A New Tavern Opened in Brunswick Town

Archeologists from East Carolina University announced that they are exploring the site of an eighteenth-century tavern in Brunswick Town, North Carolina, once capital of that colony.

The building was located by a student using ground-penetrating radar. It appeared as “a submerged structure measuring roughly 400 square feet (37 square meters) and buried under 5 feet (1.5 m) of earth.” A dig revealed more details, including the fact that the structure was destroyed by fire. The walls collapsed in a way that protected the crawl space under the floorboards from the flames, thus preserving an unusually large assortment of everyday objects.

LiveScience reports:

The objects hidden in the building’s crawl space include the brass tap from a wine barrel, unused tobacco pipes, broken mugs and goblets, crushed liquor bottles, and other items typically found in a tavern. An Irish halfpenny dated to 1766 helps narrow down the tavern's latest possible date of operation.

The Charlotte Observer also noted “iron tools that historians can’t yet identify.”

The British military burned Brunswick Town in 1776, and most people abandoned that settlement. (Gov. William Tryon had moved away in 1770, which didn’t help the local economy.) The archeologists seem to think, however, that this building had been destroyed in the preceding decade.

Strikingly, the artifacts include “thimbles, straight pins and clothing fasteners associated with the town’s female populace.” The archeologists note those might have been a male tailor’s tools. Nevertheless, those discoveries led to speculation that the tavern was also a brothel.

Another oddity is that there is no paper record of a building having stood on that spot. Researchers studying Brunswick Town have relied on this 1769 map, but it shows no structure there. So perhaps the business burned before 1769, or perhaps the business was lying really low.

The Natick Community and the Watertown Dam

Last month the Junto blog shared an interesting essay by Zachary M. Bennett, “Damming Fish and Indians: Starvation and Dispossession in Colonial Massachusetts.”

Bennett writes:

Compared to other Native Americans in southern New England, the Ninnimissinuok community of Natick, Massachusetts seemed to have secure footing going into the eighteenth century. Located only fifteen miles outside of Boston on the Charles River, Natick was the largest community of Native American converts to Christianity—or “Praying Indians”—in mainland New England with a population exceeding two hundred persons. These Praying Indians owned their land in corporation to safeguard their enclave against land hungry colonists. . . .

In 1738, colonists downstream in Watertown raised a dam several feet on the Charles River that blocked migrating sea-run (anadromous) fish. Spring fish runs were of vital importance to Natick. Native people depended on these fish for half their yearly supply of animal protein and were also an important fertilizer for New England’s notoriously thin soil. Although Massachusetts law required the operators of the Watertown Dam to allow fish to pass by building a fish ladder, on the Charles River corrupt local officials looked the other way. Natick’s Praying Indians protested. . . .

To placate Indian petitioners, the [Massachusetts General Court] committee ordered that portions of the Watertown Dam punctured by the winter ice not be repaired until May, giving migrating fish a slightly lower structure to scale. This was a deceiving concession because the General Court granted dam owners full discretion to adhere to this judgement: if they deemed the water too low to power their mills sufficiently, only the approval of five selectmen from Watertown and adjoining Newtown [sic]—communities directly invested in the smooth running of these mills—was required to raise the dam during the May fish run. . . .

For Natick, the loss of river fish a few years before the outbreak of King George’s War in 1744 was particularly bad timing. Nearly all able-bodied Praying Indian men served in this conflict and they suffered significantly higher mortality rates than their Anglo comrades in arms.

In addition, Daniel Gookin wrote in 1792, the Natick soldiers “brought home a mortal disease, of which twenty three died in the year 1759.”

As a result of those factors, Bennett writes, “land sales in the community rose 150% in the 1740s.” Gookin reported: “In the year 1763, according to a census then taken, there were thirty seven Indians only in Natick; but in this return, probably the wandering Indians were not included.” By 1792, he judged that “The Indians in Natick are now reduced to one family of five persons, and two single women.” Of course, many more people of Natick descent were still living in Massachusetts—but they were no longer recognized as Indians or no longer had their own land in Natick to live on.

Climbing the Walls at George Washington High

America’s conservative media recently went into a tizzy about the San Francisco school board’s decision to spend more than half a million dollars to install a large painting by a Communist artist showing how George Washington kept slaves and encouraged the theft of Native American lands.

No, wait that’s wrong. Right-wing pundits are criticizing the school board’s decision to remove that painting. As are some media voices on the left.

Let’s start again. The school board’s action was driven by the students at George Washington High School, most of whom are young people of color who on their school walls saw their ancestors being oppressed. Those young activists also demanded that the school’s name be changed so as not to perpetuate the honor for Washington.

No, that’s wrong, too. About two-thirds of the school’s students are Asian-American. I’ve seen no evidence of how the full student body feels about this effort. No one has formally proposed to change the school’s name.

I’d better start at the beginning. In 1936 San Francisco built a big new high school with Works Progress Administration money. That federal agency also paid the Russian-born artist Victor Arnautoff to paint thirteen mural panels in the main entrance hall and library. Twelve of those comprised a “Life of Washington.” In photos of the paintings, like the one above by Daniel Kim for the San Francisco Examiner, we can see how Arnautoff had to design around the vents in the walls.

Arnautoff didn’t recreate the usual Colonial Revival public hagiography of Washington. Though he had once fought for the royalist White Russian army, he had become a Communist. Arnautoff therefore chose to include images of Washington ordering around enslaved Africans and encouraging white Americans to migrate west, killing Native Americans in the process.

Arnautoff’s critical approach to the American Revolution produced some ironic details. For instance, his depiction of the Boston Massacre owes a lot to Alonzo Chappell’s painting of British soldiers backed into a defensive triangle by violent colonists—more royalist than rebel.

Decades passed. In 1955 Arnautoff caricatured Vice President Richard Nixon, and the House Un-American Activities Committee summoned him for questioning. Eight years later, he moved to the Soviet Union to live his final years.

Meanwhile, at George Washington High School, students were complaining about the limitations of Arnautoff’s work. Emphasizing Washington’s slaveholding meant portraying blacks only in servile roles. Black Panther activists protested by throwing ink on the paintings and gouging the plaster. As for the pictures of Natives, in 1968 a vice principal told the San Francisco Chronicle, “For years, the by-word has always been ‘I’ll meet you under the dead Indian.’”

That year the high school student body voted 61% to demand additional artwork reflecting “recognition of the great contributions of black people to the sciences and history.” In 1974 the young local artist Dewey Crumpler completed “Multi-Ethnic Heritage: Black, Asian, Native/Latin American,” an explicit response to Arnautoff’s “Life of Washington” nearby.

More decades passed. In 2017 a local preservationist organization proposed seeking landmark status for the high school, in part because of the murals. The school board declined to take that course, also in part because of the murals. Because now more people were criticizing that artwork on the grounds that the pictures created a poor learning environment for African-American and Native American students.

