Walking the Berkshires

Lost and Found Burial Ground of My Williman Ancestors

Two years ago, I discovered some fascinating information about the little known Williman branch of my family tree and posted it here. Yesterday I received a telephone call from a gentleman in South Carolina who read the post and with masterly understatement told me had new information to share. 

What he had found was simply extraordinary.  He is an historian working in part of the greater Charleston area, who was contacted by a utility company which had found old grave markers in one of its rights of way.  The images which appear in this post were taken by him, but out of respect for the sensitivity of the site which he is trying to document and preserve I will refrain from revealing either his name or its location.

Suffice it to say that in a tucked away corner of wooded land are the remains of three of my direct ancestors and several of their relations by marriage.  There are eight grave markers, most of which were installed as horizontal slabs and all of which are now on the ground, as well as clear evidence of more graves that either lacked permanent markers (possibly those of tenants, servants or slaves) or where such markers are now missing.  The eight remaining markers appear with identifying numbers in the image at right.

My new friend in South Carolina was lead to me by my post that concerned Christopher Williman (1746-1813).   Being a good researcher he also found my cellphone and home telephone numbers - thank heavens I didn't treat him like a telemarketer calling bright and early on MLK Day!  Christopher Williman is buried in the grave in the picture at the top of this post.  The grave is also marked at right with the number seven, and at #8 is his wife Mary (Walther) Williman,who died in 1804 at age 40.  These are my 5th Great Grandparents.

I was told that another of my relatives mentioned in that blog post, Angus Bethune (more on him, below), was also buried here, but did not receive the pictures until later that evening.  In the meantime, I spent the day doing my own research, greatly facilitated by a propensity of at Google to scan anything that isn't nailed down and post it at Google Books.  Under various copywrite agreements, a great deal can be viewed and even more can be queried using this tool, and by the end of the day I had reconstructed the names and marriages of all of the Williman children and some of the grandchildren.  Then I received the photographs, and discovered that I had identified three more of the names on the graves as well!

My Great Aunt Margie, whose family archive of genealogical material I inherited in 2003, would have been utterly captivated by these new finds.  She knew the bare bones of the Christopher Williman line, but Angus Bethune was listed simply as the husband of one of the daughters: Margaret (Williman) Bethune.  Now, thanks to the surviving top half of his gravestone, I know that my 4th Great Grandfather, Angus Bethune, was 46 years old when he died on December 20, 1813.  I also found several court cases in which he was involved, and details of his house on Broad St. in Charleston from a city inventory.  He was a prosperous merchant, like the Gracie family into which his grand-daughter, Elizabeth Davidson Bethune, subsequently married.   

And speaking of "Davidson".  I now know the origin of that middle name.  Grave #1. belongs to Gilbert Davidson, the second husband of another Williman daughter, Eliza.  She married Gilbert Davidson on Jan 15, 1801, the same day as her sister (my 4th Great Grandmother) married Angus Bethune!  This double wedding suggests a close relationship between these siblings - at least until the family estate was divided - and six years later my 3rd Great Grandmother was given Davidson as her middle name.

There is an Eliza Williman associated with Grave 6, but she was Eliza (Merritt) Williman, daughter of James Merritt and 1st wife of Christopher Williman, Jr.  She lived just 26 years (1789-1814).  Grave 4 belongs to Sarah Cleiland Williman, a three year old child who died in 1819, suggesting a second marriage for Christopher Williman, Jr. who I believe was the only male child of his parents to have issue. 

Grave 2 belongs to Joseph de Jongh (sometimes appearing in court records as Jough).  His stone (at right) reveals that he was a native of Ostend, Flanders, and died on June 15th, 1823 in the 46th year of his age.  Gilbert Davidson died that same month, which may indicate an outbreak of one of the malignant fevers at that time.  I found a snippet reference at Google Books from a Liverpool business and Market journal of his marriage in 1810 to a "Miss Harriet Williams (sic), daughter of Christopher Williams (sic), esq., of South Carolina."  Harriet Williman (b. 3/4/1784) was yet another Williman daughter, bringing to 4 the number of spouses of Williman children buried here.

Grave 3 (at left) is broken where the name was originally inscribed and will require more study to determine whose grave is marked by the slab.  There is also a grave in the space between stones 1 and 6 that probably once had a marker.

 The information which has been unearthed in South Carolina and in the electronic ether will help document and hopefully preserve this 200 year old family burial ground.  It is amazing that it has survived, unremarked and unremembered, for as long as it has.  It is more amazing, still, that so much evidence exists to document the lives of the principle remains, though we may never know the identifies of those at the lowest rungs of their society who are buried here as well.  I am deeply grateful to my new friend in Charleston who has taken on this project with the sort of passion and dedication that I can only hope I would show to his ancestors had our roles been reversed.

