Boston 1775: Mercy Scollay

Showing posts with label Mercy Scollay. Show all posts

Friday, February 19, 2021

Meeting the Scollays Together

In December the Shelburne Museum in Burlington, Vermont, purchased John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Mercy (Greenleaf) Scollay (1719-1793).

Unknown to the seller, at least at first, the museum already owned Copley’s matching portrait of Scollay’s husband, John Scollay (1712-1790).

Here’s the backstory recounted by Enfilade, the newsletter of the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture:

Completed in 1763, Mrs. Scollay’s portrait demonstrates Copley’s talents and abilities as a painter as evidenced through the beautifully rendered fabric draped around the sitter.

Shelburne Museum founder Electra Havemeyer Webb assembled the American paintings collection with the intention of juxtaposing well-known artists such as Copley with lesser-known itinerant or ‘folk’ painters. She purchased the portrait of John Scollay from Harry Shaw Newman at the Old Print Shop in New York City in 1959. The Museum’s extensive collection of American paintings tell a story about how the fine arts developed and came of age in the United States, and the reunion of these pendants continues to enrich the narrative.

To celebrate the Scollays’ reunion on canvas and explore that acquisition, the director of the Shelburne Museum, Tom Denenberg, delivered an online talk which is now available on the museum’s website and Facebook page.

Denenberg’s talk might overstate Scollay’s political activity in a couple of directions. He was a member of the Boston merchants who often opposed Parliament’s new revenue laws and he served many years as a selectman, including during the siege of Boston. In that way Scollay was a “Son of Liberty,” but we shouldn’t view him as a radical; he was part of the establishment. In addition, as chair of the selectmen he was merely first among equals, not equivalent to a mayor.

The most distinct aspect of Scollay’s political career, I think, is how he was a selectman from 1754 to 1764 and then from 1772 to 1790. Why the break? Because he was caught up in the financial failure of Nathaniel Wheelwright in 1765 and had to declare bankruptcy and rebuild his estate. The fact that he succeeded and was able to return to the selectmen as the board’s senior member reflects how his neighbors must have respected him.

Copley produced another pair of portraits of the Scollays as well, in pastel instead of oil. That picture of Mercy Scollay is at the Harvard Art Museums, the picture of John at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Thursday, May 02, 2013

Q. & A. on Bunker Hill with Nathaniel Philbrick, part 2

Today Boston 1775 concludes a colloquy with Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution.

Q. What could the American commanders have done differently to win the battle? What could the British commanders have done differently to avoid such heavy losses? And how would a different outcome on 17 June 1775 have affected the siege of Boston or the war?

A. The most obvious failing of the American commanders had to do with the artillery regiment under Colonel Richard Gridley, who had the unfortunate habit of picking officers to whom he was related. With only one or two exceptions, the officers under Gridley’s command were both cowardly and ineffectual, and several of them were seen running scared from the scene of the battle.

Since most of the American troops were already terrified of the British cannons, it was especially unnerving to see their own artillery officers proving so pathetically incompetent. This led large numbers of soldiers to linger back on Bunker Hill, where they could avoid the battle to the south. For those fighting in the redoubt and along the breastworks and rail fence, it was infuriating to realize that hundreds, if not thousands of their own men were on the Charlestown peninsula but were providing them with no help.

Both Colonels William Prescott and John Stark were highly critical of Israel Putnam, who had stationed himself on Bunker Hill. Putnam seems to have chiefly occupied himself trying to build a fortification that might serve as a fallback position for those on the front line, but this was hardly a priority at this point in the battle when Prescott and Stark needed every soldier and musket they could get. According to Stark, if Putnam had done what he should have and gotten those lollygaggers to join the fighting, “he would have decided the fate of his country in the first action.”

On the British side, it might have all gone very differently if they had followed Henry Clinton’s advice and landed some soldiers to the north at Charlestown Neck, where they would have cut off the American retreat.

If the American army had been routed at Bunker Hill and the British had then pursued them into Cambridge, the war might have been effectively over before it even got started. If the Americans had decisively won the battle, it might have convinced the British ministry to agree to a compromise. The ironic thing is that both alternative outcomes would have meant that America remained a part of the British Empire.

