John Linzee and “the appearance of mental derangement”

On 4 Oct 1792, about two months after giving birth to her tenth child in Boston, Susannah Linzee died. She was thirty-eight years old.

That baby, named George Inman Linzee, died the following 21 March.

His next oldest sister, Mary Inman Linzee, died on 18 May.

Within a year, retired Royal Navy captain John Linzee had lost his wife and their two youngest children. He was still responsible for six older children.

(The oldest, Samuel Hood Linzee, was by then a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He had gotten a head start in the seniority system by being listed as his father’s servant and senior clerk aboard H.M.S. Falcon in 1775, when he was less than two years old.)

The death of Linzee’s wife also led to him losing his house on Essex Street in Boston. The merchant John Rowe had left it to his niece Susannah in his will, but only after the death of his widow, Hannah Rowe.

Rowe had her own house nearby, but she decided to reclaim this one now that Susannah hadn’t survived to inherit it. In July 1794 the widow told the court she owned the

House & Land…demised to the said John Linzee for a Term that is past, after which it ought to return to her again, but the said John Linzee still withholds the said House & Land & their appurtenances

She sued the retired captain for £1,000. Sheriff Jeremiah Allen certified that he had “attached a chair as the property of the within named John Linzee and left a summons at his last and usual place of Abode.”

John William Linzee’s 1917 history of the family reprints a couple of documents from that court case but doesn’t show how it was resolved. He declared, “this disagreement was of short duration,” pointing to how Hannah Rowe left bequests to the Linzee children. However, that will was written in 1803, after John Linzee had died. It would be just as consistent with Hannah Rowe strong-arming him out of the scene and raising her great-nephews and great-nieces herself.

In fact, there’s evidence that the death of his wife cast Linzee into a depression that alienated him from people. The merchant Samuel Breck, who praised the captain as “a good officer” in earlier years, recalled:

At her death the eccentricities of the captain assumed the appearance of mental derangement. He retired to a small box in the neighborhood of Milton, where he lived entirely by himself, rode out armed, and tapped his cider-cask by firing a ball into the head.

As he was seldom to be seen at home, he fixed a parcel of hooks in his kitchen for the butchers to hang their meat on, giving a standing order to put daily a joint upon one of the hooks. It so happened on one occasion, when he was detained in Boston about a fortnight by sickness, that he found on his return home fifteen or sixteen pieces of meat hanging around the walls of his kitchen.

Linzee died in 1798. He left his estate, worth almost $18,000, to his children and grandchildren and asked to be buried next to his wife.

The Linzees’ oldest daughter, Hannah, married Thomas C. Amory. Their son John Inman Linzee served as treasurer of Massachusetts. A granddaughter married a grandson of Dr. John Warren, a great-granddaughter married a grandson of Paul Revere, and, as I wrote here, another granddaughter married a grandson of William Prescott.

Capt. John Linzee’s Ties to Boston

This is the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.

Among the Massachusetts Historical Society’s unique artifacts from that event are the crossed swords of Col. William Prescott from the provincial troops and Capt. John Linzee from the Royal Navy, as highlighted here.

Those weapons were donated by the historian William Hickling Prescott, his wife Susannah, and her cousin. William was a grandson of the colonel. Susannah was a granddaughter of the captain.

Though born in England and serving the king, Capt. Linzee had strong ties to Boston. In 1772, while master of H.M.S. Beaver, he married Susannah Inman of Cambridge, favored niece of John and Hannah Rowe.

The Linzees started having children. The first was born in Plymouth, England; the second back in Boston during the siege; the third on the Delaware River, reportedly during a battle which it didn’t outlive.

The Linzees’ fourth child was born at Barbados, the next four in Plymouth. The captain had a busy war.

Susannah Linzee’s father, Ralph Inman, had left Boston in the evacuation of 1776. Her stepmother, Elizabeth (Murray Campbell Smith) Inman, never left. She kept hold of their property, which is how he could return to his Cambridge estate when the fighting died down.

John Rowe also never left. When that merchant died in 1787, he bequeathed Susannah Linzee some Boston property. She came back to America, and the Linzees’ ninth child was born in Boston in 1789.

The following September, Capt. Linzee sailed H.M.S. Penelope into Boston harbor, writing to Gov. John Hancock that he intended to salute the flag of the U.S. of A. with thirteen guns if the battery at the Castle would reciprocate.

Linzee’s letter also mentioned his “exceeding ill State of Health,” and indeed he was so sick the Penelope sailed away without him while he recuperated in his wife’s house. A few months later, however, Capt. Linzee was back “in perfect health” on his ship along with his two eldest sons.

In the following years, things started to go wrong for Capt. Linzee.

TOMORROW: A British officer in Boston.

Preview of “The Promise of Liberty” in Charlestown

From now till Monday, coinciding with the battle anniversary, the Bunker Hill Museum is playing host to a pop-up exhibit of historic documents showing the expansion of American constitutional freedom, organized by Seth Kaller.

Pictured above are:

• 18 July 1776 New-England Chronicle printing of the Declaration of Independence.
• Newspaper printing of the proposed new U.S. Constitution, followed by George Washington’s letter to the Congress as convention chairman explaining the benefits of the new government framework.
• Newspaper reporting the first twelve proposed amendments to that constitution.
• Statement autographed by Frederick Douglass.
• Newspaper report on Abraham Lincoln’s speech in Independence Hall on his way to Washington, D.C., in 1861.
• Poster from 1913 showing the progress of woman suffrage.
• Prepared text of Martin Luther King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial, to which he improvised the “Dream” passage.

The exhibit also includes a display dedicated to religious liberty and inclusion with a reproduction of President George Washington’s letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and more.

This is a prototype of a larger traveling exhibit (or series of exhibits) that Kaller envisions called The Promise of Liberty. Its website explains:

The Exhibit aims to inspire a sense of unity and pride that cuts across political divides, while encouraging gratitude for the liberties we have and igniting a collective determination to defend and expand upon the liberties promised 250 years ago.

The organization is now talking to potential sponsors, partners, and hosts in the Sestercentennial years. In the meantime, folks can get a preview in Charlestown this weekend. 

The Malcoms Coming Back to Boston

In the published Boston town records are some lists of people arriving in Boston by ship in the 1760s.