For the Record:

Johan Christof (Christopher) Williman) (1746-1813) (Grave 7) and Maria Rumpf (Walther/Walter) Williman (abt. 1764-1804) (Grave 8) had the following known descendants:

1. George Williman (b. 1/18/1772 - not still living as of his father's will of 12/26/1813)

2. John  Jakob Williman (b. 9/4/1774 - d. 1804) married but no issue

3. Maria (Mary) Williman (b. 12/7/1776) m. 11/7/1795 William Peter(s), esq. of PonPon, St. Paul's Parish - d. before 12/26/1813

4. Eliza Williman m. 1) 11/20/1793 Dr. George F. Habnbaum, 2) 1/15/1801 Gilbert Davidson (Grave 1) d. June 1823

5. Margaret A Williman (b. 4/14/1782) m. 1/15/1801 Angus Bethune (Grave 5) d. Dec 20, 1813 age 46 They had children, including Elizabeth Davidson Bethune (1807-1864) m. Archibald Gracie, Jr. (d. 1865) of NYC, Elizabeth, NJ and Mobile, AL. Their daughter, Esther Gracie, married Dayton Ogden, whose son Archibald Gracie Ogden married Margaret Stearns Olmsted, and whose daughter Athalia (Ogden) Barker (1911-2007) was my maternal grandmother.

6.  Christopher Henry Williman (d. young abt 1783)

7.  Harriet Williman (b. 3/4/1784) m. 1810 Joseph de Jongh/Jough(d. June 15, 1823 age 46.)  They had a sole male heir, William F. D. Jongh/Jough (Grave 2) , still living in 1850.

8. Christopher Williman, Jr. (b. 4/23/1786 - 1864) m. 1) Eliza (Merritt) Williman (Grave 6) (1789-1814) They had two daughters who survived to adulthood: 

a. Maria Williman (b. 9/5/1810 - d. 9/19/1877 in GA) appears to have had three marriages.  The first was apparently to a Mr. Johnston.  The second was on 8/19/1826 to Wilbrandt Schmidt esq.  The thrid was on 7/27/1838 to Alexander Inglis.  Their son, Alexander Inglis, Jr., served in the Confederate Army from Georgia. 

b.  Harriet Eliza Williman, who in May 1838 married in New York Bvt. Maj. James Alex Ashby of the 2nd Dragoons who fought and was severely wounded in the Second Seminole War and died in Charleston 7/30/46, supposedly of complications from wounds suffered 10 years before.

Amazing, amazing stuff.

"Some Charges of a Very High Nature"; The Court Martial of Col. Matthias Ogden (Part I)

The war correspondence of General George Washington includes an extraordinary letter, written on February 22, 1779  to one of my ancestors: Col. Matthias Ogden of the 1st New Jersey Battalion (Continental). It was not particularly unusual for the Commander in Chief to correspond with one of his regimental commanders, but in this instance the message conveyed was highly unusual indeed:

"I herewith send you a copy of the charges exhibited against you by Captain Morrison.  You will be pleased to notify, when you are prepared for a defense, that the evidences may be summoned, and a court ordered."

I must confess that when I came across this unsavory bit of family history, I was as astonished as I presume the commander of the New Jersey Brigade, Gen. William Maxwell, must have been when he received notification of the charges against Col. Ogden in a letter from Washington written on February 20th:

"Captn. Isaac Morrison has lodged some charges of a very high nature, against Colo. Ogden with Copy of which he has engaged to furnish Colo. Ogden. I think myself under the necessity of having the matter enquired into, and therefore wish you to desire Colo. Ogden to prepare his defence. When he is ready I shall expect to be informed by you, that a Court may be ordered for the purpose."

Courts martial were an almost daily fact of life in the Continental army.  Col. Matthias Ogden himself presided over one in May, 1776 when he was a newly minted Lt. Colonel, and later gave testimony at the trial of Maj General Lee in 1778 after Monmouth. 

Prior to uncovering references to his own court martial in the writings of George Washington, I had thought I knew the significant details of my ancestor's revolutionary war record.  Given that he retained his command (as well as, it appears, the confidence of the Commander in Chief), was brevetted Brigadier General at the close of the war,  and personally delivered the news to Congress on October 31, 1783 of the signing of the Treat of Paris ending hostilities, I was fairly confident that whatever the "charges of a very high nature" against Col. Ogden may have been, the trial did not ruin his reputation nor wreck his career.

Indeed, the nature of the charges against Col. Matthias Ogden and results of his court martial are also found in the writings of George Washington.  I have not, as yet, found evidence on-line that a transcript of the actual proceedings survives, but there are enough clues to prompt a reconstruction of the inquiry.

It is not my purpose to vindicate or condemn my ancestor, nor to discredit or validate those who testified against him.  I will present what evidence I have found and offer an hypothesis to help explain what may have happened, and more significantly, why events turned out as they did.

In subsequent posts in this series, we shall examine the evidence at hand.  We shall meet Captain Morrison, who brought charges against his Colonel, and explore the backgrounds and subsequent careers of those men he named to give evidence.  We shall learn the "very high nature" of the charges themselves and the composition of the court martial which sat in judgment. 

We shall also endeavor to place the trial in the context of its time and place, and consider whether social and perhaps even religious divisions within the 1st New Jersey battalion, in addition to those of rank, may have prompted Captain Morrison to bring his charges - and perhaps influenced the aftermath of the trial where some of the witnesses for the prosecution were concerned.

"We are Avenging the Cause of Virgin Innocence" (Knyphausen's Raid Part VIII)

Photo credit: Portrait of Hannah Caldwell from the museum of the 1st Presbyterian Church, Elizabeth, NJ.

