Jonas Obscow, Natick Indian and Continental Soldier

Jonas Obscow (also spelled Obsco and Obscho) was born in Natick on 5 June 1739. The town’s vital records don’t identify his parents, but a man of the same name—presumably this baby’s father—died in 1745. His probate file, approved by Judge Samuel Danforth, said the most valuable part of his estate was 27 acres of land.

Four years later, in June 1749, Thaddeus Mason of Cambridge put young Jonas’s name on a list of Indians in Natick, “old and young,” separate from all other family groups.

On 27 Apr 1764, Jonas Obscow married Mary Speen, born to Abraham and Rachel Speen in 1738. “Abram Speen, wife and one child” had also appeared on the Mason list, and some of the late Jonas Obscow’s land bordered on Abraham Speen’s land, so the couple no doubt knew each other well.

The Obscows had three children recorded in the Natick record over the next few years:

• Mary, born 18 Nov 1765
• Abraham Speen, born in Walpole, 22 Dec 1767
• Zurvia, born 4 Feb 1770 and dying exactly two months later

In May 1772, the Obscows petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to permit the sale of some of their property. Their plea said that they had “for several years past, been exercised with Sickness in their family, of long continuance, which several of their Children have died.” Now “indebted to Physicians and others who relieved them in times of their affliction,” they wanted to sell “a lot of land at ye. West part of Natick four miles distant from their home lot, and four miles from the meeting house, Containing thirty seven acres.”

The Obscows had to petition the legislature before selling any land because, as Natick Indians, they needed the approval of guardians for the tribe appointed by the province. This provision was no doubt instituted with the goal of protecting Native people from being gouged. Of course, it made them dependent on the good will of the white men appointed as their guardians. The Obscows signed their petition with their marks. Three guardians of the Natick Indians signed as well. The General Court approved the sale.

In May 1775, Jonas Obscow joined the Massachusetts army, enlisting in the company of Capt. Joseph Morse within Col. John Paterson’s regiment. Obscow served in the siege of Boston at least through November, when he received a bounty coat. Military service meant income and food, but it also meant leaving Mary and whatever children were still alive back in Natick.

Jonas Obscow also enlisted for a 1777 campaign against the British in Rhode Island. Around that time his marriage with Mary was ending.

In 1783 Mary Obscow petitioned for state approval to sell her own land. That petition said she and Jonas had had four children, “But one now living about 15 years of age”—probably Abraham Speen Obscow. Mary went on to say that Jonas “Left your Petitinor & Child about 7 years ago & married unbenone to your Petitioner.” Mary had suffered from from “great Sickness & other misfortune of Broken Bones &c.,” putting her in debt to “doctr’s & Nursing &c.” The legislature granted that petition.

As of October 1788, Mary Obscow was dead, though the guardians for the Natick Indians were still selling her land “for the purpose of paying her Just Debts, & for the benifit of her Heir at Law.” One guardian held £5.12s.9d. from that estate in 1790, when Abraham Speen Obscow had presumably come of age.

In 1789 a man named Abel Perry petitioned the state to allow the guardians to look into and approve Jonas Obscow’s sale of twelve acres to him. Many Natives in New England’s “praying towns” lost the land assigned to them in just this gradual way, as debts forced them to sell off their property.

In 1796, the selectmen of Natick described Jonas Obscow as “an Indian man who is blind and is also wholly unable to go by reason of the Rheumatism and has not Estate to support him.” They were petitioning for state money to feed and house Obscow and other poor people, including Caesar Ferrit. The Natick officials argued that their town, originally founded for Indians who had converted to Christianity, deserved special consideration since Natives were exempt from local taxes but still sent their children to town schools.

The Natick selectmen also pointed out that Indians “have taken in negros…with whom they marry and have children,” and then “Said children when of age suppose them selves Exempted from all Taxes.” In other words, they would have preferred for those people of both Native and African ancestry to be classified as Negro so they were taxable. If, however, the state hinged special grants to Natick based on its large Native population, the selectmen would no doubt have wanted those same people counted as Indian.

Jonas Obscow died in Natick on 13 Nov 1805, at the age of sixty-six.

The Natick Community and the Watertown Dam

Last month the Junto blog shared an interesting essay by Zachary M. Bennett, “Damming Fish and Indians: Starvation and Dispossession in Colonial Massachusetts.”

Bennett writes:

Compared to other Native Americans in southern New England, the Ninnimissinuok community of Natick, Massachusetts seemed to have secure footing going into the eighteenth century. Located only fifteen miles outside of Boston on the Charles River, Natick was the largest community of Native American converts to Christianity—or “Praying Indians”—in mainland New England with a population exceeding two hundred persons. These Praying Indians owned their land in corporation to safeguard their enclave against land hungry colonists. . . .

In 1738, colonists downstream in Watertown raised a dam several feet on the Charles River that blocked migrating sea-run (anadromous) fish. Spring fish runs were of vital importance to Natick. Native people depended on these fish for half their yearly supply of animal protein and were also an important fertilizer for New England’s notoriously thin soil. Although Massachusetts law required the operators of the Watertown Dam to allow fish to pass by building a fish ladder, on the Charles River corrupt local officials looked the other way. Natick’s Praying Indians protested. . . .

To placate Indian petitioners, the [Massachusetts General Court] committee ordered that portions of the Watertown Dam punctured by the winter ice not be repaired until May, giving migrating fish a slightly lower structure to scale. This was a deceiving concession because the General Court granted dam owners full discretion to adhere to this judgement: if they deemed the water too low to power their mills sufficiently, only the approval of five selectmen from Watertown and adjoining Newtown [sic]—communities directly invested in the smooth running of these mills—was required to raise the dam during the May fish run. . . .

For Natick, the loss of river fish a few years before the outbreak of King George’s War in 1744 was particularly bad timing. Nearly all able-bodied Praying Indian men served in this conflict and they suffered significantly higher mortality rates than their Anglo comrades in arms.

