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The 1772 Gaspee Affair, Rhode Island’s Own Tea Party (But the Ship Burned), Part 1

The real first shot of the American Revolution may have been fired at the HMS Gaspee, a British customs schooner, on Narragansett Bay in 1772 rather than on Lexington Green in 1775.

By June 9, 1772, the Gaspee’s crew had almost daily been boarding and searching colonists’ vessels, even little packet boats, in search of smuggled goods. Americans sailing Narragansett Bay were especially offended by the Gaspee’s arrogant and aggressive commander, Lt. William Dudingston.

The Burning of the Gaspee by Charles deWolf Brownell, c1892

So on that June night, a young man sitting in a rowboat noticed Dudingston in a white shirt leaning over the starboard gunwale of the Gaspee. Joseph Bucklin realized he had a shot at Dudingston – and took it.

Bucklin wasn’t the only patriot on Narragansett Bay that night. He was one of a hundred or so Sons of Liberty who rowed out in longboats to capture the crew of the Gaspee. Then they burned the ship to the waterline. What happened that night is celebrated to this day in Rhode Island’s annual commemoration of its own Tea Party.

Customs

Dudingston had a right to board ships in Narragansett Bay. Rhode Island was a notorious haven for smugglers and privateers, and Britain badly needed the customs revenue from the tax they were evading.

The British government bore a crushing debt incurred in winning the French and Indian War. It needed money, and collecting customs duties was one way of getting it.

In 1764, the British Parliament passed the Sugar Act, a tax on sugar, and the British Admiralty bought six ships ‘of Marblehead design’ to enforce it. At the time ‘Marblehead’ was understood to be of the type built in Essex, Mass. One of those vessels was the Gaspee.

Rhode Islanders didn’t take kindly to British ships enforcing the new law. In 1764, they attacked the HMS St. John. Five years later they burned the HMS Liberty, a customs ship, in Newport Harbor.

By 1772 the Gaspee had become a daily nuisance in Narragansett Bay because her crew had an incentive to collect as much customs duty as possible: They shared in it.

Rhode Island was fed up with the Gaspee; so much so that on May 20, 1772, Gov. Joseph Wanton wrote a letter to the British secretary of state complaining about her. He argued the Gaspee‘s crew didn’t have the right to seize a quantity of rum and try the owner outside of the colony of Rhode Island. On top of that, they insulted the colonists with ‘the most abusive and contumelious language.’

Gaspee Makes A Big Mistake

On June 9, 1772, the Gaspee gave chase in Narragansett Bay to a packet boat named Hannah and ran aground on Namquid Point.

The captain of the Hannah, Thomas Lindsey, came ashore at Providence and went right to John Brown to tell him what happened.

Abraham Whipple

John Brown was perhaps the wealthiest man in Rhode Island, a merchant who engaged in the slave trade and the China trade. He had for years invested in privateers.

On talking the Hannah’s captain, Brown immediately concluded the Gaspee would be grounded until well after midnight. Then the rising tide could free her. Brown saw a way to rid Rhode Island’s merchants of the ship commanded by the much-hated William Dudingston.

Brown ordered eight longboats delivered to Fenner’s Wharf, their oars and oarlocks muffled. He sent a drummer around town to announce the grounding of the Gaspee. Anyone interested in destroying that troublesome vessel should go to James Sabin’s house, right next to Fenner’s Wharf.

Ephraim Bowen, years old about 19, answered the call. He grabbed his father’s gun, powder and shot and found a crowd at Sabin’s. Some were casting musket balls in the kitchen. His friend, 18-year-old Joseph Bucklin, a tavern-keeper’s son, had arrived, too.

Who Goes There?

On that moonless night, more than 100 Sons of Liberty silently rowed out in a line of longboats to the Gaspee,

Lt. William Dudingston leaned over the starboard gunwale in his white shirt and demanded, “Who goes there?”

Abraham Whipple responded. He was a Providence, R.I.-born seafarer who worked for John Brown and privateered during the French and Indian War. He was also sheriff of Kent County.

Dudingston asked again, “Who goes there?”

Said Whipple, “ “I am the sheriff of the county of Kent, G… d ..n you. I have got a warrant to apprehend you, G.. d..n you; so surrender, G.. d..n you.”