"Let us remember...in order to add vigour to our genius, and force to our descending swords, that we are avenging the cause of virgin innocence" said a student at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton).  The death of Mrs. Caldwell, wife of Rev. James Caldwell, reportedly at the hands of the Royalist army during Knyphausen's Raid, sparked outrage throughout Revolutionary America.  As discussed in the previous post, the circumstances of her death may never be precisely known, but the accusation that it was a deliberate murder did more to harm the British cause than even the muskets of the patriot forces.

In the weeks and months that followed her killing, a barrage of outrage and charges of the most unforgivable behavior were leveled against the Royalists in connection with the death of Hannah Caldwell. Her grieving widower, no stranger to the power of the pulpit, wrote a letter for publication in which he dismissed British claims that her killing was no assassination, calling it "a violation of tender feeling, without provocation, deliberately committed in open day, nor was it ever frowned on by the commander."  

It was the custom in those times to publish letters anonymously or with a pseudonym, but there was one loyalist who wrote an account of Mrs. Caldwell's death for newspaper publication under his own name.  Ebenezer Foster was a former Justice of the peace from Woodbridge, New Jersey and among the Tory 'refugees" who crossed over from Staten Island in the wake of Knyphausen's invasion force.  Approaching the parsonage in Connecticut Farms, he writes:

"I soon saw a group of soldiers in and about said House, and on my nearer approach, heard some of them mention, (rather piteously), a woman's being shot in the house, as soon as the crowd dispersed, I entered the house and not without difficulty , found her laying on her back on a bed that stood in a small, dark, back bedroom, (for I don't recollect that it had any window) tho' it had two doors that opened into other apartments.  She was to appearance death, and had a cloth carelessly thrown over her face, which I did not remove but left her, expecting the troops would soon march, when her friends might take care of her..

...[I] did not return in less than three hours, when some person who was near Mr. Caldwell's house, told me the woman was stripped, and thrown off the bed, but that a British officer's coming in, had prevented the soldiers from carrying off her cloaths: On entering the house I found her laying on her face on the floor beside the bed, and most of what cloaths had been pulled off by her side.  I concluded that she had been taken off the bed that the bedding might be taken from under her..."

Foster's account is intriguing as much for what he confirms in the patriot claims about her death as what he contradicts. Regardless of how she died, there is no doubt that her corpse was mistreated and her personal effects plundered along with the house.  Foster is scrupulous not to identify any specific unit with this shabby looting, implying that it happened sometime between when the British advanced beyond Connecticut Farms and when they returned.  He claimed that he and another loyalist made a close inspection to determine the cause of Mrs. Caldwell's death:

"We found that on account of a pantry that was building on the back side of the house, a small spot of covering had been pulled off opposite to the bed whereon the Lady sat, the only ball we could discover that had touched the house was the one that killed her: It appeared to have come from a northern direction (in the course of the Rebel fire) and passed between the joints of the plastered wall, it seemed to have passed so far above the bed as to have hit her above the girdle and its passing through her left breast, I account for by supposing her to have been in a stooping posture..."

There is no mention of broken glass such as reportedly cut the face of young Abigail Lennington as she watched the soldier shoot through the window: no confirmation that there was even a window at all.  Mr. Foster's reputation as "a Gentleman of great integrity" as well as a very loyal subject was cited in the newspaper account to give weight to his evidence, but whether or not it is factual reporting on his part the court of public opinion was already convinced that the killing had been deliberate.  Furthermore, the outrages perpetrated in the burning of the village and looting of its houses were there for all to see, right down to the roads strewn with he stuffing of feather beds.

And what of the claim that the shot came from the American lines to the north?  That is an odd direction.  Maxwell's men were initially arrayed along a ravine running roughly southwest to northeast and facing a royalist advance from the southeast.  The patriots then withdrew to the northwest  along a road toward Springfield as their left flank was turned by another royalist column that advanced from the east or northeast of their position.  Shots "from the north" could therefore have come from either side.

Samuel Steele Smith's out of print Winter at Morristown 1779-1780: The Darkest Hour (1979) includes several surprises for students of Knyphausen's Raid in the form of material not generally encountered elsewhere.  Sometimes, as with the complete order of battle that appears in the Appendices, the information is indispensable.  At least once, Smith confuses the actions of one unit with another (but we will address that matter in due course).  Smith dispenses with the killing of Mrs Caldwell in a single line as he describes the melee at Connecticut Farms, but later returns to it when addressing how news of her death spread throughout the countryside.  He then includes this startling paragraph:

"Some years later, there was an admission.  A New Jersey militiaman, Private Frazee Craig, of Captain Amos Morse's Company, of Colonel Jaques Essex County Regiments, testified that he was 'at the Farms [Connecticut Farms] when Mrs. Caldwell was shot by one of Capt. [John] Craig's men', also of Col. Jaques regiment. The shooting by an American, if indeed, he did it, surely was accidental."

Smith's source is supposedly testimony given by Craig while applying for a veteran's pension in the early 1830s before Judge Lewis Condit. I have read a subsequent publication of the Condit testimony that includes an account from Craig, but while discussing Connecticut Farms it makes no mention of Mrs. Caldwell.  Assuming he did make such a statement, what are we to make of it?  It was certainly not a welcome revision to the conventional narrative.  When Elizabeth native Capt. William C. deHart, an aide to Winfield Scott who returned from Mexico sick and dying, attempted to make an impartial investigation into the evidence surrounding Mrs. Caldwell's death, he was pilloried for his efforts by his fellow townsmen.

