Why was a pine tree on a flag that flew on Revolutionary War cruisers commissioned by George Washington? This was the design of Washington’s Aide, Col. Joseph Reed. Colonel Reed, writing to Colonel Moylan, on Oct. 20, 1775, wrote: “Please to fix some particular color for a flag and a signal, by which our vessels may know each other. What do you think of a flag with a white ground, a tree in the middle, and the motto ‘An Appeal to Heaven?’ This is the flag of our floating batteries.”
Floating Battery used in the Siege of Boston. Flew the Pine Tree Flag.
Even before the Declaration of Independence, Americans realized that they needed to be able to attack the British from the sea. When George Washington arrived in Boston in 1775, he began to commission cruisers to prevent British ships from re-supplying their army. They were the Franklin, Hancock, Lynch, Washington, Lee and Harrison. Massachusetts, Rhode Island and other colonies tried to form some protections from the much superior British Navy. The Massachusetts Navy sailed under the pine-tree flag.
Why would a navy ensign use a pine tree as its prominent symbol?
The pine tree flag had long been associated with New England. It was flown on colonial merchant ships as early as 1686.
It was a symbol of New England resistance to restrictions that had been placed on harvesting much needed timber. There was even a Pine Tree Riot in New Hampshire in 1772 – two years before the Boston Tea Party. The Eastern White Pine was the best suited for ships masts and the Crown wanted them for British ships.
The pine tree flag flew over Americans at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June of 1775.
What does the phrase “Appeal to Heaven” symbolize? It is from a philosopher – John Locke. When people face injustice no one on earth can help, but they must rely on a higher power and even take up arms.
In 1776 the navy of Great Britain was the most powerful in the world. How could Americans compete on the seas? States outfitted some vessels of War and Congress established a navy, but it was woefully inadequate to meet the needs of the Americans. The Patriots turned to a long established practice of issuing commissions to ship owners to authorize them to attack and seize merchant ships and warships of the British. If the privateers were successful they got to keep profits from the cargo and possible sale of the vessels they seized. The proceeds would be shared by the owners and the crew. Sometimes the state or national government received a small share as well. The primary objective was to disrupt trade and encourage British ship owners to call for an end to the war.
In the archives of the State of Rhode Island is a copy of the 1776 privateer commission of Isaac Field and his ship the Eagle. We have tried to transcribe the document.
Form of a Privateering Commission 1776
That we have granted and by these points do grant and authority to Isaac Field, mariner, commander of the schooner called the Eagle of the (_) of sixty tons or there about(s) belonging to John Matthewson and others of Providence in the colony of Rhode Island and mounting ten carriage guns and (-) by sixty-five men to fit out and set forth the said schooner in a warlike manner and by and with the said schooner and the crew thereof by force of arms to attack ships and take the ships and other vessels belonging to the inhabitants of Great Britain or any of them with their tackle, apparel, furniture and loadings on the high seas in between high water and low water marks and to bring the same to some convenient ports in the said colony in order that the courts which are, or shall be there appointed to hear and determine cases civil and maritime, may process in due form to condemn the said captures if they be judged lawful prizes, the said Isaac Field having given and with sufficient sureties that nothing be done by the said schooner or any of the officers, mariners or company thereof, contrary to or inconsistent with the —-? and customs of nations, and the instructions a copy of which is herewith delivered to him and we will and require all our officers whatsoever to give succor and assistance to the said Isaac Field in the promissary this commission shall continue in force until the Congress shall issue orders to the contrary.
By order of the Congress – John Hancock, President Dated at Providence in the state of Rhode Island and opened under my hand and the seal of the said state the twenty-seventh day of September in the year of our lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-six Nicholas Cooke, Governor.
By his honor (_). William Mumford, Secretary
Thomas Fleming Day wrote in a Naval Journal in 1911.
