love stories

Ever since the Lexington Alarm, Abigail Bishop had gotten used to the soldiers marching down High Street right outside her window. Her parents entertained the officers; General Washington himself had come to their house.

Alexander Scammell met Miss Nabby Bishop in Mistick, pictured in the background. View from Bunker HIll.

So she wasn’t at all surprised when one day in the summer of 1775 a tall, thin soldier in a sky-blue regimental coat came to the door. He had ridden his horse from Cambridge, and he had business with her father.

She didn’t find out who he was until the servant stabled his horse and he’d finished his business. Then she was introduced to Major Alexander Scammell. He had been a lawyer up north before the war, and now his brigade was besieging Boston as part of the new Continental Army. He would stay the night in Mistick.

Over the next six years, Alexander would endure hard marching, combat, privation, grief and disappointment. Through it all, the pretty young woman sitting across the dining table from him would sustain his spirits.

Maj. Alexander Scammell

At dinner, Major Scammell had them all laughing. He may have told them about the different regiments arriving in Boston from the southern colonies. Militiamen from the Virginia backcountry wore buckskin jackets with “Liberty or Die” written on them. Their outfits seemed hilarious to the fishermen in Colonel John Glover’s Marblehead regiment. But they themselves looked ridiculous to the Virginians in their short jackets and loose fishermen’s trousers.

Alexander Scammell

As Major Scammell regaled the Bishops with stories, Abigail noticed he had perfectly correct table manners. She guessed he was about thirty and certainly unmarried. At home in Portsmouth, he said, he read law with John Sullivan, now a general commanding a brigade.

By the end of Alexander’s visit to the Bishops’, he asked her parents if he could call on Miss Abigail.

They said yes.

Major Alexander Scammell wasn’t just interested. He was utterly smitten with the beautiful and well-born Miss Abigail Bishop. Over the next weeks and months, he daydreamed about her as the ragtag American militias kept the British bottled up in Boston.

Several more times that summer he rode to Mistick. The Bishops welcomed him into their elegant home and showed him many small courtesies. He started to call Miss Abigail “Dearest Nabby.” She told him she loved him.

Growing up in the tiny village of Mistick, Abigail Bishop had a quiet upbringing typical for a young girl from a family of means. But then around her thirteenth birthday, Parliament’s Stamp Act stirred up the villagers. People started arguing and going to meetings. The villagers signed a resolution against the Act, putting them in opposition to the King of England.

When Abigail was seventeen, five men and boys were killed in the bloody massacre on King Street in Boston. John Clark, a village boy her own age, had been horribly wounded. John Adams, the husband of her mother’s cousin and dear friend, Abigail, agreed to defend the king’s soldiers in court. Abigail Adams told her mother that people threw mudballs at John in the street. They also threw rocks through the Adams’ windows though Abigail was pregnant and had two small children at home.

Most of the two hundred people who lived in Mistick supported the patriot cause. But one of the village’s wealthiest citizens, Isaac Royall, stayed loyal to the king. He ended up fleeing the town, fearing for his life.

Three days after Royall fled came the call to arms. The redcoats were marching to Lexington. Nearly every man in Mistick, fifty-nine of them, answered the alarm. They marched to Merriam Corners and shot at the king’s men retreating from Concord. Walter Polley, just two years younger than Abigail, had been shot and brought home to die.

War Zone

The turmoil didn’t stop. Companies of soldiers were always marching through town to the sound of fife and drum. Rumors and alarms flew constantly: the king’s army would attack the village, their warships would sail up the river, they’d confiscate all the wood. Alexander knew more than most what was going on, and he shared what he knew during his visits.

During the Battle of Bunker Hill, Abigail, terrified, watched smoke and flames from Charlestown when the redcoats set fire to it. Then after the battle was over, horribly wounded men were carried bleeding and groaning to tents set up in the field next to Wade’s Tavern. Alexander had fought with his New Hampshire regiment in the battle. To Abigail’s relief, he wasn’t among the casualties.

Map of the Siege of Boston

The siege of Boston dragged on through the autumn and winter. Mistick was a war zone for the duration. Homeless refugees flooded into the village. Some had smallpox, sent out of Boston by General Gage. The overseers of the poor moved quickly to send them out of Mistick to their kinfolk in other towns.