According to the New York Times in April, out of slightly more than 2,000 students at George Washington High School this year, there were 89 African-Americans and 4 Native Americans. Of course, being a small fraction of the student body might well make seeing visual reminders of oppression feel even more oppressive. Not many public high schools feature paintings of dead bodies, whatever political meaning they’re intended to have.

In February, the San Francisco United School District’s Reflection and Action Committee recommended that this summer the department digitally archive the “Life of Washington” and then cover it with white paint. This committee declared that the mural “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” Which of course is the opposite of what Arnautoff intended. But pre-WW2 American racism may have seeped into his depictions unwittingly, and the changing cultural context may have altered how the images come across.

(That committee also stated: “At Oak Park School in Illinois, the[y] covered a historic WPA mural with white paint because it lacked the racial diversity their school has.” In fact, that mural had been moved from another school, and was simply moved again. The George Washington High School murals, in contrast, are frescos permanently infused into the plaster of the walls.)

Various people have disagreed with the committee. Dewey Crumpler, the artist who created the “response” murals, is now a professor at the San Francisco Art Institute; he feels that removing the Arnautoff murals would render his own work in the school “irrelevant.” An English teacher at George Washington High School assigned 49 freshmen to write essays about the frescoes. Four favored removing them. Most felt as one student wrote: “The fresco is a warning and reminder of the fallibility of our hallowed leaders.”

This month the San Francisco Unified School District board voted to accept its committee’s recommendation and find a way to conceal the murals—permanently, according to the board’s vice chair. They budgeted $600,000 for the effort; even a seemingly simple solution like painting over the walls would require a costly environmental impact study and at least a year of planning.

That’s how we’ve reached this deeply ironic moment. A progressive school board is literally talking about whitewashing over George Washington’s faults while leaving his name enshrined on a school building. Media commentators who generally speak up for the historical value of Confederate statues are voicing the same arguments to save a Communist’s New Deal critique of early America.

I’d prefer to see an approach like the one Deerfield used to update its monument to the 1704 raid on the town—adding information rather than subtracting, showing how understandings change, providing a visible reminder of how we value all students today without obliterating how American culture hasn’t always done that.

Samuel Danforth’s Independence Day

In 1788 Samuel Danforth was a seventeen-year-old apprentice carpenter living in Providence, Rhode Island.

The previous year he had started to keep a diary—fitfully at first and then more regularly. This was connected with his education since he recorded signing up for a school and kept track of what library books he borrowed and read.

On 3 July 1788, Samuel recorded a job with a deadline:

Work over on Camp hill to build Benches for to Dine upon Independence Day.

However, the next entry makes the holiday sounds like a disappointment:

a scanty meal for such a numerous train of people

Young Samuel Danforth’s diary is now in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester.

“Wholly worthless for history, and some of it discreditable”

As I wrote yesterday, in 1842 the Massachusetts Historical Society named a committee to consider taking in and/or publishing a collection of testimony collected in 1825 from veterans of the Bunker Hill battle. That testimony had been collected and preserved by William Sullivan, head of the committee overseeing the start of the Bunker Hill Monument.

One member of that M.H.S. committee was the Rev. George E. Ellis of Charlestown. He had heard about those accounts and tried to find them the previous year when he prepared an address on the battle. He couldn’t, so he must have been eager to read what finally surfaced.

More than three decades later, Ellis recalled:

I took the books to my house in Charlestown, and deliberately examined them.

Their contents were most extraordinary, many of the testimonies extravagant, boastful, inconsistent, and utterly untrue,—mixtures of old men’s broken memories and fond imaginings with the love of the marvellous.

Some of those who gave in affidavits about the battle could not have been in it, nor even in its neighborhood. They had got so used to telling the story for the wonderment of village listeners, as grandfathers’ tales, and as petted representatives of “the spirit of ’76,” that they did not distinguish between what they had seen and done and what they had read, heard, or dreamed.

The decision of the Committee was that much of the contents of the volumes was wholly worthless for history, and some of it discreditable, as misleading and false. The suggestion, as I remember, was made that the Committee report advising that the papers be burned. But this was not adopted.

Ellis’s memory doesn’t entirely fit with the M.H.S. minutes from 1842. The only recorded proposal from committee chairman George Ticknor was to simply return the volumes to the Sullivan family.

Ellis also recalled the committee had ultimately recommended “that there should be an entry made in the books, saying that they had been examined by a committee, who had passed judgment upon them, in substance as above, and that they be sealed up, and put away in our Cabinet.”

It’s unclear what actually happened to the volumes, however. The M.H.S. voted to return them, then voted to reconsider, then didn’t make a final determination at all (at least formally). The monument opened the next year.

Editing the society’s records for publication in 1880, M.H.S. chroniclers reported: “Mr. Thomas C Amory, a relative of Mr. Richard Sullivan, is strongly of the impression that the papers, on their return to Mr. Sullivan, were destroyed by him.”

Yet in 1887 Justin Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America stated that the “three folio volumes” were still “preserved in the cabinet of the Mass. Hist. Society.” A few years later, however, members couldn’t find any such volumes.

Winsor also suggested that the original documents transcribed for Sullivan survived into the 1880s: “What purported to be some of the originals were offered for sale in New York in 1877, but were bid in.” Nate Raab confirmed to me that this meant they didn’t meet the reserve price. About what might be the same collection, Winsor added: “C. L. Woodward, of New York, advertised in May, 1883, nearly two hundred papers, which were called Col. [Samuel] Swett’s Collection of Affidavits.” No word on whether that sold.

So it’s possible that there’s still a sizable collection of testimony from Bunker Hill battle veterans out there in some private archive. It’s also possible that that testimony is just as worthless as Ellis believed. I’d still like to see it.

William Sullivan’s “Bunker Hill manuscripts”

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1825, the committee raising funds to build the Bunker Hill Monument held a cornerstone-laying ceremony. Many veterans of the Revolutionary War attended.

A few weeks later, on 12 July, the head of the Bunker Hill Monument Associates, William Sullivan, told his fellow directors that “he had possession of the papers containing the accounts given by the survivors of the battle of the 17th of June, 1775, and that he proposed to hold them subject to the inspection of the Directors exclusively.”

The historian Samuel Swett got to see those accounts. The following year, he wrote in his history of the battle about “statements taken down in writing by Gen. Sullivan and other Directors of the Bunker Hill monument, assisted by Judge Thacher and one or two other gentlemen, at the request of the Directors, from surviving soldiers of the battle present at the celebration the 17th June last.”

William Sullivan (1774-1839) was a son of James Sullivan, a Massachusetts attorney general and governor, and nephew of Gen. John Sullivan of the Continental Army. He was a lawyer, officeholder, and a militia commander (hence the title of “general”). Though his father had been a Jeffersonian, William Sullivan was a fervent Federalist. He was also deeply interested in history, publishing many books explaining many things. According to Justin Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America (1887), Sullivan had the veterans’ recollections of Bunker Hill transcribed in his law office and bound those pages into three volumes.