“More than two hundred privateer commissions were issued by Rhode Island in the revolution, and not less than one hundred and ninety-three privateer cruises were successfully begun from Narragansett Bay. In November, 1776, John Paul Jones, when in command of the sloop of war Alfred, tried to enlist men at Newport but could get none, as they preferred privateering. The privateer Eagle, Captain Isaac Field, had sailed the day before and anchored at Tarpon Cove. Jones, sailing down Vineyard Sound, saw her, laid alongside and took twenty-four men out of her to force to make up the Alfred’s complement.”
Isaac had a short career. He later became captain of the Industry. He died in June of 1778 and is buried at Swan Point Cemetery.
Last year at this time I published a blog on the “Daughters of Liberty”. Today I want to revisit the list of women associated with the Daughters. I have found that particular list in a few articles written around 1900 when chapters of the “Daughters of Liberty” were forming in various towns around Rhode Island. What I couldn’t find was any primary source confirmations of these women being involved in “Daughters of Liberty” – Mary Easton Wanton, Polly Wanton, Lucy Ellery, Patience Easton, Mary Champlin and Anne Vernon Olyphant. In searching for information on these women, I found these names and others listed in an Order of Cincinnatti in France 1905 book as giving hospitality to the French troops in Newport during 1780-1781. When I look at genealogical information on the women, I find that some were too young to participate in the 1766 spinning bees. The term “Daughter of Liberty” had been broadened to include patriotic women who furthered the cause for independence. Other sources list Martha Washington, Abigail Adams and Deborah Sampson (who actually fought as a man) as “Daughters of Liberty.”
Looking at primary sources, newspaper articles record the work of the Rhode Island “Daughters of Liberty” in protesting the Stamp Act and Townsend Act with boycotts of imported clothing. Most of the articles date from 1766. One of them is later, 1769.
An entry in The Boston Chronicle of April 7, 1766, states that on March 12, in Providence, Rhode Island, “18 Daughters of Liberty, young ladies of good reputation, assembled at the house of Doctor Ephraim Bowen, in this town. . . . There they exhibited a fine example of industry, by spinning from sunrise until dark, and displayed a spirit for saving their sinking country rarely to be found among persons of more age and experience.” At dinner, they “cheerfully agreed to omit tea, to render their conduct consistent. Besides this instance of their patriotism, before they separated, they unanimously resolved that the Stamp Act was unconstitutional, that they would purchase no more British manufactures unless it be repealed, and that they would not even admit the addresses of any gentlemen should they have the opportunity, without they determined to oppose its execution to the last extremity, if the occasion required.”
The Newport Mercury on April 14, 1766 included a letter to the editor that 20 young ladies met at the “invitation of some young Gentlemen of Liberty, and exhibited a most noble pattern of industry, from a quarter after sunrise til sunset, spinning 74 and 2/3 skeins of good Linen Yarn.” The toast was “Wheels and Flax, and a Fig for the Stamp Act and its Abettors.”
The Newport Mercury published a letter to the editor dated April 23, 1766. It detailed the results of two spinning matches held in Bristol on April 10th and 15th. A chart was attached with names and amounts of skeins spun. This is the only list of names I could find. I checked some of the names through genealogical sources and I could verify that many were Bristol girls and women.
From Rhode Island Historical Magazine – vol. 4, no 3 (1884)
New York Journal 24 August 1769: July 16. — Newport. July 10. “We can assure the Public, that Spinning is so much encouraged among us, that a Lady in Town, who is in very affluent Circumstances, and who is between 70 and 80 years of Age, has within about three Weeks become a very good Spinner, though she never spun a Thread in her Life before. Thus has the Love of Liberty and dread of Tyranny, kindled in the Breast of old and young, a glorious Flame, which will eminently distinguish the fair Sex of the present Time through far distant Ages.”
“Daughters of Liberty” seemed to be a term used for women who boycotted imported clothing, tea and other products. I can find mentions of the spinning bees in the period from 1766-1769. There was a patriotic organization of women’s groups around the country (circa 1900) which took the name “Daughters of Liberty.” They researched and promoted women who had been part of the Revolutionary War effort. In 1895 Alice Morse Earle wrote a book entitled Colonial Dames and Good Wives. She credits Rhode Island women with the beginning of the Daughters of Liberty.
