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Shay’s rebellion

Stephen Higginson Tells Fish Stories To Parliament In 1771 and Gets Arrested For It

In 1771, the British government desperately needed to know how American colonists felt about fishing policies. Stephen Higginson filled them in, and almost got jailed as a traitor because of it.

Stephen Higginson served in many capacities during the American Revolution and the formative years of the country – military leader, representative to Congress and political intriguer.

Higginson was born in Salem, Mass., in 1743 into a family of politicians and clergymen. Well-connected, his single act of rebellion against his place in society seems to be his decision to marry Susannah Cleveland, his second cousin from Connecticut. As their families opposed the marriage (probably because of their youth), the couple ran away to New Hampshire to marry in 1764.

After returning to Salem, Higginson took up his position as a merchant trader, same as his father. He set up a home near East India Square in Salem across from the Lafayette Coffee House. Armed with introductions from his well-connected father, he sailed to England in 1771.

Stephen Higginson in London

Stephen Higginson

In England, Higginson had his first critical brush with politics. Higginson, on his travels in England to introduce himself to his trading partners, found himself summoned before Parliament to answer to an investigation about New England’s fisheries.

Higginson’s testimony gave a picture of how large and vital cod fishing was to the New England economy.

Seven hundred fishing vessels, most between 40 and 70 tons, worked the waters off New England fishing for cod. It took more than 4,000 people to man those vessels, Higginson estimated. Another 2,000 worked on shore, curing and preparing the catch for sale. And another 350 vessels, employing another 3,000 people, transported the fish to market.

Between 1768 and 1772, fish accounted for 35 percent of all New England exports by value. But the interests of the English and their American colonies often diverged when it came to codfish.

Fishing schooners

American fish fed slaves in the West Indies and Catholics in Europe. This resulted in New England fishermen trading with the French, importing French sugar, rum and molasses, as well as trading directly with the French in Newfoundland. Britain implemented a series of tariffs to limit New England fishermen’s ability to trade with the French, preferring to keep such trade for Englishmen.

By 1771, the arguing over the New England fishery had gone on for 40 years, and Britain’s Navy actively seized American fishing vessels caught trading with the French. Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament who sympathized with the colonists and their position, summoned Higginson to testify.

Stephen Higginson Testifies

The British, as usual, were concerned that New England was trading too much with Spain and France, rather than England.

Higginson explained that Britain remained New England’s primary trading partner. He suggested that restricting New England trade would result in the region being unable to pay its debts to English companies.

In particular, the Parliament questioned what New England fishermen would do if the government closed the fishery entirely.

A partial transcript of his testimony:

Under Questioning

Q. What would these people do if the Fishery was stopped?

A. I can’t readily resolve that question. I suppose they would remain where they are as long as they could subsist in hopes of being engaged in their old employment.

Q. But when that hope failed and they could no longer subsist?

A. Then they will probably go elsewhere?

Q. Whether they would settle at Halifax?

A. In general I think not … the Fishermen in Salem and other Towns are a very quiet and steady set of men They esteem the people of Halifax to be dissolute and of a quite contrary turn. I think therefore they would not sit down among a people so different in their manners. Another reason is that they think the Government of Halifax is arbitrary and have a terrible notion of it. Another, those who have been there have disliked the country very much as being inhospitable.

Q. Would they go to Miguelon and St Pierre and fish for France?

A. Don t think they would generally. From Marblehead some perhaps would.

Q. Why would they from thence?

A. Because the people there are of various nations Spaniards, Portuguese and Dutch, but the others are born in the towns where they live, have tenements and freeholds there and would not leave their place of abode, I conceive.

Return of the Traitor

News of Higginson’s appearance before Parliament spread, and upon his return to Marblehead, the colonial authorities arrested him on suspicion of traitorous conduct. Higginson had walked a fine line in Parliament, both continuing to state the American case for greater freedom in operating the fishery while defending the loyalty of the colonists.

Fortunately for his sake, Higginson had brought a detailed account of his testimony home with him. When he presented what he had said, the colonial authorities reversed themselves and praised him for his poise and presentation.

Into the History Books

During the American Revolution, Higginson ran his ships as privateers, and in 1783 Massachusetts elected him to the Continental Congress. Following the war, he participated in the military force that put down Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 and 1787.