Each set of entries starts by identifying the ship: for example, “Danl. Malcom Sloop Rose from Halifax” on 31 Oct 1765. Then come names and sometimes brief descriptions of the passengers.

These records show a couple of John Malcom’s trips back to Boston.

• 15 Dec 1767: On a schooner from Quebec, “Capt. John Malcom”
• 1 Feb 1768: On a sloop from Halifax, “Capt. John Malcom,” mariner

They also show that in this period Malcom was legally not considered a resident of Boston, or else he wouldn’t have gone on these lists.

Another interesting entry appears on 4 Nov 1765, a sloop from Quebec: “Mickl. Malcom to the care of Capn. Malom [sic].” That captain is probably Daniel, still based on Boston. Michael Malcom might have been his aging father or his six-year-old nephew, John’s son.

Sarah Malcom, the matriarch of the family, died in Boston on 23 Sept 1767 and was buried on Copp’s Hill. Her gravestone is quite weathered, but a nineteenth-century publication makes clear she was the wife of Michael Malcom, who died in 1775.

I puzzled over one mystery among these passenger lists. A entry for 4 Aug 1769 says a schooner from Quebec brought “Mary Malcom Wife to Jno. Malcom & 3 Children.”

John Malcom married Sarah Balch in 1750, and they had children together through the following decade. In the 1790s a Boston woman identifying herself as Sarah Malcom, John Malcom’s widow, sent petitions to the British government.

The Boston directory for 1789 listed Sarah Malcom as running a “boarding-house, [on] Ship-street.” And the 15 Sept 1800 Boston newspapers reported that Sarah Malcom, aged seventy-three, had died just a few hours after her forty-year-old daughter, also named Sarah Malcom. Those facts line up pretty well with the records of John Malcom’s wife and daughter from the 1750s.

So where does “Mary Malcom Wife to Jno. Malcom” come in? I wondered if John Malcom’s first wife Sarah might have died in Québec, he remarried to a woman named Mary, she died, and he remarried to a second Sarah. I couldn’t find any records of death and remarriage, but those events might have happened outside of Massachusetts. Given how many women of the time were named Mary and Sarah, that scenario’s not as outlandish as it might seem.

But the simplest explanation is that whoever was making those lists of incoming passengers just wrote down Sarah Malcom’s name wrong. After a few years in Québec, Capt. John Malcom’s family was moving back to Boston.

TOMORROW: More change in 1769.

“Immediately struck Mr. Malcom in the Head”

Despite setbacks like being held prisoner by the French Navy in 1764, Capt. John Malcom appears to have prospered in Québec in the mid-1760s.

By early 1767 he had bought a “country house,” perhaps rising in status from merchant captain to landed gentleman.

There was one hitch to enjoying that house, however: it was already occupied by Lt. James Burns of the 52nd Regiment and his family.

That regiment had arrived in Canada in August 1765. Burns rented the house “in the country near Québec,” he later told Gen. Thomas Gage, “as lodgings were at the time dear in the town, and [I] as a subaltern, could not bear too heavy an expense.”

Months later, as John Gilbert McCurdy recounted in Quarters, Malcom bought that house.

At the time, it looks like Lt. Burns’s wife was still nursing a new baby. He described her as “confined to her bed, having had both her breasts laid open.”

Malcom told Burns that he had to vacate the property in three days or “become tenant to him.” Which frankly doesn’t seem unreasonable, but perhaps the captain was abrupt or suddenly raised the rent or demanded earlier payment than the previous property owner.

What happened next in February 1767 was reported in the press, including the 16 March Boston Gazette, presumably copying information from a Québec newspaper:

Saturday Night last, as Captain John Malcom, together with his Son and Daughter, was going from Town to his Country-House, in a Cariole, he was met on the Road, between the Wind-Mill and St. John’s Gate, by Lieut. Burns, of the 52d Regiment, walking into Town, with a large Club in his Hand;

upon his meeting Mr. Malcom he struck his Horse and overset his Cariole;

Mr. Malcom ask’d him what he meant by such Usage, to which Mr. Burns made answer, That he would FINISH him, and immediately struck Mr. Malcom in the Head, and by the Stroak broke his Club; but notwithstanding Mr. Malcom and his Daughter asking him his Reasons for so barbarous an Assault, he struck him a second Time, which knock’d Mr. Malcom down, and continued knocking at Mr. Malcom, with the Remains of the club, until he saw two Men come up, upon which he immediately went away.

The same story was reprinted in several other newspapers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and smaller cities. However, I don’t have any more information about this incident aside from Burns having to explain his side of the story to Gage the next year. Perhaps Canadian sources would tell more.

I can’t help but compare this to Malcom’s famous run-in with George R. T. Hewes in early 1774, except in that case Malcom was the one wielding a stick, hitting the little shoemaker on the head. In that confrontation Malcom insisted that Hewes was too lowly to criticize him, a gentleman; Hewes replied with a remark that questioned Malcom’s social status. For the captain, hitting Hewes with a stick wasn’t simply satisfying in itself, but it also signaled that the shoemaker was of lower social status, not worthy of a genteel challenge.

Up in Québec, Lt. Burns was a British gentleman, at least in his own eyes, and even if he did feel pressed for money. And he may have seen Malcom—raised in provincial Maine, a working mariner until quite recently, and yet now his landlord—as a parvenu who deserved to be put in his place.

TOMORROW: Meanwhile, back in Boston…

Talking about Ebenezer Richardson in Stoneham, June 4

On the evening of Tuesday, 4 June, I’ll speak to the Stoneham Historical Society. The society is headlining my talk “The Most Hated Man in Revolutionary Boston.”

Was that Gov. Thomas Hutchinson? Customs Commissioner Benjamin Hallowell? Or even Boston 1775’s latest figure in the spotlight, Capt. John Malcom?

No, for producing long-lasting, multifaceted, bitter antipathy, I don’t think anyone could beat Ebenezer Richardson. In fact, I’ve argued that Richardson did as much as any other individual to turn people in rural Massachusetts against the royal government.

Richardson was born in 1718 on a Woburn farm touching the border with Stoneham. Until the age of thirty-four he was an ordinary middling New England farmer—married, raising children, and helping to house his wife’s poor widowed sister.

Over the next quarter-century Richardson became a secret adulterer, an outcast from his home town, a government informant, a Customs officer, a target of riots, a convicted child murderer, and a fugitive. Starting around 1760, each new scandalous episode linked him more closely to royal officials, whom people saw as protecting him.