In addition, Daniel Gookin wrote in 1792, the Natick soldiers “brought home a mortal disease, of which twenty three died in the year 1759.”

As a result of those factors, Bennett writes, “land sales in the community rose 150% in the 1740s.” Gookin reported: “In the year 1763, according to a census then taken, there were thirty seven Indians only in Natick; but in this return, probably the wandering Indians were not included.” By 1792, he judged that “The Indians in Natick are now reduced to one family of five persons, and two single women.” Of course, many more people of Natick descent were still living in Massachusetts—but they were no longer recognized as Indians or no longer had their own land in Natick to live on.

The Service of Caesar Ferrit

While Thomas Nichols was locked up in the Concord jail, accused of enticing slaves away from their masters, what was his father-in-law doing?

Caesar Ferrit and his youngest son John, born around 1753, were marching with the Natick militia company on 19 Apr 1775. According to William Biglow’s 1830 history of the town:

Caesar Ferrit and his son John arrived at a house near Lexington meeting house, but a short time before the British soldiers reached that place, on their retreat from Concord. These two discharged their muskets upon the regulars from the entry, and secreted themselves under the cellar stairs, till the enemy had passed by, though a considerable number of them entered the house and made diligent search for their annoyers.

Biglow apparently gathered this story from John Ferrit himself, reporting that he was still alive and receiving a pension.

Lt. Col. Francis Smith’s column withdrawing from Concord met Col. Percy’s reinforcement column in Lexington. The British stayed in that town to tend to wounded, rest, and regroup. Percy made his headquarters at the Munroe Tavern, almost a mile from the meetinghouse near where the Ferrits were hiding. Still, they might have had to stay under those cellar stairs a considerable time until all the redcoats were gone.

According to George Quintal’s Patriots of Color, Caesar Ferrit enlisted in the Massachusetts army in late April 1775 through the end of the year. Seth Kaller, Inc., is offering a May 1775 record of how Natick supplied muskets to Caesar Ferrit and several other soldiers. The firm did considerable research on those men, identifying six of the eleven as African-American. Ferrit also served shorter stints in 1776-77 and 1781.

In 1796 the town of Natick petitioned the state for money to support its poor, among whom it listed “one Ceasar Ferrit, an old man and unable to Support him Self wo has been consistered as an Indian and has been under Gurdians of the Natick Indians.”

Caesar Ferrit died in Natick three years later, on 23 May 1799.

Reviewing Thomas Nichols’s Case

In late February 1775 a Massachusetts magistrate had Thomas Nichols of Natick, labeled variously a “free Negro” or “mulatto,” locked up for “enticing divers Servants [slaves] to desert the Service of their Masters.”

Nichols was still in the jail at Concord when the Revolutionary War broke out. He must have witnessed the British troops under Maj. John Pitcairn force their way into the jailyard to disable three large cannon that belonged to the town.

On 13 May, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety took up Nichols’s case. Its records say:

One Thomas Nicholas, a negro, brought before this committee on account of his suspicious behavior for some time past, having been examined, Resolved, that it be recommended to the council of war to commit said negro, until there be further inquiry into his conduct. . . .

Ordered, That Mr. Isaac Bradish, keeper of the jail in Cambridge, be directed and empowered to confine one Thomas Nicholas, negro, till further orders.

A week later the committee voted:

That Capt. Edward How, Ebenezer Cutler, and Nicholas, a black fellow, now under guard, be sent up to Congress for examination and trial, and Capt. White is appointed to attend Congress, with the above named persons.

Voted, That the general [Artemas Ward] be desired to furnish a guard for the occasion.

On that same day the Committee of Safety recommended against enlisting anyone but “freemen” into the Massachusetts army. There were multiple reasons behind that decision: ideological distaste for forcing slaves to fight in the name of liberty, potential complaints from slaveowners, and a lingering fear of unreliable troops. (The Massachusetts government didn’t decide to bar free black men from the ranks until shortly after Gen. George Washington’s arrival in July.)

On 22 May, a committee of the full Massachusetts Provincial Congress in Watertown, chaired by Edward Mitchell of Bridgewater, considered the evidence against those three jailed men. The decision on Thomas Nichols came last, and it was recorded this way:

Whereas Thomas Nicols, a negro man, hath been brought before this Congress, and there being no evidence to prove any matters or things alleged against him: therefore,

Resolved, That the said Thomas be sent to the Town or District where he belongs, and that the Committee of Correspondence, or Selectmen of said Town or District, take such care of the said Thomas, that he may be dealt with as they, in their judgment, shall think proper.

Ordered, That Captain [Caleb] Kingsbury be directed to appoint some persons to conduct the above-mentioned negro to Natick, agreeably to the foregoing Resolve.

So that was it. The slave conspiracy that had made the papers as far away as Norwich, Connecticut, and resulted in Nichols being jailed for almost three months had “no evidence” to back it up.

And even after that, according to Natick historian Horace Mann, the town “confined” Nichols at the tavern of Pelatiah Morse (shown above courtesy of the Historic Buildings of Massachusetts blog). Morse’s bill for the food he supplied to Nichols and his guard is the evidence for that, but I don’t know how long the confinement lasted.

TOMORROW: Nichols’s in-laws.

Thomas Nichols of Natick

On Monday I quoted a Connecticut newspaper report of the arrest of “one Thomas Nichols, a Molatto,” in Natick on suspicion of planning an uprising of enslaved people.

What do we know about Nichols? He appears in the Natick vital records on 17 Dec 1766, listed as a “transient.” He married “Patiance Ferrit” of that town, which was originally a community of “praying Indians” but was in transition to become yet another English-dominated farm town.

