Boston 1775: mutiny

Showing posts with label mutiny. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

“The Soldiers are tired of the Camp”

Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., had plenty to tell his British intelligence contact, Maj. Edward Cane, about the state of the Continental Army.

The Continental surgeon general wrote in his 24 Sept 1775 letter:

A difficulty will soon cause one much greater than perhaps they are aware of at this time, tho’ many of them (that is the Officers) begin to Quake what they will do in December, then the time is Expired for which they inlisted for, and the Soldiers are tired of the Camp, wish for home, many will come in their Stead I am sensible, but they will not so readily get another Army together as they have this.

The return that was made to the General of the Army last week was 22,540 Men. . . .

Great disturbences in the Camp of late with Mutinying, many Soldiers are now Confined in Guard for Mutiny.

There were indeed two mutinies in the Continental ranks earlier in that month.

One was the uprising of the Pennsylvania riflemen described here. They were protesting about a sergeant being confined, and then about one of those protesters being confined, and ultimately thirty-two more men were confined. A court-martial fined them a rather small amount, for the benefit of Church’s hospitals, but they lost a lot of their privileges as riflemen.

Around the same time, the soldiers assigned to the armed schooner Hannah refused to sail out of Beverly, probably angling for better prize money. Gen. George Washington had Col. John Glover (shown above) mobilize the local militia, arrest those men from his own regiment, and march them to Cambridge. On 22 September, the general orders announced that thirty-six men had been found guilty of “Mutiny, Riot and Disobedience of orders.” One was sentenced to be whipped 39 times and drummed out of the army.

At the same time, other parts of the Continental Army were still gung-ho. There were those thousand volunteers who marched off to invade Canada this same month, for example.

As Church noted, the real looming problem would come at the end of the year. The New England colonies had enlisted their armies only until then. In October, Washington would meet with his generals, delegates from the Continental Congress, and local political leaders about recruiting a new army for 1776. But the transition from one set of men to the next was a scary prospect.

Church’s letter in Gen. Thomas Gage’s files shows that the British command inside Boston was aware of that transition. But they didn’t try to take advantage of the besiegers’ weakness over the winter, as Washington feared. The British generals wanted to leave.

TOMORROW: Officers behaving badly.

Thursday, November 24, 2022

The Continental Congress’s Thanksgivings

On 1 Nov 1777, the Continental Congress issued a recommendation “to the legislative or executive Powers of these UNITED STATES” to observe a Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, 18 December.

The proclamation didn’t allude to any particular event, but scholars treat this as an expression of gratitude for the Continental victory at Saratoga.

Certainly the Congress, then meeting in York, Pennsylvania, after being pushed out of Philadelphia, wasn’t feeling thankful about the Battles of Brandywine or Germantown.

The 1777 proclamation was explicitly Christian, referring to “the Merits of JESUS CHRIST,” and culminating in a prayer “to prosper the Means of Religion, for the promotion and enlargement of that Kingdom, which consisteth ‘in Righteousness, Peace and Joy in the Holy Ghost.’”

The Congress continued to issue Thanksgiving proclamations every fall until after the formal end of the war. The 1779 and 1780 resolutions were explicitly Christian, the other four merely theistic (though one mentioned “Louis the Most Christian King our ally”).

At first the Thanksgiving proclamations kept up the pattern of not mentioning specific events. But the long document of 26 Oct 1781, issued just days after the Congress learned of the victory at Yorktown, spelled out multiple blessings:

the goodness of God in the year now drawing to a conclusion:

in which a mutiny in the American Army [the Pennsylvania Line Mutiny, which drove the Congress out of Philadelphia again] was not only happily appeased but became in its issue a pleasing and undeniable proof of the unalterable attachment of the people in general to the cause of liberty since great and real grievances only made them tumultuously seek redress while the abhorred the thoughts of going over to the enemy,

in which the Confederation of the United States has been completed [i.e., Maryland finally ratified the Articles of Confederation] by the accession of all without exception in which there have been so many instances of prowess and success in our armies; particularly in the southern states, where, notwithstanding the difficulties with which they had to struggle, they have recovered the whole country which the enemy had overrun, leaving them only a post or two upon on or near the sea [Charleston, Savannah, and Wilmington, which was soon to be evacuated]:

in which we have been so powerfully and effectually assisted by our allies, while in all the conjunct operations the most perfect union and harmony has subsisted in the allied army:

in which there has been so plentiful a harvest, and so great abundance of the fruits of the earth of every kind, as not only enables us easily to supply the wants of the army, but gives comfort and happiness to the whole people:

and in which, after the success of our allies by sea, a General of the first Rank [Cornwallis], with his whole army, has been captured by the allied forces under the direction of our illustrious Commander in Chief.