I’ve chased traces of Ebenezer Richardson through archives on two continents. This talk brings his story back to, well, not quite to his home town, but to the neighboring town, and also the town where his widowed mother moved after she remarried.

This event is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. at the Stoneham Public Library, 431 Main Street. It is free and open to the public, sponsored by the Stoneham and Massachusetts Cultural Councils.

“His Business immediately calling him back to Quebec”

John Malcom spent November 1759 to August 1760 as a prisoner of war in French Canada.

He sailed back to Québec at the end of the year, apparently to scout for business opportunities, only to have his ship iced in.

In the winter of 1761 Malcom made a month-long trek over lake and land back to Boston.

So what do we hear about him doing next? Moving to Québec!

In the 16 Feb 1761 Boston Gazette Malcom announced:

Boston 9 February 1761.

THIS Day came to Town John Malcom, from Quebec in Canada, and desires one Thomas Power a Suttler at Halifax, immediately to come to Boston and settle all his Accompts with said Malcom without fail, as his Tarry at Boston cannot be long, his Business immediately calling him back to Quebec before the Lakes breaks [sic] up.

I’d think he could have written to Power directly, but advertising in the newspaper might have carried some legal weight.

On 2 March, the captain told Boston Gazette readers:

JOHN MALCOM will set out this Day Week [i.e., one week from today] for Quebec, by the Way of Albany, Lake George, Crown-Point, Montreal and Trois-Rivieres; and will receive Letters to carry to each Place at Mr. John Scollay’s Shop near the Town-Dock.

Perhaps, I thought, he was just going back to pick up his ship and sail it ’round to Boston again. But no, on 6 April his wife advertised in the Boston Gazette:

All Persons to whom John Malcom of Boston is indebted, are desired to bring in their Accounts to Sarah Malcom in order for Payment, as she intends soon to go out of the Province; and all indebted to said Malcom, are desired to make Payment to her directly. Said Malcom has a very commodious House at New Boston to Lett, with three Rooms on a Floor, and very good Accommodations.

In this case, “New Boston” meant what was also known as the West End. That side of the peninsula was less densely built up than the areas closer to the outer harbor.

The Malcoms evidently settled in Québec to help integrate one of the British Empire’s newest provinces into its trading system—and make money along the way. The captain maintained ties with Boston, though. Malcom announced in the 21 Feb 1763 Boston Gazette that in about ten days he was sailing his ship Friends up to Québec and could take freight or passengers.

Younger brother Daniel might have gotten involved in this trade, too. In the 25 Apr 1763 Boston Post-Boy, he advertised:

As DANIEL MALCOM intends to leave Boston for Quebec in 10 or 15 Days; any that has Demands on him are desired to apply to him. And any Persons indebted to said MALCOM are desired to pay him, or come and give their Note on Interest.—N.B. Said MALCOM goes by Land to Quebec.

Daniel doesn’t appear to have stayed in Canada for long, though. Church records and newspapers show him and his wife Ann in Boston at several points in the mid-1760s.

For the next few years John Malcom kept Québec as his trading base. But he didn’t keep out of trouble.

TOMORROW: An international incident.

John Malcom: The Early Years

Back in January I wrote about the mobbing of Customs officer John Malcom on the Sestercentennial anniversary of that event.

The standard study of that attack is “Tar and Feathers: The Adventures of Captain John Malcom,” written by Frank W. C. Hersey in 1941 and available through the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Alfred F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party looks at the same day through the eyes of George R. T. Hewes.

I collected some additional information about Malcom that I didn’t have time to dig through and share in January, so now I’m doubling back to his story. We can call this series “The Further Adventures of Captain John Malcom.” Though really it’s more of a prequel.

First of all, a note about nomenclature: Capt. John Malcom spelled his name without a second L, as did his brother Daniel Malcom. However, many people writing about him spelled the surname in the traditional Scottish style as “Malcolm.” Indeed, Hersey transcribed a petition signed by Malcom which a clerk then labeled as coming from “Mr. Malcolm.”

Because so many historians rendered the name as “Malcolm,” I followed that style in making a Boston 1775 tag for the man years ago. However, in these postings I’m going to use the spellings that individuals preferred.

This story starts in 1721, when Michael and Sarah Malcom arrived in Boston from Ulster, Ireland, where their ancestors had moved from Scotland in the previous century. They brought young children named William and Elizabeth.

On 20 May 1723 Sarah gave birth to a second boy, whom they called John. The family then moved to Georgetown in the district of Maine. Another baby boy, Daniel, arrived on 29 Nov 1725, followed by Allen in 1733 and Martha in 1738.

Michael Malcom invested in the Massachusetts “Land Bank or Manufactory Scheme.” In 1745 he was assessed to pay £16, on the high side of those investors.

Also in 1745, wrote Hersey, young John Malcom “served as an ensign in the Second Massachusetts Regiment, commanded by Colonel Samuel Waldo, at the siege of Louisbourg; and this same year he was captain of a vessel which carried dispatches from Louisbourg to Boston,” presaging his maritime career. However, John Malcom’s name also appears as a private enlisting in Capt. Elisha Doane’s company in August 1746.

In 1750 John Malcom married Sarah Balch at Boston’s Presbyterian Meeting-House. The Rev. John Moorhead baptized five of their children between 1751 and 1758.

Younger brother Daniel Malcom also came to Boston and married Ann Fudge, and they also had children starting in 1751. He became a prominent member of the Anglican Christ Church’s congregation. While John named one of his sons Daniel, I’ve found no evidence Daniel named any of his boys John.

Both John and Daniel went to sea, made Boston their home port, and rose to be merchant captains. By the late 1740s a captain or two named Malcom was sailing out of Boston for Cape Fear, North Carolina; Antigua; Annapolis; Philadelphia; Honduras; Bristol, England; and Youghal, Ireland. By the 1750s the Malcoms were owners or part-owners of ships. They traded all over North America, the Caribbean, and Britain—and occasionally Cadiz and Lisbon.

It wasn’t illegal to trade with Portugal, Spain, or Caribbean islands claimed by other empires, but there were higher tariffs on most goods traded that way. Ship captains usually tried every trick they could to minimize those tariffs. Many of those methods made that trade into illegal smuggling, but in that period Boston merchants generally figured that as long as they didn’t get too blatant the Customs service wouldn’t come down hard on them.