“The earliest definite notice of any gathering of Daughters of Liberty was in Providence in 1766, when seventeen young ladies met at the house of Deacon Ephraim Bowen and spun all day long for the public benefit, and assumed the name Daughters of Liberty. The next meeting the little band had so increased in numbers that it had to meet in the Court House. At about the same time another band of daughters gathered at Newport, and an old list of the members has been preserved. It comprised all the beautiful and brilliant young girls for which Newport was at that time so celebrated.”[Pg 242].
I would love to see that “old list of the members.”
The name Banister (Bannister) still exists on a popular wharf in Newport. John and his wife Christian were wealthy landowners in Newport before the coming of the Revolutionary War. Many of the land rich class in Newport became Loyalists. John’s brother Thomas even joined a Loyalist militia. John is not included on lists of Loyalists, but he and his wife were in a peculiar position once the British occupied Newport in 1776. John would ultimately sail for England to ask for reparations from the British for the damage done to his properties, but that left Christian and her young son to face life in Occupied Newport on their own. Marian Mathison Desrosiers book, The Banisters of Rhode Island During the American Revolution, provides details of Occupation life for Christian and others in Newport.
Newport was a Loyalist leaning town, so at first British occupation was not severe. Christian would have been able to go through her normal routines of shopping and visiting. Many of the merchants and tradespeople were able to continue their work. But there were hardships. Even during the first week of occupation Aquidneck Island families found their livestock confiscated to feed British troops. Island families could catch fish and hunt birds. Normal colonial trade was cut off, so Newport residents found themselves without items like wine and liquors.
As time went by there were further restrictions. Christian was distressed that she could not make some of her normal visits to family. By June of 1777 the British enclosed the Newport area with gates and citizens were required to get passes to even visit friends in Middletown or Portsmouth. The citizens lost their freedoms and their elected government. The British military was the law.
Occupation became progressively difficult and Christian and other women left alone had to deal with property loss, destruction of their orchards and trees, loss of personal freedom and lack of food and fuel. In December of 1778 British General Prescott ordered the army to cut up wood fences, old docks and boats, and even church pews to keep his soldiers warm and cook their food.
Christian’s husband remained in London for years trying to get repayment for his losses. Meanwhile, Christian hung on in Newport. In July of 1780 the French arrived. Unlike the British, the French paid for items, restored damaged homes and brought a sense of civility to Newport.
Christian’s husband returned after four years in England. She had managed to keep things going during his absence and the family benefited from her struggles. Her Loyalist brother in law Thomas lost all his property, but John and Christian did not. Eventually the Banister’s would make South Kingston their home.
Gilbert Stuart Portrait of Christian and her son John. Original at Redwood Library
Benjamin Cowell collected the stories of Rhode Islanders who applied for pensions many years after the war. He published his stories in a book called “Spirit of 76” and he started his book with the stories of women who had to step up and take extra responsibilities with their husbands at war. Cowell commented: “The women also of Rhode Island, with all the sympathies peculiar to their sex, took an active part in sustaining the “great cause,” and a more noble race of women never existed.”
Here are a of few of the ways women contributed to the war effort in what we might think of as ordinary tasks.
DORCAS MATTESON Dorcas Matteson, of Coventry was the mother of nineteen children. She was married in 1770 to David Matteson. In the pension application she made made years after the war, she listed some of the difficulties she endured for the “glorious cause.” When her husband went to fight in General Sullivan’s Rhode Island Campaign in 1778, it was hay time. She had to cradle her baby on some hay in a shady spot in the meadow while a young lad helped her load hay and put it in a barn. She was close enough to hear the “roar of the cannon” during the Battle of Rhode Island and she imagined the danger her husband was in. He returned a few days later when his militia duty had expired. He was safe and sound, but he did have a “bullet hole about him” that was made as they retreated from the Island. The bullet was stopped from injuring her husband by a cheese that Dorcas had sent and David had placed in his backpack.
ABIGAL SALISBURY
Abigail’s husband, George, was Sergeant of the guard that was stationed nearby at Rumstick Point. She used her knitting skills to knit stockings for the whole guard. She continued to knit stockings until she was a hundred years of age.
