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The Easter Rising Jolts the New England Irish

Just after noon on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, seven men stood on the steps of Dublin’s General Post Office and touched off the Easter Rising, Éirí Amach na Cásca in Gaelic.

One of the men, Patrick Pearse, read, “The Proclamation of a Free Irish Republic.” “In this supreme hour the Irish nation must . . . prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called,” he said.

The fighting then began.

About 1,200 armed members of Irish paramilitary groups, including the women’s Cumann na mBan, seized City Hall, the General Post Office, a telegraph office, the workhouse, the courts and a railway station. They barricaded the streets and proclaimed the Irish Republic.

A Dublin street barricaded during the Easter Rising.

The British responded with thousands of soldiers, artillery and a gunboat. After six days of street fighting, the rebels surrendered unconditionally. British forces rounded up 3,500 prisoners, sending 1,800 to internment camps. They quickly executed nearly all of the instigators, sparing one of them, Eamon de Valera, because he’d been born in the United States.

It was the latest in a long series of failed Irish rebellions against English Rule. There’d been 1641, 1798, 1803, 1879-1881, as well as guerilla skirmishes and Home Rule campaigns. Like the others, the Easter Rising would fail, at least in the short term. But unlike the others, the Irish would continue to fight and ultimately prevail. The Irish in America who supported the war effort made the difference. The British couldn’t get at them.

From Irish communities throughout the Northeast came lawyers, guns and money for the cause of Irish freedom. And after a bloody war for independence, the Irish Free State came into existence in 1921.

Easter Rising

The British had plenty of warning that Irish America would significantly aid the cause of Irish freedom. From New York, Patrick Ford, editor of the Irish World newspaper, warned the British, “You are now, unlike the past dealing with two Irelands. The Greater Ireland is on this side of the Atlantic. This is the base of operations. We in America furnish the sinews of war. We in America render moral aid.”

In Britain, Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt observed the Irish were in Ireland during former rebellions. “We could reach their forces, cut off their reserves in men and money and then to subjugate was comparatively easy,” he wrote. “Now there is an Irish nation in the United States, equally hostile, with plenty of money, absolutely beyond our reach and yet within ten days sail of our shores.”

Not all the Irish in America supported the Easter Rising, not at first. But many did. They hadn’t forgotten centuries of persecution nor the horrors of the Great Hunger. Still fresh were the memories of the famine ships, grinding poverty in American slums and bigotry embodied in the warning, “No Irish need apply.”

The shell of the General Post Office in the aftermath of the Easter Rising.

In some cases, an even more intimate connection existed between Irish New England and Ireland. James Connolly, one of the seven leaders of the Easter Rising, had lived and worked in Roxbury, Mass., for a time. Hartford police Det. Sgt. Daniel McAuliffe had had a childhood friendship with another Irish leader, Michael Collins.

One old New Bedford sailor, Henry C. Hathaway, had years earlier aided the cause of Irish independence. In 1869, as fourth officer of a whaling bark, Hathaway rescued the Fenian John Boyle O’Reilly from an Australian penal colony. O’Reilly had been recruiting men to a regiment of the Irish Republican Brotherhood when the British arrested him. After his rescue, he moved to Boston and advocated for the Irish community as editor of The Pilot.

John Boyle O’Reilly. Editor of the Boston Pilot, he died before the Easter Rising.

A Mass Movement for Irish Independence

Before the Easter Rising, the Irish in America didn’t all support a violent uprising against British rule. Two Irish American groups in Boston made the difference clear. The United Irish League of America, founded by the professional and business class, raised money to support a peaceful transfer of power under Home Rule. But Ireland would still belong to the United Kingdom. The Clan na Gael (Fenian Brotherhood), founded in 1867 by Irish working-class immigrants, supported violent rebellion to win Irish independence.

In the wake of the Easter Rising, American newspapers reported how Britain put Ireland under martial law and ruthlessly quashed any dissent. That solidified support in Irish America for an independent republic, turning it into a mass movement.

The execution of James Connolly, one of the seven leaders, proved especially provocative. Severely wounded in the street battles, he had but a day to live when British executioners tied him to a chair — he couldn’t stand up — and shot him to death. Connolly’s daughter Nora came to New England to speak about her father and raise money for the cause. She did an interview with the Boston Globe and met with Mayor James Michael Curley, who gave her a purse full of money.

The American Irish Rise Up

The Easter Rising sparked mass rallies throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut. In Massachusetts they rallied in Lawrence and Lowell, Fall River, North Attleboro, Brockton, Worcester, Chicopee, Springfield, Holyoke and Pittsfield.

Hartford held mass rallies and sent aid to the Republicans. So did New Britain, which sent rifles to Ireland.

A New Haven lawyer, John M. Sullivan, suffered in Kilmainham Jail after his arrest on the streets of Dublin. When Daniel McAuliffe returned from Ireland, the Hartford Police Department put him back on the force.

Branches of Friends of Irish Freedom formed throughout New England and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cause.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra performed a free concert for Clan na Gael to raise money for widows and orphans. The concert opened with Beethoven’s march, “Dead Heroes.”

De Valera Comes to America

Eamon de Valera

In 1918, a majority of newly-elected Ministers of Parliament from Ireland refused to take their seats in London. Instead, they convened at Dublin’s Mansion House, declared Irish independence and elected de Valera president of the new Irish Republic.