The real hazards in ocean trade were natural disasters and war.

TOMORROW: Wrecked and captured.

“Shall we in equal strains return / Thy spleen, and answer scorn with scorn?”

The Journal of American Constitutional History just published (open access, and thus available to all) David Waldstreicher’s article “Racism, Black Voices, Emancipation, and Constitution-Making in Massachusetts, 1778.”

Waldstreicher is a Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York and author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence, just issued in paperback, and Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification.

In that biography, Waldstreicher appended a number of poems published anonymously in the New England press that he “tentatively” attributes to Phillis Wheatley (or Phillis Peters, as she became after her marriage in late 1778).

One appeared in the 12 Feb 1778 Independent Chronicle in the midst of Massachusetts’s debate over ratifying a new constitution. This would be an unusual work for Wheatley, in both subject and form. She had never before exchanged literary insults in the weekly press, nor published in the satirical mode, and she rarely wrote in tetrameter. (One exception to the last pattern was “Ode to Neptune,” subject of my article for Commonplace.)

On the other hand, this poem was a direct response to one that attacked the idea of rights for black people in Massachusetts and used the name “Phillis” to refer to a politician’s black mistress. It shows poetic skill and some rhetorical resemblances to Wheatley’s published work, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the state having more reason to write it.

Waldstreicher’s paper goes into more detail than his book about the poem—its political context, its literary grounding, the verses it responded to, the reasons to link it to Wheatley. In doing so, it offers a snapshot of the state’s process of creating a constitution. That 1778 document proved to be a dead end, but this debate turned out to have a strong effect on the successful 1780 document.

Ironically, in the paper Waldstreicher stays just clear of stating that Wheatley wrote this poem, acknowledging other possibilities and calling it “Wheatleyan.” That may account for why the title of the paper doesn’t include Wheatley’s name, just “Black Voices.” 

In contrast, the book posits “If this poem is by Wheatley” and then proceeds to treat it as her work, indeed “a key work in her oeuvre.” That approach could have been demanded by how many other topics a biography has to cover, leaving less chance to pause and work through nuances. Or it could have been allowed by a different level of peer review pressure. Either way, it’s clear that Waldstreicher is convinced this poem is most likely Phillis Wheatley’s own commentary on the state of racial politics in Massachusetts in 1778.

And with the article freely available, everyone has a chance to study the poem, the verses it replied to, and the multi-layered analysis.

“Franklin was no friend of Wilkes…”

Last month the History of Parliament blog shared Dr. Robin Eagles’s review of Benjamin Franklin’s dislike and distrust of John Wilkes, based on his correspondence in Founders Online.

Eagles writes:

Franklin was no friend of Wilkes, who was ejected from his seat in the Commons following the infamous affair of North Briton number 45 and the printing of the scandalous Essay on Woman. They had much in common – both running newspapers and having voracious appetites for knowledge. They may also have coincided at the so-called ‘Hellfire Club’. Yet Franklin was repelled by Wilkes’s excesses.

I wrote about Franklin and the Baron le Despencer’s club a year ago. My conclusion was that those two men didn’t become friends until years after the baron had let the club lapse, in large part because Wilkes was blabbing about it. Some books do point to evidence for a connection between Franklin and the club; however, that evidence was made up by a British author who was a habitual liar.

Back to actual documented history.

After Wilkes had fled overseas in December 1763 leaving his case to be tried by the Commons in absentia, Franklin followed his case closely, satisfied to see Parliament resolved to rid itself of someone he considered unsuitable. On 11 February 1764 Franklin, briefly back in America, responded to his friend, Richard Jackson, MP for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, that he was ‘pleas’d to find a just Resentment so general in your House against Mr. W.’s seditious Conduct, and to hear that the present Administration is like to continue’.

Franklin’s perspective may have altered somewhat when he became friendly with Wilkes’s brother, Israel. He was even invited to ‘eat his Christmas dinner’ with the Wilkeses at the family house in Red Lyon Square in 1766. [Mr and Mrs Israel Wilkes to Franklin, 23 December 1768] He remained, though, appalled by the disorder prompted by John Wilkes’s actions and recorded in detail the riots and destruction in London and beyond during the chaotic election year of 1768.

Nonetheless, reports of those same disturbances and Parliament’s expulsions convinced the Whigs in faraway Boston that Wilkes would be a good ally in their fight to reform the British administration. 

“Terminated in a Duel…at Dorchester Point”

While looking for more ties between Charles Miller and the Boston Patriots, I came across this story from the next generation.

Boston’s Constitutional Telegraphe newspaper reported on 17 June 1801:

We hear, and are concerned to state, as we conceive it a painful task, which we consider to be our duty to perform, to announce to the public an unfortunate dispute between Mr. Charles Miller, jun. and Mr. Edward Rand, both of this town, which terminated in a Duel, early on Sunday morning last, at Dorchester Point…

Charles Miller, Jr., was baptized in King’s Chapel on 18 Nov 1770. So far as I can tell, he was the first and only child of Charles Miller, a younger son of Braintree’s Anglican minister, and his first wife, Elizabeth Cary of Charlestown.

Charles, Jr., followed his father into the mercantile business. Around the turn of the century there are lots of advertisements in Boston papers for goods offered by the firm of “Charles Miller & Son.”

Edward Rand was baptized in Boston’s New North Meetinghouse on 22 Aug 1773. He was the fourth child of Dr. Isaac Rand, Jr., a physician suspected of being a Tory but mostly tolerated because of his medical skills. (Dr. Isaac Rand, Sr., was an active Patriot, caring for soldiers with smallpox during the siege of Boston.) By the end of the 1700s the younger Dr. Rand’s reputation was solid enough that he was elected president of the Massachusetts Medical Society.

In April 1800, Charles P. Phelps (1772–1857) and Edward Rand announced that together they had rented a large store on Codman’s Wharf to sell imported fabric, hardware, and spermaceti candles. They offered to advance cash on consignments and sought “a Lad about 14 years of age” to work for them.

A duel between rising young men from such prominent families was bound to cause talk. In a letter to her youngest, Abigail Adams said: “it is reported that the Quarrel arose about a Female— this is the first instance of the Kind in our State.” Massachusetts had seen some duels before, but not that many involving locals.