In 1839 Sullivan died. His widow asked his brother Richard what to do with those volumes. On 4 Feb 1842 Richard wrote to James Savage, president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, offering “to give them a place among the Collections.” That probably meant publishing the documents in the society’s Collections series, not simply preserving them.

At the 24 February meeting the M.H.S. chose a committee of three members “to examine and report upon the three manuscript volumes containing a list of the survivors of Bunker Hill battle who appeared at the celebration, June 17, 1825, and other matters therein contained.” The members on that committee were George Ticknor the publisher, George Bancroft the historian and statesman, and the Rev. George E. Ellis, who in 1841 had delivered an address on the battle, soon to be published as Sketches of Bunker Hill Battle and Monument. They met in Ticknor’s library.

The next M.H.S. meeting was at the end of March. According to the official minutes, Ticknor “made an informal report on the matter.” In response, two members proposed that the society immediately return the manuscripts to the Sullivans, but another suggested that “the whole subject be laid upon the table until the next meeting.” That plain record conceals a difficult disagreement. A letter from Savage the next month stated that he had been so caught up in the “long discussion we had on the Bunker Hill documents” that he forgot to announce that he was about to go to England.

On 8 April, Richard Sullivan wrote to Ticknor with second thoughts:

Since the manuscripts were sent, I have had reason to think it was my brother's intention that the papers in question should never meet the public eye; that they were not prepared under authority from the Bunker Hill Monument Association, but at the suggestion of Mr. W. Sullivan, as matters of curiosity; but that as statements of facts I am now convinced, from a source to be relied upon, and as is also known to you, he considered them entitled to no credit. It is, therefore, my duty, under this information, to beg the favor of you, if consistent with your duty as a committee, to present a request from me to the Society that the manuscripts be returned to me, and in the mean time suspend your further action on the subject.

Of course, back in the 1820s Swett had written that William Sullivan did work with other directors of the Monument Association to collect the veterans’ statements. And he had gone to the trouble of having those accounts transcribed, bound, and preserved for over a decade. On the other hand, Sullivan had never chosen to publish that material himself.

At its 28 April meeting, the M.H.S. voted to approve Ticknor’s motion to return the three volumes to Richard Sullivan. But that still wasn’t the last word. On 26 May the society reopened the question of “the true historical character and value of the Bunker Hill manuscripts.” Some members wanted to hear more from their committee. The bare-bones record of the meeting again gives only a hint of what passed: “After some discussion upon the subject, Voted, That the subject be laid over until the next meeting.”

On 30 June, the Rev. Samuel Ripley, son of a historian of Concord based in large part on interviews with veterans, moved that the manuscripts be considered again. But Ticknor wasn’t present and attendance was thin. “After some discussion,” the record says again, members voted to postpone their decision until the next meeting. But officially they never addressed the question again. The M.H.S.’s published Proceedings volume reports: “The Records are silent as to any further action or discussion concerning these manuscripts.”

TOMORROW: What was so troubling about those manuscripts?

[The picture above shows the Bunker Hill Monument as it looked about 1837, twelve years after the cornerstone was laid and six years before it opened.]

Schoolmasters with the Initials “J.L.”

As quoted yesterday, in the summer of 1775 London newspapers reported that letters found on the body of Dr. Joseph Warren after the Battle of Bunker Hill implicated some people in Boston as “spies.”

The newspapers disagreed on how many letters the royal authorities had found on Warren’s body—three or six. I don’t believe the text of any letter survives. But those documents prompted the arrest of schoolteachers James Lovell and John Leach on 29 June, twelve days after the battle.

This article from the Essex Institute Historical Collections shows James Lovell writing to friends outside the siege lines throughout May and June. In a 10 May letter, Lovell even told Oliver Wendell about the dangers of sharing sensitive information:

You must however give us no State Matters; for ’tis but “you are the General’s Prisoner,” and whip! away to the Man of War; as is the Case of poor John Peck. I carry’d him Breakfast to the main Guard yesterday, and again this Morning but he was carry’d off last Evening and put on Board Ship. Inquisitorial this!

The royal authorities released John Peck in a prisoner exchange on 6 June. However, the heavy losses at Bunker Hill made the royal authorities far less forgiving.

Lovell was a strong Patriot, known for orating on the memory of the Boston Massacre back in 1771. On 3 May he told Wendell that he was trying to get his wife and children out of Boston, but

I shall tarry if 10 Sieges take place. I have determined it to be a Duty which I owe the Cause & the Friends of it, and am perfectly fearless of the Consequences. An ill Turn, a most violent Diarhea, from being too long in a damp place, has confirm’d Doctr. [Joseph? Silvester?] Gardners advice to me not to go into the Trenches, where my whole Soul lodges nightly. How then can I be more actively serviceable to the Friends who think with me, than by keeping disagreeable post among a Set of Villains who would willingly destroy what those Friends leave behind them.

Lovell was probably writing in a similar vein to Dr. Warren and perhaps indeed sending out information useful to the provincial military. He took elementary precautions. As Sam Forman notes and the E.I.H.C. article shows, Lovell already often signed his letters with just his initials. In addition, he asked Wendell to be sure to seal all their correspondence. But there was no protection for the documents that Dr. Warren chose to carry onto the battlefield.

As for John Leach, he appears to have been dragged into this situation simply because he had the same initials as Lovell. It’s also possible that the letters mentioned teaching school. Boston had three schoolteachers with the initials “J.L.” One, John Lovell of the South Latin School, was a staunch Loyalist. The other two got hauled off to jail.

Then Leach’s specialty as a teacher of navigation became a liability. Lovell taught Latin and Greek—hardly sensitive subjects. But royal officers found “Drawings” in Leach’s home when they arrested him. Those probably included detailed nautical maps and sketches of the harbor.

On 19 July, after three weeks in jail, the schoolteachers and other prisoners were taken into a military court presided over by Maj. Thomas Moncrieffe. According to Leach, the proceeding confirmed how little evidence the authorities had on them:

Till this Time we did not know our Crimes, on what account we were committed, but now we found Mr. Lovell was charged with “being a Spy, and giving intelligence to the Rebels.” And my charge, “being a spy, and suspected of taking plans.” When Capt. [Richard] Symmes appeared, he knew so little of us, that he called me Mr. Lovell; he knew so little of us, that instead of being a just Evidence [i.e., witness], he appeared ashamed and confounded, and went off.

Nevertheless, Leach wasn’t released until 3 October.

In late August, Lovell told a friend “that he expects to be out soon, tryumphant over his Enemies,” and was ready to give up “idlely schooling the children of a pack of Villains” in Boston. Instead, the royal authorities kept him locked up through the end of the siege and then carried him off to Halifax. Eventually he was exchanged.

Lovell never did go back to teaching school. Instead, he became a delegate to the Continental Congress, where he managed the correspondence with America’s diplomats—this time using a code.

“Letters were found in the Doctor’s pocket”

On 29 July 1775, the Middlesex Journal, a newspaper published in London, reported this tidbit about the Battle of Bunker Hill:

The day after the late battle in America, some of the Regulars searched the pockets of Dr. [Joseph] Warren, who was killed, and found three letters sent to him from some spies at Boston, which were immediately sent there, and the writers being soon discovered were sent to prison. 

