Tag: American Revolution

Revolutionary War stories, part 3

Continuing a series of Memorial Day posts — part one — part two

I started out this series by saying that sometimes the stories of Revolutionary War heroes and heroines have been partially forgotten, or details have been obscured. In this follow-up post, I’ll tell a little about how I researched the stories of Persis and Allen Lincoln, and the story of Briton Nichols. Maybe this will inspire other people to do some research into ordinary Revolutionary War veterans — a worthwhile thing to do as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution.

One place to start researching an individual is by looking through the local history of a given town or city. During the middle part of the 19th century, many municipalities from the 13 original colonies had local histories written. And in most cases, whoever wrote that local history would be sure to record any local traditions about those who served in the Revolution. So, for example, for the town of Cohasset where I live, Victor Bigelow wrote a history of the town in 1898, and he provided lists of those who served and told many stories of the town’s participation in the Revolution.

That being said, local histories may contain local traditions that have gotten muddled over time, and most local histories contain lots of small errors of fact. So the next step is to see if you can find corroborating evidence from other sources. Which can be a huge job. Cohasset is a small town, but there were more than 125 men from the town who did military service during the Revolution. Volunteer local historians like me don’t have time to research all 125+ individuals who served in the Revolution. You have to narrow your focus to research a few individuals in depth.

But how do you narrow your focus? Here are some strategies:

(1) Research a college graduate, who would be far more likely to appear in the written record than non-college graduates. For example, you can find brief biographies of Harvard graduates in the series Sibley’s Harvard Graduates.

(2) Research famous or semi-famous persons, or persons who are part of prominent families. For example, if you were researching persons from Braintree or Quincy, you could start with anyone related to John Adams; there are lots of published genealogies and published histories of the Adamses.

(3) To research ordinary people, start with unusual person names (such as Briton Nichols) and unusual place names (such as Cohasset). Those will be easiest to find information on.

(4) As you’re researching one person, you might run into a lead from someone else altogether (e.g., when researching Briton Nichols, I discovered Ambrose Bates kept a war diary). Keep note of those other leads so you can follow up later.

Next, here are some research strategies:

(A) Use the power of internet search. More and more 18th century documents are being digitized, making information easily available online. This works best with Search using several different search tools — I start with DuckDuckGo, first with the person’s name and place name along, then adding the following to the search string: site:.archive.org (which searches through the many books digitized by the Internet Archive) and site:.loc.gov (which searches the Library of Congress website). Next, I’ll search Google Books. Finally, I’ll try regular Google search (Google seems to turn up a lot of crap these days, which is why I leave it till last).

(B) Search genealogy sites. I use FamilySearch.org, which is free, although it does require you to set up a free account. Paid genealogy sites may give you more information, but FamilySearch.org is a good place to look for Revolutionary War military service records. Additionally, amateur genealogists may have done additional research on some individuals — but be cautious about trusting the work of amateur genealogists. Always click through to look at the sources they cite, and then click through and look at the actual digitized images for those sources (which is how I found out that Persis Lincoln and Allen Lincoln were married by Rev. John Browne of Cohasset).

(C) Don’t forget your local library. Many local libraries have local history sections. If there’s a librarian who has responsibility for the local history section, get to know that person, and ask for help when you need it.

EXCEEDINGLY IMPORTANT: For each little tidbit of information you find, make sure you record where you found it, including full bibliographic information. Footnote everything! You want other people to be able to review your research. You want citations for every single fact. If you don’t have citations for everything, others will assume you’re a sloppy researcher, and discount your work accordingly.

That’s a very brief overview of how you might begin to research individual people to find out their stories. Good luck — and don’t forget to share your research, so others can appreciate it, and correct any errors you might make, and generally help further our knowledge of Revolutionary War veterans.

Revolutionary War stories, part 2

(Continuing with yesterday’s Memorial Day post.)

Briton Nichols, a Life of Adventure

The second story of a Revolutionary War veteran is especially interesting because of the way historians have been able to connect separated facts in the historical record, and then tell a fuller story of one person. This is the story of Briton Nichols.

In the historical record, you can find a list dating from July 19, 1780, giving the names of nine men from Cohasset who began six month’s military service on that day.(10) One name on that list, the name of Briton Nichols, stands out for two reasons. First, he had a very unusual name; the written record shows no other man in Massachusetts with the first name of Briton. Second, Briton Nichols is identified as being Black, the only person on that list whose race is given, and (as near as I can tell) the only Black man from Cohasset who served in the American Revolution.

