Not so, replied the soldier. As a result, the child crept forth and followed the redcoats around as they vandalized the house. Finally, they came to his father’s communion service.
Until now, young Joel Adams had kept silent as the soldiers took his mother’s spoons and other items, reported the Reverend Smith in 1864. “[B]ut when they proceeded to take possession of the sacred utensils, he could restrain himself no longer, and in horror and indignation cried out, ‘Don’t you touch them ’ere things! Daddy’l lick you if you do.’”
The boy’s warning would have little effect. The soldiers not only took the communion service and other valuables, they also set fire to a pile of chips and broken chairs inside the house, then left Joel and his siblings to their devices. Fortunately, the children quickly doused the fire by pouring home-brewed beer and water on it—but not before pewter plates on a nearby dresser melted in the heat. Months later, after the British had evacuated Boston, a silversmith in the city informed Deacon Joseph Adams that the communion service had been pawned in his care and he was more than willing to return the looted items.
Meanwhile, the distance from the Jason Russell house on the western outskirts of town to Cooper’s Tavern in the center was about half a mile. Here, at least forty British and Americans died in the raging, running fight—the bloodiest half mile on the entire route known to historians today as the Lexington-Concord Battle Road.
In the tavern, incredibly enough, two men were sitting over their drinks (by some accounts) while tavern-keeper Benjamin Cooper and his wife, Rachel, were at the bar mixing the popular drink called flip. When the British started shooting through windows and doors, the Coopers made for the cellar, but their two customers, both unarmed, had lingered too long. They were killed (and by some accounts badly mutilated) by the combat-maddened redcoats bursting into the taproom.
Not far away, eighty-year-old Samuel Whittemore, a militia officer many years earlier, had been lying in wait behind a stone wall. When the redcoats appeared on the road in front of him, he began firing his musket. He probably had gotten off half a dozen shots before he heard a noise to his rear, turned, and saw five men from the British flanking force hurrying toward him—“shoulder to shoulder,” according to the Rev. Smith’s account.
The old-timer didn’t hesitate. “With his musket he shot one of the soldiers, and, instantly drawing his pistol, fired at another. He aimed the second pistol and discharged it just as they fired at him; one of the soldiers was seen to clap his hand to his breast. As he [Whittemore] fired the third time a ball struck him in the head, and he fell senseless. The soldiers beat him with their muskets, bayoneted him, and left him for dead.”
Sure that it was a hopeless errand, the old man’s neighbors from Menotomy carried his near-lifeless body to Cooper’s Tavern, now vacated by the British and serving as a shelter and surgery for the wounded. There, a Doctor Tufts from Medford took one look and said there was no use even in dressing his wounds—Sam Whittemore had little time to live. But Dr. Tufts did apply the bandages and clean up the elderly hero…who then proceeded to live another eighteen years!
An informant in Boston overheard some British soldiers talking about their battle on the road to Concord the next day, April 20. “We killed an old devil there in Menotomy,” said one of the soldiers, “but we paid most too dear for it—lost three of our men, the last died this morning.”
The fact is, the British paid “most too dear” for the entire expedition to Lexington, Concord, and Menotomy. The move toward future American independence already was under way in any case, but the events of April 19, 1775, triggered instant revolution rather than any gradual, negotiated process. The hornet’s-nest reaction of the Massachusetts citizen-soldiers, even her Patriot civilians, also served as an eye-opening warning for any British paying attention.
One British official who was taking heed was none other than Lord Percy, rescuer of the beleaguered Concord-Lexington column. He had once described the restless Colonials as “timid creatures” and “cowards.” But no longer. Now, the very next day, he composed a report saying in part: “[M]any of them [the Americans] concealed themselves in houses & advanced within 10 yds. to fire at me and other officers, tho’ they were morally certain of being put to death themselves in an instant.”