On his blog about Warren, biographer Sam Forman quotes two more London newspapers running versions of the same news. From the 29 July Morning Chronicle:

A gentleman is arrived in town, who was present at the action on the 17th of June, at Charles Town, between the Provincials and the Regulars. . . . He further says, that the celebrated Dr. Warren, who commanded the Provincial trenches at Charles-Town, while he was bravely defending himself against several opposing Regulars, was killed in a cowardly manner by an officer’s servant, but the fellow was instantly cut to pieces; six letters were found in the Doctor’s pocket, written from some gentlemen in Boston, who were immediately taken into custody, and whose situations when he came away, were so perilous and critical, that their friends every moment feared their executions from some arbitrary and illegal sentence of the new adopted law martial.

And a number of early September newspapers reported this news from a recently arrived merchant vessel:

She sailed from Boston the 29th of July, but has brought no newspapers, and, we are well informed, that everything remained quiet, and would continue so till an answer was received by this ship. By the above ship we learn, that two persons have been taken up in consequence of some papers found in Dr. Warren’s pocket.

Those “two persons” were the schoolteachers James Lovell and John Leach, arrested on 29 June as described yesterday.

Only a month after those arrests, the London press was reporting on the letters in Warren’s pocket. Whatever ship first brought the news must have made a very fast passage—as fast as John Derby had sailed the Quero across the Atlantic in May to carry the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s report of Lexington and Concord to London. An average voyage was closer to five weeks or more, as with the merchant vessel that left on 29 July and arrived in early September.

That speed suggests some captains were sailing as fast as possible to bring news from the new war to the Crown, and getting lucky with the weather, too.

TOMORROW: How the letters implicated Lovell and Leach.

“Masters Leach and Lovell were brought to prison”

On 29 June 1775, John Leach, a mariner in Boston’s North End, began to keep a journal. He started it out of anger because he had just been arrested by the British military authorities and he wanted to document what was happening to him.

Leach wrote:

Memorandums, began Thursday, June 29th, 1775.—At 3 this afternoon, a few steps from my House, I was seized upon by Major [Edward] Cane, of the Regulars, accompanied by one [Joshua] Loring, who is lately made a Sheriff: they obliged mo to return to my House, where Major Cane demanded my Keys of my Desks, and search’d all my Drawings, Writings, &c, and told me I had a great deal to answer for.

I replyed, it was very well, I stood ready at a minute’s warning to answer any accusation; I had a drawn Hanger, I could have took hold of in a moment, and cut them both down. I had both Courage and inclination to do it, tho’ they had each their swords by their sides, but I suddenly reflected, that I could not escape, as the whole Town was a prison. God wonderfully restrained me, as I should have lost my Life, either by them, or some of their Companions.

They then conducted me from my House to the Stone Gaol, and after being lodged there 20 minutes, the said Cane and Loring brought in Master James Lovell, after searching his Papers, Letters, &c. as they had done mine.

Cane carried my drawings to show Gen. [Thomas] Gage, next day, and returned them.

Leach’s diary was printed in the New England Historical and Genealogical Record in 1864.

Already in the Boston jail since 19 June was eighteen-year-old Peter Edes, son of the radical printer Benjamin Edes. The elder Edes had slipped out of town just before the war began and set up a press in Watertown.

Peter was also keeping a diary, and on 29 June he wrote:

Masters Leach and Lovell were brought to prison and put into the same room with me and my companions.

Peter Edes’s diary, which shares text with John Leach’s, was published in 1901.

Leach and Lovell both received the title “Master” because they kept schools. Leach taught navigation and other skills privately in the North End. Lovell was actually the usher, or assistant teacher, to his father, Master John Lovell, at the South Latin School, but the town valued him enough to pay him far more than any other usher. Lovell had also delivered the first official town oration in memory of the Boston Massacre back in April 1771.

The imprisonment of Lovell and Leach is one more thread of the story of Bunker Hill. And not just because the officer who arrested them was being promoted to major in the 43rd Regiment only because Maj. Roger Spendlove had died in that battle. (Spendlove had survived wounds at Québec, Martinique, and Havana, but not Charlestown.)

Lovell and Leach were locked up after the battle because the British commanders thought one of them was a spy.

TOMORROW: Incriminating letters.

“This British Drum was captured at Bunker Hill”?

Yesterday I quoted the traditional story of Levi Smith’s “Bunker Hill Drum,” as published in the Boston Globe in 1903.

Some details of that story seem unlikely on their face. To start with, the drum allegedly came into American hands this way:

The lad who carried the drum when the Britishers made their first attack on Breed’s hill, was shot down at the first volley, and the barrel of his drum almost riddled with bullets. After the second assault, and while King George’s troops were being rallied for their third and successful attack, one of the members of the Rhode Island company in question went over the intrenchments and carried back with him this relic.

Now it’s true that the British command’s list of casualties after the battle includes one drummer killed, as well as twelve wounded. But that’s far as the plausibility goes.

During the Battle of Bunker Hill, provincial positions were under pretty constant cannon fire from Royal Navy ships, Copp’s Hill, and field guns firing grapeshot. There were angry British soldiers at the bottom of the hill. Some of the redcoats lying on the hillside might still have been alive and ready to attack again. How easy is it to believe that a provincial man would leave the protection of the redoubt or the other barriers he and his unit had built for themselves, scramble downhill past British casualties, grab a drum off a corpse, and climb back up safely? How happy would his officers have been to see that?

And then what did that putative Rhode Island soldier do with his prize? One might think he deserved to keep it, but:

the men in the company drew lots for its possession, and afterward, by unanimous consent, gave it to the Rhode Island drummer boy, Levi Smith.

So a man risked his life for the drum, then gave it up to the company. They drew lots, so the drum probably went to someone else. But then everyone decided it should go to a third person, the drummer? That’s a roundabout way of conveying a drum to the person in the company who uses a drum.

Of course, many times people do behave recklessly and illogically. No sources in the first hundred years after the battle describe a soldier popping out from the provincial lines to grab a souvenir drum and rushing back, but we can’t say that definitely didn’t happen.

Richard Spicer investigated this story for the National Parks of Boston’s newsletter, The Broadside, in 2010 (P.D.F. download), and he found bigger holes.

To start with, when Gen. Nathanael Greene brought the Rhode Island regiments north to the siege lines around Boston, they naturally ended up on the southern wing, in Roxbury and Dorchester. Gen. Artemas Ward kept them there through the battle up in Charlestown, helping to guard that route out of Boston. No Rhode Island units were in the Battle of Bunker Hill at all.