Because Briton Nichols had such an unusual first name, and because his race is given, historians have been able to trace his life in more detail.(11) Historians discovered that in 1760, he published a book in which he told of thirteen years worth of adventures.(12) As a boy, he was enslaved by the Winslow family of Marshfield. At that time, he called himself Briton Hammond. On December 25, 1747, with the permission of his master, Briton left Marshfield to go on a sea voyage; perhaps his master hired him out as a sailor, taking a cut of his salary, a common practice in those days. Briton doesn’t say how old he was when he sailed, but later sources give his birth year as roughly 1740, so he may have been a boy or a young teen. The ship Briton was on sailed for Jamaica, took on a cargo of wood, and sailed north. Having struck a reef off Florida, the ship was attacked by Native Americans who killed everyone except Briton, and then set the ship on fire. After being held captive by the Native Americans for five week, he was able to make his escape on a Spanish schooner, whose captain recognized him, and took him to Havana, Cuba. The Native Americans followed and demanded the Governor of Havana return Briton to them, but the Governor paid ten dollars for him and kept him. A year later, Briton was caught by a press gang, but he refused to serve in the Spanish navy and was thrown in a dungeon.

Title page of an old book.
Title page of the book written by Briton Hammond (later Briton Nichols), from a digitized version on the Library of Congress website.

Briton was finally released from the dungeon four years later, though he was still trapped in Havana. Then a year after his release from the dungeon, he managed to escape from Havana aboard a ship of the British Navy. It appears Briton served in the British Navy for some time thereafter, aboard several different ships, until 1759 when he was wounded in the head by small shot during a fight with a French ship. Briton was put in Greenwich Hospital, where he recovered from his wounds. After additional service on British Navy ships, this time as a cook, he managed to find a berth on a ship bound for New England. By coincidence, his old master, one General Nichols, was on the same ship. Through that chance meeting, Briton was finally able to return to his home in Marshfield after a thirteen year absence.

Soon after his return from Marshfield, Briton’s account of his adventures was published in Boston, perhaps the earliest published memoir written by an African American. Two years later, in 1762, Briton married Hannah, a Black woman who was a member of First Church in Plymouth (today this a Unitarian Universalist congregation). In the late 1770s, Briton left the Winslow family, possibly upon the death of his master, and moved to Cohasset to join the Nichols family; at this time he changed his last name from Hammond to Nichols.

In 1777, Briton joined the Continental Army.(13) He must have been around forty years old when he enlisted. We can only speculate as to why he decided to enlist at that age. Most likely, enlisting in the military was a way for him to free himself from slavery. Ambrose Bates, who was one of Briton’s messmates, left a diary that tells a little about their military service.(14) Briton Nichols, Bates, and the rest of their contingent left Cohasset on August 27, 1777, and finally reached Saratoga, New York, in early September. There they joined the conflict between the Continental forces and General Burgoyne’s forces. Much of their military service was filled with boredom. Several days were filled with monotonous marching back and forth from one place to another. On other days, Bates simply records, “Nothing new today.” Those days of boredom were interspersed with days where they had more than enough excitement. To give just one example, on October 7, Bates recorded: “today we had a fight we were alarmed about noon and the fight begun, the sun two hours high at night and we drove them and took field pieces and took sum prisners.” The tide of battle was with the Continental forces, and Burgoyne finally surrendered on October 16. Soon thereafter, Bates and the other Cohasset men marched down to Tarrytown. Their service in Tarrytown was less exciting. Finally, on November 30 their term of military service ended, and they began marching home. They finally arrived back in Cohasset on December 7. So ended Briton Nichol’s first term of military service.

Briton Nichols enlisted again in 1780, giving his age at the time as forty years old.(15) I suspect he lied about his age, presenting himself as younger than he was. I could find no details of his 1780 military service. The next time I found him in the historical record was in the 1790 federal census. At that time, he was living in Hingham as a free Black man, along with his second wife Experience and one other household member, probably their child.

The story of Briton Nichols shows how we can recover some of the lost knowledge of Revolutionary War veterans. Briton Nichols was little more than a name on a list of soldiers, until historians were able to deduce that he was almost certainly the same person as Briton Hammond who had had such amazing adventures from 1747 to 1760.

Of special interest to those of us who are currently part of First Parish, Briton Nichols would have attended Sunday services right in our historica Meetinghouse. We can imagine him sitting upstairs in the balcony, where people of color and White indentured servants had to sit. We can imagine Briton sitting in that gallery on Sunday, August 24, 1777, a few days before he marched off to Saratoga. We can imagine the prayers of the entire congregation centering on the hope that all nine of the Cohasset men marching off as soldiers that week would return home safe and sound.

We today think of all those from this congregation who have served in the military. We think of all those veterans who are now members and friends of First Parish. We also think of those who grew up in this congregation and went off to join the armed services. And we think of those people from First Parish who died in military service. It is good for us to keep alive the memories of all those who served in our armed forces. It is good to keep those memories alive, because it reminds us of the bonds of love which transcend even death.