In the end, whatever the cause of her homicide, Mrs. Caldwell's death became a symbol of what was at stake in America's fight for independence.  A year later, her husband was shot by a sentry, and their nine children - "baptised in blood" - were fostered out, including their eldest son whose education in France was sponsored by Lafayette. 

Rev Caldwell's statue, at right, may be seen on Walnut St. in Philadelphia.

Who Killed Mrs. Caldwell? (Knyphausen's Raid Part VII)

This is the latest installment in a series of posts I began more than a year ago on Knyphausen's Raid into New Jersey in 1780. 

The American Revolution was fought as often with the pen as with the sword.  Sometimes what was written was quite literally worth battalions to the Patriot cause.  Thomas Paine's American Crisis stiffened revolutionary resolve in the face of a series of military reverses in 1776.  The murder of Jenny McCrea by two of Burgoyne's native allies the following year brought out the militia in unprecedented numbers to confront the British at Saratoga.  It did not matter that the unfortunate Miss McRea was the fiancee of a loyalist officer;  what was done to her could have been done to any American woman and that was good enough for the patriot press and its readership.

Another incident occurred in 1780 that became as notorious in patriot memory as the death of McCrea.  This tragedy, occurring on June 7th at Connecticut Farms (now Union), New Jersey during Knyphausen's Raid, was kept alive for many months afterward in the press as a symbol of royalist barbarity, Once again, an American woman was killed, but this time she was not only a staunch patriot but also the minister's wife.  Her name was Hannah (Ogden) Caldwell - a very distant relative of mine - and responsibility for her death was laid squarely on the British.  It is not altogether clear that this was the case, but there was little doubt in the minds of the revolutionaries at the time - or indeed of their descendants and subsequent chroniclers - that she was deliberately and foully murdered by the royalist invaders.

The seal of Union County, New Jersey depicts the traditional version of her death at the hands of a red-coated soldier.   It is notoriously difficult to separate fact from fiction in the fog of war, and especially complicated with this conflict, when what was recorded - and by whom - may be just as significant as the gaps in the historic record (and there are many).

Hannah (Ogden) Caldwell was third cousin to my ancestor Aaron Ogden and his brother Matthias, both of whom fought at Connecticut Farms on the day she was killed.  She was the wife of James Caldwell, the Presbyterian minister in Elizabeth Town. Reverend Caldwell was chaplain in my ancestor Elias Dayton's Third New Jersey Continental Regiment in its 1st establishment,  and subsequently served as a Deputy Quartermaster General. 

We tend to overlook that the Revolution was in many ways a religious war as well as a civil one. The evangelical "Great Awakening" of the previous generation challenged traditional church hierarchies and helped establish the underpinning of many of the democratic principles of the Revolution.  The Congregationalists of New England, the Presbyterians of the Middle Colonies and the Methodists and Baptists of the Tidewater and back county were particularly affected by this revival and many of their congregations strongly supported the patriot cause.  George III, on the other hand, was the "Defender of the Faith" for the Episcopal church, while the Dutch Reformed church split into factions in reaction to the Great Awakening that foreshadowed where the loyalties of their parishioners would lie in the Revolution.

The foremost patriots in Elizabeth Town, and hence in New Jersey, were members of Reverend Caldwell's Congregation.  His parish house was burned by Tory raiders.  In January, 1780, the church was burned as well by a raiding party from loyalist Staten Island guided by fellow townsman Cornelius Hatfield, whose own father was a noted parishoner.Caldwell subsequently moved his family to Connecticut Farms, a settlement 4 miles outside the town center, and continued his ministry while also helping to acquire supplies for Washington's encampment in the Highlands at Morristown. There are accounts that he preached with loaded pistols before him, and with good reason.  One of the loyalists who burned the church in Elizabeth Town later expressed his regret that "the black-coated rebel, Caldwell, was not then in his pulpit."

As a prominent patriot, Reverend Caldwell was certainly a ripe target for kidnapping, if not worse, by loyalist 'refugees".  But even he considered his family safe from deliberate attack.  As it turned out, they were in great peril at Connecticut Farms, but whether from a stray bullet or intentional murder is an open question.

On the morning of Knyphausen's initial advance on Connecticut Farms, Hannah Caldwell was at home with several of her youngest children, an unrelated girl named Abigail Lennington who may have been a housemaid, and a nurse named Constance Benward.  Her other children had been bundled off in a commissary wagon and her husband had encouraged her to follow, but she insisted that she would stay to protect their property.  It was her misfortune that the battle developed near her home and the patriot defenders held off the royalists for several hours before they were pushed back through the little village.  She had lowered some of her valuables down the well and filled her pockets with other precious items, then sat on her bed near the window to wait out the battle, saying "Don't worry, baby will be our protection.  They will respect a mother."