Higginson’s most well-known legacy involves his opposition to John Hancock, during Hancock’s term as governor of Massachusetts. Higginson was a firm Federalist, along with John Adams and many others. The Federalists wanted a strong central government, and they were opposed by the Anti-Federalists who wanted the states to retain more power in the new country that they were forming.

John Hancock, meanwhile, had become something of a political chameleon. He managed to win support from enough Federalists and Anti-Federalists to serve as governor.

Stephen Higginson led probably the harshest attack on Hancock, though there were many. He published the “Laco Papers” in a newspaper, castigating Hancock for a weak military record during the Revolution. He called into question Hancock’s fitness to serve, as well as the alliances he had struck with his opponents, including Samuel Adams. In addition to printing the letters in a newspaper, under the pseudonym Laco, he also had them bound and distributed.

The Laco Papers had a remarkable effect, though not the one Higginson intended. Historians agree that the publication most likely generated sympathy for Hancock and helped extend his political reign.

Thanks to: Life and Times of Stephen Higginson, Member of the Continental Congress (1783)

Images: Stephen Higginson, Delegate to Continental Congress, New York Public Library, Max Rosenthal(Etcher)

Postcard of fishing vessels at the Portland Dock, Maine, c. 1908.

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Thompson Maxwell, the Forrest Gump of the American Revolution

In 1820 at the age of 78, Thompson Maxwell rode his horse more than 1,600 miles from Detroit to New England and back. He did it to revisit some of the most important sites of the American Revolution. After all, he’d fought at most of them.

He was there when patriots dumped tea into Boston Harbor (though whether he dumped it himself is a question for historians to resolve). He fought in the Battle of Concord and then at Bunker Hill.

And that’s only part of Thompson Maxwell’s story. He also fought in the French and Indian War as a teenager, helped suppress both Shay’s and Pontiac’s rebellions as a young man and fought in the War of 1812 as a septuagenarian. All told, he saw action in 22 battles.

He may have embellished his tales a bit, but his life follows the arc of American history from the colonial wars to the settling of the west.

The Boston Tea Party

Thompson Maxwell

He was born in Bedford, Mass., in 1742 to an Irish immigrant couple, the youngest of seven children. His mother was 50 when he was born, and may have had a hard time disciplining her youngest son.

At the age of 15, Thompson ran away from home to fight in the French and Indian War. He followed his older brother Hugh, known as a “brave and useful soldier.” Brother Hugh escaped from the French after they captured Fort William Henry on Lake George.

Thompson fought under two Revolutionary heroes, John Stark and Israel Putnam, and for a time he fought Indians with the celebrated Rogers’ Rangers. He recalled the fall of Montreal, with, “colors flying, drums beating, drills and camp display in martial splendor.”

The surrender at Montreal

He couldn’t get enough of marching, hardship and danger. In 1762 he went to Detroit to quell Pontiac’s rebellion. When he came home he married Sybil Wyman, and they moved to Amherst, N.H. Eventually, the couple had five children.

Boston Tea Party

Thompson Maxwell farmed and teamed – that is, hauled goods in a wagon. A trip to Boston in 1773 brought him to the Boston Tea Party. As an old and revered Revolutionary War veteran, Thompson Maxwell dictated his memoirs several times.

He gave several accounts of how the tea was thrown overboard.

“Seventy-three spirited citizen volunteers, in the costume of Indians, in defiance of royal authority, accomplished the daring exploit, John Hancock was then a merchant,” he said. “My team was loaded at his store for Amherst, N.H., and put up, to meet in consultation at his house at 2 p.m. The business was soon planned and executed. The patriots triumphed.”

In another memoir, he claimed he had joined the Indians and dumped the tea along with them.

Historian J.L. Bell believes he was in Boston on Dec. 16, 1773, but only watched the party and picked up some gossip. He had some inside information that participants likely knew: that shipowner Francis Rotch planned to take his tea back to England, that John Hancock organized the raid and that George Robert Twelve Hewes was one of the leaders. On the other hand, he got some details wrong, claiming the “Indians” dumped the tea at Long Wharf, when it happened at Griffin’s Wharf.

