American Spring

by Walter R. Borneman

  Still, it was a lot of show for one or two tons of hay—the equivalent of about fifty bales. Lieutenant John Barker of the Fourth Regiment—never one to have much good to say about the efforts of his superiors—called the entire affair “the most ridiculous expedition that ever was plan’d.” Barker thought there had been neither enough ships nor enough men for the job. On the rebel side, the angst of Abigail Adams and her neighbors aside, the response proved once again how quickly local militia could turn out to oppose a threat.4

  But with the British regulars sailing back to Boston, how did the rebels of Hingham feel about their neighbor Elisha Leavitt, who was at least partially responsible for the intrusion into their Sabbath? By one anecdotal account from Hingham’s history, an angry band of rebels set out for Leavitt’s house, which was a rather grand structure. Instead of running, Leavitt and his wife, Ruth, appeared in their Sunday-go-to-meeting attire, set out a spread of crackers, cheese, and cake, and then cracked open a barrel of rum, “dispensing its contents liberally.” Supposedly this calmed the crowd, and the so-called Battle of Grape Island ended with the civility of a garden party.5

  THE MINOR AFFAIR OF GRAPE ISLAND was to be but a precursor to a much more involved confrontation one week later. Northeast of the North End of Boston in 1775—generally in the direction that the Sumner and Callahan Tunnels run toward Logan Airport today—lay the expanse of Noddle’s Island. Beyond Noddle’s Island, in the same general direction, were Hog and Snake Islands. Hog Island had some low hills, but Noddle’s Island was relatively flat and well suited to hay fields and livestock. At that point in time, though, anyone trying to tend either faced a quandary.

  Those who sold their goods to the British faced the wrath of rebels—just as Elisha Leavitt did—and those who sold goods to the rebels faced the wrath of the British. One resident of Hog Island was duly warned that because “the people from the Men of War frequently go to the Island to buy fresh provision his own safety obliges him to sell to them [but] on the other hand the Committee of safety have threatened if he sells anything to the [British] army or Navy that they will take all the cattle from the Island and… handle him very roughly.”6

  The Massachusetts committee of safety was well aware of this quandary and determined to do something about it on behalf of the rebels. On May 24, it ordered all sheep and hay removed from Noddle’s Island together with all livestock on the other two islands.7 General Artemas Ward sent Colonel Ephraim Doolittle with a force of Massachusetts and Connecticut men from Cambridge to implement the committee’s directive. Soldiers from Colonel John Stark’s First New Hampshire Regiment, which was stationed in nearby Medford, reinforced them.

  Despite the islands involved, this was hardly a naval exercise. The water between Chelsea, on the mainland, and Hog Island was only knee-deep at low tide and much the same in the channel called Crooked Creek, between Hog and Noddle’s Islands. About midday on May 27, upwards of five hundred rebels waded across the Chelsea–Hog Island channel and began rounding up livestock on Hog Island. A smaller detachment of about thirty men continued on to Noddle’s Island to corral other livestock and burn hay, but there they were not alone. The Royal Navy had recently occupied buildings on Noddle’s Island in which to warehouse stores, and the army was also stockpiling hay there for its horses in Boston. By one account, there were about six hundred sheep and some cattle and horses on the island.8

  By coincidence, the very day of the rebel incursion, Admiral Samuel Graves, commander in chief of the Royal Navy’s North America squadron, was on his fifty-gun flagship, HMS Preston, celebrating his promotion to Vice Admiral of the White by receiving thunderous salutes from the ships of his squadron. Admiral Graves was not known for his dash or aggressive demeanor, and he seems to have been as intent on interservice fighting with General Gage as he was on subduing rebels.

  Graves had begrudgingly arranged for the transport of Colonel Smith’s Lexington force across the Charles, stood the Somerset and other warships off Charlestown to effect Percy’s retreat, and generally been content, via his command of the seas, to keep Boston Harbor open—a relatively easy thing, since the rebels lacked any naval power. As the siege of Boston tightened and fresh produce and victuals of any kind became hard to come by, one suspects that Admiral Graves—thanks to his supplies on Noddle’s Island—was eating far better than General Gage.