At some time during the ebb and flow of the battle that day, someone shot Mrs. Caldwell.   Abigail Lennington and one of the servants subsequently gave testimony before a magistrate as to what occurred.  Numerous histories have referenced that testimony, although I have not yet had the opportunity to go to the source.  According to these accounts, Lennington was near the window when she saw a soldier come toward the house, raise his rifle, and fire through the window.  Two balls struck Mrs. Caldwell in the breast, killing her instantly, while broken glass cut Abigail's face.  Sometimes in these histories the soldier is described as "a shot squatty soldier in a red coat."  

Reportedly the British entered the house and rifled the clothes of the dead woman to get at her valuables.  The body was removed while the house was plundered and then most of the buildings in Connecticut Farms were burned (the parsonage among them, despite this account to the contrary).  It is difficult to know precisely what happened from contemporary writing filled with hyperbole.  There was such outrage, in fact, that the royalists in New York felt obliged to file their own accounts in rebuttal.  Rivington's Royal Gazette ran one such refutation by an anonymous British officer:

"Whilst the troops were advancing to Connecticut Farms, the rebels fired out of the houses, agreeable to their usual practice, from which circumstance, Mrs. Caldwell had the misfortune to be shot my a random ball.  What heightened the singularity of this unhappy Lady's fate, is, that upon Enquiry it appears, beyond a Doubt, that the shot was fired by the rebels themselves, as it entered the side of the House from their direction, and lodged in the Wall nearest the Troops then advancing."

This source is hardly less biased than the patriot press, and one wonders whether there was time enough between the killing and the burning of the Town upon the British withdrawal to go inspecting the wall for errant musketballs that may or may not have passed through the breast of Mrs. Caldwell.  Some accounts claim her body was left half exposed in the streets for several hours, while others claim a British officer covered it with his cloak and had it removed to another house.

The argument over what happened to Mrs Caldwell raged long after the smoke had cleared from the burning village. More than anything else, her death inflamed the revolutionary arbor of the defenders of New Jersey, who readily believed her killing was intentional.

Ebenezer Foster, a loyalist and former colonial Justice of the Peace, wrote his own account of the Caldwell murder for publication. We will discuss its merits in a subsequent post.

"By God! They Are Fleeing From a Shadow!"

When an ancestor's blue-colored utterances make it into the history books, the family genealogist owes it to posterity to give the episode its due.  One of my Ogden ancestors - two brothers who were officers in the New Jersey Continentals during the American War of Independence -  is said to have answered a request by one of Washington's staff officers for an explanation of the collapse of the advanced wing at Monmouth Court House with an exasperated oath, followed by the memorable line; "Sir, they are fleeing from a shadow!"  A fine sentiment, and perfectly in the keeping of the character of either Colonel Matthias Ogden of the 1st New Jersey, or Brigade Major Aaron Ogden, his brother and my direct ancestor.  But which of these swore a blue streak for posterity, and how was the incident recorded?

Various 19th century histories relate the episode differently and manage to make almost as great a muddle of things as the confused battle itself.  Joel Tyler Headley's Friendship's Memorial (1853)  appears to be wrong in two points, as it ascribes the question to Washington himself, and credits the reply, prefaced by "a terrible oath", to someone named Osgood instead of Ogden. Henry Beebe Carrington's (1897) Washington, the Soldier reports that two of Washington's aides, Harrison and Fitzgerald, encountered Major (Aaron Ogden) who replied to their question "with an explicative."  Everett Titsworth Tomlinson's The Boys of Old Monmouth (1898) says that it was Colonel (Matthias) Ogden who responded to one of Washington's aides "in a towering passion." 

So which Ogden was it?  Aaron Ogden was himself a staff officer on that day, acting as Assistant A.D.C. to General Alexander "Lord Stirling" who commanded the left wing of the Army, but carrying orders all over the battlefield.  Matthias Ogden was commanding Maxwell's Brigade, which included his own regiment and was part of the advanced wing.  This was the wing of the army that was retreating when Washington sent his aides forward to discover what was happening.

Robert Hanson Harrison was a senior secretary to Washington, and his memory of the events of this day would be in particular demand afterward, for the officer in charge of the advanced wing, Maj. General Charles Lee, was subsequently courtmarshalled and cashiered over his mismanagement of his command.  John Fitzgerald was another secretary and aide-de-camp.   If these were the two sent by Washington as indicated above, they would have been the ones to record what Ogden said, and it is most likely that they met Matthias and not Aaron Ogden.

A number of historians agree.  Stryker's The Battle of Monmouth (2006) says that Matthias Ogden called out "in great anger" to Harrison; "by God, they are fleeing from a shadow."  Wheeler's The Ogden Family in America (1907) quotes the most colorful account of this profane profundity: "with the fierce wrath of the lion disdaining his chains, when interrogated by Colonel Harrison as to the cause of the retreat, answered with great apparent exasperation; 'By G-d, sir, they are fleeing from a shadow!'"

So it seems that Harrison is indeed the source, and Matthias Ogden the cussing colonel. And indeed, in the courtmarshall proceedings, Harrison's testimony provides confirmation:

"I then proceeded down the line, determined to go to the rear of the retreating troops, and met with Colonel Ogden.  I asked him the same question, whether he could assign the cause, or give me any information why the troops retreated.  He appeared exceedingly exasperated, and said; 'By God!  They are fleeing from a shadow!"