The Irish war for independence would continue for another four years. In the meantime, de Valera spent a year and a half in the United States. He spoke to large crowds, seeking financial support and international recognition for an independent Ireland.

He spoke to crowds in Connecticut and Rhode Island, then to 50,000 at Fenway Park. The Massachusetts General Assembly received him warmly, and New Hampshire Gov. John Bartlett invited him to Manchester. He gave a speech at the Lexington Opera House in Kentucky and spoke to a crowd at Madison Square Garden in New York. For 18 months he received warm greetings by crowds, official welcomes, the freedom of cities and two honorary degrees.

The British couldn’t get to him.

On Dec. 6, 1921, the Irish Free State came into existence. More years of struggle followed, but Ireland was well on its way to becoming a republic — with the continued help of Irish America.

Historian Catherine B. Shannon described the Irish-American aid as essential. “Support from Irish America, unified by the brutal British suppression of the Easter Rising, ultimately proved crucial in the subsequent War of Independence from 1919-1921 that secured freedom for the twenty-six counties that now constitute the Republic of Ireland,” she wrote.

With thanks to: The Easter Rising: CT Ties to Bloody Irish Revolt of 1916, April 24, 2016, at 11:35 a.m. | UPDATED: December 12, 2018 at 4:47 p.m. Hartford Courant. Also to De Valera in the United States, 1919 by James P. Walsh, Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, Vol. 73, No. 3/4 (September, December, 1962), pp. 92-107 (16 pages).

Images: Irish Republican Brotherhood flag By Fred the Oyster – https://flagspot.net/images/i/ie_1798.gif, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35369203

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Jonathan Mitchel Sewall, Lawyer, Poet and a Black Man’s Drinking Buddy

When Nancy Hammond bought a house on Gates Street in Portsmouth, N.H., she had no idea it would inspire her to trace the life story of a good and interesting man. Tradition had it that Jonathan Mitchel Sewall had lived in the house during the time of George Washington. Washington, in fact, may have walked right past it on his visit to Portsmouth in 1789.

Hammond wanted to find out more.

Sewall’s house on Gates Street

She learned that Sewall recorded his observations about much of the world around him, from Salem to Spain, from slave to Superior Court chief justice. He felt things deeply, and, often depressed, he wrote popular poems about the world he knew. Hammond’s curiosity about him led her to dig up those old poems as well as fragments of his life.

Then, during the COVID pandemic, she wove them together into The Life and Times of Jonathan Mitchel Sewall, 1748-1808.

“Now I am cherishing him and hoping to make him better-known as best I can,” she wrote in her introduction.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Sewall’s life was his friendship with Primus Fowle, an enslaved printer with whom he probably shared “many a cheerful dram.”

Jonathan Sewall

Sewall was the great-nephew of Judge Samuel Sewall, a Puritan leader, Salem witch trial judge and opponent of slavery.

Samuel Sewall

Born in Salem, Mass., Jonathan was educated at Boston Public Latin School while living with his uncle Stephen Sewall, chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature. He then studied law with his cousin Jonathan Sewall, Massachusetts attorney general, before he moved to Portsmouth, N.H There he became a well-known and well-loved local character who wrote poetry and the New Hampshire Bill of Rights. He spoke at every local celebration during the rest of his life, and most likely helped the enslaved people of Portsmouth with their Black Petition of 1779.

Self Medication

Sewall came from a mercantile family, and he was apprenticed in the merchant business in Salem. Some time before his apprenticeship ended, he came down with a fever. It brought him so low that he decided to take a voyage to a milder climate for his health.

And so he sailed for Spain, probably Bilbao. New Hampshire historian Albert T. Batchellor wrote that the warm climate helped him. “[Y]et the violence of his fever and the strong medicines which the physicians administered to him when sick, afterwards subjected him to exquisite nervous affections and the keenest mental suffering approaching delirium,” Batchellor wrote.

Jonathan’s brother-in-law, William Pynchon, described in his diary on December 21, 1785, his visit to his house in Salem: “Bro. Mitchell comes in Portsmouth stage; a dark cloud over his visage, his eyes wild.“

Jonathan grew prone to hypochondria and nervous problems, which he medicated with “stimulating beverages.”

“But his friends loved him none the less and appear never to have lost respect for him,” wrote historian Charles Bell. “The lady who became his second wife, when remonstrated with on her engagement to a man of his habits, replied, ‘I would rather marry Mr. Sewall drunk than any other man sober’.”

Jonathan Mitchel Sewall, Lawyer

His mercantile career over, Jonathan Mitchel Sewall turned to the law. He studied — and probably lived with — Judge John Pickering. His later work as a Portsmouth lawyer brought him into contact with people in trouble. He often helped them out without charging them.

According to an obituary Hammond found, “The widow, the fatherless, and the stranger, also found in his talents a never-failing resources, for without even the hope of reward, he devoted his great abilities to their service.”

Though no portraits of him exist, a contemporary noticed his striking resemblance to the British statesman, Edmund Burke.

Edmund Burke, from the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds, oil on canvas, (1767-1769)

Hammond notes Sewall may also have helped draw up an eloquent petition demanding freedom for Portsmouth’s enslaved servants in 1780. The document, known as “the petition of Nero Brewster and others,” failed then to free them. In 2013, New Hampshire’s General Court posthumously granted them their freedom.

