study of Washington, the Fred W. Smith Library has two additional missions:

• It’s trying to recreate Washington’s own personal library, known from inventories. Most of that collection is now at the Boston Athenaeum, and I doubt it’s moving anywhere. The Smith Library now has 103 books known to have been owned by Washington. That leaves only about 1,100 more titles to buy.
• The building will eventually be the repository of the Papers of George Washington, currently being edited and published in an authoritative edition by the University of Virginia. (The content of published volumes is available at Founders Online.) Of course, those aren’t all the letters Washington ever wrote or received, but it will be a significant asset.  

While at Mount Vernon, I of course also visited Mount Vernon. The mansion and grounds remain impressive, and the recent additions—new outbuildings, the Museum, the Education Center (which I didn’t see)—have made it even more interesting. On this spring Tuesday, the place was swarming with school groups and families. Another visitor remarked to a docent about working on a busy day, and the docent replied, “Oh, this isn’t busy.” So expect to see a lot of other people.

A Peek in the D.A.R. Library in D.C.

Yesterday I visited the research library at the national headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington, D.C., for the first time.

For folks visiting Washington, the library is quite accessible: the building entrance is just off 17th Street across from the Ellipse, a short walk from the Farragut North and West Metro stops.

It’s also quite accessible for researchers: anyone can go in without a lengthy registration process, just a couple of sign-ins. And the shelves are open, letting a person browse for books one didn’t yet know one wanted to see.

The library space itself is a handsome, old-fashioned room, as shown above. During my visit there was plenty of space to work; in fact, even over the course of the day researchers were probably outnumbered by staff. One quirk of the space: Most of the ceiling above the reading tables is made up of skylights, so on a meteorologically interesting day the light can shift dramatically as one reads.

The collection has a focus on American genealogy, reflecting how the D.A.R. is a hereditary society, but the resources on local history and Revolutionary War history are also deep. Some of the things on the shelves I didn’t yet know I wanted to see were doctoral dissertations.

Here, for example, are some notes from William Arthur Baller’s thesis at Clark University in 1994, “Military Mobilization during the American Revolution in Marblehead and Worcester, Massachusetts”:

• At least 1652 Marbleheaders or 36 percent of the community’s population fought in the Revolution. As many as 1780 or 39 percent may have taken up arms against the British.” But the count is difficult because of the number of local men with the same name and the lack of complete rolls from privateers.
• “At least 267 Marbleheaders” became prisoners of war.
• “Fifty Marbleheaders under seventeen years of age saw service aboard privateers alone.”
• “In 1780, more than 278 of Marblehead’s women were widows and 672 of the city’s children were fatherless.”
• As to whether poor men fought while rich men stayed home, “Three hundred and eight Marbleheaders voted [paid poll tax and were thus on the voting roll?] in 1771. Of that number at least 164 fought in the Revolution. . . . Of the 140 individuals who held office in Marblehead from 1769 through 1785, 69 actually fought in the Revolution. The families of another 54 officeholders contributed at least one member to the war effort.”

Undoubtedly the D.A.R. library (like the Society of the Cincinnati’s library at Anderson House) gets overshadowed in Washington by the vast Library of Congress. But I certainly plan to go back when I have free days in the capital city.