American Revolution

Then on April 18, 1775, Thompson Maxwell drove to Boston with his team of horses, and went on to Bedford to stay with his sister and brother-in-law. That’s how he ended up at the Battle of Concord, said to be the only New Hampshire soldier there.

thompson-maxwell-british-entering-concord

The British Entering Concord, by Amos Doolittle

Afterward, he probably went back to Amherst to join his company as a second lieutenant. The company then marched to Boston to fight the Battle of Bunker Hill. Thompson described how he drove stakes to reinforce the hill and stuffed hay between fence rails. During the battle, the British shot his brother Hugh in the right arm, but Thompson got through it unscathed.

Thompson Maxwell remembered Washington arriving to take command of the Continental Army. He fought with John Sullivan at the Battle of Trenton on the day after Christmas, and he marched on to capture Princeton. He saw action at the Battle of Bennington, which defeated Gen. John Burgoyne’s forces. “Grand military display,” he said. “Resigned and went home.”

You’d think he’d had enough of fighting by then, but no, he and his brother Hugh fought to put down Shay’s Rebellion.

Finally he did have enough, and spent 20 years farming in Buckland, Mass. But he still served his country, representing Buckland at the Massachusetts constitutional convention.

Thompson Maxwell, Old Soldier

Thompson Maxwell moved to Ohio in 1800, and his wife died two years later. He saw action against Indians at the Battle of Tippecanoe, when he had reached his late 50s. In 1807, he married a widow, who died six years later, and then he married again.

During the War of 1812, he raised troops and served in the army as a major. But he got no military glory this time. He guided Gen. William Hull to Detroit, but Hull later surrendered the fort to the British. The British captured Maxwell along with the others, but paroled him because of his age — 67.

The surrender at Detroit

He received a nasty welcome at home. He later described what happened:

“A mob, irritated by Hull’s pusillanimity, misjudging my patriotic efforts, and denouncing all parties concerned in the late disasters at Detroit, rally and gather about my habitation, burn my house, destroy my property, and, barely clothed, I escape for my life through a corn-field by night. . . .”

He ignored his friends’ advice against rejoining the army, and got captured again as well as wounded. Finally he ended his military career as barracks master in Detroit.

Perhaps he kept rejoining the army for money. Indigent veterans didn’t receive pensions until 1818. His brother Hugh, for example, was broke, and tried to restore his finances by selling horses to the West Indies. Hugh died on the voyage.

Thompson Maxwell died in 1832 at the age of 90 near Detroit.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Malta War Pitted Maine Against Massachusetts

The Malta War was the name given to the fighting that broke out in 1809 in Maine’s Kennebec County. At that time, ownership of land in Maine was often an open question. Native Americans held claims to some portions of the state, then part of Massachusetts. Massachusetts officials also held claim to it. Settlers living there, some as squatters, also claimed ownership of some lands.

The dispute came to a head at 3 pm on Sept. 8, 1809, in the woods of Malta (today part of Windsor). Andrew Choate planned to buy the farm he rented. So he hired John Davis to survey the property line between Choate’s farm and Isaac Mason’s adjoining land.

Farmland in Windsor, Maine, where the Malta War broke out.

He also hired Paul Chadwick, 22, to assist in the survey. Chadwick, Davis and a third man measured the property using surveyor’s chains. Surveyor’s chains were made to specific lengths, and surveyors could mark off property in standard units of chains and links.

Because the chains couldn’t be stretched, they were a trusted unit of measure. But they also weighed a lot, which is why a surveying job required three men.

First Shots in the Malta War

Malta’s citizenry included a dissident group of squatters who did not accept Massachusetts’ ownership of the lands. They saw Chadwick and Davis as enforcing land rights to which they held no proper claim.

Nine men, who witnesses would later describe as drunk, disguised themselves in blankets and face masks and tried their best to look like Indians. They intended to cast blame for their actions on the Native Americans. Armed with muskets and scythes, the men made their way through town to Andrew Choate’s property. “Chadwick has crooked eyes,” one man was heard to say, “and damn him, we mean to straighten them.”

The men silenced Choate at gunpoint and went to the rear of the land where the survey team was working. Two of the men avoided the attack. Chadwick, though, held an end of the surveyor’s chain below the others on a bank of a stream. He had nowhere to run.

Surveying tools, from 1728 Cyclopaedia

Three of the men approached. “Damn you what business have you here?” they demanded. Then one of the men ordered the others to fire their muskets. Later it would come out that he had shouted: “Fire low.”