Joseph Bucklin, standing on the main seat of the longboat, realized he had a shot at Dudingston.

“Ephe, reach me your gun and I can kill that fellow,’ he said to Ephraim Bowen. Bucklin then fired at Lt. William Dudingston, hitting him in the arm and lower abdomen. He exclaimed, “I have killed the rascal.” Dudingston fell back, thinking himself mortally wounded.

Today, Rhode Islanders celebrate that shot as the ‘First Shot of the Revolutionary War.’

Read the rest of the story in Part 2. This article was updated in 2022.

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Joseph Moody, The Colonial Minister Who Wore a Handkerchief Over His Face

The story of the Rev. Joseph Moody, who preached with a handkerchief over his face, was too good for Nathaniel Hawthorne to pass up.

The legend of the Puritan preacher in colonial Maine was passed down for generations, and Hawthorne (who lived in Maine as a teenager and young adult) got wind of it. He wrote a fictional short story about Moody called The Minister’s Black Veil..

But Joseph Moody had already written the story of his own life in a diary written in coded Latin.

Uncommonly Qualified

The real Joseph Moody was born in 1700 in York, Maine, graduated from Harvard in 1718 and died in 1753.

As the minister of the Second Church of York, he was greatly esteemed, according to an epitaph. He was also

…an excelling instance of knowledge, ingenuity, learning, piety, virtue and usefulness, was very serviceable as a school master, clerk, register, magistrate and afterwards as a minister was uncommonly qualified and spirited to do good

Illustration from ‘The Minister’s Black Veil,’ by Elenore Abbott, 1900

Joseph Moody was the son of Parson Samuel Moody, a longwinded, eccentric and irritable minister. Parson Moody served as chaplain to Sir William Pepperell’s regiment during the siege of Louisbourg in 1745.

There are several stories about when – and why – Joseph Moody wore the handkerchief over his face, as well as its color.

According to one version, he was happy for 14 years in various local jobs — as schoolmaster, York’s registrar of deeds, county clerk and judge. But his father thought he should preach, and prevailed upon the town to incorporate a second parish in York.

Preaching didn’t suit Joseph Moody. He sank into melancholy, his mind became disordered and he started wearing the black handkerchief knotted above his forehead and hanging below his chin. . As townspeople began to shun him, he became more of a recluse, wandering the churchyard at night.

According to another version, Joseph Moody was disappointed when his cousin Mary Hirst wouldn’t marry him. He grew increasingly eccentric, finally donning the black silk handkerchief. According to a third story, he killed a friend in a hunting accident and wore the handkerchief ever after. His father made him stay up all night with the body of his friend as atonement.

The Real Joseph Moody

Richard Bowen, a program specialist at the Museums of Old York, offered a fourth – and more plausible – explanation: Joseph Moody was vulnerable to depression and guilt. After years of overwork, he suffered a mental and physical breakdown when his wife and infant daughter died in childbirth.

Only during that period did he wear a white handkerchief over his face. He recovered, and his parishioners welcomed him back. He went on to become the esteemed minister described in his epitaph.

The Diary

When Joseph Moody turned 20 years old, he began to keep a diary, in code and in Latin. The book was tiny, about five inches long by three inches wide. (You can read excerpts from it here.)

His diary, later deciphered, records life on the Maine frontier. It contains news of conflicts with Indians, of pirates and of dangerous voyages by boat to Marblehead, Gloucester and Newbury in Massachusetts.

On May 25, 1723, for example, he wrote,

Tis said that Sergeant Card was beset by two Indians about 9 or 10 o’clock last night near Capt Harmon’s barn one of which fired on him and pierced the breast of his Jacket we scarce know what to think of so strange a story.

On April 5, 1724, he reported:

Several vessels lately taken by Nutt ye Pirate and kindly treated.
Joshua Elwells was taken from him.

Joseph Moody also seemed preoccupied with death, often recording only that someone had died – even as far away as Boston.

He died in 1753 at the age of 52. People said he sang hymns in his room during his last hours. Today, you can find his tombstone at the old Second Parish Burying Ground on Route 91 in York. It reads:

Although this stone may moulder into dust,
Yet Joseph Moody’s name continue must.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Before the Famine Ships, The Irish Made Their Mark in New England

When the Irish famine ships arrived in Boston in the 1840s, tens if not hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Ireland already made their mark on New England.