Finally, the stalemate broke eleven months after it began. On March 17, the day the Irish soldiers celebrated their St. Patrick, General Washington mounted cannons on a hill and aimed them at the king’s men below in Boston. He then notified General Gage that he wouldn’t fire the cannons if the English troops and Loyalists evacuated.

Abigail was glad the war would move away from Mistick, but not at all happy that Alexander was ordered elsewhere. On one of his last visits, he told her the war wasn’t going well in Canada. He said casualties had been horrific, General Montgomery was killed and Colonel Arnold wounded. What was left of the army was coming home—amidst a smallpox epidemic. Alexander had orders to cover their retreat in New York.

Alexander Scammell Writes

In June 1776, Alexander wrote Abigail from Canada, where he’d seen battlefields soaked with blood. The cold was disagreeable and the insects annoying, he wrote. Her latest letter—her “dear Epistle”—had given him a “new flow of spirits.” “Make me happy my dear in writing every Opportunity,” he begged.

Alexander’s spirits needed lifting. Ten thousand men had marched into Canada intending to capture Quebec and persuade French-speaking Canadians to join the thirteen colonies. Instead, the patriots were defeated at the Battle of Quebec. A thousand were killed or wounded, more than a thousand were captured and thousands came down with smallpox. Retreating from Canada, the Continental Army appeared weak, divided and disheartened.

General Washington feared, correctly, that the British army would try to occupy New York City after evacuating Boston. Unlike New England, New York hadn’t decisively sided against the king. The city’s merchants and government officials were supplying British ships in the harbor.

Daydreams of Nabby kept Alexander’s spirits up in the face of such depressing developments.

The Battle of Long Island by Domenick D’Andrea

British warships landed thirty-two thousand brutally efficient soldiers and marines on Staten Island. Washington thought they’d attack Manhattan, but they instead landed on Long Island. The untrained Continentals were no match for the English forces, who routed the Continentals in the Battle of Brooklyn. They killed or wounded at least a thousand patriots and captured another thousand, including General Sullivan.

Retreat

Alexander hadn’t been taken prisoner, but the Continental Army, pinned against the East River, faced almost certain annihilation. Washington sneaked the army off Long Island from under British noses. John Glover’s Marblehead regiment ferried nine thousand soldiers and horses across the East River in the dead of night. Otherwise, the Continental Army would almost certainly have been vanquished.

The army then fled north to White Plains. But Crown forces defeated the Continentals again in battle, and again the army retreated.

The day after the Battle of White Plains was one of the lowest points of the war. All seemed lost. Alexander found time to dash off a note to his dearest Nabby. He hadn’t heard a word from her in months. “I long for the happy moment when I can press you to my heart,” he wrote. “My dear Girl write to me every Opportunity. A Letter from you would soften the Fatigues of War.” Then, he wrote, “The fighting part of this campaign will soon be over.”

But it wasn’t.

He had to do something. He decided on a surprise dawn attack on the Trenton garrison at Christmas. On Christmas Eve, Alexander boarded a sixty-foot Durham boat with General Washington. In close to a logistical miracle, John Glover’s amphibious regiment ferried overnight twenty-four hundred men, their horses and cannon across the ice-choked Delaware River. In the morning, the Continentals captured nine hundred Hessian soldiers and suffered almost no casualties.

Glover’s Regiment crossing the Delaware with Gen. Washington

Washington then begged his men to re-enlist, offering them each ten dollars of his own money. Many stayed because they had no money and no way to get home through territory infested with enemy soldiers.

A week after the victory at Trenton, Lord Cornwallis and eight thousand of his men made a frontal assault on the patriots. The Continentals held them off until darkness ended the action, but Cornwallis had trapped them against the Delaware River. In the morning they once again faced almost certain annihilation.

Washington decided on a desperate move to give Cornwallis the slip. The army would march twelve miles over frozen roads in the dark and attack the British garrison in Princeton. From there the army could march to safety in the northern mountains of New Jersey.

He ordered wheels covered in rags, torches extinguished and complete silence as the army began the long march over ice-covered roads. Some of the soldiers had no shoes and left bloody tracks in the snow.

They didn’t arrive until two hours after the sun rose. The army had lost the element of surprise and marched right up against Crown forces waiting for them. Alexander saw the redcoats gaining the upper hand in battle. He wheeled his horse around and rode to the frontline, waving his sword for the men to follow. Washington rode up on his white horse moments later to rally the troops.