What’s more, Spicer adds:

Smith’s own record of service calls this [story] further into question. Though he died in 1827, his widow lived well beyond, long enough to qualify for a pension authorized by an 1838 Act of Congress. She therefore filed a detailed application in 1840, including four affidavits from men who knew or had served with her husband during the war, and all records are consistent: Levi Smith served as a drummer intermittently about 12-13 months not in the Continental Army, but in the Rhode Island militia only, from December 1776 to March 1781; there is no record for any service in 1775; and there is no mention of Bunker Hill.

Given that evidence, can the “Bunker Hill Drum” have any connection to Bunker Hill at all? I have a theory which fits pretty well with the statement on the drum itself:

This British Drum was captured at Bunker Hill, and assigned by lot to Levi Smith, a Drummer

After Gen. George Washington arrived in Massachusetts and sized up the siege lines in July 1775, he rearranged the Continental forces. He made Greene and the Rhode Island troops part of Gen. Charles Lee’s brigade on the north wing of the lines, in Cambridge and west Charlestown.

By that time, the British army had dug in on Bunker’s Hill, the highest point of the Charlestown peninsula. They remained in their fortification there until the evacuation of March 1776. Then the Continental troops from that side of the siege lines marched onto the peninsula, both regular army and recently mobilized militia companies. In the fort they found dummies in British uniforms—“Lifeless Sentries,” in Gen. John Sullivan’s words. They probably also found abandoned military equipment, as other regiments were finding in Boston.

Among that equipment left on Bunker’s Hill might well have been a damaged army drum—not worth enough to the king’s army to be worth carrying away, but in salvageable condition for the less equipped Continentals. The Rhode Island soldiers could have grabbed that and eventually chosen one of their drummers to take it home and repair it.

That’s one possible way a “British Drum was captured at Bunker Hill”—the location, not the battle. Smith might have indeed been given the damaged drum “by lot” since it wasn’t much of a prize, after all. But he fixed it up and passed it on to his descendants, who also went to war.

But that would be a rather poor story, so over time the narrative of an old drum might have gotten blown up into the legend of a man seizing a drum in the midst of the battle. Whatever happened, the drum is in the Bunker Hill Museum, representing the combat of the battle.

The Legend of Levi Smith’s Bunker Hill Drum

This photo shows the “Bunker Hill Drum,” an artifact owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society and on display at the Bunker Hill Museum in Charlestown.

The M.H.S. webpage about the drum says:

The drum is painted deep red with traces of an earlier finish. The front face has the initials “L.S.” in shadowed script within a laurel wreath as well as later decoration (circa 1802-1812) of fouled-anchor arms of Rhode Island in gilt, with arms of the United States and motto INDEPENDENCE / BE YOUR BOAST, EVER MINDFUL / WHAT IT COST. Signed below right side of shield: "S. Brown Pain,t ProvidencE". The ropes and repairs on the drum date from the U.S. Civil War era. A silver plaque affixed to side of drum dates from circa 1890 and reads:

This British Drum was captured at Bunker Hill, and assigned by lot to Levi Smith, a Drummer in the Continental Army, Descended to his son, Israel Smith, a soldier of the War of 1812. Descended to his son, Israel Smith, leader of the Band of the 33d Mass. Infantry,—the Headquarters Band which marched with Sherman from Atlanta to the sea in 1864,—and presented by him to R.A. Pierce, Post No. 190 Dept. of Mass. G.A.R. in 1898.

That story wasn’t good enough for the Colonial Revival, though. On 1 Feb 1903, the Boston Globe ran a long article headlined “Captured at Bunker Hill” with a picture of the drum and a man who owned it. The article called the drum “One of the most valuable historical relics in the United States,” sought after by “the leading historical societies of the country.” The article told the story behind the drum this way:

It descended to Israel Smith Jr. from his grandsire, Levi Smith, who was a drummer boy in one of the Rhode Island companies, which followed the Quaker soldier, Gen. Nathaniel Greene, to Massachusetts to lend aid to the cause so dear to the heart of every loyal American. . . .

The story, as told by Mr. Smith, who, when a lad, got it from his grandfather, is a brief one. The lad who carried the drum when the Britishers made their first attack on Breed’s hill, was shot down at the first volley, and the barrel of his drum almost riddled with bullets. After the second assault, and while King George’s troops were being rallied for their third and successful attack, one of the members of the Rhode Island company in question went over the intrenchments and carried back with him this relic.

Taken to the company after the British had taken the hill, the men in the company drew lots for its possession, and afterward, by unanimous consent, gave it to the Rhode Island drummer boy, Levi Smith. . . .

that gentleman on his first furlough took it with him to his home in Providence, and after repairing a piece of the barrel, which had been knocked out by a bullet and bracing the barrel on the inside, made this relic of Bunker hill serviceable, and used it during the balance of his term as a revolutionary soldier.

Levi Smith’s son Israel then used the drum, repainted as it appears today, during the War of 1812. After being shifted between attics of the Smith family, it became the property of the G.A.R. chapter n New Bedford and then of the M.H.S.

Other newspapers and magazines ran shorter versions of the Globe article, all extolling the history of the “Bunker Hill Drum.” However, most of the details in the story of that drum don’t add up.

TOMORROW: A drum from Bunker Hill?

Did Isaac Freeman Kill Maj. John Pitcairn?

The centerpiece of Isaac Freeman’s 1780 petition to the Massachusetts General Court, the basis of his request for compensation and the setting for his expression of ultra-patriotism, is his description of having fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill:

Your memorialist would beg leave to acquaint your honors, that in the second battle that was fought in June following, on Bunker’s Hill, he in the retreat, lost a very good fire-arm, his knapsack, containing one handkerchief, shirts, hose, &c. &c. which cost him in that day, forty or fifty hard dollars…

That your memorialist was the happy man (tho’ a poor negro) that put an end to the life of that bold, and of course, dangerous man, Major [John] Pitcairn, with eight or ten others that day, besides wounding a number of other villains; in the execution of which service, your memorialist received three very bad wounds from the British pirates; in this wounded and bleeding condition, he continued like a bold soldier, fighting for the country, till he was obliged with the heroes of the day, to retreat, which was worse than death to a soldier, and give up the ground to those (British hell-hounds,) and all for want of the help of those cowardly commanders and the poltroon fellows under their command, whose i[n]f[amou]s names I conceal, who lay during the whole action at the back of the hill out of danger:

Had they like men come on, instead of the shame and disgrace of that day, a most compleat victory would have taken place, and the whole of the British army would, by the close of that day, been snuggly sent DOWN DOWN to the abode of shame, disgrace and despair; whose just fate they would have received my hearty amen and amen, as those did which I sent there in battle.—

Freeman’s petition is thus the first surviving written statement that a black man killed the infamous Maj. Pitcairn.

In my J.A.R. article on who killed Pitcairn, I quoted letters from a British marines officer near the major when he was shot. I concluded that Pitcairn was wounded and taken out of action well before he reached the redoubt on Breed’s Hill. The traditional American account of Pitcairn being struck down as he mounted the walls was thus a product of wishful thinking; soldiers wanted to believe they killed an important officer, and chroniclers wanted to believe the officer who supposedly ordered the firing at Lexington was killed in dramatic fashion.