Q. A movie studio has bought the dramatic rights to Bunker Hill. While acknowledging that authors have zero influence on casting, let’s imagine that you’re making that movie. You’ve spent a lot of mental time with several of the characters involved in the start of the Revolution. Cast a couple of those leading roles with well-known actors or actresses, past or present, and explain why they would be good choices.

A. I’m terrible at this kind of thing, but I’ll give it a try, limiting myself to actors/actresses from the past.

Errol Flynn as Joseph Warren. He’d bring a swashbuckling, action-hero charisma to the role that would be great, particularly when it comes to Warren delivering his Massacre-Day Oration in a toga and when he fights to the death at the redoubt on Breed’s Hill.

Katharine Hepburn as Mercy Scollay, Warren’s fiancée. Scollay was apparently very bright and high strung and Kate would be perfect; while we’re at it, let’s cast an older Spencer Tracy as her father John Scollay, chair of the Boston Selectmen.

Let’s go with a young Ernest Borgnine as Israel Putnam since you need a big athletic loveable guy with a wild streak.

I’d pick Laurence Olivier to be Thomas Gage and tell him to bring out his inner Hamlet.

I picture both Colonels Prescott and Stark as being thin and wiry and fairly humorless—maybe a dour Jimmy Stewart for Prescott and Max von Sydow as Stark?

See, I told you I was lousy at this kind of thing.

Hey, I don’t think that was so bad! At top: Olivier tries to channel Gen. John Burgoyne in The Devil’s Disciple. Below: Young Errol Flynn as Fletcher Christian in In the Wake of the Bounty.

TOMORROW: The Bunker Hill giveway. Answers accepted until midnight!

Sunday, July 01, 2012

Who Slept on Dr. Warren’s Mattresses?

I’m opening this week and month with two Boston 1775 postings because of the crowd of holiday events. And because of our ongoing low-level obsession with the physical remains and relics of Dr. Joseph Warren (skull, bullet, teeth, &c.). We turn now to the doctor’s mattresses.

Sam Forman, author of Dr. Joseph Warren, has posted the text of a letter from the doctor’s fiancée Mercy Scollay on 17 Aug 1775, soon after she got out of besieged Boston:

I got to Mr Savages before 5 oclock found all friends well and heartily rejoiced to see me – was too much fatigued to go further till Wednesday when I came to Watertown where I’m now pening this –

My first inquiry was for Mr [John] Hancock whom I was lucky eno’ to find – I told him that I had learnt since I came down what was doing with the few effects my poor friend [i.e. Dr. Warren] was possess of out of Boston – that John W——n had sold every feather bed to General Washinton and for ought I know every thing else – that his picture so valuable to those who esteemed the original was somewhere near Roxbury the looking glasses that was brought out of town with it were (through carelessness) broke to pieces and I supposed all that was in their hands would share the same fate –

Mr H——k appeared much affected by my relation. Said his brother had no right to doo those things without proper authority and would certainly be called to account for those proceedings – he advised me not to go to Cambridge as the confusion of the town would distract me – that he was going himself there – would see the young gentleman and without letting him know he had seen me, or heard any thing would enquire what he proposed doing, and on his return would talk further on the subject

Feather-stuffed mattresses were actually valuable property in the eighteenth century. But Scollay’s response seem to be driven mostly by the sadness of losing aspects of her fiancé and the fear of being pushed out of the family. She hadn’t actually married Joseph Warren, after all.

Sam headlined this blog entry, “How Could He Sell the Feather Beds to George Washington?” The answer lies in the records of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, which on 22 July had said:

Resolved, That the Committee of Safety be desired to complete the furnishing General Washington’s House, and in particular to provide him four or five more Beds.

George Washington had moved into John Vassall’s empty house in Cambridge a week earlier. Also in that house was adjutant general Horatio Gates, secretary Joseph Reed, aides Thomas Mifflin and (as of 27 July) John Trumbull, perhaps other assistants, and household and personal servants. But clearly not enough beds.