Patience Ferrit had been born in Milton in 1743. In Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-century Eastern Massachusetts, Daniel R. Mandell noted how her father Caesar Ferrit moved to Natick from Boston in 1751 “to live among his own Nation the aboriginal natives.” He brought his wife Naomi and four children born in Milton. The couple had three more children in Natick, as George Quintal detailed in Patriots of Color.

According to local chroniclers, Caesar Ferrit later claimed that only one of his grandparents was a Native American. The others were Dutch, French, and African. Ferrit said he himself was born in the Caribbean.

What’s more, Naomi Ferrit was of English extraction. She appears to be the Naomi Isaac who married “Cesar Ferre” in Dorchester in 1738, one of only a handful of marriages performed by a justice of the peace instead of a minister. There was even a local tradition that Naomi was the ward of “a wealthy gentleman in Boston” who employed Caesar Ferrit as a coachman. The young couple had fallen in love, this tale goes, and were forced to choose a poor life in Natick.

All those stories, some of which may even be true, testify to how the racial or ethnic categories that the laws set up were actually overlapping and fluid. The Native part of Natick was a refuge for families that crossed the society’s “color lines.” Did the Ferrits need to have ancestral roots in the Native nations of New England to live there?

By marrying Patience Ferrit, Thomas Nichols became part of that community. The couple had at least three children in Natick:

• Isaac, born 1 June 1768
• Ama, born 14 May 1770
• Cherrity, born 23 July 1773

When their third child was on the way, the couple petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to be allowed to sell real estate. They needed permission to do so because Patience Nichols was listed as a Native American. On 19 Jan 1773 the legislative Acts and Resolves state:

A Petition of Thomas Nichols of Natick a free negro man Setting forth That he hath lately purchased a plantation in Natick, containing near eighty acres of Land with a dwelling house thereon and many good accommodations; that he has lately intermarried with one Patience Terry an Indian, native, of said Natick who had legally heretofore purchased the following tracts of Land, situate in said Natick, which Lands the Petitioner paid for, but the Deed was given in his Wifes name vizt. the first lot containing about forty acres, the second lot about eleven acres more or less, the third thirty five and the fourth lot between seventy and eighty acres; of which last mentioned tract the Petitioner claims only one sixth part That he is considerably in debt for the purchase of his plantation aforesaid and otherwise. And praying that he may be impowered to sell the four pieces of Land aforesaid, which lie scattering to enable him to pay his just debts and to purchase some Stock and Tools for his plantation aforesaid.

The legislature granted the couple permission to make that sale.

Thomas Nichols had thus gone from a “transient” new arrival in Natick to a property-owner, though his economic situation apparently remained precarious. And a little more than two years later he was locked up, accused of fomenting unrest.

TOMORROW: What was the evidence for those suspicions?

Fears in Framingham and Elsewhere

Yesterday I quoted two Connecticut newspapers from March 1775 reporting on the detection of a slave conspiracy in Natick.

Such worries were nothing new. Back in September 1774, Abigail Adams had told her husband about a similar fear in Braintree:

There has been in Town a conspiracy of the Negroes. At present it is kept pretty private and was discoverd by one who endeavourd to diswaid them from it-he being threatned with his life, applied to justice [Josiah] Quincy for protection. They conducted in this way—got an Irishman to draw up a petition letting to the Govener telling him they would fight for him provided he would arm them and engage to liberate them if he conquerd, and it is said that he attended so much to it as to consult Pircy upon it, and one Liut. [?] Small [Maj. John Small?] has been very buisy and active. There is but little said, and what Steps they will take in consequence of it I know not.

Jason T. Sharples has found a deep tradition of such fears in British North America. The rumors would often take the same form: free blacks were tempting enslaved blacks, many masters and their families would be murdered all at once, blacks planned to burn the town…

The political and increasingly military tensions in Massachusetts in 1774 brought those fears to the surface again, alongside other, parallel rumors: that the British military planned to burn the town, that the provincial militia would raise 30,000 men and storm Boston, that the Crown would ship in thousands of French or Russian or Native soldiers. Most of those conspiracy theories were groundless.

People may have had their own doubts then, but they didn’t feel safe dismissing such dangers. Robert G. Parkinson just wrote about how such a worry affected people in Framingham as the war began:

Josiah Temple, a native of Framingham, Massachusetts (about fifteen miles south of Concord), published a book in 1887 on the town’s history. His recounting of what people remembered about the night of the Alarm was so different from the legend that he found it impossible to believe.

For four generations, the local story of the night of April 19, 1775, was that, as soon as the town’s militia marched north toward Lexington Green, a “strange panic” spread through Framingham. But that’s not what surprised the town historian, nor should it us. But what they said next certainly seems odd: “The Negroes were coming to massacre them all!” Some in the town, Temple noted, “brought the axes and pitchforks and clubs into the house, and securely bolted the doors, and passed the day and night in anxious suspense.”

More specifically, Temple wrote that the “women and children” in two Framingham districts felt this fear, particularly Mehetable, “wife of Capt. [Simon] Edgell,” a slaveholder. Temple also said, “Nobody stopped to ask where the hostile Negroes were coming from; for all our own colored people were patriots.” Peter Salem, for example, was marching with Capt. Edgell’s company. A black trumpeter reportedly roused the town militia. But Framingham is right next to Natick, where a free black man named Thomas Nichols had been arrested for fomenting unrest.

A similar fear affected women who gathered for safety from the regulars at a home in Menotomy, according to the Rev. Samuel A. Smith’s 1864 history:

The report was spread abroad that the slaves were intending to rise, and finish what the British had begun by murdering the defenceless women and children. It excited great consternation, therefore, among the women gathered at George Prentiss’s upon the hill, when they saw Ishmael, a negro slave belonging to Mr. [William] Cutler, approaching the house. They thought their time had come, but one, a little braver than the rest, summoned up courage to ask, “Are you going to kill us, Ishmael?”

“Lord-a-massy, no ma’am!” said the astonished black. “Is my missis here?”