Nero Brewster worked for William Brewster, who ran a tavern on Pleasant and Court streets. Sewall may well have medicated himself with stimulating beverages at Brewster’s Tavern .

This map shows the proximity of Judge John Pickering’s house to Fowle’s printing shop.

“With Jonathan’s own propensity for drink, he must have shared quite a few “cheerful” drams with Primus,” wrote Hammond. “Primus may well have been the first enslaved person that Jonathan met in Portsmouth as they probably lived across the street from each other.”

Primus would have printed Jonathan’s poetry. He had come to New Hampshire with his owner, the printer Daniel Fowle. Fowle sometimes printed Jonathan’s public poetry in his weekly newspaper, The New Hampshire Gazette.

Primus

“It has been said that Primus could not read,” wrote Hammond. “If he were the only person working with Fowle it seems unlikely that he would be unable to help with the typesetting.”

His main task, she wrote, “would have been setting the cases of print on to the press, setting the paper, and then inking the letters before the case went into the press. Then the lever was turned to pull the paper and the case of type into it and to press it down to make the print. When this was done, the lever was pulled back to take the case out and then, because the ink was oil based, the printed sheets had to be hung up to dry overnight. The type needed to be cleaned and returned to the letter cases.”

Hammond offers the kind of insight Jonathan Mitchel Sewall revealed in his poetry. She wondered,

“What must it have been like for Primus to print ads for the sale of “Indian, Negro, or Mulatto” people as slaves and information about returning escapees to their enslavers every week?” she wondered. Hammond includes examples, such as “A very likely NEGRO BOY, about 14 years of age, to be Sold, Enquire of the Printer.”

Primus died in 1791, and Jonathan wrote his obituary, which appeared in the newspaper.

Epitaph on the Death of Primus

Under these clods, old Primus lies

At rest and free from noise,

No longer seen by mortal eyes j

Or grieved by roguish boys;

The cheerful dram he lov’d ‘tis true

Which hastened on his end.

But some in paved-street well knew

He was a hearty friend,

And did possess a grateful mind

Though oft borne down with pain,

Yet where he found a neighbour kind

He surely went again;

Too often did the mirth of some

His innocence betray,

By giving larger draughts of rum

Than he could swill away,

But now he’s dead, we sure may say

Of him, as of all men,

That while in silent graves they lay

They’ll not be plagu’d again.

Not Fair

Writes Hammond, “The epitaph reads as though it was given at the graveside as it begins ‘Under these clods.’ It surely gives the impression that Jonathan knew Primus well even to the painfulness of his aging shoulders and knees.”

If Jonathan Mitchel Sewall was sensitive enough to understand that Primus suffered physical pain as well as humiliation, he may also have grasped the unfairness of his enslavement. Hammond noted that Sewall’s son Stephen, probably around 14, apprenticed to a printer, then an elite trade.

“The printing trade was a very good one to be in and a young boy could progress from his seven-year apprenticeship to become a journeyman and then a master printer himself,” Hammond wrote. “As a journeyman he would be able to get a job in almost any city. But at that time these steps would only be possible for a young white boy. Primus’ “apprenticeship” lasted for all of his long life. A printer would not only print the newspaper, but broadsides, pamphlets, books, and many types of forms especially for the state.”

In Silent Graves

Primus Fowle was buried in Portsmouth’s Negro Burying Ground, a segregated cemetery on the outskirts of the town. People eventually forgot about it until 2003, when a road crew unearthed coffins and skeletal remains. Today, a memorial park on the site memorializes those buried there.

Portsmouth African Burial Ground Memorial

Seventeen years later, Jonathan Mitchel Sewall went to his final resting place in Portsmouth’s North Cemetery. His gravestone reads,

Sacred to the Memory of Jonathan Mitchel Sewall, Esq.

Counsellor at Law who died March 29, 1808 Age 60

In vain shall worth or wisdom save

The dying victim from the destin’d grave,

Nor Charity, our helpless nature’s pride,

The friend to him who knows no friend beside,

Nor genius, science, eloquence have pow’r,

One moment to protract the appointed hour.

Could these united have his life repriev’d,

We should not weep for Sewall still had lived.

Portsmouth African Burying Ground Memorial Park By LibSEEE – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91322234.

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Louisa Adams Parties Into the Presidency

Louisa Adams wanted her husband to be president of the United States. Her husband didn’t have much choice in the matter. John Quincy Adams grew up believing he would disgrace himself if he didn’t.

“If you do not rise to the head not only of your profession, but of your country, it will be owing to your own Laziness, Slovenliness, and Obstinacy,” wrote his father, the founding father, John Adams.

In 1824, the time was right for John Quincy to run for president. One man stood in his way: the U.S. Senator from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson.

Louisa Adams tried to help get Jackson out of the way — by throwing a magnificent ball in his honor. Because that’s the way they did it in 1824.

Louisa Adams

She met her husband in England in 1790. He was a rising young diplomat, the son of the vice president of the United States. She had been born in London and spent much of her childhood in France as the daughter of a wealthy American merchant and diplomat. The two probably couldn’t have differed more.

She was a charming, fashionable, hot-blooded socialite. He was reserved, taciturn and cold. Louisa described him in a novel:

“a man of extraordinary talents…his natural disposition was ardent and impetuous, but a perpetual watchfulness over these natural defects, had taught him to master them completely, and it was only those who were the most constantly with him, who were aware that occasions could arise in which the internal volcano would sometimes produce an eruption that was short but violent in its explosion. “

They married in 1797. Around the time of the wedding, Louisa’s father told John Quincy he had lost most of his money. Financial troubles plagued the Adamses for the rest of their lives.