SARAH DYER
Like Dorcas Matteson, Sarah Dyer’s husband was away. Sarah and her husband lived in Glocester. Anthony Dyer was with the “Captain General’s Cavaliers” who were chartered in 1775 to fight the British. Sarah raked and loaded lay, hoed and gathered in potatoes, and harvested corn, and she said she did it “cheerfully.” She was doing all the women’s work and the men’s work on the same day.
ANNA ALDRICH
Anna, the wife of Israel Aldrich, was from Smithfield and was another of our typical Revolutionary mothers. She carried her baby into the field and cradled him in the boughs of a tree to keep him away from reptiles. During the summer of 1777 she hoed corn and potatoes, raked hay, pulled flax, milked cows, mended fences and raised pigs. Whatever her husband would have done at home, Anna did.
Benjamin Cowell ends his chapter of Revolutionary Women by saying that “all the ladies, married and unmarried, were engaged, in one way or another, in sustaining the great cause of liberty. While some workedsp on farms, others were engaged in making clothes for the army, or administering to the wants of the sick and wounded.” Rhode Island women braved the hardships of the Revolution in ordinary ways. Women who went to war as soldiers or acted as spies are exciting, but Cowell was right to elevate the contributions of Rhode Island women who did the work of their husband as well as their own responsibilities. Down through the years and wars, Rhode Island women have been shouldering those responsibilities.
A Brief History of the United States by Joel Dorman Steele and Esther Baker Steele, 1885 Colonial kitchen with woman spinning, an engraving
Cowell, Benjamin. Spirit of ’76 in Rhode Island, Boston 1850.
I became aware of Catharine Greene’s role in Revolutionary Rhode Island when I visited the Coventry home of General Nathanael Greene. I learned more about her as I read biographies of her husband. One of my goals this month (Women’s History Month) is to tell the stories of Rhode Island women who endured the hardships of the Revolutionary War and I will start with Catharine Littlefield Greene.
Her family called her Caty and she was born on Block Island in 1755. Her mother descended from Block Island founders and her father, John Littlefield, was a member of the Rhode Island legislature. Her Block Island childhood ended with her mother’s death when she was only 10 years old, and Caty went to live with and aunt and uncle. At that time her uncle, William Greene, was a Supreme Court justice, but he went on to being Governor of Rhode Island. Under the guidance of her aunt and uncle, Caty learned how to read and write and how to manage a household.
Nathanael Greene was a frequent visitor to Caty’s household and the pair married on July 20, 1774. The couple had little time together before the battles in the Revolutionary War began. Nathanael moved quickly from commander of the Rhode Island militia to general in the Continental Army. She opened her home in Coventry as a hospital when the Rhode Island troops were inoculated for small pox.
Caty traveled to wherever her husband was stationed (New York City, Valley Forge, Carolinas), even after the birth of their first child in 1776. There were women and children were “camp followers” who served as cooks or clothes washers. Caty had more comfortable quarters than they did, and she put her efforts into organizing events for the soldiers. She became friends with Martha Washington because they were often in camp together. She gave birth to five children during the years of the Revolution, but when she travelled she often left her children in the care of others. Being away from her children and being away from her husband were heartaches for Caty
We don’t have the letters that Caty wrote to her husband because she burned them. We do have some of his letters to her and we can get a sense of what her letters were like from how he answered her. During the Siege of Newport, Nathanael wrote:
“I am sorry to find you are getting unwell. I am afraid it is the effect of anxiety and fearful apprehension. Remember the same good Providence protects all places, and secures from harm in the most perilous situation. Would to God it was in my power to give peace to your bosom, which I fear, is like a troubled ocean….” Caty, like many other spouses of Americans in the Rhode Island Campaign, must have been fearful of the battle ahead.
Caty hoped that with the end of the war she could return to life in Rhode Island, but that did not happen.