Henry Knox, successful Scots-Irishman

By 1790, there were 400,000 Americans of Irish birth or ancestry out of a population of 3.9 million. Half were Scots-Irish from Ulster, the other half were Catholics from southern Ireland.

Before the American Revolution, the Irish population in America was second only to the English, with 70 Irish settlements in the British colonies.

It is far more difficult to find information about the Irish Catholics of colonial New England than about the Scots-Irish. Puritans persecuted Catholics, while they more or less tolerated the Scots-Irish. But so absent were Irish Catholics from the historical record that some historians – and a Scots-Irish society – claim few Irish Catholics lived in New England before the Revolutionary War.

It isn’t so. Protestant and Catholic immigrants from Ireland taught the Puritan children, settled the Maine and New Hampshire frontiers, built roads, wharves and warehouses, led armies and became successful merchants. Eight of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence had Irish birth or ancestry, as did seven of the 54 framers of the Constitution. They governed states, wrote laws and fought in the Revolution.

The First Great Migration

The first great migration to New England began in 1628, when King Charles granted a new charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Between 1629 and 1640, 20,000 people crossed the Atlantic. They weren’t all Puritans. Immigration fever had caught hold of Anglicans, Irish Catholics and Scots-Irish Protestants. They came to escape religious persecution, high rents, crop failures and poverty.

The Puritans in charge scrutinized the new arrivals. ‘Persons unmeete to inhabit here’ were sent back over the Atlantic. And since the Puritans wrote history from their own intolerant viewpoint, the Anglican and Irish experience of that era is less well – and less accurately – known.

In 1640 the great migration ended with the outbreak of the English Civil War, and some of the Massachusetts Bay colonists returned to England to fight with the Parliamentarians. New England fell into an economic depression, and the first wave of immigration ended for at least a decade.

By 1650, a steady stream of Boston-bound ships began to leave Ireland filled with redemptioners – indentured servants who agreed to near-slavery for seven years in exchange for passage, food, shelter and clothing. That stream would become a flood.

Scots-Irish

King James I had encouraged Scottish Protestants to move to Ulster in the 16^th century as a cure for overpopulation and to discourage further rebellion. They lived there for generations, where they clashed with the Catholics, but prospered from the manufacture of textiles.

Then in 1698 the English government banned the export of wool, destroying the Ulster wool industry. Crop failures inspired an exodus. The first major migration of Scots-Irish to America was a group that came with Rev. James McGregor from County Londonderry to Boston in 1718. Many of them moved to New Hampshire, establishing the town of Londonderry.

The Puritans accepted the Scots-Irish because of their Protestant religion and because they arrived in organized groups, often led by clergy. Plus, they were useful as pioneers in the forests of New Hampshire and along the Kennebec and Eastern rivers in Maine. There they acted as buffers from Indians.

Many place names in Maine and New Hampshire reflect their Scots-Irish roots: Derry, Antrim and Londonderry, N.H.; Belfast and Limerick, Maine; Colrain, Mass.; and Londonderry, Vt. (Maine today ranks seventh in the percentage of residents of Scots-Irish descent. )

As individuals, though, the Scots-Irish didn’t always receive a welcome. Their Presbyterian meetinghouse was burned in Worcester, an early harbinger of Know Nothingism.

Dangerous Catholics

The Puritans treated Irish Catholics even worse. They wouldn’t let people own property or carry on a business in Boston unless they took the Oath of Allegiance to some Protestant faith.

In 1723, Boston selectmen issued an order that anyone who came from Ireland within the past three years must register with the town because they might become a town charge or ‘otherwise prejuditial to the well fair and prosperity of the place.’

Pope Night

A notice from a Boston town meeting in 1746 warns that several Catholics reside in the town ‘and it may be very Dangerous for such persons to Reside here in Case we should be attack’d by an Enemy.’ Three days later, after a committee investigation, the selectmen reported they suspected ‘a considerable number of Roman Catholics to be now in Town.’

From the 1740s to the 1760s, rival gangs fought on Nov. 5 over the right to burn the Catholic pope in effigy, Pope Night.