Part of that drama was that an African-American soldier shot the major. My article quoted two early sources saying so. First, in 1787 the Rev. Dr. Jeremy Belknap wrote in his notes on the battle: “A negro man belonging to Groton, took aim at Major Pitcairne, as he was rallying the dispersed British Troops, & shot him thro’ the head…”

Decades later, Samuel Swett credited John Winslow with the information that on the walls of the redoubt “mounted the gallant Major Pitcairn, and exultingly cried ‘the day is ours,’ when a black soldier named Salem, shot him through and he fell.” Swett said Winslow also told him “a contribution was made in the army for Salem and he was presented to [George] Washington.” I found no confirmation of such a presentation, but it does date the report to when the commander-in-chief was in Massachusetts in 1775-76.

It seems likely, therefore, that rumors about a black soldier killing Pitcairn circulated soon after the battle. Isaac Freeman identified himself as that soldier five years later. I doubt his claim just as I doubt every other claim to that kill. But Freeman might sincerely have believed he shot the major. Or he (and anyone who helped him prepare his petition) might just have decided to try for the credit. The petition doesn’t offer any supporting details, such as when Freeman made the shot or how he recognized Pitcairn.

What’s more, Freeman’s petition should prompt some skepticism. It said he killed not only Pitcairn but “eight or ten others that day, besides wounding a number of other villains.” That’s nearly a dozen fatal shots, plus others that found their mark, not to mention misses. That’s an awful lot of shooting when the provincials at Bunker Hill were under orders to hold their fire as long as possible because gunpowder was scarce.

Nonetheless, the Massachusetts General Court responded to Freeman’s story with an award of £5. Should we take that as a contemporaneous endorsement of his claim to having killed Pitcairn? Should Isaac Freeman’s name replace Salem Poor’s and Peter Salem’s (and a bunch of others)? Or was that small payment rapidly devaluing currency simply how the legislature sent away a poor black man with some powerful connections?

I wish there were more information about Isaac Freeman beyond the 1780 petition and the 1782 probate file. (I should acknowledge that it’s not even certain those sets of documents pertain to the same man.) Unfortunately, those sources don’t mention Freeman’s home town, age, family, and so on.  We don’t know if his surname came from a family that enslaved him or reflected his status as a free man. We don’t know if he had always gone by the name of Isaac. (Peter Salem, for example, also lived under the name of Salem Middlesex.) Perhaps someone will spot some new dots and we can see a little more of this picture.

Who Wrote Isaac Freeman’s Petition?

Yesterday I presented a petition sent to the Massachusetts General Court in late 1780 and printed in Massachusetts newspapers the following January.

The petitioner, Isaac Freeman, presented himself as a “poor negro” and an ultra-patriotic citizen of Massachusetts. He said he was a veteran of the Battle of Lexington and Concord and the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he had lost considerable property.

Freeman also told the legislature, “I…remain a faithful soldier to this hour,” but he didn’t describe any further military service. The document never stated what company or regiment Freeman served in, nor what town he lived in. Such information would surely have helped his petition.

There are several entries for men named Isaac Freeman in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, but none of those men is described as black, and none has a record of service covering the Battle of Bunker Hill. George Quintal’s thoroughly researched report for the National Park Service on men of African and Native ancestry in the New England army during the Battle of Bunker Hill likewise has no entry to Isaac Freeman.

Despite that lack of confirming information, on 16 November the legislature

Resolved, That there be paid out of the public treasury of this Commonwealth, the sum of five pounds of the bills of the new emission, in full for his losses set forth in said petition.

With inflation ruining the value of the currency, that wasn’t a big grant. But it was something. The legislators could have given Freeman leave to withdraw his petition, which was the polite legal way to say no, and they didn’t.

I half think the General Court gave Freeman £5 for the petition’s literary qualities. In ornate, powerful language it reviled both the British enemy and provincial cowards at Bunker Hill. It praised the new Massachusetts state constitution. There was even a bit of poetry thrown in.

In the Suffolk County probate records I found documents that might shed more light on Freeman. A 1782 file for “Isaac Freeman Free Negro,” also identified as a “Labourer,” starts with the will he signed his mark to on 24 January. Well inscribed and full of legal language, the will says first, “My Body I commit to the Dust with decent Burial.” It goes on:

In Consideration of the Care and Kindness I have received from Mr. Dimond Morton of Boston, both in time of my Sickness, & at all other times, I give devise and bequeath to the said Dimond Morton all my Estate real personal or mixt, whether in possession Action or Reversion, wheresoever the same may be found, to hold to him the said Morton his Heirs and Assigns forever.—

The will also appointed Dimond Morton as executor. In other words, I suspect, Morton could keep anything he found of Freeman’s as long as he made sure the man received a “decent Burial.”

Morton ran a well established inn in Boston, the Sign of the Black and White Horse. His father had been an innkeeper as well, moving into town from Plymouth. In 1770 Morton witnessed the Boston Massacre. Having joined the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in 1765, he served as a captain in Col. Henry Knox’s artillery regiment for the year 1776. Later in the war he invested in privateers and mercantile ventures.

The connection between Freeman and Morton also offers an explanation for how a man who couldn’t sign his name was able to submit a long legal petition that verged on literature. The innkeeper’s younger brother was Perez Morton (shown above), a rising lawyer. In fact, Perez was surety for the bond Dimond had to submit to the probate court in settling the Freeman estate. And Perez had literary interests even before he married the poet Sarah Wentworth Apthorp.

While studying for his master’s degree at Harvard, Perez Morton composed some of the verses in William Billings’s New England Psalm-Singer. His funeral oration for Dr. Joseph Warren included three bursts of poetry; one was borrowed from Mercy Warren, and the other two I can’t identify, offering the possibility that they were his own compositions.

I theorize that Perez Morton composed the petition for Isaac Freeman, indulging himself in florid prose and throwing in a couplet he adapted from John Pomfret. The brothers used their connections to push the small grant for Freeman through the legislature. And one or the other probably slipped the composition to the Boston Gazette as well. Freeman gained some recognition and a little bit of cash, but some of that probably went to Dimond Morton for medical expenses or when he died less than two years later.

TOMORROW: The biggest mystery of Isaac Freeman.

Isaac Freeman’s Petition

This item appeared in the 1 Jan 1781 Boston Gazette, issued by Benjamin Edes:

Messrs. PRINTERS,

Your publishing the following Copy of a Petition presented to the General Assembly in their late Sessions, may probably amuse some of your Readers, at this barren Season of the Year for News.

The Commonwealth of MASSACHUSETTS.

To the Honorable Senate, and Honorable House of Representatives, in General Court assembled.

November 1st, 1780.