Since Ishmael had stayed behind to save the Cutler tavern from burning, he had cause to be annoyed as well as astonished. In 1780, Ishmael Cutler, then thirty-six years old, enlisted as a soldier. The next year, he paid the town poll tax as a free man.

COMING UP: Who was Thomas Nichols?

An “infernal Scheme” in Natick?

British officers and royal officials weren’t the only folks fearing a treacherous plot by their enemies as the Revolutionary War began. The provincials outside of Boston had plenty of suspicions as well.

The 3 Mar 1775 Connecticut Gazette, published in New London, reported:

On Thursday the 23d Instant [i.e., of this month], one Thomas Nichols, a Molatto, was taken at Natick (in the County of Middlesex) and brought under Examination, before a Justice, for being concerned in enticing divers Servants to desert the Service of their Masters—causing the Minds of the said Servants to be inimical towards their Masters Persons and Property—Endeavouring to form an unlawful Combination against their Masters, and other Injuries contrary to Law & the Peace—and for want of Sureties for good Behaviour was commited.

In other words, Nichols was locked up since he couldn’t make bail.

This item appeared two down from a breathless statement that “We are told that some Blacksmiths in Town [Boston] are employed in making a great Number of Iron SHACKLES, but for whom design’d we know not, certainly not for Boston Folks!” I’m not convinced that there was such ironwork, but there was certainly irony.

Six days later another Connecticut newspaper, the Norwich Packet, printed more rumors from Natick:

By a Gentleman arrived here from Boston, we are informed, that last Week a free Negro was apprehended at Natick, in Massachusetts-Bay Government, and, after Examination, committed to Concord Goal. It appeared that said Fellow has for some Time past been employed in forming a Plot to destroy the white People; for that Purpose he had enlisted Numbers of his own Complexion, as Associates, and they only waited until some Disturbance should happen that might occasion the Militia to turn out, and in their Absence it was proposed to Murder the defenceless Inhabitants.

The same Gentleman also informs us, that, last Monday Evening, another African, in the Vicinity of Natick, was discovered to have been deeply concerned in the above-mentioned infernal Scheme; and that his Master had delivered him up to Justice.

This supposed plot was thus the mirror image of the British officers’ worry that Bostonians were conspiring to murder them after a military alarm or a party.

TOMORROW: What was behind that fear?

[Eighteenth-century shackles above courtesy of the excellent website London Lives.]

The Legend of Abel Benson

In Framingham, there’s a tradition that the militia alarm on 19 Apr 1775 was spread by an African-American playing a trumpet. Lately, in fact, that tradition has said the trumpeter was a young boy of African and English descent named Abel Benson.

That tradition has been published in Norman Castle’s The Minute Men (1977), David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride (1994), Kenneth A. Daigler’s Spies, Patriots, and Traitors (2014), and various web articles and local talks.

It’s striking, however, that the first mention of that story didn’t appear in print until the early 20th century. As far as I can tell, Abel Benson’s connection to the Lexington alarm starts in 1908 in a compendium called Historic Homes and Places and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Middlesex County, Massachusetts.

In an entry on the Bacon family, this series quotes a man named Austin Bacon describing how he understood his grandfather John Bacon, lieutenant from Needham, responded to that alarm:

In the night or near morning the alarm was given and he set off on horseback to join his company at the more eastern part of the town, and sent his horse back when they got nearly to the Lower Falls. Soon after he had gone a trumpet sounded and some Framingham men came along with one Nero Benson, a negro, for trumpeter, and every house they passed had a blast.

Since Lt. Bacon had left, another relative presumably saw how the “Framingham men came along” and passed down that description.

That lore also surfaced (independently or not?) in George Kuhn Clarke’s History of Needham, Massachusetts, published in 1911. Clarke was a longtime collector of local history, old enough to have met a woman who lived through the first day of the Revolutionary War. Here’s how Clarke described the alarm in Needham:

On the morning of April 19, 1775, the news that the British were on their way to Concord was brought to Bullard’s Tavern, and the alarm was given by Ephraim Bullard, the tavern-keeper, or by his son of the same name, who fired a gun on Bullard’s Hill. . . .

In “The Leg” [a section of Needham later traded to Natick] the alarm was sounded by the trumpet of Abel, or Nero, Benson, a negro.

Unfortunately, Clarke didn’t write out the basis for that statement.

Both Nero and Abel Benson had appeared more than half a century earlier in William Barry’s History of Framingham, published in 1847. Three times in that book, Barry identified Nero Benson as the “trumpeter in Capt. Clark’s company” from Framingham in 1725—fifty years before the Revolutionary War. Another page lists “Abel Benson, trumpeter” among that town’s Revolutionary veterans. And there’s a genealogy that shows Nero was Abel’s grandfather through a son named William.

(Note that Abel Benson was also a brother-in-law of Peter Salem, a soldier at Bunker Hill sometimes credited with shooting Maj. John Pitcairn—though I think that’s dubious.)

It’s significant that Barry wrote about the Bensons without describing either Nero or Abel as being an important part of the area’s militia response in April 1775.

TOMORROW: In fact, there’s strong evidence neither Nero nor Abel Benson sounded the alarm.

Who Was Crispus Attucks’s Father?

Many websites and books identify Crispus Attucks’s father as Prince Yongey (or Young or Jonar), based on the fact that Framingham records say a man of that name married Nancy Peterattuck on 19 May 1737.

However, according to William Brown’s runaway advertisements, “Crispas” was about twenty-seven years old in 1750. That means he would have been about fourteen when Nancy Peterattuck married Prince Yongey.

Furthermore, in 1860 someone from Natick informed William C. Nell that Attucks’s parents were “Jacob Peter Attucks” and “Nanny,” which might have been another form of Nancy. This source said there were other children in the family—Sam, Sal, and Peter—and that they were all “uncommonly large.”