With such (quite literally) damning testimony, Charles Lee was finished as a commander.  Harrison went on to be one of Washington's six original appointments to the Supreme Court, though illness prevented him from serving.  He died in 1790, followed just a year later by Matthias Ogden who was stricken by Yellow Fever.

"By God!" is a comparatively mild oath, even in Ogden's day.  Whatever choice words may have salted his speech beyond this were tactfully omitted in the accounts by Washington's staff.  He was not the only one who was "exceedingly exasperated" on that day, and his curses were said to have been eclipsed by those uttered by his Commander in Chief when he rebuked General Lee on the field.  What Washington may have said in a great temper can only be surmised, but there is no record of any phrase leaving his lips quite so memorable as "fleeing from a shadow."

I Spy

I've been enjoying Alexander Rose's Washington's Spies; The Story of America's First Spy Ring, not only for the solid writing and his excellent detective work piecing together the inner workings of Patriot espionage in and around New York, but also because it contains a trove of period details you won't find in the D.A.R. archives or in your ancestor's Society of the Cincinnati biography.

Rose memorably describes New York during this period as "A bustling mercantile metropolis descended into a mare'snest, the leading red-light district in North America, the black market capital of the Revolution."  A third of it gutted by fire, the city was a brimming caldera of Tory refugees, smugglers, soldiers of the British empire and prisoners of war rotting away in floating hulks and packed on land in noisome hells where they died in appalling numbers. 

More than 500 prostitutes worked the notorious "Holy Ground" - then owned by the Church of England - at the site of today's "Ground Zero".  During the American occupation of the City in 1776, many a militiaman became "hors de combat" with the clap, and it was no different when New York became the main British garrison of the war. 

Loyalist privateers based in New York captured thousands of prizes during the war, and this fact reminds me that I am long overdue for a post on the remarkable career of Connecticut privateer and very distant relation Gideon Olmsted.  We shall remedy that situation early in this new year, as well as get back to the half finished series of posts I started last Summer on Knyphausen's Raid  which left off after the Battle of Connecticut Farms. 

As to the spy ring that is central to Rose's story, it is a gripping tale with invisible in and ciphers aplenty, but it also includes insights from recent scholarship that shed new light on old controversies.  Rose reveals that it is now known that the great fire that swept through the western third of the city as the patriots retreated from MManhattan may later have been encouraged by ad hoc arsonists, but was initially sparked by careless British camp followers hunkered down in a storehouse near Whitehall-dock.  They "procured from an adjacent yard a number of pine boards, the ends of which they places in the chimney [with] their opposite points resting on the cedar floor of the apartment" and subsequently left their fire unattended. 

I also had not been aware that the discredited Major Robert Rogers of French and Indian War fame had a central role in the discovery and capture of American spy Nathan Hale.  In 2000, a manuscript was donated to the Library of Congress that was written by Connecticut Tory Consider Tiffany and had been kept by his family for many generations.  Tiffany's account describes how Roger's suspected a spy had been smuggled across the Sound, and later not only spotted hale but through a ruse of friendship got him to betray himself in front of witnesses.  A British diary by an officer of the 40th foot confirms that Rogers was the spycatcher, recording that "Nathan Hales, a Captain in the Rebel Army & a spy was taken by Majr. Rogers..."

Aside from these juicy details, I believe I may know a descendant of Washington's spy-master, Benjamin  Tallmadge, and am going to put the question to my friend when I return to work tomorrow.  Both he and Benjamin Tallmadge share the same last name and come from the same part of Long Island.  Tallmadge retired just down the road from me in Litchfield, Connecticut, and his portrait at right of is in the collection of the Litchfield Historical Society.

Not only that, I discovered yet another mention of my ancestor Matthias Ogden in Washington's Spies, who not only concocted a plan to kidnap the heir to the British throne but also managed his own intelligence network while commanding the 1st New Jersey Continentals.  Just last month, in fact, I received a message from a descendant of one of his officers - Captain Daniel Baldwin, who lost lost a leg at Germantown - asking if I had any information about his later work as a spy in Newark's "Neutral Ground" reporting to Matthias Ogden.  Such are the joys of geneablogging!

Missed by a Myles

It used to be that having a Mayflower Pilgrim in your family tree made you a member of a rather exclusive club.  With each successive generation the odds that you or the person you marry have a Plymouth pedigree are exponentially greater.  Thanks to the bottleneck of the Black Death, and a quirk of genealogy that has more slots available for ancestors with each preceding generation than there were individual people alive back then to serve in that capacity, just about all of us with European ancestry can justly claim to be royal bastards of one sort or another.

Still, for Yankees of old Puritan stock there is a special allure to finding a Brewster or Alden in the family foliage.  There is, in fact, a Mayflower Pilgrim lurking in my ancestral files somewhere though I cannot offhand recall his name - who was one of the many who did not survive that first winter of 1620-1621.  His wife and children remained behind in England, and one of his progeny eventually made a more successful go of it in the New World.

And then there is Thomas Standish.  That is a name to capture the imagination, for it would be tantalizing indeed to link my ancestor who was born in 1612 and died in 1693 with the red-bearded captain of the Plymouth militia made famous in a wholly fictional romance by Longfellow. 