The memorial of Isaac Freeman, (a poor negro) humbly sheweth,

That your memorialist, in the face of death and danger, enter’d the service of this country, on that auspicious and ever memorable, and thrice happy day, the 19th of April, 1775, which glorious morn gave birth to the independence of America. No sooner was the alarm given, that a band of the British villains, robbers, and cut-throats had begun the horrid slaughter, by sheding the blood of a number of the worthy inhabitants of Lexington; but their blood cryed from the ground for vengeance, and demanded of all the Sons of Freedom, to repair to arms, and revenge the injury done their bleeding country—I enter’d the service on that blessed occasion, and have fought and bled in the cause of the country; and remain a faithful soldier to this hour.

Your memorialist would beg leave to acquaint your honors, that in the second battle that was fought in June following, on Bunker’s Hill, he in the retreat, lost a very good fire-arm, his knapsack, containing one handkerchief, shirts, hose, &c. &c. which cost him in that day, forty or fifty hard dollars, for which be never has received one farthing; tho’ others have been fully and generously rewarded for their losses by former Houses of Assembly, whose noble example of rewarding merit, and doing justice, he doubts not will ever be the paths your honors will delight to step in, and hereby encourage good soldiers in your Honors service; his losses and services, he thinks, ought to go hand in hand, and therefore humbly begs leave further to observe to your Honors——

That your memorialist was the happy man (tho’ a poor negro) that put an end to the life of that bold, and of course, dangerous man, Major [John] Pitcairn, with eight or ten others that day, besides wounding a number of other villains; in the execution of which service, your memorialist received three very bad wounds from the British pirates; in this wounded and bleeding condition, he continued like a bold soldier, fighting for the country, till he was obliged with the heroes of the day, to retreat, which was worse than death to a soldier, and give up the ground to those (British hell-hounds,) and all for want of the help of those cowardly commanders and the poltroon fellows under their command, whose i[n]f[amou]s names I conceal, who lay during the whole action at the back of the hill out of danger:

Had they like men come on, instead of the shame and disgrace of that day, a most compleat victory would have taken place, and the whole of the British army would, by the close of that day, been snuggly sent DOWN DOWN to the abode of shame, disgrace and despair; whose just fate they would have received my hearty amen and amen, as those did which I sent there in battle.—

And very happy happy would it have proved to the United States, if that infallible rule had been adopted on this occasion, of the Great, the Wise and ever memorable General and Protector OLIVER CROMWELL, Esq; of Blessed Memory———(To PAY WELL and HANG WELL.) And had their frighted commanders been made an example of, with some of their hen-peck’d comrades

Would not those wretches, who now in triumph sing,
Have grac’d a gibbet, and adorn’d a string?

Sure I am that justice would have taken place, and the world been rid of a very tame set of J—k–ss–s, who live only to discourage better solders, and much time saved which has been taken up in court-marshals, to try cowardly leaders; and at this day, not one British officer, or British soldier, would have been found in any part of America.

By the conduct of the above frighted fellows, I was deprived that pleasure which I so earnestly wished to see, which was, to have seen the Britons turning their backs, cover’d with shame, disgrace and slaughter, as with a garment,—with everlasting destruction tripping at their heels, to enclose Tom Gage, & the remainder of his army in the same net.

Your memorialist now looks up to the seat of justice, which your Honors now fills with dignity, under a new, and he trusts, is the happiness Constitution now in being under Heaven, and which he prays GOD to establish to the end of time, and crown your Honors with eternal glory.

——And notwithstanding the loss of blood and treasure, &c. &c. has not yet been rewarded: I stand ready whenever call’d into the field by your Honors command, to step forth and spill the last drop of blood in the defence of your Honors lives, estates, and this much injured country, and resign my life as every good soldier ought to do, when I hope to join those noble Martyrs who are inroll’d in the catalogue of fame, in the other world, who fought, bled and died in the cause freedom and liberty, and there to mix (tho’ a poor negro) with a Charles the XII, a Cromwell and a Warren, who are now set down in peace, crown’d with everlasting joy and glory.

I now close with hoping your Honors will take into your most serious consideration, my case, with my wounds and loss of blood and treasure; and grant a poor negro such recompence as your Honors, in your great wisdom and goodness shall seem meet; and he, in duty bound, will ever pray.

ISAAC FREEMAN.

The two lines of poetry that appear in the midst of this petition were derived from a couplet in “Cruelty and Lust” by John Pomfret (1667-1702):

Does not that wretch, who would dethrone his king,
Become the gibbet, and adorn the string?

Those words might appear to declare the importance of royalty, but Pomfret presented them as coming from the mouth of a cruel, lustful monarch. So even though this petition had to rewrite them for a republican context, the underlying sentiment was compatible.

TOMORROW: How did the Massachusetts legislature respond to this petition? What can we make of it as a historical document?

Jacob Frost’s Compensation for “Capitivity”

Back in 2017 I looked into a sketch titled “The Young Provincial” and published in The Token, for 1830.

An edition of the collected works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (above right) attributed that sketch to him. But, as literary scholars have concluded and I confirmed, the author was really the Rev. William Bourn Oliver Peabody (above left). Producing an example of the 2016 meme “You” and “The Guy She Told You Not to Worry About.”

I also concluded that “The Young Provincial” was based on the story of Pvt. Jacob Frost, captured at the Battle of Bunker Hill, but fictionalized enough that we can’t rely on it for historical detail.

I came across another period source on Jacob Frost. After his return from captivity to Tewksbury, he petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for support. The legislature summed up his request this way:

That he was a Soldier in Capt. Walkers Company in Colo. Bridges Regiment, and was in the Battle at Bunker Hill, where he was wounded, barbarously used & taken prisoner carried to Boston, & afterwards to Halifax, from whence he made his Escape out of Goal, last Sepr.

That he lost a Gun. & other Articles amounting to £4.13/ . And praying for allowance &c.

On 28 Oct 1776 the General Court resolved to pay “Twenty Eight pounds, Eighteen shillings to Jacob Frost in full for his Wages thirteen Months and a half, while in Capitivity, and for things lost in the Battle.”

Frost had been shot in the leg, locked in the Boston jail where most of his fellow prisoners died from their wounds, moved out of the colony to Nova Scotia, and then escaped and made his way back. But he was still framing his request in terms of lost wages and property. And the legislature agreed he deserved some compensation or reward.

Dr. Ezekiel Brown in the Concord Jail

Yesterday we found Ezekiel Brown back in his native town of Concord. He had left as a boy, his poor family seeking better farmland, and returned as a young man with enough skills and drive to set up a shop—only to be locked in jail for debt on the eve of the Revolution.

Brown rejoined his family in Concord in 1781, having read a bunch of medical books and served in the Continental Army for four years as a military surgeon. He entered private practice. Soon Dr. Brown’s neighbors again elected him to town offices and invited him to join the Social Club.

But then the war ended. From London, Brown’s old creditor Frederick William Geyer contacted his father-in-law—Duncan Ingraham of Concord, another member of the Social Club. Together the two men resumed Geyer’s lawsuit for debt.

In February 1786, Brown signed a certificate stating he had witnessed the death of Moses Parker in the Boston jail back in 1775, a document now held by the Boston Public Library. Two months later, Ingraham and Geyer won a judgment against him of more than £500.

