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Christopher Hawkins, Against All Odds, Escapes a Revolutionary Prison

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Christopher Hawkins went to sea on a privateer like many young teenagers during the American Revolution. He did it for the cause of liberty, for adventure and for a share of captured prize money. He got adventure, but instead of bounty he got imprisonment, hunger and pain..

The colonies had quite a fleet of privateers — 1,697 ships, with 55,000 seaman serving aboard them. The so-called “pirate navy” had 26 times as many vessels as the continental navy’s 64. Privateering amounted to armed robbery at sea during wartime. Governments issued letters of marque, which gave permission to the holder to attack enemy vessels and to capture them as prizes. They also captured crews and exchanged them for prisoners of war.

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).

Privateering was lucrative, but it was also dangerous. The British Royal Navy captured or sunk 78 percent of privateer ships were captured or sunk by the Royal Navy.

Christopher Hawkins signed on to privateers that was not one in five of the lucky ones.

Christopher Hawkins

He was born June 8, 1764, the son of Hesabiah Hawkins. As a boy he worked on the family farm in North Providence. When he turned 12, he was bound out to a tanner, Aaron Mason, and he worked in that trade for 12 months. Then he ran away to New Bedford to join a privateer.

Christopher Hawkins later in life

Skinny, dark-haired and fair-complexioned, he had a sarcastic tongue and the gift of gab. He signed onto the schooner Eagle, an American privateer. As a cabin boy, Hawkins helped the cook, brought food to the crew and officers, carried messages, climbed aloft to stow sails, stood watch and learned how to steer the ship.

The Eagle sailed across the Atlantic and back without capturing a prize. Then she encountered the larger British sloop-of-war Sphynx, which captured the Eagle. Hawkins, taken prisoner with the rest of the officers and crew, was confined in an old transport ship. Then the British took him off to serve the officers of the frigate Maidstone.

HMS Maidstone

He did that for a year, gaining the trust of the ship’s officers. They sent him ashore with a message. Instead, he encountered another boy from the vessel, John Sawyer, and together they escaped. With help from Sawyer’s family on Long Island, Hawkins returned home to Providence.

Hawkins related in his memoir how he went privateering again in 1781 under Capt. Christopher Whipple in a 16-gun brig. They sailed a mere five days before encountering two British frigates, the Amphetrite and Madea. The Madea captured them.

Christopher Hawkins Goes to Sea Again

The war was not going well for the British. Cornwallis would surrender just a few weeks after Hawkins’ capture. The British cause was undermined by the well-known cruelty and arrogance of its officers and enlisted men toward prisoners of war. The mistreatment of prisoners infuriated the colonists and hardened their determination to win at any cost. Christopher Hawkins would see it firsthand on the Jersey.

Nothing symbolized British cruelty more than the floating hell called the  Jersey, a prison ship anchored off Long Island. Jersey had deteriorated from a 74-gun frigate to a decommissioned shell, her sails and rigging dismantled.

Privateer Capt. Thomas Dring, imprisoned in the leaky old hulk, called it unfit for anything other than prisoners destined for speedy annihilation.

The Jersey

“I doubt whether you could find such another set of demons as the officers and men who had charge of the Old Jersey Prison-ship,” wrote Alexander Coffin, a captain who survived his ordeal. The prisoners endured “Foul Air, Tainted Provisions, Bad Water, and Personal Filthiness,” he wrote. Disease was rampant, and men who caught the bloody flux evacuated their bowels while sleeping, adding to the fetid atmosphere.

The British overcrowded the Jersey, sometimes with 1,100 men, many of them homesick teenagers from privateers. They were walking skeletons, overrun with lice, their nakedness barely covered.

Slumber offered little relief. Dring described the groans of the sick and the dying; the exhausted prisoners’ curses  aimed at the inhumane guards; the restlessness caused by the suffocating heat, and the poisonous air, mingled with the sounds of wild and delirious ranting.

If the prisoners could sleep, they sometimes woke to find themselves lying next to a corpse. 11,000 prisoners died on board the Jersey. from 1776 to 1783.

More revolutionaries died in British prisons than on the battlefield.

Christopher Hawkins, Prisoner

The British sent Hawkins to the Jersey aboard a transport ship, so crowded they couldn’t sit down for several days. The British hoped their abuse would convince their prisoners to go over to their side, but they didn’t. On the first day, the prisoners defiantly sang a patriotic song which ended every stanza with, “For America and all her sons forever will shine.”

The transport ship took Hawkins to the Jersey, anchored in Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn. A guard ship anchored near them, along with a hospital ship, and a line of sentinels guarded the shore.

Wallabout Bay today

The first night Hawkins had to sleep 20 feet from the gangway, and prisoners walked over him to get on the upper deck. Men with the bloody flux spattered him with excrement.

Within an hour of their arrival, Hawkins and his friend William Waterman decided to escape, though they knew the guards would murder them if caught.

Dring recalled the cruelty of the British guards.

“One Sam Talman (an Indian fellow belonging to the 17th Regiment) was Stripped and set up as a mark for them to Shoot at for Diversion or Practice, by which he Received two severe wounds, in the neck and arm…[A]fterwards they destroyed him with many hundreds others by starvation in the prisons of New York.

Plotting the Escape

Hawkins and Waterman managed to steal an old axe from the cook’s room and a crowbar from the upper deck. They hid them until an early-autumn thunderstorm broke out in the afternoon.

They believed their best chance of escape lay in breaking through the lower-deck gunports, barred with iron and bolts.

“When a peal of thunder roared we worked with all our might with the axe and crow-bar against the bars and bolts,” Hawkins wrote later in life. “When the peals subsided we ceased, without our blows being heard by the British, until another peal commenced. We then went to work again, and so on, until our work was completed.”

They replaced the bars and bolts and hung a garment over the shattered gun port.

Freedom

They told their fellow prisoner, Capt. Whipple, of their plan to swim to a point beyond the sentinels on Long Island. “Give it up,” Whipple said.” It is only throwing your lives away, for there is not a man on earth who can swim from this ship to that point as cold as the water is now”. He asked how far they thought it was. Hawkins said a mile and a half.

’It’s all of two and a half miles,”  Whipple said.

On the third day of their confinement, the weather was as good as could be expected for an escape attempt: mild and hazy, the night extremely dark.

Belowdecks on the Jersey

With a rope he found, Hawkins tied his clothes, silver dollars, rum in knapsacks on his back.

They gave the rope to several fellow prisoners who agreed to hold onto one end. They tossed the other end out of the gunport and Waterman shimmied down it. Hawkins waited a minute and then followed.

In the Water

Hawkins swam slowly along the side of the ship until he reached the stern. Then he sank himself deep in the water and swam quietly away from the ship. After he’d gotten far enough away, he hailed Waterman three times. Waterman did not answer.

He took his course from the ships’ lights in the harbor and from the sentinels who cried “All’s well”every half hour.

After he swam for about two hours his knapsack broke loose. He put it under one arm, but that slowed him down and put him off course. By then he was benumbed from cold, but could swim tolerably well. He decided to let the knapsack go, parting with it forever. Twenty-five minutes later he swam within 12 feet of the shore, where he could touch bottom, “I found I could not stand, I was so cold,” he wrote. “But I moved around in shoal water until I found I could stand, then stepped on shore.”