Louisa followed her husband to his diplomatic postings in Russia, Ghent and London. During their marriage she had 15 pregnancies and delivered three sons and a daughter, who died in infancy.

Back to the USA

In 1817, President James Monroe appointed John Quincy Adams secretary of state. They moved to Washington, D.C., and eventually bought the house Monroe had lived in on F (now I) Street.

The house that James Monroe and John Quincy Adams lived in.

By 1824, Monroe neared the end of his term, which gave John Quincy Adams a chance to run for president. He knew he’d probably face Jackson, a war hero, for the prize.

Adams and Jackson had little in common other than their age (57), their ambition and their early promise. Adams’ career as a diplomat began at 14, when he went to St. Petersburg to work as secretary to the U.S. minister to Russia, Francis Dana. Jackson began his career as a soldier at the age of 13, when he volunteered to fight in the American Revolution for the local militia.

Andrew Jackson

In 1824, men did not campaign for president the way they do today. There was no gladhanding the public, no caucuses or primaries. In six of the 24 states, legislators cast the vote for president. And in all the states, only white male adults could go to the polls.

Politicians shunned retail politics. Instead, they played social politics, appealing to political power brokers in their own parlors.

It was not something Adams was good at. Jackson, on the other hand, was. Dashing and tempestuous, he had won enormous popularity after winning the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812.

Louisa Adams made up for her husband’s shortcomings. She had shone as a diplomat’s wife and a society hostess. She threw herself into Washington’s social whirl, hosting dinners and levees at their F Street mansion for people important to her husband’s career.

John Quincy Adams by George Peter Alexander Healy

Louisa Adams’ Ball to End All Balls

Louisa held a grand ball on Jan. 8, 1824, the ninth anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans. The purpose of the party was ostensibly to honor Jackson, but really to eclipse him. On the social front, Jackson’s backwoods wife, Rachel, couldn’t hope to compete with the worldly Louisa. Plus, by “honoring” Jackson, the Adamses hoped to win his endorsement for president. They might even persuade him to run as vice president.

Louisa invited a thousand people to the house on F Street, so many they had to remove all the furniture and doors. They even built pillars to keep the floor from caving in. Louisa filled the house with flowers, hired the marine band and served a lavish buffet.

The party was a smash, Louisa a legend. People talked about it for days. The National Republican printed a poem in her honor, which ended,

Belles and matrons, maids and madams,

All are gone to Mrs. Adams.

They continued to go to Mrs. Adams. In March, her husband recorded they’d had 235 visitors in their home that month alone.

The prize

Jackson still ran against Adams for president, and he even won the popular vote in a three-way Electoral College tie. The election then went to the House of Representatives.

Adams beat Jackson by making a deal with Henry Clay, then Speaker of the House. After Clay threw the election to Adams, Adams made Clay his secretary of state.

Drawing of the President’s House by Benjamin Latrobe

That enraged Jackson, who accused Adams of making a corrupt bargain. Jackson was already furious with Adams’ supporters because they had attacked Rachel. He resigned his Senate seat and almost immediately launched a grassroots campaign to defeat Adams for reelection. Jackson and his supporters would make the next four years the most miserable of John Quincy and Louisa Adams’ lives.

Images: Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, Architect. The White House “President’s House” Washington, D.C. South front elevation / Jan. , B H Latrobe. Washington D.C, 1817. Jan. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2001698953/. Adams house By APK – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117668495. With thanks to Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams by Louisa Thomas.

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Abigail Adams, Matchmaker

Nothing cheered Abigail Adams so much as a wedding. During her lifetime of difficulty and sadness, she needed cheering. Her husband was often absent, a beloved son died young, a daughter lost a battle with breast cancer, another son became a dissolute alcoholic. Through it all, her family and servants came to view her as Abigail Adams, matchmaker.

She thought of her servants as family, kept their secrets and hosted their marriage ceremonies. She married off six pairs of them, five of them in her own home.

In 1801, that meant the White House.

1793 plans for the White House by James Hoban

Abigail Adams, Matchmaker

Abigail’s nephew, William Smith Shaw, knew how much she loved weddings. “I declare I wish you would have, Aunt, a wedding every night in the week, for I plainly see that it gives you better spirits and consequently better health, than all the medicine in the world,” he wrote to her in 1798.

“I am a great friend to Matrimony, and always like to promote it, where there is a prospect of happiness & comfort,” she replied.

Portrait of William Smith Shaw by Gilbert Stuart.

She had just hosted the wedding of her servant Abigail Hunt and a local farmer, Ebenezer Harmon, at her farm in Quincy, Mass. “I regaled them with a Glass of wine, & some cake and Cheese,” she wrote. Then she went to bed as the wedding party went off dancing. “I retired to rest at about nine, and with the pleasurable reflection of having made Several honest families happy & pleasd I enjoyd a comfortable nights repose.”

John Adams heartily approved of Abigail’s matchmaking among the servants. “I hope you will marry Louisa & Betcy Howard and all the single ones, who are ripe,” he wrote to her from Philadelphia in 1798.