William Barry’s 1847 history of Framingham says Jacob Peterattucks was in that town by 1730 working for “Col. Buckminster.” There was a series of prominent men with that surname, including Joseph (1666-1747) and his sons Joseph (1697-1780) and Thomas (1698-1795).

It seems more likely, therefore, that Prince Yongey was Crispus Attucks’s stepfather, marrying his mother in 1737 after his father Jacob Peterattucks’s death. There are, of course, many other possible scenarios, including multiple people with the same name, unreliable informants, or a church marriage performed years into the relationship because the couple’s owner got religion.

Jacob Peterattucks was previously listed as a member of John Shipley’s military company in 1722, described as “Servt. John Wood.” On 16 May 1723, he was one of several men dismissed as “Sick, lame and unfit for Servis, by thear own Requests.” Notably, the lieutenant of that company was Joseph “Buckmaster.” Crispus Attucks was born around that year.

(In addition, a Moses Peter Attucks of Leicester served as a private at Fort Massachusetts under Lt. Elisha Hawley and Capt. Ephraim Williams in 1747-49. Another member of the family?)

We have no way of knowing whether Prince Yongey had any influence on Crispus Attucks, who was enslaved to Brown by 1750 and perhaps earlier, and therefore may never have lived with a stepfather. Yongey did become a Framingham fixture, as local historian Barry learned from townspeople who had known him:

But the most noted individual of the class under consideration, was Prince, sometimes called Prince Young, but whose name is recorded as Prince Yongey, and Prince Jonar, by which last name he is noticed [and “rated”] in the Town Rec. in 1767. He was brought from Africa when a young man of about 25 years, having been a person of consideration in his native land, from whence, probably, he derived his name. He was first owned by Col. Joseph Buckminster, and afterwards by his son, the late Dea. Thomas. He married, (by name Prince Yongey) in 1737, Nanny Peterattucks, of Framingham, (the name indicating Indian extraction) by whom he had several children, among them a son, who died young, and a daughter Phebe, who never married.

Prince was a faithful servant, and by his general honesty, temperance and prudence, so gained the confidence of his first master. Col. Buckminster, that for about a quarter of a century, he was left with the management of a large farm, during his master’s absence at the General Court. He occupied a cabin near the Turnpike, and cultivated, for his own use, a piece of meadow, which has since been known as Prince’s meadow. He chose the spot as resembling the soil of his native country.

During the latter part of his life he was offered his freedom, which he had the sagacity to decline; pithily saying, “massa eat the meat; he now pick the bone.” Prince shunned the society of persons of his own color, and though accustomed to appear in public armed with a tomahawk, was a great favorite with the young, whom, under all provocations, he was never known but in one instance to strike.

He had been sufficiently instructed to read, and possessed the religious turn characteristic of the African race. In his last sickness, he remarked with much simplicity, that he was “not afraid to be dead, but to die.” He passed an extreme old age in the family of Dea. Thos. Buckminster, and died Dec. 21, 1797, at the age of 99 years and some months. Numerous anecdotes are yet related, illustrating the simplicity, intelligence, and humor of “Old Prince.”

This description of Prince Yongey is evidently based on people who knew him as an old man, probably after his wife and perhaps his children were gone. He outlived the institution of slavery in Massachusetts, though he insisted that the Buckminster family was obliged to look after him in his old age, and he even outlived Deacon Buckminster.

It occurred to me that some elements of Prince Yongey’s life might have gotten mixed in with locals’ memories of Crispus Attucks, especially if they were indeed part of the same extended family. Brown’s descendants recalled Attucks being allowed to “trade cattle upon his own judgement”; locals recalled Yongey managing the Buckminster farm for his master. And did ”Prince’s meadow” become remembered as the “cellar hole” where the Attucks family lived?

Sorting Out the Versions of Crispus Attucks

This is a view from the Crispus Attucks Footbridge in Framingham, built near the area where he was reportedly born and worked for William Brown. And it looks like a good place to pause and reflect about how to reconcile the conflicting traditions about Attucks’s life.

The standard modern story (which I’ve repeated myself) is that Attucks escaped from slavery in Framingham in 1750, when he was about twenty-seven years old, and made a new life for himself as a sailor traveling to the Caribbean and North Carolina. At least while he was back in Boston, he used the alias “Michael Johnson,” presumably to preserve his freedom; that was how he was identified immediately after he was killed. We don’t know how within three days printers knew he was “born in Framingham,” nor how his real name became known the next week.

The Brown family traditions don’t fit easily with that story, but they aren’t easy to dismiss, eoither. Descendants of William Brown told their story of his slave Crispus by 1857. We might suspect they were trying to seize on the celebrity that abolitionists like William C. Nell had conferred on Attucks, but in 1859 antiquarians found the Boston Gazette advertisement that backs up the family’s claim.

Brown descendants also brought forward a cup, teapot, and powderhorn that Attucks reportedly owned. The provenance of these “relics” is impossible to confirm, but the two items that survive do appear to date from the early 1700s. They’re also cheap and misshapen, unlikely to have been saved unless the family had invested them with some meaning.

The biggest contradiction between those two stories is that the Brown family said Attucks returned to his master after 1750 and remained in Framingham for the rest of his life. In the late 1800s, that tradition expanded to say that Brown also let Attucks go to sea, apparently to accommodate the documentary evidence from 1770. But there’s still no explanation why Attucks would be using the name “Michael Johnson” if he had his master’s permission to travel to Boston, trade cattle, and work on ships.

One possibility is that in the confusion after the Boston Massacre people misidentified the big mulatto man shot in the chest as the sailor Michael Johnson. William Brown alerted the authorities to their mistake. and they corrected the dead man’s name to Crispus Attucks in legal papers by the next week, but the printers didn’t catch up, leaving us with newspapers that still erroneously called that man a sailor.