He was completely naked except for a small hat on his head.

“What a situation was this” he wrote, “without covering to hide my naked body, in an enemy’s country, without food or means to obtain any, and among Tories more unrelenting than the devil,—more perils to encounter and nothing to aid me but the interposition of heaven!”

Christopher Hawkins In the Raw

In the darkness, he searched for the barn where he and Waterman agreed to meet. On the way he tripped over a rock, badly bruising himself. Hawkins found the barn, but Waterman wasn’t there. Hawkins slept in the barn until dawn, when a young woman came to milk the cows. He hid himself from her, then stayed in the barn all day. He tried to milk the cows but failed. When night fell, he set out again.

Famished, he tried to eat some watermelons he found in a field, but they were too unripe to eat. It started to rain, and he wandered until he came to another barn and slept in it soundly until late the next day. He set out again and found some old pears in an orchard — rotten, but he ate them anyway. Then he spied a potato patch nearby, so he went toward it hoping to get some. A young woman stooping to pick potatoes stood up. She saw his naked body, screamed and ran toward the house. Hawkins ran in the other direction and hid in the woods.

Encounters

Weak with hunger, he found another barn and slept in it on a pile of flax that night. At dawn the next day he set out and saw farmers in their field. He determined to ask them for help. He approached two young men who draw away from him. Hawkins said, “Don’t be afraid of me. I am a human being.” They asked him if he was scared. No, he said. “How came you here naked?” they asked. He sat down and told them what happened.

One young man told him to hide, and said he would talk to his mother. He soon returned with two big pieces of buttered bread and a pair of trousers. He told him to hide in the barn and wait for his mother. She soon brought him a shirt and told him her husband had died in prison. She and her sons were Dutch; their house was nine miles from the Brooklyn ferry. That meant he’d left the Jersey 60 hours ago and no farther from her than when he started out.

The old woman told him Hessian soldiers infested the area. She told him to go back into the barn and throw the trousers out. She would then put them and a shirt on a fence, and he should take them. That way, they could both truthfully say if questioned that he’d stolen the clothing hung out to dry.

Hessian soldiers

She advised him to steal a canoe, paddle across the cove to a road that would take him to a house in Oyster Bay. There he’d find a man who could help him.

Christopher Hawkins, Captured Again

He encountered sentinels on the road near the village of Jamaica and hid in some bushes. Then a man driving cattle approached, so he found a stick and helped him drive the cattle. He passed the sentinels without incident.

As night fell he came to a tavern, and decided to sleep in the stable.  It had no straw, so he lay down in a manger. But a carriage pulled up, and two men brought horses into the barn. By the light of their lanterns they discovered him pretending to be asleep. They roused him, and he convinced them he was drunk. The men thought he might steal their horses. So they tried to march him into the tavern, but he bolted and ran away.

Hawkins crossed a plain, and the rain began to bucket down in torrents. He found another barn, made a bed of straw and slept soundly. The next day he found the house the old woman had told him about. But a woman answered the door and said her husband was away. She declared herself loyal to the king and threatened to give him up.

So he ran away from her, only to be captured by a British patrol. They were staying in a house in Oyster Bay and locked him in a room. He was told to lie down on some straw to sleep but the fleas made him toss and turn. A sentinel heard him thrashing and shouted, “Lie still, God Damn you,” and stabbed him with his bayonet. He then had to lie still as the fleas tormented him and his wounds stiffened.

Another Escape, and Some Luck

At dawn he was sent to a Tory colonel a mile away. The colonel questioned him and said he must go back to the Jersey. Then he left Hawkins with a guard in an unlocked room on the ground floor. The guard left him to eat his breakfast in an adjoining pantry. So Hawkins stood up, sneaked out the back door and hid himself in a wood lot. He stayed quiet for several hours. Finally when no one was around he began walking. After about six miles he found still another barn at nightfall and slept in it.

The next morning a woman who lived in a small house gave him some bread and milk. Then, shortly after he set out again, he had a stroke of luck. He recognized a man on horseback coming toward him: Capt. Daniel Havens. He was uncle to John Sawyer, Hawkins partner in his escape from the Maidstone.

Havens didn’t recognize Hawkins, but stopped when he hailed him. Hawkins told him his story, and Havens told him to stay at his house while he traveled west and he would get him home when he returned.

Howard’s Tavern on Long Island, 1776

The house was 20 miles away. Hawkins walked seven miles and stopped at a tavern where Havens said a Mr. Snow would feed him. He did, and Snow gave him dinner.

He then reached Havens’ house. No men were present, and the women seemed suspicious of him. He left, and on the street he recognized John Sawyer’s sister. She told him his friend had died at sea three weeks earlier.  She suggested he get a berth aboard a sloop that smuggled goods to Connecticut.

He walked down to the sloop and checked with the captain, who welcomed him aboard. Hawkins slept on the boat. The next night they left, landing in Stonington, Conn., where a tavernkeeper gave him a bed and a meal. Neither the captain nor the tavernkeeper charged him. He then set out the 40 miles to Providence, reaching it in two days.

The Rest of the Story

After the war, Hawkins went to work for a farmer, Obadiah Olney of Smithfield.  At the age of about 20 he married Dorcas Whipple of Smithfield, a farmer’s daughter. He then went to work for William Whipple of Fairfield, N.Y.. In 1786 he and his family moved to Norway, N.Y., then Fairfield, then Newport. He worked as a farmer and a carpenter. In his spare time he educated himself, having had little opportunity as a boy. He prospered and served as Commissioner of Roads and the first Supervisor of Newport.

In religion, he was a Methodist, in politics, a Federalist. Described as an affectionate husband and kind parent, he had six daughters and a son.

At the age of 70, he wrote his war experiences in a journal. Thirty years later, it was published as The Adventures of Christopher Hawkins.

He died on Feb. 25, 1837.

A descendant discovered the manuscript in a Kansas City linen closet. Her son donated it to the Museum of the American Revolution.

The Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Brooklyn

Another Discovery

When the new U.S. Navy occupied Wallabout Bay and began expanding the Brooklyn Navy Yard on the mud flats near the shore, they found the remains of thousands who had perished aboard the British prison ships.

In 1808, the remains of more than 11,000 prisoners of war were interred in a tomb on Hudson Avenue. Later they were moved to their current site in Fort Greene Park. In 1908, President-elect William Howard Taft attended the dedication of the monument to the prison ship martyrs.

Historians now recognize that the privateers, so many of whom died in prison, gave America a real naval advantage over the British. “The battles of the American Revolution were fought on land, and independence was won at sea,” noted John Lehman, former secretary of the navy.

The historian Edward G. Burrows reminds us to acknowledge the sacrifice of those who died. The United States wasn’t just made by “those gentlemen in powdered wigs and knee britches we have heard so much about in recent years,” he wrote. The country was also made by “thousands upon thousands of mostly ordinary people who believed in something they considered worth dying for.”