The item in the Green Mountain Patriot of Peacham, Vermont, on 2 July avoided using the term “duel,” saying instead that the two men had met “for the purpose of honorably settling an honorable dispute.”

The Federal Galaxy of Brattleboro broke the full story on 29 June:

FATAL DUEL.

A report of a late duel in Boston has been current in town for ten days past—A letter dated Boston, June 17, received by the Editor, from his friend residing there, gives the following recital of the event:

“Some misunderstanding having taken place between Messr. Charles Miller, jun. and Isaac [sic] Rand, (respectable merchants in Boston) which originated respecting a certain young lady, to whom Miller had paid his addresses; after giving each other some hard words, Rand sent Miller a challenge, which was accepted. Having agreed on seconds, they repaired to Dorchester Point early on Sunday morning last;…”

Decades later, Rand’s business partner Phelps wrote in an unpublished memoir that the lady was “from Rhode Island,” but I located no source identifying her.

After describing the action, the letter in the Federal Galaxy stated:

“You will find no mention made of this affair in the Boston papers, as the several printers have been requested by the parents of Miller and Rand, not to notice it.”

And indeed the Constitutional Telegraphe’s article appears to be the only report printed inside Boston. It was, however, reprinted outside the town from Maine to Virginia.

TOMORROW: Who lived, who died, who told the story.

“A brief historical sketch of the skull of a British Soldier”

At the end of yesterday’s post, the Worcester printers and antiquarians Albert Tyler and Daniel Seagrave confirmed with Nancy Felch that her late husband had lectured about phrenology.

That conversation happened in the mid-1870s, with the men asking about events about thirty-five years before. In the intervening years Walton Felch had been most active as a hydropathic physician (and amateur poet), but he had indeed been a phrenologist.

As related by Tyler in 1905, the two men pressed on to their real interest: Had Felch owned the skulls of two British soldiers killed on 19 Apr 1775?

She answered “Yes.”

“Where are they now?”

She said she had them in possession, and they were packed away among other things useless to her at her old residence in Barre.

The thought of their value to the collection of this then young [Worcester] Society [of Antiquity] instantly occurred, and the writer [Tyler] asked her if she was willing to part with them. She replied that if we wanted them, we could have them in welcome.

So in due time a box containing the whole phrenological outfit was received at our office. . . .

We found in the collection only one of the two skulls—the absence of the other the widow could not explain.

Walton Felch’s phreonological material doesn’t appear on the inventory of his estate, which might reflect its low market value in 1872.

Though Tyler’s reminiscence was silent on this point, it seems clear that the antiquarians offered Nancy Felch some payment for those goods. A local newspaper article from 1881 said, “The members made up quite a collection of money for the donor,” she being “in reduced circumstances.” A Boston article from 1895, while getting several details wrong, stated that Daniel Seagrave “assisted the widow with the funeral expenses.” I suspect Seagrave bought the material, expecting to give the skull to the society when it had a place to keep it.

The widow Felch finally died in Barre in 1896. Her maiden name was Brigham; the Worcester Society of Antiquity’s proceedings credit Dr. F. K. and F. A. Brigham with donating “Pam[phlets], Papers, Hand-Bills and Plaster Casts belonging to the late Walton Felch, phrenologist” in 1897. That suggests she may not have located all her late husband’s phrenological material in the 1870s, but eventually the society got all that survived.

The society’s published record of its meeting on 5 June 1877 says:

Mr. Charles R. Johnson gave a brief historical sketch of the skull of a British Soldier who was killed at the battle of Concord, April 19th, 1775, now in the possession of a member of this Society.

That sketch was not printed with the proceedings, and the member who possessed that relic was still anonymous.

Meanwhile, Tyler was still interested in the other skull. His story went on:

In a casual conversation with the late Dr. Joseph N. Bates [of Barre] there was another “happening.” He was a collector of antique things, and when the discovery of the skull was mentioned to him, and the loss of the other one, he smiled and said, “I have got that one; I attended Mr. Felch in his last sickness and he gave it to me!”

Dr. Bates died; his brother, Dr. George Bates, was his executor; inquiry was made of him concerning the second skull, but nothing ever came of it. It is probably lost beyond recovery.

Dr. Joseph N. Bates (1811–1883) appears above, courtesy of the Roster and Genealogies of the 15th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

Back in 1840, Edmind Quincy Sewall, Jr., had described how one of the skulls ”was only the upper half of the head” displaying a “bullet hole.” He didn’t take note of the other at all. I suspect that it was intact and undistinguished, though I’ll note later statements to the contrary. If I’m right, the skull that Dr. Bates took looked like any other specimen of the cranium and was thus easily overlooked after he died.

TOMORROW: Getting to see the skull.

“Intensely interested in the history of the battles for independence”

Albert Tyler (1823–1913, shown here courtesy of the Cabinet Card Gallery) was born in Smithfield, Rhode Island. As a teenager he trained as a printer at the Massachusetts Spy in Worcester.

This was the newspaper that Isaiah Thomas co-founded in Boston, then moved to central Massachusetts just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

After coming of age, Tyler moved to the nearby town of Barre and printed the Barre Patriot for several years. Then in 1851 he left printing to be a Universalist minister.

Over the next ten years Tyler preached to three congregations, which might indicate that profession was not for him, but he kept the honorific “Reverend” nonetheless.

Tyler returned to Worcester and went into business with another former employee of the Massachusetts Spy (and Universalist), Daniel Seagrave (1831–1902). They bought the book and job printing operation of the Spy, staying in the same building.

In 1875 Tyler, Seagrave, and a grocery magnate named Samuel E. Staples (1822–1902) took the lead in founding the Worcester Society of Antiquity. Seagrave became its first secretary.

Thirty years later, on 6 June 1905, society secretary E. B. Crane read reminiscences from the Rev. Albert Tyler about “singular happenings” related to the building of the society’s collections. At the start of one anecdote the octogenarian recalled what appear to be the course of lectures Walton Felch offered at the end of 1840:

In 1839, in the old and original Worcester Town Hall, a traveling lecturer, Walter Felch by name, gave phrenological examinations in the day-time and lectured in the evening upon phrenology, then a popular topic. He exhibited the usual array of drawings, plaster casts and skulls in the delineation of his subject.

Among the latter were two skulls, which he said the Selectmen of Concord had permitted him to take from the graves of the British soldiers who fell in that first battle of the Revolution.