Meanwhile, young Dr. John Warren was working a short distance away at the Continental Army hospital. And he had much of his late brother’s household property, including the bulky feather mattresses and frames. Was he really in a position to keep those under wraps?

Looking at this record and the headquarters accounts, I don’t think the young doctor sold the mattresses to Gen. Washington, as Scollay wrote. Rather, he sold them to the provincial government for the general’s use.

At the end of the siege, the headquarters steward, Timothy Austin, asked the Massachusetts legislature if he should pack up the household furniture to be moved to New York. The legislature replied no, those things were only on loan. Of all the furniture in Washington’s headquarters, only a set of chairs from the family of Suffolk County sheriff William Greenleaf can be identified today with a reasonably solid provenance. But it is interesting to know that Washington’s household slept on the late Dr. Warren’s beds.

Sam Forman will be speaking at the Old State House in Boston on Tuesday, 3 July, at 1:00 P.M. His gallery talk is titled “Dr. Joseph Warren and the Boston Massacre: Defining American Liberty on the Eve of Revolution,” and I’m sure he’ll sign books there. This event is free with museum admission.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Upcoming Events Off the Beaten Path

In addition to the annual commemorations grouped around Patriots’ Day that I linked to here, a few more talks caught my eye because they’re one-off events in unusual venues.

On Monday, 16 April (which is legally Patriots’ Day), at 10:00 A.M., Dr. Sam Forman will sign copies of Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty, at the Vine Lake Cemetery, 625 Main Street in Medfield. Why a cemetery in Medfield? Because that’s the burial place of Mercy Scollay, Dr. Warren’s fiancée when he died. Forman will “read from her newly attributed works and unveil her portrait.”

That same day at 7:00 P.M., Seamus Heffernan will do a book-signing and chat about his alternative-history comic Freedom in the Modern Myths shop at 34 Bridge Street in Northampton. Check out our conversation about that reworking of the Revolution starting here.

On Tuesday, 17 April, the Nichols House Museum will present a lecture by Peter Drummey, the Stephen T. Riley Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, on ”The Real Liberty Bell: Boston Abolitionists, 1700-1863.” This will take place the American Meteorological Society at 45 Beacon Street in Boston starting at 6:00 P.M. Admission is $20, or $15 for members of the museum. For reservations, call the museum at 617-227-6993, preferably by 13 April.

Finally, on the actual anniversary of the outbreak of the war—Thursday, 19 April—Prof. William Fowler will speak at the National Archives in Waltham about his latest book, American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two years After Yorktown, 1781-1783. Fowler is, among many other things, the Gay Hart Gaines Distinguished Fellow in American History at Mount Vernon. That free program begins at 6:00 P.M. Reservations are recommended; email or call toll-free 866-406-2379.

Tuesday, March 06, 2012

The Trail of Sally Edwards

Yesterday I shared some details about how a woman named Sally Edwards—possibly still in her teens, with no husband in sight—gave birth to a baby, also named Sally Edwards, in Dedham in June 1775.

There are two big problems in tracking that mother and child much further. One is that people probably took steps to keep them from being tracked. The other is that their name was not uncommon—and looking for “Sarah Edwards” as well brings up possibilities all over the place.

According to Dr. Sam Forman in his new biography Dr. Joseph Warren, which unearthed this event, the baby remained in Dedham for another three years, with Warren’s former medical students paying the bills for her support.

The mother—to innkeeper Dr. Nathaniel Ames’s relief—returned to Boston after the siege in mid-1776. Forman cites letters from Warren’s fiancée Mercy Scollay to say that a “Mrs. Charles Miller” took in both Sally Edwards and Dr. Warren’s oldest child Betsey in 1776.

The most prominent Charles Miller around at the time was a Boston merchant whom the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had appointed deputy commissary general in May 1775. After the Continental Congress took over the war, he worked under commissary general Joseph Trumbull for the rest of the siege. In 1776, Miller stayed in Massachusetts as Trumbull’s deputy in the work of collecting and shipping food to the Continental Army.