 Myles Standish came over with his wife Rose, who died with so many others that winter.  his second wife Barbara arrived in Plymouth in 1623 and all of his known children were by her.  None of these is Thomas Standish, whosettled in WethersfieldCT.  Wethersfield, which vies with Windsor for the claim to be the oldest settlement in Connecticut, was established by Puritans from Plymouth.  Could Thomas Standish have been a child of that first marriage, left in England as a lad of eight?  So far, there is no verified connection between the two Standishes.

Thomas Standish had a daughter Lydia who married John Belden, of an old Norman Yorkshire family with links to noble houses, and from there to Charlemagne, and ancient Picts, and if the Royal pedigrees are to be believed - to Joseph of Arimathea, but no Myles.  Not yet. 

Rara Avis from the Suffragist Years in Massachusetts

From time to time, something I have researched and written about here out of personal interest is found by those looking for specialist knowledge on the web.  That is the fun of having diverse interests and an inquisitive mindset, though there is risk of becoming something of a dilettante, or worse, succumbing to what my sister calls MARS or Male Automatic Response Syndrome, in which those of my gender with this affliction feel compelled to hold forth on any topic regardless of qualification.  Perhaps you have seen this at play around the holiday dinner table, or in certain gatherings of men in the legal profession (which might property be called MARS bars).

Nonetheless, blogs can be great aggregators of related data, and good blogging, like good research, is also capable of synthesizing and intelligible whole out of all of those pieces.  So I was delighted when I was contacted by someone who was searching the web for information about woman suffragist memorabilia and stumbled upon something I had written about my Gr-great Aunt Het the suffragist, or possibly about a suffragist curiosity in my possession that once belonged to her.  This person hoped I could help untangle the puzzle of an item that turned up in an old shed on land in Maine, and though I am no expert I know a bit about the topic and how to use the web to do research and I said I'd have a go. 

There was no picture, but the item was described to me this way:

I have a metal bird that we found in an old shed on our property in Maine.  It is blue and gold and says Votes for Women Nov. 2..it also says in small letters...

"Mass woman suffrage assn. Gertrude H. Leonard-Teresa A. Cr....something...Have you heard of this item... It is about 11 1/2" long and 3 1/2" wide at the widest part..

Here was a bonanza of useful data that I was sure could help establish the provenance of the item and connect it to specific people and events.  I started with Gertrude H. Leonard and the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, and immediately had all the Google hits I could wish for.  Once I had the middle name, I was able to find a biography of Gertrude Halladay Leonard in Harvard Univerity's Women's Rights Collection:

Gertrude Halladay Leonard (1868- ) - suffragist.

Scope and Content: She first became interested in the suffrage cause in 1905, and for the next 12 years gave an increasing amount of time to the Mass. Woman Suffrage Association. From 1912-1917 she was chairman of the State Board of Directors and was virtually acting president as Alice Stone Blackwell was often unable to fulfill her duties as president. She was parade chairman of the first Boston Suffrage Parade. Along with Theresa Crowley, Mrs. Leonard was greatly responsible for the work of lobbying in the Mass. Legislature in favor of a suffrage bill. Mrs. Leonard resigned from her chairmanship of the Mass. Woman Suffrage Association in 1917 and spent the next few months in France working with the Red Cross. In 1925-1926 she worked as an organizer for the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association.

There is some confusion in the sources I found on line (even from the same Harvard source) concerning her date of death, given as 1919 but clearly impossible if she were a Leagyue of Nations organizer in the mid 1920s.  In any case, this same biography provided the name and biography of the other woman, Teresa A Crowley.

Lawyer, suffragist, and amateur actress Teresa A. (O'Leary) Crowley was born in Wakefield, Mass., in 1874. As chairman of the Legislative Committee of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, TAC led several successful campaigns against anti-suffrage politicians; she was remembered as one of the leading outdoor suffrage speakers.

Crowley's Irish heritage is interesting, given that many in the Suffrage movement, and particulalry in NAWSA in the critical decade leading up to winning the franchise in 1920, were upper middle class Protestant women.

And the date, November 2, turns out to a milestone of sorts in the History of the suffrage movement in Massachusetts.  On that date in 1915 the male voters of the state defeated a referendum that would have amended the US Constitution to give all women the right to vote.

As in 1895, the referendum is once again defeated by Massachusetts voters, reflected by the votes in Beverly. The only community in the state of Massachusetts to vote in favor of suffrage is Tewksbury with a vote of 149 to 148. Statewide, only 35.5% was in favor. Four states in the east vote on full suffrage for women: Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. All four states vote in the negative. "

All this, I might add, took less than 15 minutes to pull together using nothing other than Google.  I am not qualified to appraise the value of this item, but it is clearly of deep historical value as a relic of the suffrage movement in Massachusetts, connected to two of its foremost leaders and to a critical, heartbreaking vote on whether women should be empowered with the vote.

 

As always, the journey of this suffragist bird from 1915 to a shed in Maine is the last piece of the puzzle and one I may not be able to unravel. I have told the owner of this item that whatever is the ultimate decision made about its dispossition, that I would hope that it would find a good home where its historic significance is recognized.  In the meantime, the research has been great fun. 