The tide of battle turned. The Continental soldiers regrouped, fought hard and forced the redcoats to retreat.

The victories at Trenton and Princeton had saved the Continental Army.

Winter Encampment

Washington then took the army north to winter over in Morristown, New Jersey. From there, Alexander rode two hundred fifty miles in the intense cold to see Miss Nabby. He slept in taverns or farmers’ houses. His heart full of hope and anticipation, he again came to the Bishop house on High Street. And once again he sat in the Bishops’ parlor, enjoying their hospitality and regaling them with stories and jokes.

Alone with Miss Nabby, he asked her if he could ask her father for her hand in marriage.

She said no.

She told him she loved him. But she wouldn’t marry him unless he quit the army. She’d had enough of worry, enough of the long separations.

Devastated, Alexander returned to winter quarters in the New Jersey mountains. The army was shrinking as the hungry, cold men were deserting right and left. Then smallpox broke out in February.

Alexander didn’t give up. He got permission to leave again, and he set out on his horse for Mistick. Once in the Bishop house, he asked Miss Nabby to let him ask her father for her hand. She said only if he quit the army.

Alexander Scammell’s Divided Heart

Nearly two years after he first met Abigail Bishop, Alexander Scammell wrestled with his divided heart. He was torn between his desire to marry her and his devotion to the cause of liberty. He was concerned for his men who had suffered and sacrificed so much. And he couldn’t abandon Washington, the man he considered his great and good general.

George Washington Before the Battle of Trenton (1792) by John Trumbull

Alexander sadly left the Bishops for New Hampshire to raise a new regiment for the summer campaign. “I feel as if I had left my better half behind me, a certain inexpressible something hangs upon my mind, that I can’t feel happy when absent from my dearest Nabby,” he wrote to her in March. He begged her to marry him. He cajoled her, he even suggested she could immortalize her character by encouraging her lover to defend his country.

“If you can consent to my proposal, I will fly to you the wings of Love,” he wrote.

There was no need. She did not give her consent.

English General John Burgoyne was planning an invasion from Canada, hoping to cut New England off from the other colonies. Alexander took his regiment north to join the army and try to stop the enemy. He led his regiment on a hundred-mile march over muddy roads through dense forest. The weather turned wet and rainy. Sometimes it snowed. Sometimes it hailed.

They arrived at the encampment on May 20, 1777.

But it wasn’t until September that British forces met the Continental Army at Saratoga. Alexander bravely galloped through enemy lines to rally his regiment. He suffered a leg wound during the battle, but it didn’t incapacitate him.

The Tide Turns

The victory at Saratoga turned the tide of the war. It persuaded the French to recognize the thirteen colonies as an independent republic and send military aid. But Washington and his men didn’t know that then. Alexander stayed with his general.

Farther south, the enemy had captured Philadelphia. Nabby’s cousin John Adams, serving in the Continental Congress, had to flee from the British in the middle of the night.

Washington reviews the troops at Valley Forge.

Alexander took his men to Valley Forge, where they starved and shivered through the winter with the rest of the army. In January Washington appointed him adjutant general, keeping him terrifically busy filing reports and issuing orders. For months he was too busy to visit Mistick. But Abigail was always on his mind.

In the spring of 1778, the French agreed to side with the Americans in the war. The English then retreated from Philadelphia for New York. They encountered Washington’s army in Monmouth, New Jersey.

Washington ordered General Charles Lee to attack the English rearguard. Lee fought tentatively and failed to press his advantage. . Washington took command on the battlefield, Alexander at his side. They rallied the troops and held the field. Washington later said the man who inspired them was Alexander Scammell.

Alexander Scammell Tries Again

Though Alexander was too busy to visit Mistick, he always found time to write to Miss Nabby. In November, he sat at his desk at winter quarters in Middlebrook, New Jersey. He expressed his bewilderment to her. Why hadn’t she written? he asked. “I am at a loss,” he wrote. He predicted the war would end soon, and he hoped to see her that winter. In a half-crazy sentence he wrote that he would take her silence as acceptance of his marriage proposal.

On the day after Christmas, he wrote to her again from Camp Middlebrook. He was low in spirits. Though she hadn’t written to him, a clear sign of her disinterest, he asked her once more to marry him. And he used every argument he could think of. They weren’t getting any younger, he wrote, and he knew Washington would give him leave if she agreed to marry him. Plus, they had a duty to get married. On top of that, the war was nearing its end.