The writer was a boy of fifteen years of age, who, as a Spy printer boy, had a free pass to the lecture. He was intensely interested in the history of the battles for independence . . .

Nearly forty years passed away, the boy had become a man beyond middle age, and was one of the proprietors, under the business name of Tyler & Seagrave, of the office in which he had learned the trade. In editing and printing a historical work, we came across the name of “Walton Felch,” whose brief history was necessary to its completeness. After many inquiries we learned of the residence of his widow. We communicated with her, and she called at our office.

The boy, who remembered the skulls, was not so sure he remembered the name, and though the husband’s name seemed familiar, forty years had dimmed his recollection into uncertainty, but he ventured to ask the widow if her husband ever lectured on phrenology. She said he had in his younger days. The query then followed, “Did he have two skulls of British soldiers who fell at Concord?”

TOMORROW: Yes and no.

“When forty-two countrymen Sure bid their friends adieu.”

Ezra Lunt and Henry-Walter Tinges printed the Essex Journal in Newburyport with the financial backing of Isaiah Thomas, who made a hasty move from Boston to Worcester in April 1775.

On 26 May, the Essex Journal published this verse in a section of the back page titled “The Parnassian Packet”:

A Funeral ELEGY, to the Immortal Memory of those Worthies, who were slain in the Battle of CONCORD, April 19, 1775.

AID me ye nine! my muse assist,
A sad tale to relate,
When such a number of brave men
Met their unhappy fate.
At Lexington they met their foe
Completely all equip’d,
Their guns and swords made glitt’ring show,
But their base scheme was nipp’d.
Americans, go drop a tear
Where your slain brethren lay!
O! mourn and sympathize for them!
O! weep this very day!
What shall we say to this loud call
From the Almighty sent;
It surely bids both great and small
Seek GOD’s face and repent.
Words can’t express the ghastly scene
That here presents to view,
When forty-two brave countrymen
Sure bid their friends adieu.
To think how awful it must seem,
To hear widows relent
Their husbands and their children
Who to the grave was sent.
The tender babes, nay those unborn,
O! dismal cruel death!
To snatch their fondest parents dear,
And leave them thus bereft.
O! Lexington, your loss is great!
Alas! too great to tell,
But justice bids me to relate
What to you has befell.
Ten of your hardy, bravest sons,
Some in their prime did fall;
May we no more hear noise of guns
To terrify us all.
Let’s not forget the Danvers race
So late in battle slain,
Their courage and their valor shown
Upon the crimson’d plain.
Sev’n of your youthful sprightly sons
In the fierce fight were slain,
O! may your loss be all made up,
And prove a lasting gain.
Cambridge and Medford’s loss is great,
Though not like Acton’s town,
Where three fierce military sons
Met their untimely doom.
Menotomy and Charlestown met
A sore and heavy stroke,
In losing five young brave townsmen
Who fell by tyrant’s yoke.
Unhappy Lynn and Beverly,
Your loss I do bemoan,
Five of your brave sons in dust doth lye,
Who late were in their bloom.
Bedford, Woburn, Sudbury, all,
Have suffer’d most severe,
You miss five of your choicest chore,
On them let’s drop a tear.
Concord your Captain’s fate rehearse,
His loss is felt severe,
Come, brethren, join with me in verse,
His mem’ry hence revere.
O ’Squire Gardiner’s death we feel,
And sympathizing mourn,
Let’s drop a tear when it we tell,
And view his hapless urn.
We sore regret poor Pierce’s death,
A stroke to Salem’s town,
Where tears did flow from ev’ry brow,
When the sad tidings come.
The groans of wounded, dying men,
Would melt the stoutest soul,
O! how it strikes thro’ ev’ry vein.
My flesh and blood runs cold.
May all prepare to meet their fate
At GOD’s tribunal bar,
And may war’s terrible alarm
For death us now prepare.
Your country calls you far and near,
America’s sons ’wake,
Your helmet, buckler, and your spear,
The LORD’s own arm now take
His shield will keep us from all harm,
Tho’ thousands gainst us rise,
His buckler we must sure put on,
If we would win the prize.

This tribute to the local men killed the previous month started with the town of Lexington, not just because redcoats had fired the first fatal shots there but because that town lost more men than any other.

Seven Danvers men were killed in and around Jason Russell’s house in Menotomy, so that town got the next mention—which the newspaper’s Essex County audience probably appreciated.

Eventually the poet got to individuals, naming a couple of men at the top of society—Capt. James Miles of Concord and Isaac Gardiner, Esq., of Brookline—and Benjamin Pierce of Salem, also killed at the Russell House. Other dead officers went unnamed, however.

Ezekiel Russell printed this poem at the bottom of his “Bloody Butchery of the British Troops” broadside, shown above. You can peruse that page more closely through the American Antiquarian Society, founded by Thomas.

The Russell broadside contained some errors (a missing “brave,” “young” became “your,” another “your” dropped out), suggesting that shop hastily copied the text out of the newspaper. I would have expected the transmission to go the other way: from the Russell print shop, which was known for publishing a young woman’s elegiac verses, to the Essex Journal.

That in turn suggests that Russell didn’t issue the “Bloody Butchery” broadside until more than a month after the battle. Maybe he needed that time to engrave all those coffins.

“We shall have many chearful rides together yet”

As I quoted yesterday, in his 6 Apr 1775 letter to his wife Mercy, James Warren started by telling her that the latest news from London made a political solution to Massachusetts’s conflict with the Crown less likely.

And that had kept the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in Concord from adjourning as he’d hoped.

Warren went on:

However my Spirits are by no means depressd, you well know my Sentiments of the Force of both Countrys, you know my opinion of the Justness of our Cause, you know my Confidence in a Righteous Providence. I seem to want nothing to keep up my Spirits and to Inspire me with a proper resolution to Act my part well in this difficult time but seeing you in Spirits, and knowing that they flow from the heart.

How shall I support myself if you suffer these Misfortunes to prey on your tender frame and Add to my difficulties an affliction too great to bear of itself. The Vertuous should be happy under all Circumstances. This state of things will last but a little while. I believe we shall have many chearful rides together yet.

We proposed last week a short adjournment and I had in a manner Engaged a Chamber here for my Beloved and pleased myself with the health and pleasure the Journey was to give her; but I believe it must be postponed till some Event takes place and changes the face of things.