Oath of Allegiance

The Catholics kept out of the Puritans’ way and they stayed out of the historical record. Historian Michael O’Brien argues that many Irish Catholics abandoned their faith and became Baptists and Methodists. “There was no alternative for them,” he concluded.

In 1678, the men who took the Oath of Allegiance before the Massachusetts governor had such Irish Catholic names as Murphy, Dempsey, Casey, O’Kelly, Hearn and Collins.

Many of the Irish Catholics came as indentured servants. They sailed from Dublin, Cork and Waterford to Marblehead, Boston, Providence and Piscataqua, Maine. Some came from Galway via Newfoundland, where they fished.

Some came by way of Barbados, where Oliver Cromwell had deported 50,000 Irish Catholic peasants as indentured servants in the mid 17^th century. Ann Glover was one. She was living in Boston by 1680 and hanged on Nov. 16, 1688 as a witch. The proof: she could only say the Lord’s Prayer in Gaelic.

Soldiers and Schoolmasters

Another indentured servant from Ireland was Matthew Lyon, born in Dublin on July 14, 1749.. He emigrated to Woodbury, Conn., in 1764, and he fought in the Revolution. Afterward he was elected to Congress, where he started the first brawl.

Records show early 18^th century soldiers and schoolmasters named Kelly, Sullivan, Fitzgerald, Hickey, Murphy, Mooney, Maloney, Lynch and Reilly. And there are plenty of New England towns with Irish Catholic place names, suggesting the Scots-Irish weren’t the only hardy pioneers. There’s Kilkenny, N.H.; the lost town of Cork, Maine; Dublin, N.H., and Dublin, Maine; and three Waterfords – in Maine, Vermont and Connecticut.

Half the Rebels

Washington at Valley Forge

With no love of the English, Irish immigrants and their descendants played major roles in achieving American independence. John Hancock was Scots-Irish; so was George Washington’s trusted adviser, Gen. Henry Knox. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, Matthew Thornton, came from non-Ulster Ireland – in Limerick – though he lived in Londonderry, N.H.

More than 1,200 officers in the American armies came from Ireland, including Gen. John Sullivan, later a New Hampshire governor. And the muster roles of the Continental Army and Navy are filled with Hibernian names. There are 695 Kellys alone who fought against the British.

So many fought, in fact, that one British general testified at the House of Commons that ‘half the rebel Continental Army were from Ireland.’

St. Patrick’s Day

The Continental Army also celebrated St. Patrick’s Day in 1778 at Valley Forge. According to an account of the incident, some of the Pennsylvania German volunteers made a stuffed scarecrow they called a ‘paddy’ and hoisted it on a pole. It attracted a crowd of angry Irish soldiers, who threatened a riot. Their officers couldn’t restore discipline.

Then George Washington arrived on horseback and tried to calm the outraged Irishmen. Finally he said, “I, too, am a lover of St. Patrick’s day, and will settle the affair by making all the army keep the day.”

He then ordered a whiskey ration to every man in camp, and the soldiers long remembered the day as a pleasant episode in camp life.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Great New England Shoemakers Strike of 1860

The great shoemakers strike of 1860 began with 3,000 Lynn, Mass., shoe workers who deliberately chose George Washington‘s birthday to start their righteous rebellion.

Shoe workers march during the shoemakers strike.

Employers had taken advantage of workers’ desperation following the Panic of 1857 and cut their pay. Tens of thousands would soon join them in the struggle for a living wage.

Within a week the strike spread to 25 New England shoe towns, as 20,000 shoe workers walked off the job. Another 20,000 supporters marched in parades, came to rallies and jeered the out-of-town police.

Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln, then campaigning for president of the United States, announced his support for the shoemakers strike.

“I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers can strike when they want to, where they are not obliged to labor whether you pay them or not,” he wrote. “I like a system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere.”

By the end of the shoemakers strike, shoe workers would claim a partial victory, and their newly formed unions would live on to fight another day.

$1 A Week

The New England shoemakers strike had been brewing for years. Shoe workers had traditionally worked as fishermen and farmers. They made shoes at home to supplement their incomes. Men shaped the leather and their wives and daughters sewed uppers to soles. Eventually, demand for shoes increased, and employers centralized production in factories. By 1850, Lynn produced 4.5 million shoes a year.

