Learning about the “Oxford Army”

Here’s one more detail about the Locke family, whose retreat to Sherborn in December 1773 I’ve been discussing.

The youngest child was John Locke, born in 1765. He had a peripatetic life after the Revolution, not marrying and moving north to Maine and west to Northampton before his death at age thirty-four.

The family history, Book of the Lockes, also stated he “was a soldier in the Oxford army.”

What the heck was that? I wondered. Most of the references to the phrase that I found went back to the English Civil War, when the college city of Oxford was the military stronghold of the Royalists. But it turns out that Massachusetts hosted its own “Oxford army.”

In the late 1790s the U.S. of A. went through some friction with France, then governed by the Directory. Eventually this low-level conflict was called the “quasi-war.” At the time, however, some people wanted to get ready for real military action.

One product of this period was the U.S. Navy, recommissioned after the Confederation Congress had done away with this form of national military to save costs. The U.S.S. Constitution was one of the frigates launched in that push, and it’s still with us, along with the larger navy.

In May and July 1798 Congress authorized President John Adams to beef up the army as well. One measure increased the still-authorized U.S. Army by over 10,000 men, these new soldiers for a while called the Additional Army. But enough citizens were worried about the army becoming too large that the government needed to assure them with a different approach.

Thus, Congress founded a parallel force of 10,000 men, the Provisional Army of the United States. Later this was superseded by the Eventual Army of the United States, which could be as large as 30,000. This force was authorized to last only as long as the crisis with France—that was the provision or event that defined it.

As further reassurance to the populace, George Washington was brought out of retirement to be the nominal commander of all the U.S. armies. The regular army already had its command structure. But for the new Provisional Army, operational command fell to inspector general Alexander Hamilton. He brought in William North as his adjutant general.

It took a while for the Provisional/Eventual Army to commission officers, so those officers didn’t start recruiting men until May 1799. In the next several months, before Congress decided that peace with France was at hand, that force grew to a little more than 4,000 soldiers. That army had three sites for training: Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in the south and Plainfield, New Jersey, for the middle states.

And the third Provisional Army campsite, for troops hailing for the New England states, was in the Massachusetts town of Oxford.

The Life of Sarah Fayerweather

In 1756 Thomas Fayerweather (1724-1805), a wealthy Boston merchant, married Sarah Hubbard. She was a daughter of the treasurer of Harvard College, born in 1730. Her portrait by Robert Feke, now owned by Historic New England, appears here.

According to Boston town records, that wedding took place on 26 June. The Sarah Fayerweather cookbook I described yesterday is dated exactly eight years later. That date provides a link between it and this particular Sarah Fayerweather, and suggests that the book might have been an anniversary gift.

The Fayerweathers had four children baptized at the Old South Meeting-House between 1757 and 1769. Though they never seem to have joined that church, Douglas Winiarski wrote about the prayers they requested here.

Thomas Fayerweather had business ties in other American ports as well as London and the Caribbean, well documented in his surviving correspondence. His investments included some slaving voyages and some genteel smuggling. Fayerweather’s political profile seems invisible, however; after 1769 he apparently spent much of his time in rural Oxford, away from tumultuous Boston.

Sarah Fayerweather oversaw her kitchens, but she almost certainly had servants do the work there. On 2 Apr 1770 Thomas hired out “five black men-servants” named Cato, Charleston, Jack, Prince, and Boston, perhaps because he didn’t need them out in the country. Unfortunately, Thomas Fayerweather doesn’t appear on Massachusetts’s 1771 tax list for either Boston or Oxford, so we don’t have the details of his property then.

In the fall of 1774, as Massachusetts militarized after the “Powder Alarm,” Thomas Fayerweather made a deal with George Ruggles of Cambridge, a Jamaican merchant who had married into the Vassall family. The two men swapped houses.

Ruggles got a new house inside Boston, protected by the British army. The Fayerweathers gained a mansion and farm on the Watertown road in Cambridge, next to the estate of Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver. Oliver was gone, along with most of the other Loyalists from that part of town. That’s why that home on the “Tory Row” part of what’s now Brattle Street is known as the Ruggles-Fayerweather House.

When the war started, it appears the Fayerweathers again moved out to Oxford, leaving their Cambridge house empty. Early in June 1775, Gen. Israel Putnam took Lt. Col. Experience Storrs of Connecticut out there and told him to use it as barracks. On 8 June, Storrs wrote in his journal:

Mr. Fairweather came home last night out of humor as they tell me. No wonder, his house filled up with soldiers, and perhaps his interest suffers as it really must. Sent for me, yet appears to act the part of a gentleman.

By the end of the summer, the Fayerweathers’ house was being used as an army hospital. But after the siege the family got their Cambridge property back, and they maintained their wealthy lifestyle. Sarah Fayerweather died in 1804, her husband Thomas a year later, leaving a fortune of $64,000.