The “insurrection here,” he also wrote, will not be so “despicable as it is perhaps imagined at home.” He also admitted to being startled by the previous day’s events. “For my part, I never believed, I confess, that they wd have attacked the king’s troops, or have had the perserverance I found in them yesterday.”
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Additional notes: The Jason Russell House, moved a short distance from its original location and preserved by the Arlington Historical Society, stands today close to the intersection of Jason Street and Massachusetts Avenue.
A summary of the facts that should render Menotomy equally as famous as Lexington and Concord:
The twelve men found dead in the Jason Russell House constituted the greatest number of men, either British or American, killed at a single site, at roughly the same moment, all day long that April 19.
Menotomy was the site of the bloodiest half-mile segment—from the Jason Russell House to Cooper’s Tavern—of the entire Battle Road from East Cambridge to Concord and back to Charlestown Neck and Bunker Hill.
The fighting at Menotomy cost each side more soldiers than any other town involved in the events of April 19, 1775—forty British and twenty-five Americans dead.
With the attack on Lord Percy’s supply train, the “old men” of Menotomy accomplished the American Revolution’s first forcible capture of enemy provisions and military supplies.
Tar and Feather
BRITISH SOLDIER GEORGE WALKER EITHER WAS FOOLHARDY OR BADLY MISINFORMED as to the mood of the local Colonials one day in August 1775. It is safe to assume, too, that up to this point in his life, the term “tar-and-feather” was a concept known to him strictly in the abstract, rather than as personal experience.
Clearly enough, it was a stubborn sense of loyalty that made him refuse to drink “damnation” to his king.
Who even today could decry such an understandable impulse for one of the king’s own? Without a doubt, it was asking a lot…but then, George Walker’s defiant reaction was one that bode little good for his personal well-being in the colorful, busily teeming port city the Colonials had created on the Atlantic seaboard.
It was called Charles Town at the time, it’s Charleston, South Carolina, today. Either way, it was no place for George Walker to be out alone in 1775, the eve of the American Revolution…no place, indeed, for any Loyalist or British soldier, sailor, or official.
The restive citizens of Charles Town hadn’t even heard about the shooting at Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, when they seized British arms and ammunition from two magazines and the State House. Asked to investigate such bold, rebellious conduct, the Commons House of the Assembly blandly reported to William Bull, acting royal governor, that the necessary “intelligence” wasn’t available. Not so incidentally, some members of the Assembly’s House themselves had helped seize the missing arms.
Loyalists, suspected or known, were harassed on the street or ordered to stay at home that summer. One local planter was banished from the colony, then shipwrecked and drowned when he complied, reports Walter J. Fraser Jr. in his book Patriots, Pistols and Petticoats: “Poor Sinful Charles Town.” Says Fraser: “Two avowed Loyalists to the crown were taken by a mob, stripped, tarred and feathered, and then carted through the streets as a example to others.”
Who were the tormentors making life miserable for the Tories and their British friends? They were not moderates such as Henry Laurens, newly elected president of the South Carolina Provincial Congress and future confidant to George Washington. Nor were these more thoughtful Patriots able to control events around them. A “crown officer” lamented the “numerous body of the low and ignorant” who followed the lead of “a few incendiaries an
d some hotheaded young men of fortune” in the sometimes violent street actions. Among the latter was wealthy young planter William Henry Drayton, who joined members of the Committee of Safety as they “prowled the streets” in search of any unfortunate considered “inimical to the Liberties of America,” reports Fraser.
It was in this hothouse atmosphere that British soldier George Walker refused the demand to join a toast offering damnation to his king. The response of the American colonists taunting him was immediate—and rough.
As Fraser puts it, they first “jostled” him through the streets, stopping only to toss a bag of feathers onto the balcony of a Crown official’s home and to shout imprecations in that direction as well. The mob, equipped with tar and more feathers, next “pushed and shoved” the hapless Walker along Broad Street until reaching Charleston’s famous Exchange Building, still standing today.