In 1852, the Lynn factories introduced Singer sewing machines. Consequently, boys and girls could do the work previously done by skilled adult artisans. The children worked for 10 exhausting, dangerous hours a day.

Then the financial panic of 1857 sent the country into a long depression. Shoe workers lost their jobs and ran up heavy debts. When their employers rehired them the next year, they cut the workers’ wages and lengthened their hours. For 16-hour days, men earned $3 a week, women only $1. It wasn’t enough to support a family, let alone repay debt.

Of the 50,000 journeymen shoe workers in Massachusetts, only Lynners had organized a union by 1860. They formed the Mechanics Association in 1859, led by Alonzo Draper, a married 24-year-old law student. Draper also edited the paper, the New England Mechanic.

The union members elected James Dillon, a 35-year-old Englishman, as vice president. Napoleon Wood, another leader, was a Methodist minister who often said the struggle for decent living standards didn’t conflict with his religious beliefs.

Best Interests

Lyceum Hall, where the shoemakers strike began.

In early February, the Mechanics Association held a mass meeting at Lyceum Hall in Lynn to decide on a plan. They appointed committees to meet with employers, and they wrote a circular stating their demand for higher wages.

The circular said the working men had everyone’s best interest at heart, “inasmuch as the wealth of the masses improves the value of real estate, increases the demand for manufactured goods, and promotes the moral and intellectual growth of society.”

The employers refused to meet with the workers.

The Shoemakers Strike Begins

And so they walked off the job on Washington’s birthday because it was a “fitting day for a blow in favor of the cause you engage in.”

Reporters covered the mass meeting at Lyceum Hall in Lynn on Feb. 22, 1860, calling it the ‘largest and most enthusiastic of its kind ever held in New England.’ The workers set up committees of 100 men each to post the names of scabs, to keep order and to make sure shoes wouldn’t be finished elsewhere. They then marched to their factories and handed in their tools.

That same day, several hundred shoe workers in Natick met. They decided to strike and marched through the streets singing a song to the tune of Yankee Doodle.

Starvation looks us in the face.
We cannot work so low.
Such prices are a sore disgrace.
Our children ragged go.

The strike leaders over the next few weeks traveled throughout New England, urging shoe workers to organize and to strike. In Massachusetts they went to Marblehead, Newburyport and Haverhill. In New Hampshire to Rochester, Dover, Farmington and Barrington. They also traveled to Berwick, Maine. Draper went as far as New York, giving speeches and raising money for the strike. Newspapers called it ‘The Revolution at the North’ and ‘The Rebellion among the Workmen of New England.’

No Slaves Here

A few days after the men went on strike, the women stitchers and binders decided to join them. They planned a Great Ladies Procession in Lynn at 10 a.m. on March 8, but a blizzard began two hours earlier. Undaunted, 1,000 women and 5,000 men plowed through snow drifts that appeared impassable. They carried banners that read, ‘American Ladies Will Not Be Slaves: Give Us a Fair Compensation and We Will Labour Cheerfully.’ Others read, ‘Our Union is complete: Our success certain!’

Ten days later, workers marched in another procession in Lynn. It was two miles long, with 10,000 workers from North Shore shoe towns, two companies of infantry from Lynn and Marblehead and several fire departments. Thousands lined the street to watch the parade, including school children who got the day off.

Shoemakers Strike Ends

lincoln-hamlin-republican-ticket-appleton-motor-wi-19-jul-1860

Lincoln supported the shoemakers strike.

There was no rowdyism, and the strike leaders strongly discouraged alcohol. The strikers enjoyed community support, with businessmen contributing money and groceries and clergy denouncing the employers from their pulpits. When Boston police arrived at the train station, a crowd of 8,000 people jeered and hissed at them.

The employers were ready to raise wages by the second week of the shoemakers strike, but refused to recognize the union. On April 10, a thousand Lynn workers went back on the job after 30 employers agreed to raise wages by 10 percent. Some held out for a few weeks longer, but the shoemakers strike had ended.

The women had already gone back to work. Though the men supported them, they didn’t include the women’s wage demands in their proposals. They were concerned the employers wouldn’t consider their demands if they added the women’s.