For the next three years, the Congress’s Thanksgiving proclamations and recommendations to the states all referred to the slow steps toward a final peace:

1782: “the present happy and promising state of public affairs; and the events of the war in the course of the last year now drawing to a close”
1783: “hostilities have ceased, and we are left in the undisputed possession of our liberties and independence, and of the fruits of our own land, and in the free participation of the treasures of the sea”
1784: “a general pacification hath taken place, and particularly a Definitive Treaty of peace between the said United States of America and his Britannic Majesty, was signed at Paris, on the 3d day of September, in the year of our Lord 1783; the instruments of the final ratifications of which were exchanged at Passy, on the 12th day of May, in the year of our Lord 1784, whereby a finishing hand was put to the great work of peace, and the freedom, sovereignty and independence of these states, fully and completely established”

And then the Continental Congress stopped recommending Thanksgivings. From 1785 to the advent of the new federal government, there were no national Thanksgiving proclamations.

In those years the Congress had difficulty completing normal business, going for long periods without a quorum. The external crisis had passed, and people disagreed about solutions to the internal difficulties. And the Congress delegates might have felt that with independence won Americans had both less to wish for and less to be thankful for.

The image above is one page of the Congress’s Thanksgiving proclamation in 1781, signed for that legislature by Thomas McKean and Charles Thomson and now owned by the Rosenbach museum and library. The texts of all the Congress’s proclamations have been shared by the Pilgrim Hall Museum.holiday

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

“Remarkably stout and hardy men”

On Thursday, as I announced earlier, I’ll speak at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site about “Washington’s Riflemen: Heroes or Headaches?”

Here are extracts from two journals in the summer of 1775 showing both sides of those Continental soldiers from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland.

First, Dr. James Thacher, then a surgeon’s mate, under the date of August 1775:

Several companies of riflemen, amounting, it is said, to more than fourteen hundred men, have arrived here from Pennsylvania and Maryland; a distance of from five hundred to seven hundred miles. They are remarkably stout and hardy men; many of them exceeding six feet in height. They are dressed in white frocks, or rifle-shirts, and round hats.

These men are remarkable for the accuracy of their aim; striking a mark with great certainty at two hundred yards distance. At a review, a company of them, while on a quick advance, fired their balls into objects of seven inches diameter, at the distance of two hundred and fifty yards.

They are now stationed on our lines, and their shot have frequently proved fatal to British officers and soldiers who expose themselves to view, even at more than double the distance of common musket-shot.

Second, Pvt. Aaron Wright of Pennsylvania, a rifleman himself, on 10 September:

Great commotion on Prospect Hill among the riflemen, occasioned by the unreasonable confinement of a sergeant by the adjutant of [Col. William] Thompson’s regiment; and before it was over, 34 men were confined, and two of them put in irons at headquarters in Cambridge; on the 12th, they were tried by a court-martial, and one was whipped 17 lashes, for stealing, and drummed out of camp.

Tomorrow night, we’ll look at both sides of those troops.

Friday, May 09, 2014

The Fate of Don Galvez’s Portrait

Yesterday’s posting described how in May 1783 Oliver Pollock gave the Continental Congress a portrait of Don Bernardo de Gálvez, who as Spanish governor of Louisiana had been a strong ally for the new U.S. of A. After being displayed for a day in the Congress’s chamber, the painting was moved to the house that chairman Elias Boudinot was renting in Philadelphia.

The next month, soldiers of the Pennsylvania Line marched on the capital to demand their unpaid wages. They surrounded the Pennsylvania State House. Some authors say they were upset with the Congress, some with the Pennsylvania Council—but since both bodies met in the same building, that didn’t much matter.

James Madison’s notes on the situation state:

The mutinous soldiers presented themselves, drawn up in the Street before the State House where Congress had first assembled. The Executive Council of the State sitting under the same roof, was called on for the proper interposition. President [i.e., Governor John] Dickinson came in, and explained the difficulty under actual circumstances, of bringing out the militia of the place for the suppression of the mutiny. He thought that without some outrages on persons or property the temper of the militia could not be relied on. Genl. [Arthur] St. Clair then in Philada. was sent for; and desired to use his interposition, in order to prevail on the troops to return to the Barracks. His report gave no encouragement.

Neither the state governor nor the highest-ranking army general thought he had enough reliable troops to force the mutineers away.