  Amid the pomp of his promotion ceremony, Admiral Graves was aware of an urgent message from General Gage dated two days before, reporting that Gage had received intelligence that “the Rebels intend this Night to destroy, and carry off all the Stock & on Noddles Island for no reason but because the owners having sold them for the Kings Use.” (Benjamin Church wasn’t the only spy employed by Gage, and such intelligence may have come from any number of informants. Church himself was on the road to Philadelphia at that point.) Graves’s response was typical. The admiral told the general that his patrol boats would keep the “strictest look out,” but begged “leave to observe to your Excellency that in My opinion A Guard upon the Island is the Most probable Means of preserving the Hay from being destroyed”—intending to throw the issue back in Gage’s lap.9

  Now, as Graves looked in that direction, he did not need a telescope to see the billowing black clouds from the hay fires and know that something was amiss. His first reaction was to sigh and complain that Gage and the army had let him down again and that “assistance from the Army could not immediately be had.” But with “no time to be lost,” he swung into action. A small marine guard of forty men was already on Noddle’s Island, and as it moved to engage the marauding rebels Graves ordered a larger force of marines to be landed in support. He also dispatched the small schooner HMS Diana, under the command of his nephew, Lieutenant Thomas Graves, to sail between Noddle’s Island and the mainland as far as the depth would allow and frustrate the rebels’ line of retreat.10

  Armed with four six-pounders and a dozen smaller swivel guns, the Diana soon poured fire on the rebels on Noddle’s Island while the larger force of marines splashed ashore from longboats. In the face of this assault, the Noddle’s Island force slaughtered what livestock they had corralled, set fire to a farmhouse and barn, and retreated across Crooked Creek. About fifteen of them, including Private Amos Farnsworth of Groton, “Squated Down in a Ditch on the mash and Stood our ground” as a company of marines marched into view. “We had A hot fiar untill the Regulars retreeted,” Farnsworth recalled. “But notwithstanding the Bulets flue very thitch yet thare was not A Man of us kild.” On the British side, two marines were killed and two others wounded, one mortally.11

  By then it was about 5:00 p.m. The Diana was in the shallows between Hog Island and the mainland, attempting to trap the rebels there until the high tide might strand them. But at the same time, with the tide still ebbing, it was dicey business for Lieutenant Graves and the Diana. The schooner exchanged heavy fire with the rebels on Hog Island and continued to do so as the rebels managed to escape the island and re-form on the Chelsea mainland. This left the rebels safe from the advancing marines on Noddle’s, but as Lieutenant Graves tried to steer the Diana back to deeper waters and make his own escape, the wind died completely. The Diana became trapped and unable to maneuver in the shallow water. Graves put out the ship’s boats in a hurried attempt to tow it to safety.

  As more rebels congregated along the Chelsea shore, they poured fire into the Diana, a barely moving target. Admiral Graves dispatched eight to ten longboats to his nephew’s assistance, but they rowed into an increasing fusillade of rebel fire as they attached towropes. For a time, the crews of the flotilla of longboats struggled to make headway as the guns of Diana returned the rebel fire.

  All this made for quite a show along the Chelsea shore. By 9:00 p.m., with the sun setting, Israel Putnam and Joseph Warren arrived on the rebel side with two fieldpieces and still more men. Both were drawn to the sound of the guns. Putnam called out to the Diana to surrender and be given appropriate quarter, but Lieutenant Graves answere
d with two cannon shots. Putnam directed his two fieldpieces to respond, and despite one cannon later exploding and wounding four of its gun crew, this concentrated fire lasted two hours as the Diana slowly drifted along the shore.

  Finally, the schooner caught on the ways of the Winnisimmet ferry. These ways were heavy wooden beams that ran like railroad tracks into the water to facilitate hauling boats ashore. For the Diana, they proved to be a spider’s web. The schooner came fast aground and soon heeled over to the point that Graves and his crew could no longer stand on deck. They abandoned ship and were rescued by the nearby longboats well after midnight.12

  By sunrise on May 28, the rebels had boarded the Diana and were making off with what plunder had survived the shelling, including the ship’s cannons and swivel guns. A British sloop, the Britannia, tried to prevent this with another round of cannon fire, but the rebels on board the Diana responded in kind and then piled bales of hay under the vessel’s stern and set it on fire. By 7:00 a.m. the Diana was a flaming wreck.