Images: Prison Ship Martyrs Monument By Adolph Alexander Weinman – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21825033. American flag By DevinCook – https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Betsy_Ross_flag.svg#mw-jump-to-license, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128445800

 

 

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The Midnight-ish Rides of William Dawes, Samuel Prescott and Paul Revere

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“Listen, my children, and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of”……William Dawes. No, that doesn’t work. “Of the midnight ride of …Samuel Prescott. No, that doesn’t work either; Oh, I have it: “Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Thus, Paul Revere became a legend and an icon in American history, and William Dawes and Samuel Prescott were left in the dust from Paul Revere’s horse, a footnote at best, if remembered at all.

Sadly, much of the history Americans know is founded on myths and legends. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” did much to create a history rife with deliberate inaccuracies and gives all the glory to Revere. The truth, however, is almost completely different from the “history” of the poem, learned by countless generations of Americans in school, and carried through to adulthood.

Paul Revere holds his (then) claim to fame.

Paul Revere holds his then-claim to fame.

In fact, until Longfellow wrote the poem, Revere, was known for his metalwork but not for Revolutionary War heroics anywhere in New England, let alone the rest of the country. He was locally well-known as an artisan and entrepreneur. When he died in 1818, his obituary made no mention of the “famous” ride. Just as Hollywood creates heroes, Longfellow created a heroic persona for Revere far beyond what he actually did.

Some Truth to the Story

While the events described in the poem all took place on the night of April 18, 1775, they were set in motion long before that. The possibility of a confrontation between British forces and colonists had been brewing for months. The colonist had prepared for just such an eventuality.

The most critical part of the preparation was prior warning. Paul Revere did play a part in these events, and he did arrange for the famous signal from the steeple of Christ Church (Old North Church) – one if by land and two if by sea. And it is true that he did participate in part of the ride that night to warn of British movements.

But beyond that, the majority of Longfellow’s poem amounts to fictional propaganda. He wrote it just before the start of the Civil War. Longfellow, an ardent abolitionist, designed the poem to stir up patriotic fervor, not to record history.

Straying From the Truth

“And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm…“ It didn’t take long for Longfellow to stray from the truth. Revere was not on the opposite shore in Charlestown. He was in Boston, on the shore near the Old North Church, and when he, “…with muffled oar Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore…” — he did it as a passenger. Two very brave and anonymous men did the rowing past the British guard boats.

“Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride, Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride, On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere…And lo! As he looks on the belfry’s height, a Glimmer, and then a gleam of light! He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns, But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight A second lamp in the belfry burns!” If he was impatient at all, it was on the Boston shore where he would have seen the signal, since he only crossed the water once the signal had been given. With a horse waiting for him on the “opposite shore,” he would have quickly mounted and gone on his way with little ceremony.

William Dawes, Too

It beggars belief to think the colonial leaders would assign such a critical task to just one man as Longfellow’s poem infers. Of course they didn’t. Revere was only one of at least two men specifically assigned to carry the message of the British movements to critical personnel and start the add-on affect of riders spreading out throughout the countryside.

William Dawes rode too.

They did it this way for a couple of reasons. First, one man could not possibly cover the area needed to reach all the important personnel. Secondly, they had to assume capture, so they needed redundant messengers. If one got caught, then another carried the same messages. In fact, Paul Revere and William Dawes  just started a chain of riders that got bigger as the night progressed.

The idea that Revere, or any single rider, rode to warn every village and farm is staggering. In the first place, they didn’t have enough time to stop at every house to issue a warning. And that assumes they even knew how to find each house. Although Longfellow never claimed Revere rode along shouting “the British are coming, the British are coming,” this somehow got added to the legend.

Three Reasons

It doesn’t make sense for three reasons. First, not every house held patriots. Many held loyalists, and British patrols were out everywhere. Riding by shouting their presence would have amounted to a very risky proposition.

Secondly, many homes were farmhouses, and not located on any main route. Going to every one would have taken days for one or two men.

Thirdly, anyone riding around in the dead of night, when everyone slept, shouting “the British are coming” would have been thought a crackpot. Since they were all British,  the warning would have seemed nonsensical. And that assumes sleeping people would even hear them at that time of night.

The Real Reason They Rode

The riders did not blindly go from place to place hoping to find everyone to pass on the news. They all had specific targets – personnel they were tasked with warning. Those personnel would then get the message out to everyone who mattered. Most of the time, the riders knocked on doors to wake the residents up. Then they’d quickly convey the message that the Regulars (or Redcoats) were out, and then ride on to the next target.  The messages were brief and to the point. By Revere’s own account, his message was, “The Regulars are coming out.”

In fact, two men, Paul Revere and William Dawes, Jr., set out at about same time, along different routes that eventually converged in Lexington. Alerting specific men, those men, in turn, rode out to warn others, and so on and so on. While Revere took the water route to Charlestown, Dawes took the longer land route out of Boston. He barely cleared the city before the Regulars shut it down. Dawes would have started sooner since it took time for Revere’s slow and silent rowboat ride across to Charlestown.

“It was one by the village clock, When he galloped into Lexington…It was two by the village clock, When he came to the bridge at Concord town…” Revere did make it to Lexington, joined a half hour later by Dawes. It was about midnight, not one as in the poem. That meant both Revere and Dawes set out somewhere near 11 p.m. They had as their ultimate mission at Lexington to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock, spending the night in the town. Other riders then took over to spread the alarm around Lexington and the surrounding countryside. Here that they were fortuitously joined by Dr. Samuel Prescott, who just happened to be in town returning from an evening with a female friend at around 1 a.m. The three men now set off together toward Concord. 

William Dawes and Samuel Prescott Escape

They never made it farther than Lincoln, 4.4 modern miles from Concord. Neither Revere nor Dawes saw Concord Bridge because a British patrol stopped them. The British captured Revere, but Dawes and Prescott managed to escape. Undoubtedly riding at breakneck speed, through unfamiliar fields and along farm roads, Dawes’ horse threw him. Apparently the horse continued on since Dawes, probably more than a little sore, had to walk back to Lexington. His night ride had ended.

Prescott, however, continued to Concord, and he, not Revere, passed the warning to Concord. Through all this,  countless other nameless riders actually spread “…the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm…”

Prescott made it to Old North Bridge in Concord.

Revere and the Regulars

When questioned by the patrol, Revere seems to have had no problem bragging to the British that he knew of the army’s movement from Boston. He also knew the militia were gathering at Lexington to meet them. Revere wasn’t the only one being held by the patrol, and they all set off back toward Lexington. As the British patrol and its prisoners neared Lexington, they could hear sporadic shots and the ringing of bells. Revere told the major commanding the patrol that these were the alarms to warn the countryside of the coming of the Regulars. At this point, discretion became the better part of valor for the British. They released their prisoners and set off to warn their coming compatriots, but not before confiscating Revere’s horse. 

On foot now, Revere walked back to the Rev. Jonas Clarke’s house, where Hancock and Adams stayed. The whole area was abuzz, and Clarke’s house must have been in disarray. Hancock and Adams needed to leave. They may have heard the firing on Lexington Green as they fled the area, assisted by Revere.