That Charles Miller was born in 1742 at Braintree, son of the region’s Anglican minister. In 1769 he married Elizabeth Cary, daughter of prominent Charlestown merchant Richard Cary, in King’s Chapel, Boston’s most prestigious Anglican church.

That religious affiliation may help to explain why Sally Edwards had her baby baptized by an Anglican minister in Dedham—and they were scarce on the ground in New England outside Boston during the siege. Did she come from an Anglican family? Was she feeling more support from the Millers than from anyone else in her life?

I have no further clues about either Sally Edwards, mother or daughter. As has been discussed previously on Boston 1775, some families have claimed descent from Dr. Joseph Warren through an undocumented daughter. In one case that daughter was said to be named “Sarah Warren.” However, I haven’t seen evidence to support those traditions, and Sarah was (as I said above) a very common name.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Educating Dr. Warren’s Orphaned Children

When Dr. Joseph Warren died at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, his estate was burdened with debts. Those finances were also tangled up in the estate of the spectacular bankrupt Nathaniel Wheelwright, which the doctor had agreed to administer.

As I described yesterday, Warren left behind four children and a fiancée named Mercy Scollay. (Ironically, Mercy’s father, selectman John Scollay, had been forced into bankruptcy after Wheelwright’s collapse, and had had to dig himself out of that financial hole.)

Mercy Scollay took on the task of raising the Warren children and arranging for their education. The eldest boy was of particular concern, according to the values of the time: as the son of a gentleman and a martyr, Joseph simply had to go to Harvard—but who would pay the fees for schooling (the Boston schools were closed during the siege), tutoring, and the college itself? Scollay asked lots of people for support. The local Freemasons seem to have been the first to respond to her.

In January 1777, Samuel Adams proposed at the Continental Congress that “the eldest son...might be adopted by the continent, and educated at the public expense.” On 18 May, he sent Scollay this letter, shared online by the Massachusetts Historical Society:

With respect [the M.H.S. transcription has “request”] to the youngest Son and Daughter, I mentiond my strong Desire that they might be continued under your care; and that means might be continued to have the eldest son sent to Dummers School [now the Governor’s Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts]. . . .

While I was in Baltimore, an opportunity presented of making a Proposal, which, if agreed to, would be honorary to my friend and beneficial to his Son. General [Hugh] Mercer having been slain in Battle [at Princeton], or rather Barbarously murdered [not really], a Motion was made in Congress for a Monument to be erected to his Memory, and that his youngest Son should be educated at the Expense of the Continent.

I did not think my self partial in judging that the services and Merit of General Warren considered as a Patriot or as a Soldier were not inferior to those of General Mercer, and therefore added to the Motion that the same Honor should paid to his memory and that one of this Sons should be educated—I proposed the eldest. It was agreed that my Motion should be first entered on the Journal, and a Committee was appointed to consider of both.

Congress soon after adjorned to this Place [back to Philadelphia]. The gentlemen of the Committee are not all of them arrived. I am persuaded it will be agreed to in the Committee, but as the Determination in the House may be uncertain, I think it best that it should not be made known abroad [i.e., publicly], till we see the event.

That sort of regional horse-trading in legislation is not unfamiliar today.

What about the three other children: Elizabeth, Mary, and Richard? Gen. Benedict Arnold wrote to Scollay offering $500 in July 1778 and again in late 1779 in case the Congress didn’t offer additional funds. Mercy Warren of Plymouth (her husband no close relation to the Warrens) was apparently interested in bringing up Elizabeth, but the girl chose not to leave her school in Boston.

A 20 Dec 1779 letter from Samuel Adams relays this news from Dr. John Warren, the children’s uncle:

the eldest son was, as early as it could be done, put under the care and tuition of the Rev. Mr. [Phillips] Payson, of Chelsea; a gentleman whose qualifications for the instructing of youth, I need not mention to you. The lad still remains with him.

The eldest daughter...is with the doctor; and he assures me, that no gentleman’s daughter in this town has more of the advantage of schools than she has at his expense. She learns music, dancing, writing and arithmetic, and the best needle-work that is taught here. The doctor, I dare say, takes good care of her morals.