Boudinot wrote to his brother on 23 June:

I have only a moment to inform you, that there has been a most dangerous insurrection and mutiny among a few Soldiers in the Barracks here. About 3 or 400 surrounded Congress and the Supreme Executive Council, and kept us Prisoners in a manner near 3 hours, tho’ they offered no insult personally. To my great mortification, not a Citizen came to our assistance. The President and Council have not firmness enough to call out the Militia, and allege as the reason that they would not obey them.

Eventually St. Clair got an assurance from the soldiers that they’d let the politicians go to their homes. In a draft announcement on the event, Boudinot added:

Congress left the House & passed thro’ the ranks of Mutineers without opposition. When the President [i.e., Boudinot himself] had got half way home—6 or 7 of the Men followed him with their Arms & requested his return, but on his way one of the Sergeants met him & desired him not to regard the Men who had gone without order.

Various men, including delegate and colonel Alexander Hamilton, bustled about to resolve the crisis. But the Congress decided that it couldn’t rely on the local authorities for security and had to leave Philadelphia immediately. They adjourned to Boudinot’s alma mater at Princeton, New Jersey.

At first Boudinot moved in with his sister, Annis Stockton. Later he rented a house, moving his “Family and Furniture from Philadelphia” to Princeton. Varnum Lansing Collins’s The Continental Congress at Princeton reports that the move cost Boudinot £50, though that probably included six cartloads of Congress’s papers. The move also took a few months. On 11 August, the Continental Congress’s records addressed “an application from the President respecting the present deranged state of his household.” Some officials did venture back to Philadelphia to collect papers and finish up business there, but it would not be the nation’s capital again for several more years.

Boudinot might have left the Gálvez portrait behind in Philadelphia, or it could have been lost in the turmoil. Perhaps it became federal property in 1789 and was sent to Washington City, but then destroyed in the British invasion of 1814. I can’t find any further mention of it in the Congress’s published records. About a century ago, the National Portrait Gallery reported that nobody knew its location.

In 1976 Spain gave the U.S. an equestrian statue of Galvez, which as shown above now stands outside the State Department.

Monday, May 14, 2012

The Drama of the Lady Shore

This week the Daily Mail reported on the auction of a diary by Thomas Millard, carpenter aboard the British ship Lady (Jane) Shore during a fateful voyage in 1797.

I find conflicting details of that trip on the web, but all sources agree on the basics. The main cargo was a shipload of women: one source says sixty-six and another implies there were close to a hundred. Those women had been convicted of crimes in Britain and sentenced to exile in the new penal colony of New South Wales. There were also some male captives, including prisoners from Britain’s ongoing war with France.

Soldiers and marines were guarding those prisoners. However, as the Annual Register told its readers in 1798:

The Lady Shore had on board, besides convicts, eighty soldiers of the New South Wales corps, amongst whom were German, French, and condemned criminals, reprieved on condition of serving, during life, at Botany-Bay.

In other words, the guards weren’t any more happy to be there than the convicts being transported.

On 1 August, the Lady Shore was “four days sail from Rio de Janeiro.” Millard wrote in his diary:

We ware Alarm’d by the firing of Musketts on the deck and to my Great Surpris the Capt falling down the steeridge ladder which woke me out of my Sleep.

Some of the guards and French prisoners had revolted in the name of the republic. In taking over the ship they had chopped off the head of the chief mate and shot Capt. James Willcocks, who soon died.

One detailed account of this mutiny came from young purser John Black’s version, published in 1798. Millard recorded another side of Black, writing that he had tried to commit suicide rather than surrender. Another version of events is in chapter 18 of J. G. Semple Lisle’s memoir; that book has a lot to say about how the author tried to warn his superiors that there would be a mutiny.

Two of the French prisoners had been pilot and helmsman on their own warship, so they quickly steered for the South American territories of France’s ally, Spain. To stave off a countermutiny, on 14 August the ship’s new commanders put the British officers and a handful of soldiers and convicts still loyal to the Crown, along with their wives and children, into a longboat. Those twenty-nine people received food and navigation equipment, and were close enough to shore to land the next afternoon. But Millard the carpenter was too useful to go free.

The Lady Shore sailed into Montevideo, Uruguay, by the end of the month. At first the Spanish authorities locked them all up as mutineers, but the French ambassador argued that his countrymen had captured the ship according to the rules of war. Most of the women went to work for the local gentry. As for the carpenter, the Daily Mail says:

Millard was allowed out to work for a shipwright during the day but returned to prison at night.