The Forgotten Man

Mostly forgotten in all of this: Dr. Prescott. He didn’t belong to the original plan to spread the warning. Rather than run after escaping the British patrol, he continued on to Concord,. With great courage, since he had almost been captured at the edge of town, stopped at several houses in Lincoln to raise the alarm. Other nameless riders set off from there. Reaching the sentry at Concord, Prescott further spread the word. The Concord First Parish Church bell then began the general alarm.

The memorial to the Paul Revere capture site

Prescott then rode to his brother Abel’s house and told him to ride to Sudbury with the alarm. He continued on to Acton and Stowe, continuing to spread the warning. 

After the Ride

After the Lexington and Concord battles, Revere couldn’t return to Boston, now under siege. He tried to get a commission in the army but was refused. He continued to offer his services, however, and was initially used as a courier and in an effort to produce more gunpower. Nine months after Bunker Hill, Revere was involved, with others, in a successful effort to find and recover his friend Joseph Warren’s body from the battlefield. In April 1776 he was commissioned an infantry major in the Massachusetts Militia and transferred to the artillery a month later.

In November 1776 he won promotion to lieutenant colonel and stationed at Castle William, defending Boston Harbor. He spent the next two years quietly, broken only by the occasional prisoner escort and two brief deployments to Rhode Island. In the summer of 1779, he commanded an artillery detachment during the disastrous Penobscot Expedition. As one of the senior leaders of the campaign, his enemies later tried to lay blame on him. Although the hearings reached no conclusion, Revere was asked to resign. Rather than resign, however, he demanded a court-martial, which cleared him in February 1782.

After the war, already a renowned silversmith, he invested in an iron-working foundry. With its success, he expanded further into bronze casting and rolled copper. In 1801 he founded the Revere Copper Co., now called Revere Copper Products, and headquartered in Rome, N.Y.

Revere died on May 10, 1818 in his home on Charter Street, Boston. He is buried at the Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street.

Paul Revere went into manufacturing after the Revolution.

Paul Revere’s home in Boston’s North End, a stone’s throw from Old North Church, is preserved as a museum. A statue of him astride his horse stands in the park in back of the church.

William Dawes, Jr.

It is not clear what William Dawes, Jr. did in the aftermath of the ride. His story picks up again on 9 Sept.  9,1776, with his commission as a major in a Boston militia regiment. He saw no action during the war, serving mostly as a quartermaster in central Massachusetts. He also served as a prisoner escort for British prisoners from the battles at Saratoga.

Dawes must have still served in the militia in some capacity after the war because he refused to join a punitive expedition against Indians. On Feb. 25, 1799, Dawes died in Marlborough, Mass. Believed to have been buried at the King’s Chapel Burying Ground where he has a tomb marker, there is some speculation that he is buried in his wife’s plot at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain.

William Dawes has a plaque at King’s Chapel Burying Ground.

A traffic island in Cambridge, Mass., has a bronze plaque denoting the route of his ride, along with bronze horseshoes set in the pavement.

His family name did not fade from history, however. Among other notable Dawes relations, his great-grandson, William Dawes, served as a Union officer in the Civil War. One of William’s sons, Charles Gates Dawes, served as the 30th vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge. He also won a Nobel Prize in 1925 for his work on the Dawes Plan for World War I reparations.

Dr. Samuel Prescott

Little is known about Dr. Samuel Prescott after his ride. A man of that name is recorded at Fort Ticonderoga, and another in a British prison in Halifax. There is no evidence beyond the name to indicate that either of these men is the Dr. Samuel Prescott that rode to Concord. One account claims he died in prison in 1777 but evidence is lacking. While most have forgotten Prescott’s ride, Concord remembers it yearly at midnight on April 18 and Acton on Patriot’s Day.

Unquestionably, Paul Revere, William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott performed an extremely valuable service that night. Without their timely warning, events at Lexington and Concord may have been very different. But during their lifetime, they were never iconic Revolutionary War heroes. Without Longfellow’s assistance, Revere undoubtedly would have been remembered solely for his superb silver work and for his entrepreneurship with iron and copper. In a sense, Longfellow may have done Revere, Dawes and Prescott a favor by calling attention to the ride, which probably would have been nothing more than a minor footnote without the poem.


Charles Gates Dawes is the author’s 9th Cousin, 2 times removed. However, he did not realize his relationship to William Dawes until he researched this article. William Dawes is not a relative of his.

Images: Paul Revere Capture Site, photo taken by By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11394644.

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The Enigma of Dr. Benjamin Church

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One man’s traitor is often another man’s patriot, depending on who does the labeling. Frequently the victor in a war dictates the label. But often the label is not that simple and clear. Such is the case of Dr. Benjamin Church, often called “America’s First Traitor.”  The problem comes from the fact that “America” did not exist at the time of his alleged treason.

Dr. Benjamin Church

Benjamin Church

Benjamin Church was born in Newport, Colony of Rhode Island, British America, on Aug. 24, 1734. A Mayflower descendant through his ancestor Elizabeth Warren Church, his heritage was steeped in the founding of the New World. His father was a merchant. His grandfather, Col. Benjamin Church, played a prominent role in King Philip’s War and led the force that hunted down and killed King Philip.

Col. Benjamin Church, ca 1675

Being the son of a prominent, well-to-do family, much would have been expected of him. He went to Boston Latin School to prepare for Harvard, from which he graduated in 1754. He studied medicine in British America for a time before continuing the study in London. In England that he met and married his wife, Hannah Hill. After his return to Boston, he started a highly successful medical practice and was known for his medical and surgical skills.

By the 1760s Church began to be seen as a supporter of the burgeoning movement in Colonial America that would eventually lead to revolution. He became a prominent member of the Whig Party and was an intimate of Dr. Joseph Warren and Samuel and John Adams. The narrow telling of the story of the American Revolution has long fostered the myth that the intended purpose of the of the Patriot movement was dissolution of the union with England. But this is completely false. Most individuals who espoused the Patriot cause were not seeking to break their English bonds but to have perceived grievances redressed within the existing system. Open, armed rebellion was not a general cause celebre before 1775.

A Leading Patriot

Residing in Boston, Church became a trusted confidant of many of the prominent patriots. In the aftermath of the Boston Massacre, he treated some of the wounded and examined Crispus Attucks’ body. He was a skilled orator, and three years after the Massacre, he gave a spirited oration commemorating the event.

The Boston Massacre, engraving by Paul Revere

Church’s involvement in Massachusetts politics culminated in his 1774 election to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Thereafter, he became a prominent member of the Committee of Public Safety. To all outward appearances, Benjamin Church was a leading patriot, deeply involved in the cause. Church commanded such respect that in July 1775 the nascent Continental Congress appointed him the first director general and chief surgeon of the new Medical Department.

However, sometime in early 1775, Church began to spy for the British military, with direct links to Gen. Thomas Gage. It is not clear how much information passed between them before the fatal shots on Lexington Green. His motives are still not clear.

General Thomas Gage (John Singleton Copley)

General Thomas Gage (John Singleton Copley)

Certainly, the British paid him, and he did maintain a lavish lifestyle that required a large income. Was money the primary motivation for his ostensible change of heart? Or did he grow disenchanted with n increasingly militant patriot cause? Or was it a combination of greed and disenchantment?