The muskets, loaded only with small shot, would presumably just send Chadwick running. But the first shot hit him in the legs, the second in the stomach and, as Chadwick fell, the third shot hit him in the shoulders.

“Damn him. It is good enough for him,” one man said as the attackers turned to leave. “He had no business here.”

Chadwick’s Final Statements

Choate ran for help and carried Chadwick to his father-in-law’s house. For the next two days Chadwick lingered while his wounds got worse.

Chadwick, on September 9, said “I consider myself to be an undone man. I think I shall, before a short time, appear before God.”

James Brackett, justice of the peace, visited Chadwick and recorded the dying man’s final statements. He had recognized two of the “Indians” who had attacked him: Jabez Meigs and Elijah Barton. Choate recognized David Lynn as the man who had silenced him and ordered the men to “fire low.” Soon four others were rounded up as also participating in the attack: Prince Cain, Nathaniel Lynn, Ansel Meigs and Adam Pitts.

Elijah Barton spent one night hiding under a friend’s floorboards, but eventually all seven were rounded up and questioned. They confessed: “I was present to my very great shame,” Barton would say.

The seven men were taken to Augusta to await trial. Meanwhile, their friends began to agitate. They gathered up a force of men to storm the jail at Augusta and release the defendants.

The Malta War Ends

The Massachusetts Land Office, meanwhile, grew concerned over reports of the insurrection. They undoubtedly remembered Shays’ Rebellion 21 years earlier, when 4,000 unhappy landowners staged an armed rebellion in western Massachusetts.

Massachusetts Gov. Christopher Gore detached a militia unit of several hundred men to keep the peace and prop up the government in Kennebec County while the trial proceeded. After repelling one attempt to attack the jail, an uneasy peace settled over Augusta as the trial grew near.

Gov. Christopher Gore

At trial, the defendants put up a defense. One man was accused of saying that Chadwick was about to go on a very long journey. But Chadwick had, in fact, spoken of traveling to Ohio. Another testified that Chadwick was unhappy with his wife and would be glad to be rid of her by leaving.

They also attacked Chadwick’s dying statement. Jabez Meigs and Paul Chadwick had a series of running disagreements. Chadwick accused Meigs of tearing down the frame to his barn. They argued over ownership of a sled. And Meigs had threatened Chadwick in a moment of anger. Could this be the reason Chadwick accused him on his death bed?

In the end, the seven men were acquitted and set free. The militia was allowed to return home and the Malta War ended.

Thanks to: Trial of David Lynn, Jabez Meigs, Elijah Barton, Prince Cain … 1809-1810. This story updated in 2022.

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Royall Tyler, the Man Nabby Adams Wanted To Marry

John Adams’ daughter in 1785 dumped the charming rake Royall Tyler to marry a dashing military hero. She may well have regretted her choice, but her secretive nature prevents us from knowing.

Abigail, or ‘Nabby,’ was the only daughter of John and Abigail Adams who lived to adulthood. She was handsome, not beautiful, and reserved. When she was 16 years old, Royall Tyler came to Braintree to practice law. He won, then lost, her heart.

What Nabby couldn’t have known was that her husband-to-be, William Stephens Smith, was a has-been at 30, and Royall Tyler would become a successful politician, professor and literary celebrity.

Royall Tyler

The dashing Royall Tyler

Royall Tyler was born June 18, 1757 in Boston, the son of a wealthy merchant. His father died when he was young. He studied at Harvard, where he squandered half his inheritance on drinking, partying and gambling. He also fathered a child with a cleaning woman.

After college, he studied law under Francis Dana, for whom a young John Quincy Adams had worked when he served as minister to Russia. Tyler then moved to Braintree, where he lodged with Abigail Adams’ sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Richard Cranch.

He soon grew friendly with John Quincy Adams and his sister Nabby, who at 16 was eight years younger than he.

Tyler cut a dashing figure. He was handsome, well-mannered and dressed stylishly.

Abigail Adams found Royall Tyler charming, and believed him when he told her he had reformed. She wrote to her husband, then in Europe. The young man had ‘a sprightly fancy, a warm imagination and an agreeable person,’ she wrote, though she admitted Tyler was ‘rather negligent in pursueing (sic) his business … and dissipated two or 3 more years of his Life and too much of his fortune to reflect upon with pleasure; all of which he now laments but cannot recall.’