Unfriendly Fire

The Confederate Brigadier in the northern branches of our family tree is a fascinating anomaly.  Oral tradition held that General Archibald Gracie, the third in four successive generations to bear that name, had his head blown off by a cannon ball at Petersburg.  Contemporary newspaper accounts in our family archive variously describe the agent of his destruction as shell fragments and even a sniper's bullet, but thanks to a niche area of Civil War studies and a book by Jack D. Welsh detailing the The Medical Histories of Confederate Generals, I believe I can now say with certainty that he kept his head but was done in by artillery fire.

"He was killed December 2, 1864, in the Petersburg trenches by the explosion of a Parrott shell.  He was looking through a telescope at the time, the top of his head exposed.  His neck was fractured, and he was struck three times in the shoulder."

Welsh also provides more information about a wound General Gracie received in 1863.

"On December 14th, 1863, near Bean's Station, Tennessee, his left arm was struck by a rifle ball; that same day, after having it examined, he returned to the field.  The surgeon could detect no lesion of the bones.  Later examination revealed that the musket ball had struck his forearm posteriorly two inches below the elbow, passing deeply and transversely through the deep flexors, and had come out before the radius.  Twenty days after the injury, the limb was markedly swollen, and the little and ring fingers wee paralyzed.  Abscesses formed, and at the end of six weeks, two exfoliations were removed.  Rapid recovery followed.  Gracie rejoined his brigade in April 1864, while it was located in the vicinity of Lick Creek (Virginia)."

Gracie probably convalesced in Richmond, with his wife Josephine Gracie née Mayo.  A child was born to this couple on December 1st, 1864, which was also Gracie's birthday.  He had received leave to go visit his wife and newborn daughter just before he went to inspect the trenches.  He was 32 years old.

Lemons to Lemonade on a Trip to Trenton

I spent the day yesterday traveling on business to and from Trenton, New Jersey.  I had never set foot in New Jersey's capitol city before: just noted the big letters on the bridge proclaiming "Trenton Makes, The World Takes" while rattling over the Delaware on Amtrak.  It turns out that I found things there to interest me, which was a blessing because I was in Town in my capacity as a board member of a not-for-profit that had run out of money and was forced to terminate its executive director and cut back on other staff.  It has been a long while since I was faced with the hard task of firing someone for reasons other than poor performance (not that that is any picnic), and I made the trip from Connecticut to show respect and accept my share of ownership of the decision.  Many of my fellow Board members were absent, or only could participate on the phone instead of in person.  It is time, I believe, to absent myself from this Board altogether.  Failure isn't fundable, and dysfunction is depressing.

With these cheery thoughts, I got to Town an hour before my meeting, and started to recognize street names from reading Stephanie Plum paperbacks.  It turns out that Barracks Street was just a block from my meeting at the Capitol Building, and I have reasons to be interested in this 18th-century structure as it features prominently in the opening chapter of my work-in-progress alternative history novel, in which Washington is captured and executed during a failed attack on Trenton.  I was the only visitor to the Old Barracks Museum at 11:00 a.m. yesterday morning, and so had a personal tour with a very engaging guide who has volunteered at the site for nearly four decades (photo credit via answers.com).  The original parts of the building date to the French and Indian War, and it is the only barracks from this period that remains anywhere in the United States.  There is an excellent exhibit on the archaeological finds unearthed at the site of an 18th-century riverside store, including the armor plated scales of the enormous sturgeon that once thrived in the Delaware and other rivers along the Atlantic seaboard. 

None of my Patriot ancestors from New Jersey fought at the Battle of Trenton, but my great Grandfather Archibald Gracie Ogden died there in 1932 after suffering a massive seizure while attending a meeting of the State chapter of the Society of the Cincinnati.  As I walked through the sumptuous halls beneath the Capitol rotunda, I suddenly noticed the portraits of New Jersey's governors and quickly found that of my 4th Great Grandfather, Aaron Ogden, who served a single year term in 1812 and turned down an appointment as a major general to do so.  There are a number of engravings based on this portrait, including the one at left, but I had never before seen the colored original. Note the badge of the Cincinnati pinned to his breast;  he was the president of the New Jersey Chapter for many years. I had no camera with me and cannot find an image of it on-line, so perhaps I have a reason for a return visit. 

We met in Senate Legislative Committee Room #1, but I took so many twists and turns upstairs and down that I felt the urge to shout out "Hello Cleveland!", though I doubt any of the staffers, lobbyists or security personnel would have gotten the reference to Spinal Tap.  The room, when I found it, was laid out in standard fashion, with the curved desks of committee members glaring down on the chairs of those giving testimony.  We were so small a group, we sat below the salt in a semi-circle of our own.  The walls were painted an unfortunate shade of institutional green that almost could have been called pistachio but had a tinge of sickly yellow.  I am sure it was designed to put those in the hot seat even less at ease.  The cool pink marble and gilded halls outside were decidedly in contrast to the parts of the building where the sausages get made.

The meeting did not conclude until practically 4 p.m., guaranteeing that I would have New York rush hour traffic to contend with on my return.  I thought better of the George Washington Bridge cider press and slipped up the Palisades and over the Tappan Zee to the Sawmill and Taconic, getting home by 8:30 with perhaps 45 minutes stuck in traffic.   What otherwise felt like attending a funeral turned out to be a good day in Trenton.