The Coded Letter

There is even some suggestion, without any real proof, that he was a closet Tory. It is not likely that the truth will ever be known.  The one thing to remember – often conveniently overlooked – is that treason can be a two-way street. Under British law, the law of the land in the colonies, patriots plotting against the government hovered on the borders of treason. When they began an armed conflict against the government, then they openly committed treason under the British law that governed them.

Church passed his messages to General Gage through a series of messengers. Then in October 1775, one of Church’s former mistresses gave a coded message to a Rhode Island patriot, who turned it over to Gen. Nathanael Greene instead of passing it along. Greene then sent it onward to General Washington.

Washington had the coded letter given to two men good at puzzles. They independently deciphered the message and came up with identical results. The letter provided details of ammunition, recruiting, American strength, New York artillery and Bunker Hill casualties. It was a damning missive.

Nathanael Greene

The former mistress, described as “a very lusty woman much pitted with smallpox,” was arrested and brought to Boston. Through her interrogation and clues from the letter, its author was identified as Dr. Benjamin Church. Church was immediately arrested and brought before the war council. He admitted to sending the letter, but professed innocence of any evil intent. Church claimed he sent it as a ruse to fool the enemy about the Americans’ real situation. He further claimed that nothing in the letter could not be gleaned from public documents and knowledge.

Despite his smooth talk, his lengthy protestations of innocence fell on deaf ears.

Church’s code. Photo courtesy National Park Service.

The Dilemma of Benjamin Church

The problem came when it was time to decide how to deal with him. It was one thing to call his conduct treason, but another to give it the force of law. In open rebellion, the Colonies could not simply fall back on British law and the articles of war adopted in Philadelphia said nothing about treason or espionage. In fact, under the current legal conditions, his actions did not rise legally to a crime of any kind. The easiest thing for Congress to do was strip Church of his appointment as Surgeon General and to turn Church over to the Massachusetts to decide his fate.

Church appeared before the Massachusetts House of Representatives to plead his innocence in an hour-long oration. Again, it fell on deaf ears. The House expelled him. But Massachusetts had the same legal problem as the Continental Congress. It had no laws governing treason, so it could not pass sentence. Congress simply ordered Washington to send him under arrest to Connecticut for indefinite confinement.

He was confined in a damp, dark cell, and specifically denied pen, ink and paper. He won a brief parole when several physicians attested to his poor health in confinement. But this release did not last long, as rioters sacked his Boston house. He returned to prison for his own protection. Efforts to use him in a prisoner exchange also failed. In 1778 he was released and sent in exile to Martinique. However, he never reached his destination as his ship was lost at sea. His wife and children made their way to London. There, the King granted her a £150 pension, over £30,000 today.

Treason or Not?

For 150 years, the single intercepted letter served as the only real proof of Church’s “treason.” Then definite proof emerged in General Gage’s papers showing that he spied for the British since at least the early part of 1775. Among the information passed on by him: the existence of Patriot arms in Concord. And the British paid him for all the information he gave them.

The question remains, however: Did he commit treason? Information passed to British authorities before April 19, 1775, when the Revolution broke out, would not have risen to the level of treason. Everyone was a British subject at the time so he could not have committed treason against any government.

It can be argued that he betrayed the trust of others. But that is not a crime. After April 19, 1775, from a British standpoint, the rebels committed treason against the Crown.  So Church’s spying for British authorities, whether for money or not, served as patriotism to the mother country. Furthermore, at the time of his arrest, the colonies, while in open rebellion, had not declared independence.

Certainly, his contemporaries faced a quandary about what to do with him. Dangerous to the patriot cause, certainly, so they could not simply let him go free. But they didn’t find him guilty of anything.

Traitor or patriot? It depends on your point of view.


Bill Utley has a B.A. in History from Syracuse University and an M.A. in Criminal Justice from the University of New Haven. He has co-authored a book on the French history of Fort Niagara.  Retired from the U.S. government, he is an Army veteran and Dr. Benjamin Church’s fifth cousin, seven times removed. 

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Easy Money: How New England Puritans Invented Our Currency

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Easy money is perhaps New England’s least famous contribution to humanity. Around the world, currency is still mostly in the form of legal tender paper money. It’s a special type of paper money. Unlike numerous types of paper money in history, it is not convertible to gold upon demand. Nor is its quantity “backed” or restricted in any way by its issuer’s gold stock. In general, it is not forced on sellers in private spot transactions. It is just a pure legal tender money.

This means that creditors cannot reject payments of obligations in that object. Most critically, these creditors include the tax authority, and no other object has this status. Every taxpayer must obtain legal tender money in order to pay taxes. This legal status distinguishes the dollar from bitcoin, both of which have no intrinsic value and no relation to gold. It is a major reason why bitcoin hasn’t and probably couldn’t replace the dollar. And it is a major reason why governments can inflate their money at will. Taxpayers still have to obtain it, typically by selling goods and services for it. For the government, it is easy money.

This device, of flimsy appearance but enormous power, was invented in the colony of Massachusetts Bay in the period 1690-1692. From there it spread to other colonies. Because of the Revolutionary War, the idea spread to Europe. Monetary history would never be the same. No country ever again manipulated the content of its gold coins, as they had for two millennia, in order to finance a war. The printing press took over war finance.

Why Massachusetts Puritans?

Why and how did the Massachusetts Puritans invent this new type of money? They numbered 50,000 people at the edge of Western civilization, far less numerous and far less sophisticated than the great financial centers of Amsterdam and London. The first step to answering this question is to recognize that the innovative legal tender paper money was not born in a normal economy. Its invention did not simply replace precious metal coins. The items eligible for use as tax payments in 1690 Massachusetts, just before the invention of legal tender paper money, didn’t just include coins. They also included wheat, barley, barley malt, rye, maize, peas, oats, beef and pork.

It was a very odd monetary economy that saw its roots in the beginning of the English colonization of America. Let’s then take a journey further back in time – and space – all the way to Pocahontas.

An 1850s painting of John Rolfe and Pocahontas

Pocahontas’ husband, John Rolfe, started tobacco planting in Jamestown in the 1610s. Quickly everyone who could became a tobacco planter. The planters desperately needed European goods and food. And so when European ships came for their tobacco the planters exchanged all their tobacco – but also most of their coins – for European products. As a result, very few coins remained for domestic circulation. Tobacco quickly emerged as the alternative to coins. By 1624, even the colony’s budget was expressed in pounds of tobacco.

A Pattern of Easy Money

The pattern repeated itself in all the non-Iberian colonies: maize in Plymouth, sugar in Barbados, boards in Maine, beaver furs in Canada and whalebones in Long Island. Each colony adopted its main product as money. As a matter of course, in 1630 the young colony of Massachusetts Bay adopted three official currencies: English silver coins, grains and beaver furs.

But Massachusetts soon became different because its people were different. Relatively affluent, highly educated and commercially oriented, the Massachusetts Puritans were not content with using commodities as money. They also had the means and the expertise to try something better. An unusual period of experimentation began. In 1635, lead bullets were adopted as small change. Bullets served in their traditional role in the 1637 Pequot War, which gave Massachusetts access to Long Island shores. That was the production center of wampum – the seashell jewelry/money of Native Americans. So in 1637, Massachusetts made wampum legal tender for small debts.