The First Wedding

In 1784, Abigail Adams made her first match. John Adams was then serving as minister to Great Britain and she was about to sail for London to join him. She hired John Briesler, a local man, to accompany her across the Atlantic. Before she left, she wrote to her husband about him . She called Briesler “a steady frugal fellow, with a mind much above the vulgar.” The Adamses came to depend on Briesler. “As good a servant as ever bore the name,” she later wrote. If it hadn’t been for him, she wrote years later, she never would have gone into public life. He was “virtuous, handy and attentive.”

Briesler was especially attentive to Abigail’s 23-year-old ladies’ maid, Esther Field. In 1788, just a few weeks before they were to return to America, Esther came to Abigail in much distress. She confessed Briesler had gotten her pregnant.

“[P]oor Brisler looks so humble and is so attentive, so faithfull & so trust worthy, that I am willing to do all I can for them,” Abigail wrote to her sister, Mary Cranch.

abigail-adams-attacked-thomas-jefferson-portrait

Abigail Adams by Gilbert Stuart

Abigail Adams, matchmaker, got them married a few days later in St. Marylebone church in London. Abigail worried about Esther delivering the baby aboard the ship returning home. She arranged for a nurse to come with them to help with the childbirth. The baby, a girl, was born aboard the ship. “We got through this business much better than I feared we should. I had for the first time in my life, to dress the little animal,” she wrote to her daughter.

Over the years, Esther had more babies. Abigail, however, found ways to keep her employed.

In 1797, she hosted the wedding of another servant, Polly Doble Howard, and Jonathan Baxter, Jr.

The White House

Abigail had managed the farm and family during her husband’s long absences. She engineered the moves to join him. She set up official houses in London and Paris on his diplomatic missions; to New York when he served as vice president of the United States and to Philadelphia as president. Then, three years into his presidency she had to set up another house. This time, she did it in the Wilderness City – Washington, D.C. – where the seat of government had moved.

It was November 1800. Abigail was 56 years old and not looking forward to the move. She had stayed at her Quincy farm fighting off raging fevers as her husband fought off his political enemies. He moved into the President’s House a few weeks earlier than she.

John Briesler was with him. Abigail had also sent William Shipley ahead of her to help. Another of John Adams’ servants was also probably in Washington: Richard Dexter, an “honest and faithful domestick” who handled horses.

John Adams by Gilbert Stuart

White House Wedding

A week before Abigail was to leave for Washington, she sent two of her housemaids ahead. John Adams had called the White House “habitable,” but that may have been charitable. The staircases hadn’t been finished, the plaster hadn’t dried on the wall and none of the rooms had been furnished.

Rebecca Tyrell was one of the maids Abigail sent ahead. Rebecca had worked for Abigail since 1790 and nursed her through various illnesses. Abigail viewed her almost as a daughter. She called Rebecca “my most beloved domestic who was to me as a child in sickness and in Health.”

Betsy Howard went with Rebecca. She was Polly Doble Howard’s sister, and one of the domestics John Adams considered “ripe.” She would sleep on the same floor of the President’s House as Abigail and John Briesler. Their rooms, wrote Abigail, were as “handsome and well-furnishd as any of my Bed chambers at Quincy.”

The other servants slept along the ground floor corridor, in the basement.

So why did Betsy Howard get special treatment? “[F]or Many reasons I chose to have her under my own Eye,” wrote Abigail to her doctor, Cotton Tufts.

Abigail was probably worried that Betsy might find herself in the same position as Esther Field had 16 years earlier. Or maybe she had.

In January 1801, Betsy Howard married William Shipley in the President’s House.

Abigail Adams, Matchmaker Twice More

Abigail Adams spent only four months in the cold, unfinished White House, where she had famously hung her washing to dry in the East Room.

Her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, would observe, “there is something in the climate and habits of this place very hostile to the happiness of New Englanders.” She and John had, in fact, been miserable in the White House.

Two weeks after Abigail Adams arrived in Washington, their son Charles died, a homeless alcoholic, in New York City. Two weeks after that they would learn John had lost the presidential election. During that time they had only 13 servants to do the work of 30 – furnishing the big house, hosting official entertainments and keeping the fires going to dry the plaster.

Abigail left Washington happily in February 1801. “My residence in this city has not served to endear the world to me. I am sick, sick and sick of Publick life,” she wrote as she left.

Peacefield, the Adams home in Quincy

She wasn’t sick of matchmaking. In 1802, Elizabeth Epps and Tilly Whitcomb married at the Adams’ farm in Quincy.

Rebecca Tyrell stayed with Abigail another three years after they left Washington. John Adams had brought Richard Dexter back with him to Quincy. In 1804, Rebecca Tyrell married him at the Adams farm. Abigail would remember Rebecca in her will, bequeathing her $30 and a gown.

After the ceremony, Abigail Adams, matchmaker, bragged of her love matches to her friend, Hannah Phillips Cushing.

“At the Wedding,” Abigail continued, “amongst other Guests were six couple who had lived with me during her residence with me all of whom had been married from me in that period & all but one married in my family. This I believe is rather a singular instance.”

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Rhode Island Privateer Marlborough Attacks Britain’s Slave Trade in Africa in 1778

On Jan. 2, 1778, the Rhode Island privateer Marlborough, with 96 Rhode Island and Massachusetts sailors on board, began its voyage to the west coast of Africa. It was one of the most extraordinary voyages of the American Revolutionary War.