“Here,” adds Fraser’s account, “a kangaroo court ‘condemned’ him for being ‘a Tory and an enemy to the country.’ He was sentenced to be ‘stripped naked, tarred and feathered all over his body.’”
For George Walker, the abstract now became the reality—and painfully so. He indeed was tarred and feathered. Additionally, he was stoned, “doused repeatedly with water,” and finally thrown into the Cooper River. He was fortunate enough to escape drowning, thanks to a passing boat that gave him sanctuary. Even so, his searing experience cost him an eye for life, along with two broken ribs.
Back in town, says Fraser, the Loyalist contingent certainly could take no solace from the latest mob action. “A loyalist sympathizer in Charles Town declared that the King’s friends are despondent, ‘expecting every moment to be drove from their occupations, and homes and plundered of all they have.’”
***
Additional note: The not-so-quaint custom of tarring and feathering as a punitive practice can be traced back to the English fleets of the Middle Ages and to mob actions in London. There the victim was often carried to the Strand and left bound to a Maypole. Tax collectors and bailiffs were frequent targets of the mob wrath.
Also on the eve of the American Revolution, British soldiers in Boston one day in 1775 very publicly resorted to the same cruel treatment of a peddler—then marched him through town accompanied by fife and drums. In the months ahead, the rebellious Sons of Liberty often would pay the same “compliment” to known Loyalists and other perceived enemies of the Revolution.
Start to Famous Career
AT AGE THIRTY-FOUR, HE WAS AN APOTHECARY, A MERCHANT, AND A FIREEATING commander of a militia company in New Haven, Connecticut. His Governor’s Foot Guard was a showcase outfit, every man decked out in striking uniform of white, black, and scarlet red.
So far, so good, it would appear.
But he could be brash, he could be troublesome. After Lexington and Concord, the town fathers balked at allowing him access to the local powder magazine. His reaction? Pass along those keys, or he and his men would break in and help themselves to the powder and ball to be found inside.
The selectmen complied, and the militia commander was soon marching his men north to Massachusetts to join in the fighting. “None but Almighty God shall prevent my marching,” he declared before setting out.
None did, but, to give him credit, there were those who placed obstacles in his intended path to fame and glory. Acts of God or nature intervened as well.
On his way to the American siege lines in Cambridge outside Boston, he encountered a returning Connecticut militia officer, Colonel Samuel Parsons, who told him the Americans were greatly lacking in cannon. The captain of the Foot Guard suggested that the guns lying fallow at the lightly garrisoned Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain could be captured with relative ease. He laid the same proposal before the Massachusetts Committee of Safety at Cambridge and won its approval to mount an expedition forthwith to seize Ticonderoga and its cannon and stores.
He had to recruit more men for the task, but he rode ahead to Stockbridge in western Massachusetts, a rallying point where he began to organize his campaign while awaiting his added troops. There, he discovered Connecticut had dispatched its own expedition…based upon the information he, himself, had provided Colonel Parsons of the Connecticut militia just weeks before. Not only was the rival force already on its way to Lake Champlain, but arrangements were under way for it to link up with Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys of the New Hampshire Grants, with the hulking backwoodsman Allen taking overall command for the assault on the British fort.
Accounts vary as to the details, but the officer from New Haven—diminutive in size next to the giant Ethan Allen—caught up to the rowdy Green Mountain Boys and their chief and tried to press his claim to leading the raid on Ticonderoga. He was allowed to go along—strictly at Allen’s forbearance—and even to enter the British fort side by side with his roughhewn rival.
As events turned out, the fort indeed was taken with ease. The two command disputants did enter the premises together—as Allen dutifully reported to New York officials. But the irksome militia officer from New Haven again demanded recognition as commander. Allen then turned in a report leaving out his counterpoint’s role altogether.
The apothecary-turned-officer was especially annoyed by another citizen-officer, Colonel James Easton, who had been present for the Ticonderoga raid and had been appointed to carry word of the victory back to Massachusetts. Convinced that Easton had misstated the true facts of the situation, the New Haven officer became so incensed, he challenged Easton to a duel and, when that “offer” was refused, allegedly kicked the colonel.