Pilgrims Going to Church by George Henry Boughton

In 1639, the colony legalized bullion brought by privateers for tax payments. In 1642, Massachusetts was the first colony to recognize foreign (Spanish and Dutch) coins and to encourage their imports. The abolition of monarchy in England annulled the royal minting prerogative, leading Massachusetts to be the only colony to open a mint (in 1652).

Charles II

But royalty returned in 1660, and in the late 1670s King Charles II pressed Massachusetts on the issue of the independent mint, which was seen as nothing short of treason. It was shut down in 1682. At the same time, a private bank started operations in Boston. It issued banknotes awkwardly backed by land titles rather than coins. The bank ceased operations shortly thereafter, perhaps because England threatened to abolish all land titles in Massachusetts.

obadiah-holmes-charles-ii

Charles II

In 1684, the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company was annulled in England, and in 1686 a new regime was imposed by the new king, James II. This Dominion of New England was a pure dictatorship, unlike the colony’s General Court, which was a democracy among male church members. Another attempt at a land bank was made, but it was aborted as soon as the English dictator, Sir Edmund Andros, invalidated all land titles.

With local coins gone and bank projects in ruin, in 1688 Massachusetts was not much better, in terms of its existing currency, than when it was founded in 1630. Some English coins and grains still facilitated daily transactions within the colony. But the monetary laboratory that operated there during these six decades was not entirely in vain. It was powered by English America’s largest merchants, concentrated in Boston, and by graduates of English America’s only college (Harvard). As a merchant republic, Massachusetts was similar to previous hubs of financial innovation – Venice and Amsterdam. The shocks of both the new environment and England’s constitutional upheavals caused Massachusetts to replicate humanity’s monetary history in 60 years: seashell jewelry, grains, uncoined precious metal, coins and banknotes.

Glorious Revolution

Then came the Glorious Revolution in England. It soon inspired a revolution in Boston, which dismantled the Dominion and restored the charter government de facto. The Glorious Revolution also dragged the English colonies into their first war with French Canada. The revolutionary Massachusetts government lobbied the monarchs William and Mary to restore their charter at the same time that they launched expensive attacks on distant Canada. In the fall of 1690, these two tasks collided on the beaches below Quebec City. Massachusetts tried to occupy the French colony, counting on God to provide a Puritan victory over Catholics. The expected plunder was supposed to pay the soldiers. But it was not to be. The soldiers returned defeated in November, ravaged by smallpox, frozen and hungry, and demanded pay for their horrible three-month journey.

The batteries of Quebec bombard the New England fleet

The government promptly increased taxes enormously, but it would have taken too much time to collect them (in coin, grains, and other goods). The soldiers were “mutinous,” reported Boston pastor Cotton Mather. Mather and the elite knew that the very same place they tried to occupy (Quebec) was in the habit of issuing paper money (manually, from playing cards!). The Canadian money was in the Old World style: It was forced on all sellers under penalty and the government committed to exchange it for incoming French silver coins. As the intellectual capital of English America, Massachusetts had printing presses and thus had the technical ability to easily pull off a paper money issue. The problem was a constitutional one: William and Mary, considering restoration of the colony’s charter, would not have been happy seeing Massachusetts once again violating the royal monopoly on money creation. What to do?

A Solution

The government, experienced in monetary innovation, figured out a solution: There will not be “paper money” but only “bills.” No private party will be forced to accept them – no sellers in the markets, not even the soldiers. The soldiers will be informed that they can receive the “bills” if they want, instead of waiting for tax proceeds to be collected, and taxpayers will be informed that they can discharge their enormous tax obligations with these “bills.” That is, only tax collectors will be forced to accept the bills.

In modern parlance, the bills were only legal tender for taxes. Officially, it was not money at all, and thus England should not care. I call it “easy money” because it was money that was easy to issue – no need for precious metal and a mint – and it was made in a dishonest way to fool England.

Easy Money

The bills were enacted into law on December 24, 1690. Printing soon began. The issue of the bills was handed to a committee of five bay merchants,. They included Elisha Hutchinson, grandson of the religious dissident, Anne, and grandfather of the governor and historian, Thomas; Treasurer John Phillips, Mather’s father-in-law; and Adam Winthrop – the first Harvard graduate of that famous name.

In January 1691, the bills were given to soldiers but the public was reluctant to accept the bills. Members of the elite rushed to save the new experiment. Among them were Cotton Mather, who wrote a fiery pamphlet, and the rich Sir William Phips (leader of the Quebec expedition). Phips reputedly exchanged some of his own coins for bills to establish their credit. It worked.

William Phips

William Phips

England, as planned, did not care about this experiment. In October 1691, William and Mary granted a new charter to the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Upon the charter’s arrival in 1692, the new government understood that it no longer had to fear England’s reaction regarding its money-issuing activities. In the summer it decided that the “bills of credit” (as they came to be known) will be legal tender not only for taxes but for any monetary obligation. In this step, the bills became identical in legal status to England’s silver coins. However, since they were not made of precious metal, they were identical to our modern currency. Ironically, this time of brilliant innovation was also the summer of Salem witch trials.

The Expedient of Easy Money

Mather later summarized his people’s ingenuity.

“In this extremity they presently found out an expedient, which may serve as an example, for any people in other parts of the world, whose distresses may call for a sudden supply of money to carry them through any important expedition.”

Mather, the mad genius of Boston, was right. Founder John Winthrop did not think of paper money when he said in 1630: “We shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” But in the context of money that was what eventually happened.

stone-throwing-devil-cotton-mather

Cotton Mather

Of course, silver and later gold made a comeback, again and again, to prevent inflation, only to be discarded during wars. Gold coins disappeared from American shops and homes in the Great Depression. Gold remained behind the scenes until 1971, loosely “backing” an ever-increasing amount of paper dollars. Only foreign central banks had the legal right to convert the dollars they held into U.S. gold. But the system came under pressure of increasing government expenditures: The Vietnam War, President Johnson’s War on Poverty and the war on gravity (the Space Program) cost so much money that the dollar’s relation to gold lost its credibility. In 1971 President Richard Nixon “suspended” the convertibility promise, and in fact, took the entire world off gold.

Massachusetts Money

Since then, our currency is Massachusetts currency. If and when it a digital version replaces it, its legal status will remain the same. Even if it disappears from shops in favor of electronic payments of various sorts, it still forms the foundation of the monetary and financial systems. These systems consist mostly of promises to pay “dollars” – the paper money and token coins issued by the federal government.

And it all started in a futile attempt of New Englanders to occupy Quebec.

Dror Goldberg is the author of Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in April 2023.

 

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

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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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The Rise and Fall of Cape Cod Salt

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Around 1830, mothers on Cape Cod faced a vexing problem. Their young sons kept wearing out the seat of their pants. They did it by sliding down the slanted wooden covers of the Cape Cod salt works that covered the shoreline from Buzzards Bay to Provincetown.