There was deep affection between the Warrens, just as there was between their friends, John and Abigail Adams. At this time James was forty-eight years old, Mercy forty-six. They had five children, all boys; the youngest was George, who turned nine that year. Looks like James thought that was old enough for Mercy to come to Concord for some private time with him while the congress wasn’t in session.

At the end of his 6 April letter, James returned to that personal message for Mercy:

But to dismiss publick matters, let me ask how you do and how do my little Boys, especially my little Henry [second youngest, born in 1764], who was Complaining. I long to see you. I long to sit with you under our Vines etc and have none to make us afraid. Do you know that I have not heard from you since I left you, and that is a long while. It seems a month at least. I can't believe it less. I intend to fly Home I mean as soon as Prudence Duty and Honour will permitt.

The line about “Vines” was another Biblical allusion (Micah 4:4; also 1 Kings 4:25; Zechariah 3:10). The Warrens knew that phrase well enough that James could cut it off with an “etc.”

That verse was also a favorite of George Washington, another gentleman planter. And through him it got into the lyrics of Hamilton.

TOMORROW: Concord’s cannon.

“His majesty’s troops peaceably marching to and from Concord”

I profiled Maj. Robert Donkin (1727–1821) back in 2021, which was 212 years after someone drew this profile of him as a retired general.

In 1777, Donkin was an officer in the 44th Regiment of Foot, stationed in New York City. He decided that was the right time to publish a collection of short essays and anecdotes on military topics.

Donkin described Military Collections and Remarks as the wisdom of “a late general officer of distinguished abilities, in the science of war”—probably his mentor, Gen. William Rufane. But the major wrote at least some of that material himself since it referred to events after Rufane’s death in 1773.

Donkin cast the project as a charity project. In his preface he wrote of “the bloody massacre committed on his majesty’s troops peaceably marching to and from Concord the 19th April, 1775,” and promised that proceeds from his book would

relieve and support the innocent children and widows of the valiant soldiers inhumanly and wantonly butchered that day, as well as for those that gloriously fell in their country’s cause at Bunker-hill the 17th June following.

The book contains a subscribers’ list eighteen pages long, all military officers or administrators, about 500 of them. At the end of that list is an accounting. Donkin and his agents had collected £422.7.3.

Here are the costs for the 296-page book, printed in New York by Hugh Gaine:

To Paper for 1000 Copies, £37.19.4 1/2
To Printing Expences, 57.13.1 1/2
To folding, sewing, and covering 1000 Copies, 21.1.10 1/2
To Advertisements, 4.19.3 1/2
Expences in England, Scotland and Ireland. 5.5.0
Incidental Charges 5.0.0
[total] Sterling, £131.18.8

The major therefore declared he had “Distributed in Charity, Sterling, £290.8.7.”

But if Donkin and Gaines thought that they were done when they printed those pages, they were fooling themselves.

TOMORROW: Cut it out.

“Dill” Screenplay Reading in Old South, 19 Mar.

On Tuesday, 19 March, Revolutionary Spaces’s Old South Meeting House will host a live reading of a screenplay, performed by local actors and accompanied by music and sound effects.

The drama is called Dill, described as “inspired by real people and real events on the Cape Ann Shore in Massachusetts during a tumultuous time on the cusp of the American Revolutionary War.”

At the risk of spoilers, I’m guessing the central character, “an enslaved woman named Dill, short for Deliverance, who…finds herself in a love triangle between two men,” is based Deliverance Symonds. Abram English Brown wrote a chapter about Symonds in Beneath Old Hearth-Stones (1897).

After the reading, there will be a discussion of the screenplay’s historical context featuring these experts:

• Lise Breen, author of “Hidden City: Slavery and Gloucester’s Quadricentennial” in Gloucester Encounters: Essays on the Cultural History of the City 1623-2023 and coauthor of Objects of Myth and Memory: American Indian Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
• Nerissa Williams Scott, producer of Dill and other films, C.E.O. and Lead Creative Producer of That Child Got Talent Entertainment (TCGT), and an affiliated faculty member at Emerson College in the Business of Creative Economy and Visual Media Art departments.
• Beth Bower, formerly staff archaeologist at the Museum of Afro American History and archaeological and historic resources program manager for the Central Artery project, now studying the 1750–1850 African American community in Salem.
• Jeanne Pickering, an independent scholar of slavery in eighteenth-century Essex County who maintains the research databases of NorthShoreSlavery.org.

The event announcement does not name the author of the screenplay.

This is a free event, but registration is requested. Doors will open at 6:30 P.M., with light refreshments available, and the performance is scheduled for 7:00.

“The Art of Horsemanship in all its different branches”

As I wrote yesterday, by 1781 a man named Jacob Bates was living north of Philadelphia and breeding horses.

Was this the same Jacob Bates who had visited Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Newport in 1772 and 1773, exhibiting feats of horsemanship for paying audiences?

Starting in mid-1785, a man named Pool advertised similar equestrian exhibitions in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. I’m looking into Pool, and what I’ve found so far is surprising enough that I have to pause to catch my breath. I hope to tell you soon.

What’s important to this story is that in August 1785 Pool came to Philadelphia and erected “a MENAGE, as a very considerable expence.” It stood “near the Centre-House,” a prominent tavern. Back in 1772, folks could buy tickets for Bates’s shows at the same Centre-House.

Bates had used the same term for where he showed his horses, spelling it “Manage.” Strictly speaking, it meant a riding school rather than a theater, but of course he wanted to elevate his craft.

Pool moved on from Philadelphia. It looks like he was in New York at the end of September 1785, and in 1786 in Boston and New York again.

On 28 Apr 1787, a year and a half after Pool’s departure from Philadelphia, Jacob Bates announced that he was starting a riding school:

The MENAGE
At the Center-House will be Opened on the 7th day of May, by the subscriber, for the instruction of Ladies and Gentlemen in that manly, useful and healthy exercise, the Art of Horsemanship in all its different branches: as he had the honour of instructing several Gentlemen 6 years ago, and likewise last summer, he hopes the pupils that may in future come under his care, will not find the least reason to complain, either of his abilities or attention.

The days of exercise will be on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for the Gentlemen; and in order that business may not be interrupted, nor Gentlemen incommoded with the heat of the day, he proposes to begin each morning at 4 o’clock and close at 8 o’clock.