The two younger children, a boy of about seven years, and a girl somewhat older, are in the family of John Scollay, Esq., under the particular care of his daughter

In 1780, Congress took up the issue of the other three children, noting that “it appears no adequate provision can be made out of his [the late father’s] private fortune.” The national government decided that Massachusetts should step up with its own money, but agreed to provide half of a major-general’s pay until the youngest child came of age. The back pay came to $7,000, historian Jared Sparks later calculated. Of course, inflation was eating away the value of that money.

What return did the nation get on its payments for the boys’ education? Not much, alas. The young Joseph Warren graduated from Harvard in the class of 1786, served as a militia officer at the Castle, and died at age 22. His little brother Richard went into business and died at 21. Elizabeth married Gen. Arnold Welles and died without having children. Mary married twice, and is the only child of Dr. Joseph Warren to have left heirs.

The major local legacy of Dr. Joseph Warren came through his younger brother, also a physician. Dr. John Warren helped to found Harvard Medical School. His son Dr. John Collins Warren helped to establish the New England Journal of Medicine and the Massachusetts General Hospital, and performed the first surgery under ether anesthesia.

Saturday, August 09, 2008

Looking for Dr. Warren’s Children on Wikipedia

Boston 1775 has hit the big time! Last Friday I received a missive on what Wikipedia was saying about Dr. Joseph Warren’s children. I followed it up, and discovered that as of yesterday the first citation in the Warren article was to this Boston 1775 post. And who says you can’t trust Wikipedia?

Unfortunately, you can’t always trust Wikipedia. That same entry went on to say:

At the time of Warren’s death [during the Battle of Bunker Hill], his children—Joseph Warren, H. C. Warren, Richard Warren, Elizabeth Warren, Mary Warren—were staying with Abigail Adams at the John Quincy Adams birthplace in Braintree, Massachusetts. A cairn now marks the spot where his oldest daughter observed the battle from afar after word of her father’s death. The Warren children were then financially supported by Benedict Arnold who later succeeded in obtaining support for them from the Continental Congress until they were of age.

To start with, Dr. Warren and his wife, who died in 1773, had only four children: Elizabeth, Joseph, Mary, and Richard, in order of birth. In 1775 their ages ranged from about nine years old to about three, according to this later letter from Samuel Adams. Rhoda Truax’s biography of the family says their nicknames were Betsey, Jose, Polly, and Dick.

There’s no citation on Wikipedia for the statement that those kids were with Abigail Adams during the Battle of Bunker Hill (which is what my correspondent was asking about, quite skeptically). Adams described the time of that battle in a letter, and her son John Quincy later recalled it in more letters, as I quoted back here. Neither mentioned the Warrens. Since one of John Quincy’s recollections went on to praise Dr. Warren (who had treated his injured finger), he would surely have mentioned being with the Warren children while their father was being killed—if indeed he had been.

Also, contrary to the Wikipedia explanation, no one knew that Warren was killed in that battle until it was over. It’s possible that one of Warren’s daughters later visited that hill in Braintree and looked toward the site of the Charlestown battle, but that’s not what Wikipedia describes (as of now—maybe I’ll fix it in the coming week).

So what happened to Warren’s four children in 1775? The doctor’s most recent biographer, John Cary, supposes that they were “left in the care of Mercy Scollay in Boston when Warren had been forced to flee town” in April. Scollay was a daughter of selectman John Scollay; she and the doctor had just become engaged, or perhaps engaged to be engaged. Citing a letter from Scollay to John Hancock dated 21 May 1776 (which I haven’t seen), Cary continues: “Shortly before his death, Warren asked her to care for his children if anything should happen to him.”

Here, courtesy of Teach US History, is an engraving from about 1825 of Warren leaving to go to his final battle. [ADDENDUM: The engraving appears in an 1846 issue of The Columbian Magazine, so it might be twenty years older than I thought.] He’s not letting emotion overcome him, to say the least. A baby—arguably a three-year-old—looks on. The caption for this engraving called the woman his wife, so we know misinformation didn’t start with Wikipedia.

TOMORROW: The education of Dr. Warren’s children becomes a national issue.

Boston 1775

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