This scenario raises more questions:

• Why did the first reports about “Johnson” already connect him to Framingham?
• Why did Boston bury Attucks as a “stranger” if he had a master and family still in close touch and living less than a day away?
• Why didn’t William Brown seek compensation from the Crown for the loss of his slave?
• Why did Bostonians like William Pierce (cited in Traits of the Tea Party) continue to say Attucks was a sailor for years afterward?

Another possibility is that the Brown family preserved the memories of Crispus Attucks working for their ancestor, trading cattle “on his own judgment,” but forgot the part about how he escaped and never came back. That may not have been his 1750 departure; Attucks may have returned then but left permanently later, and Brown didn’t bother advertising for him again. Other members of the extended Attucks family continued to work in Framingham for years, and the family could have attached memories of them to Crispus after he became famous.

Again, that scenario has a big hole:

• If one of your family slaves has run away and you later learn he’s been killed in a riot in Boston, wouldn’t you remember him as a miscreant who got what was coming? Why would your family memory drop the fact that he’d run away when to you that was probably one of the most significant facts about his life?

Finally, there’s the Natick tradition that William C. Nell spoke about in 1860, one which named other members of the Attucks family. Nell’s informant said that his or her mother had heard Attucks’s sister Sal speak about him, apparently in the 1770s or 1780s. Nell didn’t name his source, and his papers have probably disappeared, leaving us with less to evaluate. To my knowledge that tradition never got into books, and no historians have grappled with it.

The Natick information emphasized Attucks as a big man, a bold man, and a law-breaker (smuggling horses, fighting soldiers). It said nothing about Attucks being enslaved to the Brown family, though it did identify him as a likely son of Jacob Peterattuck, “who lived with Capt. Thomas Buckminster of Framingham.” That tradition also said nothing about Attucks’s work at sea, saying instead that he had visited home “with three or four horses” shortly before the Massacre. Again, that’s hard to reconcile with the 1770 reports about “Michael Johnson” awaiting work on a ship south.

A lot of recent historical scholarship has used Crispus Attucks as an example of a politically aware sailor, not so much tied to Boston as part of a roving maritime working class within the British Empire. It emphasizes his life in the shadows as a runaway slave.

However, if the Brown family and Natick traditions are correct, then Attucks had much stronger links to life in rural Massachusetts than the standard profile suggests, though he may also have worked on ships. If not legally free, Attucks had at least some practical freedom within his bondage to William Brown. And he had an extended family out in the Framingham and Natick area, some of them known for carrying on Native American traditions (“the gourd-shell squaw”). That would provide new areas for historical consideration. But still, how did “Michael Johnson” enter that scenario?

More Information about the Attucks Family

In 1860 the historian and activist William C. Nell addressed a crowd at the ninetieth anniversary of the Boston Massacre. That event took place in an auditorium called the Meionaon, part of the Tremont Temple. [Why don’t we have a Meionaon anymore?]

As part of his speech, Nell shared some new information he had gathered about the family of Crispus Attucks, by then a symbol of African-American patriotism. Nell’s speech was printed in The Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper.

Later that year, a writer in the Boston Transcript argued that Attucks was an Indian rather than a black man. (He in all likelihood had both African and North American ancestry.) Nell drew on the same new information when he wrote into that mainstream newspaper to refute that claim.

First, a Massachusetts legislator from Framingham named James W. Brown wrote to Nell on 18 Feb 1860 to say:

He (Crispus) was the slave of my great grandfather, Deacon William Brown, of Framingham. He returned after his runaway excursion, and was a faithful servant. He was allowed to buy and sell cattle on his own judgment. It was probably upon one of these trading tours that he was drawn into the affray of March 5th. He pressed close upon the British troops, who received him and the other people with loaded muskets.

Attucks beat down their guns with a heavy stick, and shouted, “They dare not fire!” They did fire, and with what effect was known to all. Of stout and vigorous frame, athletic, bold and patriotic, had he lived, he would, doubtless, have acted a conspicuous and useful part in our great revolutionary struggle.

That was basically the same thing the Brown family had published three years before, down to the statement that their ancestor had let Attucks trade cattle “on his own judgment.” This letter made explicit that Attucks had returned to Framingham after the months in late 1750 when William Brown had advertised him as a runaway, and was still working for the Brown family when he died.

We should expect that story to reflect what the Browns wanted to believe, or wanted people to believe about them. It portrays William Brown as a lenient master, and Attucks as “faithful” and “patriotic.”

Nell didn’t name the person who had sent him a second letter from Natick dated 17 Feb 1860. It said in part:

Several persons are now living in Natick, who remember the Attucks family—viz., Cris, who was killed March 5th; Sam, whose name was abbreviated into Sam Attucks, or Smattox; Sal, also known as Slattox; and Peter, called Pea Tattox.

My mother, still living, aged 89, remembers Sal in particular, who used to be called the gourd-shell squaw, from the fact that she used to carry her rum in a gourd shell.

The whole family are described as having been uncommonly large, and are said to have been the children of Jacob Peter Attucks, who lived with Capt. Thomas Buckminster, of Framingham.

It has been conjectured that Jacob and Nanny were of Indian blood; but all who know the descendants, describe them as negroes. Crispus lived in many different places in Natick and Framingham.

When the inhabitants were detained in Boston, he used to smuggle their horses out of the town. He brought out three or four horses, which he took to Framingham, and then returned to kill the red-coats. His sister used to say that if they had not killed Cris, Cris would have killed them. Cris is said to have been in every street fight with the soldiers for some time previous to March 5th, 1770.

In addition, in writing to the Transcript Nell said, “Crispus Attucks was born in Framingham. A portion of his early life was passed in Sutton (now Millbury).” I’m not sure what the basis for that last statement is. Of course, all this information was second- or third-hand, about a man who had died ninety years before and had been born nearly a half-century before that.