Some employers did sign agreements with the local unions. Most of the male workers got a raise, and unions organized where previously they hadn’t existed. As the Haverhill Gazette reported, “An Association of mechanics will grow out of the movement which will doubtless do much for the protection of the laborers in their rights.”

Alonzo Draper would become a general for the Union Army in the Civil War and die from a stray bullet at the age of 29.

With thanks to History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Volume One From Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor by Philip Sheldon Foner. This story about the shoemakers strike was updated in 2023.

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Elbridge Gerry, the Unfairly Maligned Revolutionary Who Approved the Gerrymander

Marbleheaders today will tell you it’s too bad Elbridge Gerry is best remembered for the creation of oddly shaped and highly partisan electoral districts, known as gerrymandering.

Elbridge Gerry

When he served as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, the General Court sent him a plan to redraw political districts. Gerry thought the plan unfairly favored incumbent politicians. But he signed it anyway, probably the biggest mistake of his life. That single act would seal his reputation for political chicanery.

Elbridge Gerry didn’t deserve to have his name forever linked with political trickery. During his lifetime he had a reputation for integrity. He stood on principle even if it cost him. His shrewd business sense and logistical acumen were indispensable to the Revolutionary cause. He knew how to keep New Englanders and the military supplied – an oft-overlooked key to American victory.

John Adams admired him, saying,

If every Man here was a Gerry, the Liberties of America would be safe against the Gates of Earth and Hell.

The Roads of Revolution

Elbridge Gerry was born in Marblehead, Mass., on July 17, 1744 (Old Style), the son of a wealthy merchant.

By the tme he was 20, Elbridge Gerry earned graduate and undergraduate degrees from Harvard. His master’s thesis in 1765 argued the colonies should resist the recently passed Stamp Act.

A depiction of the Second Continental Congress voting on the United States Declaration of Independence

After Harvard, he went to work for his father’s counting house. The Gerry family owned ships and traded dried codfish with Barbados and Spanish ports. He prospered, and by the time he took his pen to the Declaration of Independence he was ranked the 11th wealthiest of the 56 signers.

In 1770, Elbridge Gerry sat on a Marblehead committee to enforce the prohibition on tea. He later joined his father on Marblehead’s Committee of Correspondence. The committees, which served as shadow governments, were crucial to successful colonial resistance to Britain.

He was elected to the Massachusetts General Court in 1772. There he made friends with Sam Adams. When the British Parliament closed the port of Boston in June 1774, Gerry managed to get provisions and arms to New England. Marblehead became a key port of entry, and Gerry made sure the goods they delivered made it safely to Boston. The Revolutionary propagandist Mercy Otis Warren said he did it with “punctuality and indefatigable industry.”

Supply Chain Issues

As a member of the Committee of Safety of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, he played a key role in moving arms and ammunition to Concord and away from the British Army. On the night of Paul Revere’s famous ride, he was staying at the Menotomy (now Arlington) Tavern with two patriot colonels. The tavern was on the road the British took to Lexington. Some redcoats stopped to search it, and Gerry and his companions escaped capture by hiding in a cornfield, still in their nightclothes.

He then spent the early days of the Revolution in Boston raising troops and supplies for the Continental Army, using his business contacts in Europe.. It was Gerry who came up with the plan to encourage privateering. He might have been hanged for it.

John Adams was a big fan of privateering as a revolutionary weapon.

Adams wrote privateering,

…pays its own expenses and procures its own men … and is the surest way of distressing their commerce, [and] protecting our own.

Ups and Downs, Ins and Outs

Elbridge Gerry was a small dapper businessman, aristocratic and charming but without a sense of humor. He didn’t marry until he was in his 40s. When he did marry Ann Thompson, 20 years his junior, he made up for lost time. They had 10 children.

Ann Thompson by John Vanderlyn

He was a man of principle, though those principles could change.

After the Revolution, he spent the rest of his life in and out of political office. He bought Elmwood, the Cambridge estate of the former lieutenant governor, Thomas Oliver, which the state had confiscated. Later James Russell Lowell was born in the house.

Elmwood, now on the National Register of Historic Places.

He played a large role in the Constitutional Convention. At first he supported a strong central government. Then he refused to sign the Constitution because it didn’t guarantee individual liberties. Later he supported ratification.