Perhaps he was still smarting from his own rough treatment at the hands of the Green Mountain Boys, who allegedly—and drunkenly—jeered him after the Ticonderoga victory and even took shots at him.
Meanwhile, the dispute over who did what at Ticonderoga reached such proportions that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress sent a delegation to investigate the situation. Taking further umbrage at such lack of faith in his protests, the peacetime apothecary resigned from military service.
Soon, another dispute flared up—Massachusetts would not accept and pay all his reported expenses. That imbroglio was fated to go all the way up the line to the Continental Congress before it would be settled—with the Congress finally agreeing to pay what funds Massachusetts refused to pay.
And so it went. One thing after another, again and again. Troubles of this sort—bad luck, betrayals, criticisms, fair and unfair, his own egocentrism—all amounted to a constant cloud over his head. Before the Revolutionary War ended, he would be the center of repeated controversy, argument, personal quarrel, wounded feelings, and dispute. He would also commit one indisputably unforgivable act.
Though arrogant and headstrong, he was also a brave, resourceful officer who often won the praise and respect of his fellow officers, George Washington foremost among them. Largely at Washington’s instigation, he was given a commission in the Continental Army—and in no time, he was elevated to the rank of brigadier general. Indeed, in the next two years or so, he would become widely known as the hero of Quebec, Valcour Island, and Saratoga.
All that, of course, came after he rushed home from his Ticonderoga adventure in response to news his wife was deathly ill, only to find that she had died before he could reach her side. A sad moment for the embattled husband, but then, there was much to his life, both before and after, to evoke sympathy from any objective observer…up to a point.
While he was the descendant of a colonial governor of Rhode Island on his father’s side and a wealthy, aristocratic family on his mother’s side, he was not blessed with a happy childhood in his native Norwich, Connecticut. His father failed in business and drank heavily. Yellow fever struck the family, taking four of the six children as its victims.
The surviving boy had to leave school for financial reasons. A leader among his peers, he was so rebellious that one Thanksgiving he threatened to fight a constable intervening as he and his friends prepared to build a huge bon
fire on the village green.
His despairing mother at last persuaded cousins Daniel and Joshua Lathrop to take in her son as an apprentice in their drugstore. The experiment worked—he was with them for several years, with time out only for brief military service during the French and Indian War of the 1750s. The young man moved on after his apprenticeship to operate his own apothecary in New Haven, a vocation supplemented by his financial interest in various merchant ships. He occasionally—like many colonial merchants—also “worked” as a smuggler circumventing British customs laws.
Married in 1767, he and the former Margaret Mansfield, daughter of New Haven’s sheriff, had three sons, lived in a stoutly built home of their own creation, and boasted a stable of horses. Margaret’s husband, popular in the community’s more radical political circles, cut a fine figure in his gentlemanly dress, offset by dark skin, dark hair, and contrasting eyes of light blue, though he was a bit short by the standards of the day.
It no doubt was a sad day when he returned from the wars to the north—wars both with the enemy and presumed friends—and found his wife already beyond earthly reach. To make matters worse, he himself fell prey to a difficult siege with the gout. Fortunately, his one surviving sibling, his sister Hannah, was on hand to help care for him and his three sons, Richard, Henry, and Benedict.
The last, of course, was an enduring family name. That early governor of Rhode Island bore the name Benedict, as did the militia captain’s own hard-drinking father, as, now, did his son in Hannah’s care. All Benedicts. All Arnolds. All of them, Benedict Arnolds.
Gentleman from Georgia
COMING TO ORDER IN THE SECOND CONTINENTAL CONGRESS SESSIONS OF 1775 were the assorted—indeed, the distinguished—delegates sent to the rebel legislative body in Philadelphia by…well, not quite all thirteen of the original American colonies, but by only twelve of those historic entities.
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 9