In order to care for his troops, her husband had taken out loans, but Congress later denied his petitions to help him pay off the loans. Rhode Island properties were sold off to cover debts and the Greene moved to a plantation in Georgia. By 1786 Greene died of a sunstroke and Caty was left a young widow.
Catharine GreeneSpell Hall – CoventryNathanael Greene
There is more to her story that I will tell in a later blog.
In a previous post I set the stage for the story of Talbot’s capture of the British ship Pigot. Right after the Battle of Rhode Island, Lafayette suggested a plan to remove a British schooner that had been blocking Narragansett Bay. He reached out to Silas Talbot because Talbot was a seaman who knew the Rhode Island waters. Talbot agreed to the plan, but he had profit in mind as well as serving the American cause.
As he was preparing for the attack, Talbot met with Nicholas Cooke, the Governor of Rhode Island. Cooke owned a ship called “Hawke” and with the help of local Providence merchants, the Hawke was fitted out and armed for the mission. General Sullivan gave Talbot permission to recruit Continental soldiers. Talbot was acting as a privateer. The Battlefield Trust definition of privateer is: “the term privateer refers to a privately-owned ship or sailor commissioned by a government to raid an enemy’s military and merchant shipping. Although controversial, there is a long history of privateering that dates back to the seventeenth century. The main difference between pirates and privateers is that privateers are commissioned by a specific government and can only attack ships that fly under an enemy flag, while pirates are not sanctioned by any government and can attack whomever they choose.”
Talbot had made a deal. Talbot and his men, fifty percent / Cooke and his associations, fifty-percent.
October 25, 1778, the Hawke made its way from Providence to a remote anchorage off of Bristol. The next day the Hawke sailed passed the Bristol Ferry area to Mount Hope in Bristol. Two days later she quietly made her way down the Sakonnet River. They moved toward the Pigot, but a sentry saw it and began firing from a battery on Aquidneck Island (perhaps by Fogland Ferry). Talbot took the Hawke to safety up the Taunton River and he took a small boat down to the Sakonnet River to spy on his quarry (he may have gone on horseback). He saw that the Pigot had netting to defend it from an invading party, so when he returned to the Hawke he ordered a kedge anchor lashed to the jib boom. Talbot was finding a way for the Americans to get through the defensive netting by ramming through it with their spare anchor as a point.
On the night of October 28, 1778, the Hawke sailed from the Taunton River to the Sakonnet River. The sentries at the Fogland Batteries did not see her. When the Hawke got within sight of the Pigot, Talbot positioned his craft so he could ram his jib boom and kedge anchor through the netting to shred it. The crew of the Hawke swarmed over the deck of the enemy skip. The Pigot crew stayed below deck, but the captain was the only one to resist. The prisoners were locked below while members of the Hawke crew sailed the Pigot to Stonington, Connecticut.
British Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie recorded the event in his diary – 29 October, 1778:
“The galley off Black Point in the Sakonnet with eight twelve pounders and two eighteen pounders plus swivels was surprised this morning about 02:00 by rebels, who boarded and took her with little or no resistance. They cut her cable and stood out to sea. We sent the King George privateer to chase them but they got clear off toward New London.”
This was a profitable venture for Talbot. The Rhode Island General Assembly voted him a silver sword and the Continental Congress promoted him to Lieutenant Colonel. His share of the sale of the Pigot was 500 pounds.
Silas Talbot would go on to further adventures with the Pigot. The website of Naval History and Heritage Command reports: “In the spring of 1779, the Navy Board at Boston purchased prize Pigot, and she operated under Talbot as the Argo guarding Narragansett Bay. During Argo’s cruises she alone kept these important waters open to vital American coastal shipping. Legend holds that she was subsequently burnt.”
Sketch of Pigot from Heritage of Courage.
Resources:
Fowler, William. Silas Talbot Captain of Old Ironshides. Mystic Seaport, Mystic Connecticut, 1995.
” Silas Talbot and the British warship Pigot, 29, October 1778″. Heritage of Courage. John Peck Rathbun Chapter Rhode Island Society, Sons of the American Revolution, 1992.
Diary of Frederick Mackenzie. Harvard University, Cambridge: 1930.
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