He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1789 to 1793, a diplomat to France from 1797-98 and governor of Massachusetts from 1810-12.

Gerry lost much of his money when elected governor because his brother defaulted on a large loan that Gerry had guaranteed. Needing a job, Elbridge Gerry asked President James Madison to choose him as vice president. Two weeks after he lost re-election as governor, Madison did him a solid and invited him to run as his vice president. Madison had a motive, though. He wanted to appease the Northeast after he started the hugely unpopular War of 1812.

Madison won reelection, and Gerry then became popular in Washington, D.C., and a favorite of Dolley Madison. He died in office on Nov. 23, 1814.

Gerry Plus Salamander

Gerry had won election Massachusetts governor as a Democrat-Republican.

The Legislature was then controlled by the Democrat-Republicans as well. Under the state constitution, it had to redraw electoral districts. The lawmakers sent Gerry a plan that drew some districts in crazy shapes to make it easier for the Democrat-Republicans to win re-election. Gerry thought the plan unfair. He told his son-in-law he found the bill ‘highly disagreeable,’ but he signed it anyway on Feb. 11, 1812.

Detail from Gilbert Stuart self portrait, Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, R.I.

One district in Essex County was shaped like a salamander. The editor of an opposition newspaper hung the map over his desk. The story goes that the artist Gilbert Stuart came into the editor’s office one day and saw the map. Stuart then grabbed his pencil and drew a head, claws and wings onto the map and said, “That will do for a salamander.” The editor retorted, “Better say a gerrymander.”

The newspaper printed Stuart’s cartoon along with the word gerrymander and spread it far and wide. Elbridge Gerry’s reputation was sealed for the ages.

Historian Sarah J. Purcell offers another take on him. Elbridge Gerry, she wrote,

…was consistently motivated by a desire to do what he thought was right to create the most moral, virtuous, and stable American nation possible.

With thanks to the Society of the Descendants of the Declaration of Independence. Image of Elmwood By Midnightdreary – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5578063.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The Red, Black and White Men of Glover’s Regiment Take Washington Across the Delaware

John Glover’s Regiment of Marbleheaders accomplished an amazing feat on the night of Dec. 25, 1776. They ferried 2,400 men, plus horses and artillery, across the Delaware River in a blinding snowstorm.

Glover’s Regiment had a well-earned reputation for discipline and teamwork. But not everyone approved of it. Emmanuel Leutze, in his famous painting, showed why: He painted a black soldier in Washington’s boat.

There wasn’t just one African-American in Glover’s Regiment, but dozens. Indians, too, made up the crack unit. They came together before the war fishing in the North Atlantic, where race didn’t matter in a storm.

Getting rid of the British did matter to them. During the war, the British Navy had closed down the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. The fishermen and sailors of Glover’s Regiment came from the fishing village of Marblehead, Mass., and some nearby towns.

Marblehead especially depended on those fishing grounds, and their closure reduced its people to crushing poverty.

Glover’s Regiment

The tough, disciplined members of Glover’s Regiment had nautical skills that proved invaluable during the American Revolution.

When the British defeated the Continental Army on Long Island, George Washington ordered Glover’s Regiment to manage a surprise nighttime operation. On the night of Aug. 29, 1776, the mariners rowed and sailed for six hours across the East River.

They safely landed 9,500 men on Manhattan, along with all their baggage, nearly all their artillery, stores, horses and provisions. Had the evacuation failed, Washington’s army—and probably the war—would have been lost.

Washington and Glover

Nevertheless, a Pennsylvania general was shocked by the “number of negroes” treated as equals in Glover’s Regiment. The regiment’s muster rolls listed one-third of the men as “dark complexioned.” Most lived in Marblehead, their average age 23 and their average height 5′ 5″.

Nor did Washington, a Virginian, have any love for African Americans. He resisted admitting them into the Continental Army, but he did allow the first integrated regiment — Glover’s Regiment — from the very beginning.

military-heroes-glover's-regiment-glover

John Glover

Part of the reason may have to do with his personal friendship with the bold, burly John Glover, forged during the Siege of Boston. Glover, like Washington, exercised good taste and decorum. He dressed well, always with two silver pistols and a Scottish broadsword. The rest of the regimental leadership also came from some of Marblehead’s leading families — Ornes, Lees and Gerrys — tied together by blood and friendship. “The officers seem to have mixed with the world,” noted one observer.