  On the British side, Admiral Graves held the requisite court-martial for a commander who had lost his ship, but “the perseverance and good Conduct” of his nephew were judged to be beyond reproach. As Lieutenant Graves and all his crew had “lost every thing they possess on Board her,” Graves asked the Admiralty to indemnify them for their personal losses and termed the encounter “an Example to the whole Fleet to defend his Majesty’s Ships and Vessels to the last Extremity.”13

  News of this encounter gave a huge boost to the morale of the rebel troops around Cambridge, who were in the doldrums of not having much to do. It had only been a small, lightly armed schooner, but rebel forces—on land, of all places—had taken on the Royal Navy and left one of its ships ablaze.

  THE NAVAL ACTION THAT TOOK place in and around the waters of Machias, Maine, in May and June 1775 was not so clear-cut as that off Noddle’s Island. Instead, it showed just how convoluted things could become as rebels and loyalists maneuvered for power. Machias was about as far east as one could get and still be in Maine, then a district of Massachusetts. Established in 1763, Machias was a logging town. Its economy and the well-being of its one thousand or so inhabitants revolved around lumber that was shipped principally to Boston in exchange for just about everything the town needed. Among the leading players in this commerce were Morris O’Brien and his six sons, who owned one of the local sawmills, and Stephen Jones, who managed the local mercantile interests of his uncle, Boston merchant Ichabod Jones.

  Machias was not immune from the political passions sweeping the rest of colonial America, but it had pressing matters of survival. The winter of 1774–75 had not been a good one. A severe drought the previous summer had decimated what local crops there were, and the closures mandated by the Boston Port Act meant that the normal flow of lumber and supplies between the town and Boston were interrupted. Ichabod Jones, who had passed the winter in Machias because of the growing unrest in Boston, determined to break this deadlock, and early in May of 1775 he sailed for Boston with his two vessels, the sloops Unity and Polly, loaded with lumber.

  It seems likely that Jones sold the lumber to the British and then convinced General Gage—who was all too happy to receive it—that he should be permitted to return to Machias carrying not only certain provisions for the town but also a significant stash of merchandise from his Boston warehouses—exactly the sort of transaction that Gage had been strenuously forbidding. In order to protect himself on both ends, Jones had obtained an assurance from Admiral Graves—because this involved the sea approaches to Boston—that anyone carrying much-needed provisions such as lumber would be free to arrive and depart without being molested or detained. But Jones also approached the rebels on Boston’s board of selectmen and got their promise to the people of Machias—whose welfare the board had in mind—that Jones should be allowed to return to Boston for further trading. Upon pondering whether Jones might be in danger from local rebels upon reaching Machias, or wondering whether Jones really intended to return to Boston, Admiral Graves, at General Gage’s request, decided to order the schooner Margueritta to sail with Jones’s convoy, which had grown to include three other vessels besides his two sloops.

  The fifty-ton Margueritta was hardly a powerhouse, but it did make an impression against unarmed merchant vessels. The schooner was armed with twelve swivel guns and carried a crew of twenty under the command of midshipman James Moore. It appears that as a secondary assignment to keeping tabs on Mr. Jones, Admiral Graves ordered Moore to attempt to salvage guns from the British schooner Halifax, which had been wrecked near Machias the previous year. Graves and Gage feared that these, like other armaments throughout the colonies, had fallen or were about to fall into rebel hands.14

  On June 2, Jones’s convoy, shepherded by the Margueritta, dropped anchor off Machias, and the next day Jones went ashore to begin his final negotiations. He thought it would be simple: in exchange for much-needed supplies, all a citizen had to do was sign a paper indulging “Capt. Jones in carrying Lumber to Boston” and promising “to protect him and his property, at all events.” But suddenly, the townsfolk of Machias showed a good deal of rebel resolve even as the Boston board of selectmen had been concerned about their welfare. Few, if any, were willing to sign Jones’s safe conduct decree if it meant trading with the British in Boston.