JACOB BATES.

N.B. Ladies will be attended to on the other three days.

I don’t think there’s any way to know if Pool’s “MENAGE” had stayed up until Bates started to use it, or if Bates had to rebuild from scratch. But the fact that the two men referred to the same spot is probably why some authors say Bates took over or even rented Pool’s establishment.

Back in 1772, Jacob Bates didn’t sell horseback riding lessons, however much he hinted that his equestrian displays were instructive. But perhaps he was getting too old for those tricks, and genteel riding lessons looked like an easier way to make money.

It looks like the riding school didn’t last more than a season, however, and Bates went back to his property in the Northern Liberties.

In September 1788 Bates advertised the auction of the Richard Hopkins estate in the Independent Gazetteer. However, on 26 Nov 1789 the sheriff advertised the same estate for sale, apparently having seized it under a prior writ.

Nonetheless, Bates was still out at Point-no-Point in July 1792 when he offered an “Eight Dollars Reward” for the finding “a Negro boy named RICHMOND, about eighteen years of age.” Bates stated: “he may pretend to know something of breaking, riding, and taking care of horses as he has seen something of it.” Presumably young Richmond’s experience working with horses for Bates was precisely why Bates wanted him back.

Finally, on 18 Mar 1793 Johoshaphat Polk and Philip Redman advertised the settlement of “the Estate of Jacob Bates, late of Point-no-Point, deceased.” If this Pennsylvanian was indeed the man who had toured colonial ports showing of his riding skills in 1772–73, he had returned to the continent and died as an American.

Some Museum Programs for School Vacation Week

Some of greater Boston’s Revolutionary sites have announced special programming for next week, which is a public school vacation in Massachusetts.

Thanks to support from the Highland Street Foundation, the Paul Revere House in the North End will be free to visit on Tuesday, 20 February.

On the two days that follow, the site is offering a drop-in family activity called “Share Your Love of the Written Word,” inspired by vintage postcards from its collection. Participating is free with admission. Regular admission is $6 for adults, $5.50 for seniors and college students, $1.00 for children 5-17, and free for members and North End residents.

Nearby, the Old North Church and Historic Site is usually closed to the public during the winter, but it will be open 17–24 February from 11:00 A.M. (12:30 P.M. on Sunday) to 5:00 P.M. Admission tickets, which costs $5 per person, include a self-guided tour of the church’s sanctuary, the current exhibit, and answers from the education staff. For $5 more one can enjoy a self-guided tour of the historic crypt and an audio guide.

Outside the city, the Concord Museum is promising unspecified “special family activities” on Monday, Thursday, and Friday, according to its calendar. That week is also the last chance to see the museum’s exhibit “Interwoven: Women’s Lives Written in Thread.” On Friday, 23 February, educator and reenactor Michelle Gabrielson will present the work of quilting a petticoat.

The Lexington Historical Society’s historic taverns will host special programs for kids of different ages on “Lighting the Way” and “Science and Medicine” during the vacation week. For more details, including the registration cost, visit its events page.

The Families of Sylvanus Lowell

Looking at the vital records from various Massachusetts towns helps to fill in the details of the life of Sylvanus Lowell, the ship’s captain maimed by a cannon in December 1773.

But those records also show some gaps and mysteries.

The vital records of Amesbury show the future mariner born to Moses and Francis (usually spelled Frances) Lowell on 2 May 1746. His name was apparently spelled as “Salvenas,” which looks more like church Latin than classical. He had siblings named Sarah, Thomas, Moses, Affea, Daniel, and Willebe (Willoughby). Their mother died when Sylvanus was two.

The vital records of Bradford say that on 2 Aug 1770 “Silvanus Lowell of Amesbury” married Hannah Hopkinson, daughter of Ens. Solomon Hopkinson of Bradford. That marriage is also noted, without an exact date, in the Amesbury records.

The Bradford records add that Hannah Lowell died on 20 Sept 1771, or possibly 26 September, “in her 26th year.” Thus, Sylvanus Lowell quickly became a widower.

There’s no child listed of that marriage in Amesbury or Bradford. However, the Bradford records are notably sparse if you weren’t named Kimball. The next sign of the family appears in the vital records of Newburyport, which say that Hannah Lowell, daughter of Sylvanus and Hannah, was baptized there on 20 June 1775. Was this a daughter of the captain’s first marriage, baptized at about age four? There’s no answer.

Likewise, I’ve found no answer about Sylvanus Lowell’s second marriage to a woman named Elisabeth. She pops up in the Newburyport records as mother of several children by him:

• Elisabeth, baptized 6 Oct 1776 and buried 3 Sept 1777.
• Elisabeth, baptized 12 Apr 1778.
• Harrison, baptized 30 Jan 1780, probably died young.
• Sylvanus, baptized 12 Aug 1781.
• Sally, baptized 2 Feb 1783.
• Thomas, baptized 11 Sept 1785 and buried 3 Sept 1786.

Newburyport also recorded the baptism of Harrison Lowell, son of Capt. Sylvanus and Elisabeth, on 29 Jan 1799. This may be the Maine legislator Harrison Lowell whose gravestone (shown above) gives his birthdate as 3 July 1791—though, again, that baptism would have been delayed.

Even more mysteriously, on 9 Mar 1791, Newburyport’s Essex Journal reported: “Died, Mrs. Lowell, wife of Capt. Silvanus Lowell of this town.” The vital records say that Elizabeth Lowell was buried that day. Obviously, she couldn’t have given birth to a son in July. Maybe the second Harrison was actually born in 1789 or 1790, and both the baptismal record and gravestone are off?

On 10 Oct 1791, just a few months after being widowed for the second time, Capt. Sylvanus Lowell married a widow about thirty-six years old named Elizabeth (McCard) Barriere or Berryer. She had a daughter, Fannie, from her first marriage.

I haven’t found any sign of Sylvanus having children by his second wife named Elizabeth. Each brought young children to the marriage to raise. Several of those children grew up, married, and had long lives. Both parents lived into their eighties.

This genealogical data shows Capt. Sylvanus Lowell having a fairly typical life for a New England patriarch of his time. Looking just at his three marriages and possibly eight children over more than a decade, one wouldn’t know that he’d come close to dying and lost significant portions of his body just before the Revolutionary War.

TOMORROW: What did you do in the war, Papa?