He was more fortunate than most; in the summer of 1799 he was allowed to sail in the Liberty to America, where he settled in New Jersey, took a wife and raised two children.

The 320-page journal was auctioned after being put up for sale by Millard’s American descendants.

Gavin Pascoe at South Sea Miscellany writes:

If there was any piratical event crying out for dramatisation in fiction or film it’s this one…

Seriously, this story has female convicts! In tropical locations! With violence! Why isn’t it already on cable?

Friday, May 15, 2009

Mutiny Aboard the Tyrannicide, 17 May

Here’s an announcement from the Beverly, Massachusetts, library about a free talk scheduled for this Sunday, 17 May, at 2:00 P.M.:

In November of 1776, Captain John Fisk of the brigantine Tyrannicide set sail from Salem in search of British merchantmen. Crewed, in part, by local Beverly, Gloucester and Salem men, the events of this voyage were lost in the mists of time until speaker Dennis Ahern started reading the logbook of their voyage. This is the story of that voyage, the story of a mutiny on board one of America’s first commissioned warships.

The Tyrannicide was actually commissioned by Massachusetts, as part of the state’s own navy. There’s a little of this story in Paul A. Gilje’s article “The Meaning of Freedom for Waterfront Workers” in Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Scandalous Conduct of the Connecticut Troops?

Rebellion in the Ranks, the book by John A. Nagy that I described yesterday, lists two mutinies within the Continental Army during the siege of Boston. One was a brief attempt by a Pennsylvania regiment to free a couple of their comrades from military jail, as chronicled two days ago. The other appears in a letter from Gen. Israel Putnam (shown here) to Gen. George Washington dated 1 Dec 1775:

I shall esteem it a particular favor if your Excellency will be so obliging as to recommend my worthy friend, Colonel Henry Babcock, to the Honorable Continental Congress, to be appointed to the rank of Brigadier-General in the Continental army. I have been upon service with him several campaigns in the last war, and have seen him in action behave with great spirit and fortitude when he had command of a regiment. He has this day been very serviceable in assisting me in quelling a mutiny, and bringing back a number of deserters.

Putnam was trying to get a brigadier-general to help manage his division. Babcock (1736-1800) was an old comrade from the French & Indian War. Born the son of Rhode Island’s chief justice, he had graduated from Yale in 1752 at the top of his class. At this time he was making his home in Stonington, Connecticut.

What did Putnam mean by “mutiny” and “deserters”? That becomes clear in Washington’s report to Congress on 4 December:

The scandalous conduct of a great number of the Connecticut troops has laid me under the necessity of calling in a body of the militia, much sooner than I apprehended there would be an occasion for such a step.

I was afraid some time ago, that they would incline to go home when the time of their enlistment expired. I called upon the officers of the several regiments, to know whether they could prevail on the men to remain until the 1st of January, or till a sufficient number of other forces could be raised to supply their place. I suppose they were deceived themselves. I know they deceived me by assurances, that I need be under no apprehension on that score, for the men would not leave the lines.

Last Friday showed how much they were mistaken, as the major part of the troops of that colony were going away with their arms and ammunition. We have, however, by threats, persuasions, and the activity of the people of the country, who sent back many of them, that had set out, prevailed upon the most part to stay. There are about eighty of them missing.

In other words, those troops were mutinying and deserting by leaving for home “when the time of their enlistment expired,” which was on 1 December. Even though their officers had asked them nicely not to! (Well, one reading of the Connecticut militia law had their enlistments ending on 10 December, but commanders were asking those men to stay through the end of the year.) All but one of the Connecticut regiments tried to leave, so this “mutiny” wasn’t the bright idea of a few hotheads.

Prof. Fred Anderson’s article “The Hinge of the Revolution: George Washington Confronts a People’s Army, July 3, 1775” suggests that this dispute reflects a particular regional understanding of military service. As he developed the idea in more detail in A People’s Army, Anderson posits that Calvinist New Englanders viewed their service in the mobilized militia as a “covenant” with society, its parameters defined like a contract. In practice, New Englanders were perfectly willing to do their militia service, but insisted on going home at the end of the stated terms.

In contrast, Washington and his top officers, like the British commanders in the French & Indian War before them, felt that soldiers should continue to serve if the situation required them. By that light, militiamen who left at critical times were “deserters” even if the letter of the law was on their side. The commander-in-chief stopped most of the Connecticut men from leaving and had other units guard their camp for the rest of the year.