She also told John Adams that Royall Tyler was courting his daughter.

Reformed Rake

John Adams exploded in writing at the news. He wrote Abigail a letter in January 1783:

I confess I dont like the Subject at all. . . . My Child is a Model, as you represent her and as I know her, and is not to be the Prize, I hope of any, even reformed Rake. . . .

But Tyler persisted and John Adams eventually relented. By the spring of 1784 he won Nabby’s heart and the approval of her parents. The Adams family expected them to marry.

Nabby’s letters are lost, and she never mentioned Royall Tyler in her letters. Still, it’s possible from her mother’s writing to glean what happened.

Stories about Tyler’s college days resurfaced in Braintree, and the Adamses came to think of him as an insincere flatterer.

Nabby Adams

In 1784, Nabby sailed for Europe with her mother to join her father and oldest brother, John Quincy.

Nabby wrote letter after letter to Royal Tyler. Ships from America kept arriving without letters from him. She kept to herself her ‘fear, suspicion, doubt, dread and apprehension.’

Finally, her mother broached the subject with her. Nabby asked Abigail whether she thought someone they knew was a man of honor. Abigail responded:

I replied yes a Man of strict honour, and I wisht I could say that of all her acquaintance. As she could not mistake my meaning, instead of being affected as I apprehended she said, a breach of honour in one party would not justify a want of it in the other. I thought this the very time to speak. I said if she was conscious of any want of honour on the part of the Gentleman, I and every Friend she had in the world, would rejoice if she could liberate herself.

Nabby decided to dump Royall Tyler.

In the summer of 1785, Nabby told her mother about the break-, up, asking that ‘neither the Name or subject may ever be mentiond to her.’ She sent Tyler a Dear John letter in September that year.

Consolation

Nabby’s letter devastated Royall Tyler. He took lodgings with the Palmer family in Boston, where he was consoled by Betsey Palmer. He took so much consolation from Betsey he fathered a child with her – and possibly two — while her husband was away.

Tyler then married Betsey Palmer’s daughter Mary, and they had 11 children. He took part in suppressing Shay’s rebellion, which took him to Vermont. There he became chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Vermont.

Royall Tyler became a literary celebrity as well. He wrote a comedy, The Contrast, performed in New York City before George Washington and members of the first Congress. He wrote a satirical newspaper column, published a novel, the Algerine Captive, authored legal tracts, plays, a musical, two long poems, essays and a travel narrative.

Tyler later said he only regretted his youthful profligacy to the extent it hampered his ambition later in life.

William Stephens Smith

When Nabby Adams broke up with Royall Tyler, she had her eye on someone else: Col. William Stephens Smith, secretary to the American delegation to London.

Smith was the son of a wealthy New York merchant, a Princeton graduate and a veteran of the Revolution where he had served on George Washington’s staff. When she married him, Nabby had on idea of the downward spiral his career would take.

They married in 1786 and returned to New York, where they had four children.

Smith received appointments to several federal posts, but he dabbled in Latin American coups and speculated recklessly in land. By 1809, the family lived on a small farm in western New York State. The rest of the Adams family viewed him as hopelessly improvident.

Nabby discovered a small lump on her breast, which turned out to be an aggressive form of breast cancer. In 1811 she returned to Boston and had a mastectomy without anesthetic.

She survived the operation and returned to New York. The cancer returned, though, and she told her husband she wanted to die in her father’s house. Her wish was granted on Aug. 15, 1813.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Tobias Gilmore Wins Freedom From Slavery Fighting for the Colonies

Tobias Gilmore, an African-American soldier in the American Revolution, left a legacy that includes a cannon left to the Town of Taunton, Mass., and some very surprised descendants.

Glover’s Regiment crossing the Delaware with Gen. Washington

He came to America as a slave and then earned his freedom by serving in the Continental Army for five years. Local lore links him and his cannon to George Washington, which he fired 14 times on the Fourth of July. Thirteen shots went off for the original colonies and one for Washington.

He was born sometime around 1745 in coastal West Africa. The son of a chieftain, he was named Shibodee Turry Wurry. In about 1757, slave traders kidnapped him while he gathered coconuts.