Finally, he wrote, no one could make her happier than he could, and she was too nice to leave him hanging.

“I know you have a generous Soul. I conjure you by all the tender moments we have spent together to write me an answer to this I must urge & insist upon it,” he wrote.

She didn’t write.

He told his friends that he feared the war would doom him to old bachelorism. But three months later he gave Miss Nabby one more try.

Dear Sir,

On April 13, 1779, Alexander Scammell sat down and wrote to John Bishop, asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He did it though Abby hadn’t agreed to marry him, and she hadn’t written to him in two years.

His “fixed determination,” he wrote, “…has been ever since hostilities commenc’d to continue in the army so long as my bleeding country demanded my services, and to prefer my Country’s good to every self-interested consideration.”

However, he wrote, his happiness depended on Abigail. Though he was willing she should find someone else who would make her happy, he was still interested in her if she hadn’t.

He worried, he wrote, that the Bishops thought he was ignoring their daughter because he didn’t visit. But, he explained, General Washington wouldn’t give him leave because of his duties as adjutant general. And he made one last, desperate attempt to win Abigail Bishop:

“Your former Goodness and Generosity imboldens me to ask your and Mrs Bishop’s consent to marry Miss Naby, without being oblig’d to leave the army, provided she is willing. At the same time could wish you would not mention to her that I have wrote this Letter to you, as I have not previously obtain’d her consent to make this proposal, besides it might wound her delicacy, if she knew I had wrote you on the subject, and so frankly opened the State of our Courtship.”

John BIshop, like his daughter, didn’t reply to Alexander.

Still ‘No’

Still he dreamed of Abigail Bishop.

The war in the north had ground down to a stalemate, and the action moved south. The army then spent the fierce winter of 1779-1780 in Morristown, New Jersey, again short of food and supplies. Men died of the cold. They were so desperate for food and warmth they plundered the local farms. Alexander had to supervise their trials and punishments. But fighting was unlikely, so Alexander finally got permission to leave camp. On Christmas Day he set out on his horse for Mistick.

Through the snow and ice he rode, crossing rivers in boats and sleeping in taverns and farmhouses. He reached the Bishop house, where the family invited him in. Finally, for the first time in nearly three years, he laid eyes on Miss Nabby. She was still unattached, still lovely.

And she still wouldn’t marry him.

Alexander finally gave up. In the summer of 1780, he wrote again to John Bishop, thanking him for the polite, generous and kind treatment he’d received from the family.

“I once fondly hop’d for a Connection in your Family, and that I should before this had the honor of addressing you in a more respectful manner,” he wrote. “My hopes have now vanish’d, and I am oblidg’d to give up my long expected happiness. But altho’ I never expect to stand in a nearer Relation to you than at present, yet my gratitude will never be diminished.”

The Death of Alexander Scammell

Alexander wrote from New York, where he had supervised the hanging of the British spy, Major John André, Benedict Arnold’s accomplice. The task was so disdainful he asked permission to resign his post as adjutant and command a regiment instead.

By May Alexander Scammell had command of a light infantry, the vanguard for the army’s march to Yorktown. On September 30, 1781, he was scouting fortifications the British had recently abandoned. He came upon a British cavalry patrol that he mistook for American.

When he realized his mistake he surrendered, but another cavalryman came up behind him and shot him in the back. The British took him captive and then paroled him to a hospital in Williamsburg. Alexander Scammell died there on October 6, 1781.

Washington was said to have cried at the news. Three of his fellow officers held him in such esteem that they named their sons after him: General Peleg Wadsworth, General Henry Dearborn and Colonel John Brooks, later governor of Massachusetts.

Five years after Alexander Scammell died, Abigail Bishop married Dr. Archelaus Putnam of Danvers, Massachusetts. She was thirty-three years old, thirteen years younger than he. On November 12, 1786, Abigail Adams’ sister, Elizabeth Smith Shaw, wrote a letter to her niece suggesting Nabby Bishop married for money rather than love.

Miss Nabby kept her letters from Alexander Scammell to the day she died.

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This story is an excerpt from the New England Historical Society’s book, Love Stories from  History. Click here to order your copy today!