As for Putnam’s recommendation of Henry Babcock, Washington passed it to Congress with a note that said, “I know nothing of this gentleman, but I wish the vacancy was filled, as the want of one is attended with very great inconveniences.” But Congress didn’t commission Babcock in the Continental Army. Instead, in February 1776, the Rhode Island legislature put him in charge of defending Newport.

TOMORROW: And then Babcock went mad.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Lt. Ziegler and “Our Thirty-Two Mutineers”

On 13 Sept 1775, Pvt. Jesse Lukens (1748-1776), son of the Surveyor-General of Pennsylvania, wrote back to his home colony from the siege lines at Boston about the behavior of Col. William Thompson’s battalion of Pennsylvania riflemen. The Pennsylvanians had arrived at the siege of Boston in the summer of 1775. They were specially valued for their marksmanship, so they seem to have been assigned unusually light duty. Their colonel was also apparently not a strict disciplinarian.

Lukens described the result:

They had twice before broken open our guard house and released their companions who were confined there for small crimes, and once it was with the utmost difficulty that they were kept from rescuing an offender in the presence of all their officers. They openly damned them and behaved with great insolence. However, the Colonel was pleased to pardon the men and all remained quiet; but on Sunday last the Adjutant having confined a Sergeant for neglect of duty and murmuring the men began again and threatened to take him out.

That was 10 September. The adjutant was Lt. David Ziegler (1748-1811), born in Heidelberg—one of a number of German immigrants or sons of immigrants in the battalion’s officer corps. I love the charge of “murmuring.”

The adjutant, being a man of spirit, seized the principal mutineer and put him in also, and coming to report the matter to the Colonel, where we were all sitting after dinner were alarmed with a huzzaing and upon going out found they had broken open the guard house and taken the man out.

The colonel and lieutenant-colonel, with several officers and friends, seized the fellow from amongst them, and ordered a guard to take him to Cambridge to the main guard, which was done without any violent opposition, but in about twenty minutes thirty-two of Capt. [James] Ross’ company, with their loaded rifles, swore by God they would go to the main guard and release the man or lose their lives, and set off as hard as they could run. It was in vain to attempt stopping them. We stayed in camp and kept the others quiet.

Sent word to Gen. [George] Washington, who reinforced the guard to five hundred men with fixed bayonets and loaded pieces [i.e., artillery]. Col. [Daniel] Hitchcock’s regiment, (being the one next to us,) was ordered under arms, and some part of Gen. [Nathanael] Greene’s brigade, (as the generals were determined to subdue by force the mutineers, and did not know how far it might spread in our battalion.)

Genls. Washington, [Charles] Lee, and Greene came immediately, and our thirty-two mutineers who had gone about a half a mile towards Cambridge and taken possession of a hill and woods, beginning to be frighted at their proceedings, were not so hardened, but upon the General’s ordering them to ground their arms they did it immediately. The General then ordered another of our companies, Capt. [George] Nagel’s, to surround them with their loaded guns, which was immediately done, and did the company great honor.

However, to convince our people (as I suppose, mind,) that it did not altogether depend upon themselves, he ordered part of Col. Hitchcock’s and Col. [Moses] Little’s regiments to surround them with their bayonets fixed, and ordered two of the ringleaders to be bound. I was glad to find our men all true and ready to do their duty except these thirty-two rascals. Twenty-six were conveyed to the quarter-guard on Prospect Hill, and six of the principals to the main guard.

You cannot conceive what disgrace we are all in, and how much the General is chagrined that only one regiment should come from the South, and that set so infamous an example, and in order that idleness shall not be a further bane to us, the General’s orders on Monday, were “that Col. Thompson’s regiment shall be upon all parties of fatigue, and do all other camp duty with any other regiment.”

So no more special treatment for Thompson’s riflemen.

The men have since been tried by a general court-martial and convicted of mutiny, and were only fined twenty Shillings each for the use of the hospital—too small a punishment for so base a crime. Mitigated, no doubt, on account of their having come so far to serve the cause and its being the first crime.

The men are returned to their camp and seem exceedingly sorry for their misbehavior and promise amendment. I charge our whole disgrace upon the remissness of our officers, and the men being employed will yet, no doubt, do honor to their Provinces. For this much I can only say for them that upon every alarm it was impossible for men to behave with more readiness or attend better to their duty; it is only in the camp that we cut a poor figure.

The picture above is a Pennsylvania long rifle made around 1780, in the collection of the State Museum of Pennsylvania and visible through ExplorePAhistory.com.

TOMORROW: A recent book that puts this mutiny in context.

Boston 1775

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