Naturally, that made the Social Club meetings more rancorous. The oldest members of the group, later called the Social Circle, remembered Dr. Brown as the main reason that it broke up in the 1780s. Lemuel Shattuck wrote that he was a “notorious disturber” who wouldn’t let anyone else speak. John S. Keyes described him as “that hot-headed, long-winded, hard-used, rough-tongued, ill-bred, ‘jack at all trades,’” who “would out-talk his neighbors, especially choleric old Duncan Ingraham.”

On the other hand, Grindall Reynolds, who wrote a profile of Brown in 1871 later published in The Centennial of the Social Circle in Concord, took the doctor’s side of the quarrel. Reynolds made much of the fact that Brown was an American military veteran while Geyer was a Loyalist and Ingraham had Loyalist leanings before the war.

According to Shattuck, Dr. Brown offered to pay his debt in “government securities”—presumably at full face value. But 1786 was at the height of the economic crisis that provoked the Shays Rebellion. The market value of those securities was low. Ingraham refused the offer. There was no way Brown could raise enough cash. At depressed prices, even his property in the center of Concord couldn’t cover the debt.

Ingraham and Geyer had Brown committed to the Concord jail on 13 May 1787. The doctor escaped at some point but was locked back up on 8 May 1788. After a move to the Cambridge jail, the creditors finally agreed to let Brown go free in June 1789.

By then Dr. Brown and his wife Mary had seven children, the oldest fourteen and the youngest an infant. Their best option was to leave Concord for Maine, where Brown or his father had received a land grant before the war. The family settled on about 500 uncultivated acres in what was then Clinton and is now Benton. For the third time Dr. Brown set to work establishing himself.

Ultimately, Dr. Ezekiel Brown was able to regain his social and financial footing. He made his house a tavern. His sons held town offices and cleared their own farms. In 1818 the Revolutionary veteran applied for a federal pension. He stated that he was in reduced circumstances and had “lost the use of my left arm and hand by reason of an ague” while still supporting his wife, two widowed daughters (one “insane”), and a grandson.

Under the 1820 pension law, however, the federal government said Brown owned too much property to need support. He and the selectmen of his town petitioned Congress to approve a pension, but it doesn’t look like that happened before his death in 1824 at the age of eighty.

Ezekiel Brown in the Boston Jail

When the British army put Thomas Kettell and other provincial prisoners from the Battle of Bunker Hill into the Boston jail, one of the men they found there was Ezekiel Brown (1744-1824) of Concord.

Robert Gross discusses Brown at length in The Minutemen and Their World. He was born in Concord, but his poor father moved the family back and forth between Groton and Dunstable. Brown returned to Concord at the age of twenty-two with no property but enough education to set up as a scrivener and clerk. Soon he had his own shop and wife.

In 1772 Brown bought a house, barn, and land near the center of town, as shown above. (Once the headquarters of the local D.A.R., it appears now to be a private residence.) Brown took out two mortgages for a total of £203, presumably using that money to buy goods for his business. His neighbors elected him to minor town offices.

In May 1773, however, the Boston dry-goods firm of Nathan Frazier and Frederic William Geyer sued Brown for a debt of almost £275. He lost his appeals in court, and on 14 December he was locked in the Boston jail as a debtor. Geyer made the unusual choice to keep paying the costs to keep Brown in jail.

Ezekiel Brown was thus confined in Boston through the Tea Party, the arrival of Gen. Thomas Gage and royal troops, the “Powder Alarm,” and the outbreak of war in his home town. What was he doing all that time? Studying medical books.

Most of the provincial prisoners from Bunker Hill were wounded, and Brown helped to care for them. In a petition to the Massachusetts General Court he stated:

on the 18th June the day after the Battle of Bunker Hill the Prisoners being Provincials who were taken by the Ministeral Army & brought into Boston Goal he gave his attendance and gave them all the relief in his power visited them dressd their Wounds & assisted Doctr Miles Whitworth in administering medicines to them from l8th. June 1775. to March 1st. 1776

The legislature granted Brown £8 on 24 Jan 1777. Even though most of those prisoners had died, they agreed that he had performed good service.

By then Brown was free, his creditor Geyer having left with the British military. Though father of a growing family, he joined the Continental Army for five months as a surgeon’s mate to continue his medical training. In 1777 he enlisted again, this time as a regimental surgeon, and served through January 1781, mostly in northern New York. Elaine G. Breslaw’s Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America states that Brown didn’t have a lot of medical training, but he had as much as many colleagues.

After his military service, Dr. Brown returned to Concord, set up a practice, and rose in local society again. He became a member of the town’s Social Club. Then the war ended, and his financial troubles returned.

TOMORROW: Geyer’s father-in-law.

Thomas Kettell: Underage Prisoner after Bunker Hill

One of the last survivors of the Battle of Bunker Hill was Thomas Kettell, who died on 17 Sept 1850. He had lived seventy-five years after the battle, long enough to see the Bunker Hill Monument (for which he subscribed $5) not only started but completed.

The Boston Evening Transcript stated that Kettell was ninety years old when he died and

the last survivor of four brothers, all of whom bore arms in the revolutionary war. At the age of fourteen he was taken prisoner by the British, when they burnt Charlestown at the battle of Bunker Hill. He afterwards served in several campaigns in the Massachusetts forces.

Since Thomas was born on 23 Feb 1760, he was actually fifteen during the battle. He was definitely a prisoner of war for a short time. Newspapers from September 1775 list him among the provincials held by the British after the battle, but he’s the only one noted as “(a lad, dismissed),” or freed.

I haven’t found a record of Thomas Kettell’s later military service. There’s no entry for him in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War and no pension file, despite his long life.

Thomas was born and raised in Charlestown. There were a lot of Kettells in that town, including at least one more Thomas Kettell born five years before. This Thomas came from a family of bakers but went into silversmithing. He became an established Charlestown businessman, also serving as clerk of the Middlesex Canal corporation.

Thomas Bellows Wyman’s Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown (1879) called Kettell “a gentleman of the old school, rigid and unyielding in manners, and of the like firm integrity.” An obituary reprinted in the Baltimore Sun stated:

During a life of nearly a century he was esteemed by all who knew him, for the uprightness and integrity of his character, his kind manners, and his observance of all the duties of a citizen and sincere christian.

Given Kettell’s long life and his career in Charlestown, I presume that he had plenty of chances to tell his story of what happened on 17 June 1775. What did he see during the Battle of Bunker Hill? What part of the provincial forces was he attached to, or was he a civilian caught up in the action? What was his experience as a young prisoner of war?

Sadly, I haven’t found any account by or attributed to him. Aside from the 1775 newspapers and the 1850 obituaries, we’d never know that young Thomas Kettell had any connection to the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Thomas’s older brother John left a May-September 1775 diary that Richard Frothingham quoted several times in his History of the Siege of Boston (which renders Thomas’s first name as “Timothy” in the only mention of him). If that document ever turns up, perhaps it mentions Thomas’s release from captivity.