Why would a privateer sail to far-away West Africa? The story starts in Providence, R.I., with John Brown, the main investor and mastermind behind the voyage. He belonged to the Brown family of Providence, among the most successful merchants in Rhode Island. In 1772, he organized and led the burning of the British revenue cutter Gaspee, an important early violent act of resistance against Great Britain. The Gaspee affair led to the Revolutionary War.

John Brown

Genesis of the Marlborough

In 1776 and 1777, Brown got rich investing in privateers. During the war, the Continental Navy was no match for the Royal Navy, the world’s strongest maritime power. America’s most effective weapon at sea by far was privateering—the operation of privately owned commerce raiders. From British ships, Americans captured gunpowder, weapons, food and other supplies they desperately needed.

Privateers were not pirates. Privateers were commissioned by the Continental Congress to attack only enemy shipping. Once a privateer captured an enemy vessel, the captain of the privateer would typically select from his ship a prize master and a small prize crew. They would sail the captured vessel to a safe U.S. port so an admiralty court could adjudicate the prize. The admiralty court would conduct a trial by jury to determine whether the privateer had lawfully taken the prize from an enemy combatant. If it was, it would be sold at public auction. The net proceeds would be divided. Typically, 50 percent would go to the privateer’s owners. The rest would go to the privateer’s officers and crew pursuant to a formula agreed to before the voyage.

The 12-gun privateer brig Independence, on the left and commanded by Thomas Truxton, captures a larger and better armed British merchant ship sailing from the Caribbean, in 1777. Watercolor by Irwin Bevan (1852-1940). (Naval History and Heritage Command).

In the early years of the war, American privateers easily seized hundreds of poorly-defended merchant ships sailing between Britain and both the Caribbean and Canada. Brown grew rich. But the days of easy conquests eventually ended. Powerful Royal Navy warships began protecting commercial vessels in convoys and seizing privateers. Most crews of captured privateers went to British prisons in New York or back in Britain. Many of the prisoners died of malnutrition and disease.

Off to Africa

Brown decided in the second half of 1777 that, with his new wartime profits, he could afford to construct a large privateer that carried at least 20 cannon. Such a privateer could avoid capture by a British sloop-of-war and defeat armed merchantmen. But it could still be captured by a 32-gun Royal Navy frigate, many of which were hunting for privateers in the British Caribbean and on the Canadian coast. What to do? Brown had the brilliant idea of sending his new privateer to the coast of West Africa.

Brown figured, correctly, that the Royal Navy was overstretched. It had few ships remaining to patrol the far-away African coast and British interests there.

The Atlantic Slave Trade

At the time, one of the worst tragedies in world history continued unabated: the Atlantic slave trade. European and American merchants sent ships across the ocean to purchase African captives. They then carried them to the Caribbean islands, Brazil and the North American mainland. There the Africans were forced into a lifetime of unpaid work and permanent bondage. The captives were taken away from their families forever, and thousands of them died during the voyage across the Atlantic, called the Middle Passage. It was a horrible, abominable trade, and it is mind boggling to believe it ever existed, especially by today’s moral standards.

Diagram of a slave ship from the Atlantic slave trade. It shows how kidnapped Africans were jammed into the ship’s hold.

In the first three-quarters of the 18th century, Great Britain led the world in slave trading. The year 1775 marked the zenith of Britain’s slave trade, led by merchants from Liverpool, Bristol and London.

A British slaving voyage typically had three legs, thus giving rise to the name “triangular trade.” Starting from Britain, the slave ship sailed to the African coast carrying goods mainly manufactured in Britain, such as muskets, gunpowder and textiles, used to trade for African captives. Then the ship carried the captives across the Atlantic to a Caribbean possession of Britain—such as Jamaica, Barbados or Antigua. There the surviving captives were ultimately sold to local plantation owners. Next, the ship’s captain purchased sugar—and related products, rum and molasses—to bring back to Britain to sell to British wholesalers.

Enslaved workers planting sugar cane in Antigua.

Sugar

Sugar was the key. Europe craved sugar, and the English in particular loved sugar in their cookies, cakes, tea and coffee. The value of sugar imports, and molasses and rum, from the British Caribbean by far outstripped the value of imports of tobacco from the colonies of Virginia and Maryland, and rice from South Carolina.

Slave labor was indispensable to the production of sugar. Plantation owners in the Caribbean islands used gangs of enslaved workers working in brutal conditions to cultivate, harvest, and process sugar cane into sugar.

The continuation of slave labor depended on the African slave trade. This was because sugar plantation owners needed to replenish their slave stock each year by purchasing new captives.

Enslaved people in the British Caribbean, due to poor food, primitive living conditions and overwork, left them vulnerable to deadly diseases. The mortality rate was shocking, much worse than for the enslaved in North America. As a result, British Caribbean planters had to import massive numbers of African captives just to maintain their enslaved populations.

What would become the United States and later became the United States overall played a comparatively small role in the African slave trade, outfitting only about 2.4 percent of all slaving voyages. Rhode Island dominated the slave trade among the thirteen mainland colonies. More than half of the North American slave trading voyages in colonial times emanated from Rhode Island (primarily Newport), with the rest coming mostly from New York City, Boston and other coastal New England ports.

John Brown

What led John Brown to his idea to send a privateer to distant Africa was his familiarity with the African slave trade. First, coming from Rhode Island, he could speak with returning slave ship captains to discover that few or no British warships patrolled the West African coast.