  By the time Ichabod Jones called a town meeting, which assembled on June 6, Machias residents realized that Jones had them over a barrel. To date, their pleas to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress for assistance had gotten lost in the exigencies around Boston. They could starve or they could give Jones a short leash. He was the only game in town. Accordingly they agreed that, while “averse to the measures proposed,” they would permit Jones to carry lumber to Boston and purchase from him those provisions with which he returned. Those who thought they were being blackmailed were certain of it when they left the meeting and saw that Midshipman Moore had quietly sailed the Margueritta closer to town and anchored it in an intimidating position. Meanwhile, Moore found four of the cannons from the Halifax and put them aboard his ship.

  However Ichabod Jones had managed it, it now appeared as if he had the town’s acquiescence: he could go about his business as one of the few merchants in America trading in British-held Boston. The Unity and the Polly tied up at the town wharf and began to offload much-needed supplies and take on cargoes of lumber. But then Jones showed his true colors. Annoyed at the strength of the rebel opposition in town, he decided to distribute supplies only to the loyalist portion of the population—identified as those who had voted in favor of his carrying lumber to Boston. This goaded the rebel faction into action. They collected near the town meetinghouse on Sunday morning, June 11, and determined to capture Ichabod and Stephen Jones and Midshipman Moore as they attended church services.

  The upshot was that Moore saw an armed band of about thirty men coming toward the meetinghouse and eluded capture by jumping out a window and making his way back to the Margueritta. Stephen Jones was captured, but Ichabod Jones escaped into the nearby woods. Once Moore was on board the Margueritta, he beat his crew to quarters and demanded the Joneses’ safe passage to his ships, threatening to burn the town if his orders were not followed.15

  This was something of an idle threat, because his ship’s swivel guns were hardly heavy enough ordnance to cause much damage. Rebel action against Ichabod Jones’s two sloops was another matter. They were anchored in the Machias River some distance from the Margueritta, one above it and the other below it. The rebels fell first on the sloop anchored upstream—it has never been categorically established whether this was the Polly or the Unity—stripping sails and rigging and plundering the remainder of its cargo. Then they turned to the Margueritta and ordered Midshipman Moore to strike his colors. Moore declared he “would defend the Vessel as long as he lived and would fire on the Town” unless they gave up Jones’s sloop.16

  An exchange of small-arms fire went on for about fifteen minutes, unt
il Moore slipped his anchor cables and drifted downriver. But meanwhile, a second band of rebels had gone farther downriver in three small boats, boarded Jones’s other sloop, and begun to bring it upriver. By now it was near sunset as Moore, putting some distance between the Margueritta and his antagonists on shore, floated down the river and came upon the second sloop moving upstream under rebel control.

  Seeing the Margueritta advancing downriver as if to attack, the rebels on the second sloop drove it ashore. Moore evidently now intended its capture, and he brought the Margueritta within fifteen yards. This set off a flurry of musketry from the shore and renewed calls for Moore to surrender. Supposedly he replied that he “was not ready yet,” and once again the Margueritta’s swivel guns blazed away to the accompaniment of small-arms fire on both sides.17

  Attempts by the rebels to board the Margueritta were turned back after a brisk action. Dawn on June 12 found four small boats, abandoned and riddled with holes, stuck on the mudflats of the river as the tide went out and Moore still in possession of the Margueritta. Miraculously, for all the firepower, it appears that the only casualty to that point after a long day of gunfire was one wounded British sailor.18

  But the fight was not over. Moore brought the Margueritta alongside yet another sloop new to the action and pressed its captain to pilot both vessels into the open sea. As they sailed down the river, rebel fire continued from the riverbank. Moore even hailed a sloop inbound from Nova Scotia and appropriated some needed rigging and supplies. Meanwhile, the rebels were far from abandoning the chase. About forty men took over what long tradition maintains was the sloop Unity with Captain Jeremiah O’Brien in command. Enlisting the aid of a small schooner to accompany them, they got under way in pursuit of the Margueritta.