But some parts seem to check out. There was indeed a prominent Thomas Buckminster (1698-1795) in Framingham. William Barry’s 1847 History of Framingham reported that Jacob Peterattucks “was in F[r]am., 1730, and worked for Col. Buckminster,” and that in May 1737 Nancy Peterattuck married Prince Yongey, a man enslaved to the Buckminster family. At that date Crispus Attucks was evidently in his teens. Was he indeed a son of Jacob Peterattucks? Was Nanny/Nancy his mother, remarrying? Or was this a more extended family?

Other parts of Nell’s new information raise questions, however. Though Framingham and Natick are next to each other, Sutton is twenty miles away. How did young Crispus go from one area to the other and back as Nell described?

Usually the phrase “inhabitants were detained in Boston” refers to the siege of 1775-76, but Attucks was dead by then. I know of no reason for people to “smuggle horses out of town” earlier.

Finally, all these stories about Crispus Attucks working steadily for his Framingham master until 1770 don’t square with the newspaper reports after his death that he was a sailor, nor with how Boston officials at first called him “Michael Johnson.” Those contemporaneous details fit better with the picture of a man who escaped from slavery by going to sea and then protected himself from recapture through an alias while back in Massachusetts.

TOMORROW: The teapot finally surfaces. You remember the teapot, right?

[My great thanks to Boston 1775 readers Joe Bauman and Liz Loveland for giving me the resources to transcribe the 16 Mar 1860 Liberator items fully and accurately. With their help I’ve revised this posting. Folks can find images of all Liberator issues here.]

What Will Happen with the Sawin House?

Back in 2012, I noted that there was a discussion about tearing down the Sawin House in Natick.

The oldest parts of that building are said to date back to 1696 and the first English settlers in that town, which was originally set aside for Native American converts to Christianity. The building also has a connection to the Lexington Alarm, though that’s more tenuous.

The house is now inside a MassAudubon wildlife sanctuary, and that organization says that preserving the structure is not within its mission.

This past week Brian Benson reported for the local newspaper that the Natick selectmen had deadlocked over competing proposals and would probably turn the question over to the full town meeting.

The Historical Society has proposed taking materials from the Sawin House, which is on South Street in MassAudubon’s Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary, and reconstructing in Shaw Park on Rte. 16 a section of the home resembling its appearance when Europeans settled the area.

But, the proposal has sparked controversy with some people arguing the society’s plan would take the home out of its historical landscape and take away open space. Others have said it would help showcase the town’s history and protect part of a building that could otherwise continue to deteriorate.

The plan to move the house would alter the use of Shaw Park and alter the historic structure from how it exists today, and those changes would require approval from various levels of government. That’s unlikely to happen unless the community reaches a consensus on what it wants. But it doesn’t appear to be an easy question.

Links for the Patriots’ Day Season in 2012

Events commemorating the start of the Revolutionary War come on strong in the next couple of weeks. The best clearing-house for happenings out in the countryside is BattleRoad.org’s Events page. Among those items is my own talk in Lincoln tomorrow night: “What Did the British Hope to Find in Concord on April 19th?”

BattleRoad.org’s listings extend to the end of the month. They include the battle demonstrations and encampments inside Minute Man National Historical Park on 14-19 April. I prefer visiting those over the venerable dawn skirmish on Lexington common because they’re (a) not at dawn, and (b) spread out, so the sight lines are better.

On that last point, writer Derek W. Beck asks whether V.I.P. seating for the Lexington reenactment is in the spirit of the occasion. Or would the provincials in that skirmish have seen those arrangements as similar to seating the meetinghouse according to social status and wealth?

One local commemoration I hadn’t read about before is Acton’s “Robbins’ Ride.” Alas, “for the purposes of safety and practicality,” this isn’t reenacted by an actual thirteen-year-old boy on a horse. Then again, an adult is more likely to ride responsibly.

In the city, Boston National Historical Park hosts its annual “Paul Revere’s Row” on 15 April. The next morning, Roxbury celebrates William Dawes’s trip through that town with events starting at 8:00 at the U.U. Urban Ministry/First Church. The Paul Revere House has many presentations and family activities lined up for the school vacation.

Finally, on Sunday the Boston Globe ran several articles pertinent to the holiday:

• On reenacting the real fight in Lexington on 19 Apr 1775, which occurred in the afternoon as the British expedition came back through town and met the reinforcement column. In the late 1900s the town militia’s attack on the regulars withdrawing to Boston became known as “Parker’s Revenge.” 
• On Bedford’s pole-capping ceremony, a tradition that goes back 47 years. (While I’ve found scattered references to the “Liberty Cap” in Revolutionary times, the symbol seems to have reached its greatest popularity as a Jeffersonian symbol during the partisan politics of the early republic.)
• On Cyrus Dallin, sculptor of the Paul Revere statue in the North End, and his museum in Arlington.
• On the legacy of the “praying Indian” communities of Massachusetts—Natives who adopted Christianity and a lifestyle that combined American and European culture, only to be eventually swept along by the growing population of British settlers and their descendants.

Thomas Sawin Homestead in Natick, 1692-?

This is the old Sawin house in Natick, photographed in 1936, from the American Antiquarian Society’s photographs of historical structures by Harriette Merrifield Forbes.

The oldest part of the house was reportedly built in 1696 by Thomas Sawin, who made a deal with the Christian Native community of Natick to set up a sawmill and gristmill for them. He legally lived in Sherborn for another two decades. The Sawins were among the first families of full British descent to settle among the Natick community. By 1745, however, the area had so many white inhabitants that they took over the government, and Natick became much like other Massachusetts towns.