Washington also appreciated the discipline of Glover’s Regiment. As seafarers, they were used to instantly obeying their officers — unlike the other New Englanders in the Continental Army. Sea captains made up many of the regiment’s 10 company captains, each of whom commanded about 50 privates, .a lieutenant, an ensign, several sergeants and corporals, clerks, drummers and fifers.

The mariners did dress funny. They wore clothes practical for duties aboard ship, such as short, wide-bottom pants, work shirts, round blue jackets with leather buttons. They tarred their wide brimmed hats to repel water.

John Glover

John Glover himself was the son of a Salem house carpenter who died when he was four. The family moved to Marblehead, and Glover rose from cordwainer and fisherman to rum trader to ship owner and merchant.

John Glover house in Marblehead.

As a ship owner, he had felt British oppression. The British Navy impressed his sailors and searched his ships for smuggled goods without warrants. Plus he had to deal with corrupt British customs officials. So in 1759, he joined the Marblehead militia.

After the Boston Massacre Glover was elected to the Committee of Correspondence. He was lieutenant commander of the militia when Col. Jeremiah Lee died in April 1775. Shortly thereafter, Glover’s Regiment marched to the Siege of Boston.

It became the 14^th Continental Regiment, known by the generals as an amphibian regiment.

Winter Soldiers

On Christmas Day, 1776, the Americans had suffered a series of defeats since the debacle on Long Island. Washington’s army had grown tired of retreating. Washington desperately needed to motivate his men to re-enlist at the end of the year.

He got some help from Thomas Paine. On December 19, Washington had Thomas Paine’s words from Common Sense read to the men: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

Washington wanted his army to cross back over the Delaware River for a surprise attack on Hessian soldiers wintering in Trenton. Winter had set in, and ice floes choked the treacherous river. Washington asked Glover if they could cross the 800-foot-wide river.

Glover told Washington “not to be troubled about that, as his boys could manage it.” They managed.

Glover’s Regiment

The night was fearfully cold and dark, with rain turning to sleet, then snow, and the northeast wind beating on the men’s faces. Gen. Henry Knox thought it impossible to cross the river.

The Americans, though, had access to Durham boats designed to carry large amounts of ore. The black-hulled boats were eight feet wide and as long as 60 feet, with pointed ends.

For hours, Glover’s Regiment loaded 40 men at a time along the slippery river banks into the boats. Four or five of Glover’s men muscled each boat across the river using long poles in the shallows and 18-foot oars across the middle. Then they’d return for another load.

Reenactment of the crossing of the Delaware in a Durham boat

Knox realized the wet weather would render the soldier’s powder nearly useless, making the artillery crucial to success. Glover’s Regiment therefore managed to ferry 18 cannons and frightened horses across the Delaware. Knox later wrote, ‘ . . . perseverance accomplished what at first seemed impossible.’

They didn’t make it across the river until 3 am on the 26th. Washington thought about turning back. He knew they couldn’t reach Trenton in the dark and feared they’d lost the element of surprise. He decided to go ahead, since it would probably be harder to go back.

Morale Booster

Though the Americans attacked in daylight, they still had surprise on their side. The short battle resulted in 106 Hessians of the 1,200 killed, the rest captured. Only four of Washington’s men were wounded.

It wasn’t a turning point of the war; that didn’t happen until the Battle of Saratoga in the fall of 1777. But it did lift American morale at a time when it sorely needed lifting.

Statue of John Glover on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.

Glover’s Regiment disbanded after Trenton, as most of the men wanted to join privateers or the new Navy.

Glover went home to Marblehead to take care of his sick wife, who soon died. Washington asked him to stay in the military. He agreed to stay and served with distinction to the end of the war, the only senior officer to serve in both the Army and the Navy.

Glover’s Regiment became a legend in Marblehead. In 1975, a group of Glover’s Regiment re-enactors formed and began to appear in Marblehead parades.

This story about Glover’s Regiment was updated in 2022. Images: Glover’s house in Marblehead By Fletcher6 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8563299. Reenactment By Luke Jones from Yucca Valley – Durham boats, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9393630. John Glover statue Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5789440.

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