Second, Brown was himself an experienced slave trade investor. He had personally invested in two African slaving ventures, one in 1763 and another in 1769.

Brown was also aware, from reading newspapers, that beginning in early 1777, American privateers started to capture British slave ships. In most cases, American privateers captured British slave ships with hundreds of African captives on board just as they were about to reach their destinations in the British Caribbean. The American privateers typically sailed the seized vessel to a French Caribbean island and sold the human cargo there to French plantation owners.

Brown was not motivated to attack Britain in Africa from humanitarian impulses to aid Africans. But he did want to harm British economic interests and, at the same time, earn profits doing so.

A Privateer in Africa

A privateer sent to Africa could attack and plunder slave trading posts established by British slave traders. Such a post typically contained warehouses full of British manufactured goods intended for the local slave trade. The privateersmen could carry off this booty and load the goods into the holds of their privateer. In addition, African captives kept in pens at the slave trading posts, intended to be sold to passing British slave ships, could also be seized. Moreover, British slave ships with its human cargo on board could be captured.

Kidnapped Africans bound for slavery

If Brown was really fortunate, he figured, his privateer could capture a large British slave ship filled with African captives, ready to sail for the Caribbean islands. A prize crew from Brown’s privateer would be ordered to sail the slave ship in the Middle Passage and try to arrive at a safe port, in one of the French-controlled Caribbean islands or in American-held Charleston, S.C., or Savannah, Ga. There the surviving enslaved Africans on board could be sold. Then Brown and his investors could really cash in.

Brown completed construction in Providence in late 1777 of a new 20-gun, three-masted brig. He named it the Marlborough. After breaking through a blockade of British warships (a close call), the privateer sailed to Martha’s Vineyard. There, 24 more crew members enlisted for the voyage. It then departed for Africa on Jan. 2, 1778.

The Story of the Marlborough

My recent book, Dark Voyage, An American Privateer’s War on Britain’s African Slave Trade (Westholme, 2022), tells the tale of the remarkable voyage of the Rhode Island privateer Marlborough to West Africa.

Most of the book is about the Marlborough’s voyage. In short form, here are some of the notable events from the voyage.

The New England privateersmen sacked and took out of operation one of the top British slave trading posts in Africa. They also captured several armed British slave ships and sailed them as prize ships back to North America.

One British slave ship, when seized, had more than 300 African captives on board. It was about ready to sail for the British Caribbean, just as John Brown hoped. The Marlborough returned to New Bedford, Mass., with 26 African captives on board.

A number of African leaders cooperated with the New Englanders, including King Tom. He had served as an intermediary for European and American slave ship captains for decades. Several British slave ship captains greedily agreed to cooperate with the New Englanders by giving them valuable intelligence. They did it even though that meant committing treason against their own country.

Impact of the Marlborough

The Marlborough damaged the British slave trade more than any other American privateer. In my book, I argue that the actions of the officers and sailors of the Marlborough, as well as those of other American privateersmen who intercepted British slave ships at sea, had a stunning unintended consequence. The British slave trade by 1778 had not only been disrupted, it had virtually collapsed. American privateersmen interfered with the conduct of the British slave trade to such an extent that British slave merchants substantially reduced their investments in African slave voyages. By 1778 the reduction was more than 70 percent. As a result, during the early years of the Revolutionary War, the number of enslaved Africans forcibly shipped across the Atlantic Ocean declined dramatically. It fell perhaps by as much as 60,000 and probably more.

On the other hand, the men of the Marlborough and other American privateersmen, when they did capture British slave ships, became crass slave traders, hoping to sell their captives for as high a price as possible. The privateersmen can thus be viewed as heroes or villains—or both.

The American Revolution, with its rhetoric emphasizing liberty and freedom, ultimately led virtually all states to abolish the African slave trade. However, due to a compromise with South Carolina in negotiating the U.S. Constitution, and some illegal slave trading, total abolition didn’t happen until January 1, 1808.

Christian McBurney, the author of this story about the Marlborough and the related book, has authored six books on the American Revolution and co-authored two on Rhode Island in World War II. He is also the editor and publisher of a leading Rhode Island history blog at smallstatebighistory.com.

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Mashie Miaskiewicz, a Salem War Hero, Comes Home

In 1942, like thousands of men from throughout New England, a young man from a Polish neighborhood in Salem, Mass., enlisted to fight for his country during World War II. Mieczyslaus Miaskiewicz (pronounced Mis-kev-itch), known as Mashie, was one of those young men.

Mieczyslaus (Mashie) Miaskiewicz’s Army photo

Derby Street

Mashie grew up on Derby Street in the heart of Polish Salem, the son of Czeslaw Miaskiewicz, an emigrant from Poland. The family was devoutly Catholic, producing two priests among the seven children surviving to adulthood.

The Derby Street neighborhood was tight knit. Polish families utilized the St. John’s Society, a fraternal organization that offered insurance and sick benefits to members. It also promoted a marching band, drill team and athletic teams. The society was housed in St. Joseph’s Hall at 160 Derby Street, a building that still stands today at the corner of Derby Street and Palfrey Court.

The four-story Kotarski building at 167-69 Derby Street, Salem. Mashie Miaskiewicz lived here for most of his childhood. Demolished in 1938. (Peabody Essex Museum photograph).

Mashie attended St. John’s Polish School on Herbert Street, where Polish language was part of the curriculum. He liked sports, worked out at the YMCA and bowled.