During the alarm of 19 Apr 1775, the Sawin family and their Bacon in-laws were active in the Natick militia. According to traditions recorded by local historian Horace Mann (not that Horace Mann):

Thomas [Sawin], 3d, born in 1751, was called Ensign and Captain, and built the house near the brook about 1770. He married Abigail Bacon, of Dedham, in 1771, and was the father of Thomas and Martha, the founders of the Sawin Academy at Sherborn. He was a minute man in 1775 and a soldier in the Canada expedition of 1776. It was to this house that Abigail Bacon and her neice, Abigail Smith, came on the night of the 18th of April, 1775, to warn the Sawins of the marching of the British from Boston; and this house was a rendezvous of a portion of the Natick minute men.

Actually, while a local young woman named Abigail Bacon might have been involved in spreading the alarm on 18-19 April, Abigail Smith could not have been. In January, Boston 1775 reader John Russell showed me a document indicating that Smith was still only an infant then. Which makes two dramatic stories of the Revolution her descendants retold in the late 1800s that have proven untrue.

The surviving Sawin house, greatly expanded in 1791, sits on property now managed by the Massachusetts Audubon Society as part of the Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary. The society can’t keep up the building and plans to demolish it.

On 14 April at 11:00 A.M., I’ve been told, there will be “A Call for a Prayer of Thanksgiving” at the house as described on this Facebook page. The organizers hope to save the structure from demolition, but whether it’s practical to preserve or move it is uncertain. This may be the house’s last Patriots’ Day.

The Mysteries of Crispus Attucks

As we look ahead to this year’s anniversary and reenactment of the Boston Massacre (announcements to come), today’s Boston Globe ran an article headlined “Two towns claim Crispus Attucks.” Its main point is how very little we know about Crispus Attucks, the best known victim of the Massacre. We can’t even be sure whether he lived in what is now Framingham or Natick.

In fact, I think we know even less than the article states. Michele Morgan Bolton reported:

historians continue to debate the historic role of this son of an African slave father and Natick Praying Indian mother in the bloody skirmish with the British.

I don’t believe we have any solid evidence about Attucks’s parents. Because he was apparently enslaved as a young man, he was probably born into slavery. That would mean that his mother was enslaved, but his father may have been free. If young Crispus inherited the surname Attucks from his father, the man was likely a Natick Indian—the word means “little deer” in the native language. However, some enslaved children with surnames inherited them from their mothers, as in the case of Sally Hemings’s children.

It seems significant that this description of Attucks’s parents—African father, Native Christian mother—matches what’s in Dharathula Millender’s biography of Crispus Attucks. Many eager readers have taken that book as genealogically reliable, but it’s fictionalized biography for young readers.

The article continues:

A 1972 “Negro History Bulletin” stated that Attucks was believed to have been a slave in Framingham who lived with his family in a cellar hole on what is now Route 9, near Route 30.

This refers to Bill Belton’s article “The Indian Heritage of Crispus Attucks,” which in turn cites J. H. Temple’s 1887 History of Framingham. That book states:

Crispus Attucks...was a mulatto, born near the Framingham town line, a short distance to the eastward of the state Arsenal. The old cellar-hole where the Attucks family lived is still visible. He was probably a descendant of John Auttuck, an Indian, who was taken prisoner and executed at the same time with Capt. Tom, in June, 1676. Probably the family had intermarried with negroes who were slaves, and as the offspring of such marriages were held to be slaves, he inherited their condition, although it seems likely that the blood of three races coursed through his veins. He had been bought by Dea. William Brown of Framingham, as early as 1747.

Note the repeated use of “probably.” Temple felt Attucks was “probably” descended from John Auttuck. But can we assume his family used surnames the same way English colonists did, passing them down along male lines? Was Attucks a rare name in the community? (There were people in Framingham surnamed “Peterattucks” in the early 1700s.) Why assume Crispus was a direct descendant of John, except that both were recorded by the authorities?

As for Temple’s date of 1747, The Negro in the American Rebellion, published in Boston in 1867 by William Wells Brown (no relation to the Framingham deacon), also said that Brown owned Attucks in that year. But neither book offered documentation. We do have clear evidence that Brown claimed Attucks in 1750, when he placed an advertisement in the Boston Gazette reporting that his enslaved worker “Crispas” had freed himself.

The Globe article continues:

All accounts agree Attucks excelled as a cattle and horse trader and was a valued employee of William Brown, a grist-mill owner. But after attempts to buy his freedom failed, Attucks, at 27, is believed to have fled to sea in 1750. Some believe he sailed on a whaler off Nantucket. Or was it the China trade, by way of the Bahamas?

According to lore, Attucks reappeared just before the massacre, likely finding dock work as a rope maker. But trouble was already flaring between the British “lobster backs” and colonists, culminating in the deadly confrontation outside the Customs House on March 5, 1770, that kicked off the American Revolution.

Our only account of Attucks’s skill as a livestock trader comes from an unidentified descendant of William Brown whom Temple questioned in 1887. There’s no record of him trying to buy his freedom or working in Boston’s rope-making industry. The “China trade” didn’t exist until after the Revolution, when American merchants needed to find markets outside the British Empire. The term “lobster backs” appears to be an anachronism.

There is one indication that Attucks worked on a New Bedford whaling ship, but that account raises as many questions about the man as it answers. Traits of the Tea-Party (1835) credits a Boston barber named William Pierce with this information:

Attucks..., he says, was a Nantucket Indian, belonging on board a whale-ship of Mr. Folger’s, then in the harbor...

Pierce also told the author that he had never seen Attucks before the night of the Massacre, so he was recalling secondhand information. In 1770, Boston’s newspapers reported that Attucks was “lately belonging to New-Providence, and was here in order to go for North-Carolina”—nothing about Nantucket. So Pierce might have heard the wrong facts or become confused over sixty-five years.

American culture has come to see Crispus Attucks as a hero, martyr, and very important person. But he had to live his life in the shadows—as a slave, a runaway, and a hard-working sailor. Now we’re almost desperate for information about him, and grasp at almost any statement as if it were reliable. But we still know very little.