Several thousand miles of wooden evaporating vats, pipes and windmill arrays checkered the shoreline during the heyday of the Cape’s salt industry. They made a half million bushels of salt from seawater every year, with the help of the sun and the wind.  If you put the Cape’s salt works end to end in 1831, they’d stretch from Boston to Amarillo, Texas.

Enoch Harding’s saltworks along Bucks Creek in West Chatham, Mass. Also a playground for boys.

It was big business, but it wasn’t one big business. The hundreds of Cape Cod salt establishments were almost all family-run operations. When it rained, women and children ran out and covered the vats. School would even pause so the children could roll the covers over the brine-filled vats. People said the vat closings sounded like thunder.

By the Civil War, the Cape Cod salt works had almost all vanished. Henry David Thoreau during his walks on the Cape from 1849 to 1857 noticed them. “Novel and interesting objects,” he wrote, noting they were seen in only a few other places along the Atlantic seaboard.

Cape Cod Salt

Thoreau watched Cape Codders “breaking up their salt-works and selling them for lumber.” And he wondered why salt was made on Cape Cod when it could be made anywhere along the Eastern Seaboard.

What happened? How did Cape Cod become the major producer of salt in the Eastern United States? And why did it disappear so quickly?

The story of the Cape Cod salt business usually begins with a retired Dennis sea captain, John Sears.  Sears, according to the tale, found a way to make salt from seawater. The sun, the wind and the free market did the rest.

But there never was a free market in salt, not in the United States. The heavy hand of the government created and then destroyed the Cape Cod salt industry — through laws, tariffs, treaties, bounties, taxes and war.

kicker

Sleepy John Sears

Sears had a nickname, “Sleepy John,” because, his family said, he often had fits of abstraction that looked like sleep.

Sleepy John thought a lot about salt. He may have read an essay on making salt by a London physician named William Brownrigg. Brownrigg described the lucrative French business of solar-evaporated salt along 150 miles of the Bay of Biscay.

Congress Voting Independence by Robert Edge Pine. Congress also voted on a salt bounty.

Brownrigg wrote his essay in 1743, but the Continental Congress had ordered it reprinted and distributed in the 13 colonies in 1776. During that revolutionary year, Congress also granted a bounty of one-third of a dollar for every bushel of salt imported or manufactured.

Until the American Revolution, cheap imported salt came from Liverpool and the British Caribbean. Then in 1774 the British blockaded the Port of Boston. New Englanders desperately needed salt for household survival and for the commercial salt cod fishery to function. The British blockade spread to other ports, and the price of salt went up and up.

John Sears no doubt spent time thinking about salt prices, bounties and the fact that boiling a gallon of the stuff took about 400 gallons of seawater and a great deal of firewood.

The First Salt Works

In the summer of 1776, Captain Sears went to work. He built the first salt works in Sesuit Harbor. It wasn’t much more than a leaky vat, 100 feet long and 10 feet wide. He hauled seawater one bucket at a time to his salt works. It took 350 gallons of water to produce one bushel of salt. His neighbors laughed at him.

At the end of the summer he produced eight bushels. His neighbors called his salt works “Sears Folly.”

During the summer of 1777 he tried again, but only after caulking the vat to make it watertight, the way a ship is caulked. That year his saltworks produced 30 bushels of salt. He sold them for $2 a bushel, a nice price in 1777.

HMS Agamemnon, similar to the HMS Somerset

Sears continued to improve his operation. In November 1778, the British man-of-war HMS Somerset wrecked on the shoals of Truro. A tiny militia marched its crew to Boston as prisoners of war and scavengers took everything they could find. John Sears got a bilge pump from the shipwreck.

He rigged it up the next summer so he could pump water by hand from the sea. At least that saved him from the hard work of carrying buckets of water by hand.

Maj. Nathaniel Freeman then suggested using wind power to pump water into the vats.  Sears set up little windmills with six feet of canvas on each blade – called salt mills. They pumped water through hollow pine logs lined with lead.

In 1793, a Harwich carpenter named Reuben Sears built a sliding square roof that opened and closed on oak rollers. His idea caught on.

Cape Cod Salt Boom

Here’s how the salt works operated: The salt mills powered pumps that drew in saltwater at high tide through the hollow logs. Then the water flowed into an upper tier of vats, called the water vats. The sun and wind evaporated the water, but left plants and sea animals in it. So the operator would let out the brine from the water vats and it would flow down into the pickle vats.

In the pickle vats, most of the biggest impurities — lime — came out.

Then the vat operator would let out the brine from the pickle vats, and the so-called “bitter water” would flow into the third, or water, vats for final evaporation. The operator would then shovel the crystallized salt out of the water vats and take it to a drying room.

All in all, it took about three weeks for the seawater to evaporate into salt.

Diagram of Enoch Harding’s saltworks on Bucks Creek in West Chatham.

The Cape Cod salt business got another boost in 1789.  The American Revolution had left the government deeply in debt, so Congress levied a tariff on imported salt to raise money. The price of salt shot up 25 percent. Then in the next few years, Congress raised the tariff three times, doubling the price for Cape Cod salt makers. It also defined a bushel as 50 pounds — smaller than the standard Cape Cod bushel of 75 pounds.

Congress also helped along the salt business by offering a bounty of three shillings for every bushel of salt. By 1802, Cape Cod had 136 salt works. People called them the “Lazy man’s gold mines.”

The Revolution had helped the Cape Cod salt industry in another way. The British Royal Navy destroyed many ships and impressed mariners, leaving Cape Cod’s fishing and coastal shipping industry in shambles. The peninsula fell into an economic depression. Salt making promised a way to earn a decent living.

Retired Sea Captains

Daniel Webster once described the very great number of sea captains and other mariners he’d met on Cape Cod. In a letter to his former constituents in Dennis, he recalled a jury trial in Barnstable Court. The case involved the entrance to a harbor in the Sandwich Islands. When Webster asked how many jurors knew the entrance to Owyhyhee Harbor, seven of the 12 said they knew it well.

The Cape had the highest ratio of mariners in the United States, and the highest total number as well, except for a few urban seaports. Sea captains had enough capital from their voyages to pay for the construction of the saltworks. It was a good job for men who often had trouble finding work on land.

John Sears, now known as Salty John, worked with other retired sea captains from Dennis to develop the saltworks. William P. Meyer, in his essay The Making and Unmaking of a Natural Resource: The Salt Industry of Coastal Southeastern Massachusetts, concludes the sea captains of Cape Cod created the salt industry.

The Cape also had plenty of skilled carpenters who made a full-time job out of building saltworks. One observer noted the salt business “gives employ to an amazing number of carpenters and other workmen.”

A saltmill

Another peculiarity of the Cape fed the salt industry, noted William P. Quinn in his book, The Saltworks of Historic Cape Cod. Descendants of the first European settlers were granted rights to common lands in perpetuity. That meant plenty of free land along upland beaches for the wooden vats, pipes, salt mills and drying sheds needed for salt making.

Finally, the Cape had a ready market. Fishermen, who salted the cod they caught, bought the product at the salt stores next to the salt works. Whatever they didn’t sell to fishermen they sent in packet ships to sell in Boston and New York.