Like so many men in Salem back then, Mashie’s father was a leather worker. He worked for many years at Korn’s leather factory in Peabody. It was hard work, dirty work, smelly work and sometimes dangerous, but it was good pay and steady. In 1934, when he was 18, Mashie followed his father into the leather factory. It is unclear if he graduated from high school.

Mashie’s insular world came to an end with the advent of World War II. He enlisted in the Army in 1942.

Staff Sgt. Mashie

By late 1943, he achieved the rank of staff sergeant and was flight engineer aboard a B-17g bomber, called the Daisy Mae, stationed in Tortorella, Italy, part of 347^th Bomber Squadron, 99^th Bomber Group. The B-17, Flying Fortress, was a heavy bomber with a wingspan of over 100 feet, powered by four, 1,200 hp engines. It was the ideal aircraft for long-distance missions. But it was hazardous duty fraught with danger from antiaircraft fire. Roughly one third of aircraft operating over enemy territory in Europe were shot down.

A restored B-17g Flying Fortress similar to the aircraft Mashie Miaskiewicz served on as flight engineer and top gunner. (Photo by Master Sgt. Ken Hammond www.defenselink.mil/multimedia).

Mashie’s job was to know the workings of the airplane better than anyone else, including the pilot. He must know engine mechanics, fuel consumption, and operation of all equipment, including the radio, bombing equipment, and armaments. It required considerable technical training. And he must be a gunner as well. It was a vital job placing a lot of responsibility on the former leather worker from Salem.

Final Mission

On May 18, 1944, the 347^th Bomb Squadron received orders to bomb the oilfields at Ploesti, Romania, a vital oil supply for the Third Reich. The squadron flew in a box formation, a horizontally and vertically staggered formation that concentrated the bombers’ guns for defensive purposes. A sudden change in the weather forced the Daisy Mae to return home before completing the mission.

A refinery burning in Ploesti after a U.S. bombing raid, 1943.

Flying over Yugoslavia, within sight of the Adriatic Sea, the aircraft was hit by flak, blowing the nose section completely off, killing the pilots and radio operator. With the props still rotating, the remainder of the plane went into a rightward spiral, allowing enough time for some of the crew to bail out.

Three crew members, the bombardier, the navigator, and the waist gunner, bailed out and survived. The rest, including Mashie, were killed.

The Body on a Hillside

After the war, American forensic teams scoured Europe searching for the remains of those missing in action. Miaskiewicz’s remains could not be positively identified from those located at the Daisy Mae crash site, and what was presumed to be his remains were flown to the United States and buried at the National Cemetery on Long Island.

Over the next 60 years, his sisters Christine and Theresa Miaskiewicz would travel to Long Island to visit their brother’s grave.

But that changed dramatically in 2011, when the Miaskiewicz sisters were contacted by the United States military with astonishing news.

A Bosnian archaeological team was searching the Mostar area for remains of Bosnians who perished in mass killings after World War II. Near the village of Stubica, the Bosnian team heard about an American airman shot down during the war. Villagers had discovered his body and brought it for burial on a nearby hillside. Apparently, his remains were still there.

Bosnian authorities alerted the U.S. ambassador by letter, which included a photograph of American dog tags taken from the airman’s remains. A week later forensic specialists went to Stubica to make a positive identification. There they reassembled the skeletal remains.

At that point, although the identification was not yet positive, the indications were overwhelming. SSgt Mieczyslaus Miaskiewicz had not been buried in New York, but rather in a hillside grave in Bosnia.

The Mystery Solved

How did Mashie’s remains end up on a Bosnian hillside? Mashie’s chute never opened, and he plummeted to the ground to his death. It is likely for that reason that he landed away from the other crew members. Then American forensic teams missed his remains after the war.

Villagers near Stubica saw the giant plane come down. They found Miaskiewicz’s body, wrapped him in his parachute and buried him. They kept his artifacts safe, including his dog tags, rosary beads and a crucifix. The villagers prayed and lit candles at the gravesite over the years. As far as they knew, the American serviceman had nobody to pray for him.

Mashie Returns to Salem

The reburial ceremony for Mashie Miaskiewicz at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Salem, 67 years after he was shot down over Bosnia. (Courtesy of William Legault).

Back in Salem, in the very house where they first got word that Mashie was missing 67 years before, Miaskiewicz’ sisters got a phone call.

They were asked to provide DNA samples so that a positive identification could be made, the last piece in the identification puzzle.

At last, their brother would be coming home.

Today, he is buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Salem.

End Notes

James F. Lee, the author of this story, is a freelance writer and blogger whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, and AAA Tidewater Traveler Magazine. He can be reached at www.jamesflee.com and 570-713-5926.

Sources:

In the Heart of Polish Salem: An Ethnohistorical Study of St. Joseph Hall and Its Neighborhood, (Stanton and Becker, NPS, 2009).

Email correspondence with Theresa Miaskiewicz via Thomas Miaskiewicz.

U.S. City Directories, Salem, MA, 1922-1943, and U.S. Census, accessed via Ancestry.com.

“So Close: The Last Flight of the Daisy Mae,” by David J. Kinsey. 99^th Bombardment Group Historical Society Newsletter, December 2012.

“A WWII Tragedy from Sixteen Brief V-mails,” by David Steinert, Motorpool Messenger, August 2010.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/over-cauldron-ploesti-american-air-war-romania

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