The slavers shackled him below deck on the slave ship Dove, bound for Virginia. A storm battered the vessel, so the slave traders changed course for Rhode Island. There they auctioned off some of the captives as slaves to pay for repairs to their ship.

A Raynham, Mass., a sea captain named John Gilmore purchased Shibodee Turry Wurry. He then gave him a new name: Tobias Gilmore.

Private Tobias Gilmore

As the Revolution approached, patriotic rhetoric about securing the natural and inalienable right of liberty no doubt inspired Tobias Gilmore.

Continental soldiers at Yorktowns; on the left, an African American soldier of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment

Continental soldiers at Yorktown; on the left, an African American soldier of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment

When war did break out, each colony had to supply a quota of troops for the Continental Army. New England regiments recruited slaves by promising them their freedom. Massachusetts sent 1,535 African-American soldiers to the Continental Army, while the other New England colonies sent 2,278. Historians count 9,000 black Patriot soldiers, including the Army and Navy, state militias, privateers, wagoneers, servants and spies.

African Americans, in fact, made up about a fifth of the Continental Army. By the Siege of Yorktown, an officer in a French regiment estimated that one-quarter of the northern army was African American.

African Americans joined the British cause as well, but in far fewer numbers.

The Taunton Flag, adopted by the people of Taunton in 1774

Tobias Gilmore began his military service on Dec. 8, 1776, as a private in Capt. Jonathan Shaw’s company, part of Col. George Williams’s Regiment.

Gilmore fought three tours of duty and saw action in the Battle of Fort Ticonderoga. He was at the Battle of Monmouth, Battle of Forts Clinton and Montgomery, Battle of White Plains and West Point. He also suffered through the Continental Army’s winter encampment at Valley Forge.

According to local lore, Toby Gilmore rose through the ranks to bodyguard or servant to George Washington. That can’t be proved or disproved. Some claim the painting Washington Crossing the Delaware pictures him as the African-American soldier, but probably not.

Freedom

Tobias Gilmore received his discharge in December 1781 and returned to Raynham a free man. He had won his freedom during his first enlistment – which lasted eight days. He married Rosanna Hack, and they had eight children: Toby Jr., Nancy, Delia, Timothy, Esquire, Selina, Rosina and Seabury. Toby senior went to work for his former master, and then he and his wife set up a housekeeping business.

Gilmore bought land in Raynham confiscated from a Loyalist and auctioned off. People liked Toby so much that few bid against him.

He was a frugal businessman and built a house in Raynham about 1784. It still stands. He then built a second house in 1798 bigger than his former master’s.

At some point he obtained a cannon. He told the story that Washington gave it to him.

The cannon, nicknamed Old Toby, served with him in the Raynham militia to help put down Shay’s Rebellion. The Old Colony Historical Society noted in 1879 that Tobias Gilmore gave “Old Toby” to the town. Gilmore,

…the colored revolutionary veteran ancestor of the colored villagers in North Raynham, well known as industrious and worthy citizens. It was given by Tobias to the citizens of Taunton for firing sallies on Washington’s birthdays and Fourth of July, or revert to his descendants.

Tobias Gilmore died April 19, 1812 at age 70. He lies buried at the Hall and Dean Burial Ground in Raynham.

Family Detective

In 1921, the Taunton Daily Gazette noted the passing of Caroline Gilmore, Tobias Gilmore’s last living descendant.

Ninety years later, Miloh Pasto came to the Old Colony Historical Society to research her 3^rd great-grandmother, Elmira Sullivan. She turned out to be Tobias Gilmore’s great-granddaughter. Further research then revealed Gilmore had at least 100 living descendants through his daughter Delia and her husband, Thomas Davis.

One of those descendants was a surprised North Carolina firefighter named Chaz Moore. Moore, a Sturbridge, Mass., native, learned in 2012 of his revolutionary roots. North Carolina’s Sons of the American Revolution then inducted him as the first black member.

“Growing up, I wasn’t even certain that African-Americans even fought in the Revolutionary War,” Moore told the Associated Press in 2012. “It’s not something that’s talked about. Then to say, ‘Well, yeah, they did, and you’re a direct descendant of one’ was unbelievable, humbling. I had to redefine patriotism for myself.”

The cannon today resides at Old Colony Historical Society. So do Tobias Gilmore’s mitre, rundlet and other personal effects.

This story was updated in 2023.

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