What was left from the first vat was used as fertilizer. The bitter water produced Glauber’s salt, used in glassmaking, and Epsom salts. Salt makers sold both profitably.

Cape Cod Salt Mania

Cape Cod’s salt industry spread beyond Sesuit Neck in Dennis to Quivet Neck, all  along the Bass River and next to the Mill Pond in Yarmouthport. Salt was made along East Bay in Osterville, on the Common field in Barnstable Village and along Lewis Bay and Hyannis Harbor in Hyannis. Practically everyone in West Falmouth was a Quaker and nearly all got involved in salt making.

Onondaga saltworks showing salt being raked from solar evaporation vats of a design copied from the Cape Cod saltworks.

Salt kept the harbors busy as coastal schooners brought loads of soft lumber from Maine, fishing vessels bought salt and packet ships carried it to markets in Boston and New York.

In 1807, President Thomas Jefferson closed U.S. ports to all exports and restricted British imports. Congress repealed the duty on salt, but the price of salt shot up to $7 a barrel. The Cape’s salt works tripled over the next few years.

War of 1812

During the War of 1812, Congress restored the duty on imported salt. But British warships surrounded Cape Cod, seizing fishing vessels and blockading the packets that brought salt to markets in New York and Boston. That didn’t stop smugglers from trying to get through British lines. One smuggler used red sails because they were hard to see at night.

On Sept. 30, 1814,  the captain of the British frigate HMS Spencer, Richard Raggott, sent a letter to the “selectmen and proprietors of the salt works of Orleans.” In it, he demanded payment of $1,000 or he’d destroy the salt works. In December, the Spencer sailed into Rock Harbor, but the Orleans militia was ready to skirmish. They repulsed the vessel, killing at least one British marine.

Brewster, on the other hand, agreed to pay Raggott $4,000 to prevent him from bombarding its salt works along the Bay shore.

Falmouth also refused to pay ransom to the British.

Loring Crocker owned a salt works in the Common field behind the Unitarian Church in Barnstable. Raggott wrote to him, too, demanding $6,000 to protect his property.

Crocker and Barnstable’s committee of safety asked their counterparts in Boston for help. Boston sent four cannons that — according to lore — came from Ticonderoga.  The Barnstable militia mounted two guns in front of the salt works and two at Salteen Point in Barnstable Harbor.  When HMS Nymphe sailed into the harbor, 1,500 militiamen awaited her. She lobbed a cannon ball on shore, then left, emptyhanded. Two of those cannon now stand in front of Barnstable Courthouse.

A Frenzied Peace

After the declaration of peace, Congress kept the 20-cent duty on salt to pay for the war. From 1816 to 1820, Cape Cod went into a frenzy building salt works. At the peak of the salt business in 1831, 881 salt works lined the north and south shores producing half a million bushels of salt. Loring Crocker alone owned 17,000 feet — 3.2 miles — of vats.

Mashpee, then a de facto Indian reservation, was the only town that didn’t make salt.

“The turtle-like sheds of the salt-works were crowded into every nook in the hills,” wrote Thoreau.

The salt works were vulnerable to Cape Cod storms, though. In 1815, for example, a nor’easter accomplished what the British couldn’t: It swept away salt works along Buzzards Bay.  Over time, other storms damaged the vats and the saltmills, which were soon rebuilt.

West Yarmouth Salt Works. Thanks to the Yarmouth Historical Society.

But then the Great October Gale of 1841 hit Cape Cod, and hit it hard. Hundreds of Cape fishermen and mariners died in the storm. It laid waste to the fishing fleet and the salt works. It was the one storm from which Cape Cod never recovered.

Congress had already lifted the duties on imported salt by then, creating cheap competition to Cape Cod salt. But the damage to the fishing fleet shrank demand for salt. As a result, many people didn’t see the point in rebuilding their salt works. Construction of new salt works had already come to a halt six years earlier.

In 1842, Congress added insult to injury by reducing the import duty on salt to eight cents a bushel, and then reduced it further in 1846.

By 1850, Massachusetts lost about two-thirds of its capacity to produce salt.

Competition

During the Cape’s salt-making frenzy, a competitor emerged in the west. The Onondaga people and later Jesuit missionaries had long known about the salt brine springs at the southern end of Onondaga Lake near Syracuse, N.Y. In 1784, the new U.S. government and the Six Nations of the Iroquois League signed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. It gave the lands around Lake Onondaga to local salt producers, stipulating anyone could use the salt produced.

Starting in 1797, New York state promoted the upstate salt business by giving out leases to the springs. By 1810, Onondaga and Cayuga counties produced 3 million bushels of salt annually.

But upstate New York had no fleet of packet ships to transport the salt to market. During the War of 1812, Onondaga salt could not reach coastal markets.  The war persuaded lawmakers to approve a new waterway connecting the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean so salt and other products could reach markets to the east and west.

The Erie Canal at Little Falls, between 1880 and 1897

In 1825, the completed Erie Canal opened. In Syracuse people called it “the ditch that salt built” because a small tax on salt paid for the debt service on the canal. On Cape Cod, they might have called it “the ditch that killed the salt works.”

As workers dug the ditch, several large salt making companies imported carpenters from Cape Cod to build up the salt works near Syracuse.

The Fall of Cape Cod Salt

Thoreau and others blamed “competition from the west” for the decline of the Cape Cod salt works. William Meyer, on the other hand, pointed to the repeal of the tariff as the main cause.  And he argued that Congress hadn’t imposed the tariff in the first place to help the salt industry.

“For only one reason did members of Congress so long maintain a tax their constituents hated so much,” wrote Meyer. “The tariff was the chief source of support for the federal government, and imported salt made a particularly remunerative object of taxation.”

During his visits before the Civil War, Thoreau noted the saltmills had gone still. “Her salt works are fast going to decay,” he wrote. By 1888, the last salt work on Cape Cod was taken down.

Remnants

Only a few reminders of Cape Cod’s once-vast salt works still exist. The Aptucxet Trading Post Museum, part of the Bourne Historical Society, has a replica salt works. A miniature reproduction of the Falmouth salt works is on display at the Falmouth Museums on the Green.

Salt vats at the Aptucxet Trading Post.

Occasionally a storm will expose a lead-lined pine log once used to pipe water into evaporation vats. And keen observers may notice an old building made of wood that doesn’t seem to hold paint too well. It would have once been a salt work. The Kelley Chapel at the Yarmouth Historical Society is one.

In some places, the wood still weeps salt.

A small cemetery in West Brewster at the intersection of Airline Road and Old King’s Highway has just 124 headstones. One of them contains the epitaph:  “John Sears, Inventor of the Salt Works, Aged 72 yrs.”

With thanks to WILLIAM B. MEYER. “The Making and Unmaking of a Natural Resource: The Salt Industry of Coastal   Southeastern Massachusetts.” Massachusetts Historical Review 15 (2013): 123–50. https://doi.org/10.5224/masshistrevi.15.1.0123. Also to The Saltworks of Historic Cape Cod by William B. Quinn and Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky. 

Images: Salt crystals By Mark Schellhase – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4500571. Bourne saltworks replica by Joanne Corsano. 

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