Tomorrow: a follow-up post sharing my research tips, in the hopes that others will be inspired to do more research into Revolutionary War veterans.

Notes

(10) Victor Bigelow, Narrative History of Cohasset (1898), p. 308.

(11) An introduction to a narrative by Briton Nichols, who earlier in life was called Briton Hammond, gives an overview of what historians conclude about his life: “It is accepted that in 1762 Hammon married Hannah, an African American woman and member of Plymouth’s First Church, with whom he had one child. For many years this was all that was known of Hammon’s life after his return to New England. More recent research, however, has revealed that Hammon probably changed his name to Nichols some time in the late 1770s, after the family with whom he and his master were living when Winslow died in 1774. Briton Nichols is listed as having fought for the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War, as did many members of the white Nichols family…. In later census records, Briton Nichols is described as a free husband and father.” Derrick R. Spires, editor, Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives (Broadview Press, 2023), p. 54.

(12) In this paragraph, the details of the earlier life of Briton Nichols/Hammond are taken from his book, A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man (Boston: Green & Russell, 1760); as reprinted on the Pennsylvanian State Univ. website https://psu.pb.unizin.org/opentransatlanticlit/chapter/__unknown__-9/ accessed 22 May 2025.

(13) Victor Bigelow, p. 208.

(14) Victor Bigelow reprints the text of this brief diary, pp. 299-303.

(15) Entry for Briton Nichols, 19 July 1780, “Massachusetts, Revolutionary War, Index Cards to Muster Rolls, 1775-1783,” FamilySearch.org website https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QLLS-BBT3 accessed 22 May 2025.

Revolutionary War stories

A post in honor of Memorial Day.

The American Revolution began 250 years ago, as of April 19 this year. This significant anniversary is a good time to reflect on the sacrifices that were made by Revolutionary War-era soldiers and sailors.

And it turns out that we don’t know as much as we think we know about the soldiers and sailors of the American Revolution. We don’t have very good records of exactly which soldiers and sailors died during the Revolutionary War; there simply weren’t full and accurate records of military service,(1) and we don’t even have accurate figures for how many military deaths there were in the Revolution.(2) Yet by digging in to the historical record, historians have been able to recover some remarkable stories that had been forgotten or mis-remembered.

I went looking for stories about people from Cohasset who served in the American Revolution. (My interest was partially selfish — since First Parish, where I serve, was the only church in town during the Revolution, then if I found a Cohasset resident who served in the Revolutionary War, they would have been part of First Parish.) I found two super interesting stories that had been partially forgotten or obscured — but thanks to the efforts of twenty-first century historians, we have now recovered many lost details.

Persis Tower Lincoln, Revolutionary War Heroine

Victor Bigelow, town historian and author of A Narrative History of Cohasset (1898), tells the story of Persis Tower Lincoln. During the occupation of Boston, which lasted from spring of 1775 into 1776, Persis was married to Allen Lincoln, a seaman; Persis was then 16 years old, and Allen was 20; John Browne, minister of First Parish, officiated at their wedding. Allen then left Persis for military service. While he was away, Persis sailed a small boat across Massachusetts Bay to Gloucester to get supplies through the British blockade, so we remember her as a heroine of the American Revolution. Meanwhile — so the traditional story goes — Allen’s ship was captured by the British, and according to local tradition he was taken to Dartmoor prison in England where he died.(3)

Persis’s story appears to be true. Unfortunately, Allen’s story has been remembered incorrectly. Dartmoor Prison wasn’t completed until 1809, so he couldn’t have been imprisoned there during the Revolution. Then too, Allen and Persis had daughter together, and their daughter Sally was born in 1778.(4) Finally, military records show that Allen Lincoln of Cohasset served in the Continental Army after his purported death, in 1776, 1777, and again in 1778.(5)

A more accurate history of Allen Lincoln appears to be something like this: After serving in the military for several months in both 1776 and 1777, Allen re-enlisted in the Continental Navy with the rank of Seaman. Then on March 17, 1778 he was taken prisoner by the British; he was captured about a month after his daughter Sally was born, and was initially imprisoned at Rhode Island.(6) Subsequently, he was apparently taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he died in 1778.(7) It’s not surprising that he died while he was a prisoner of war; the mortality rate was notoriously high among prisoners of war held by the British, and more Revolutionary War soldiers and sailors died in prison camps than died in battle. Allen died at age 22, leaving behind an 18 year old wife and an infant daughter whom he probably only saw for the first few weeks of her life.

Allen Lincoln’s story is worth remembering on its own merits. But it’s also a reminder of how much has been forgotten or mis-remembered about the sailors and soldiers who died during military service in the Revolution. Indeed, historians aren’t even sure how many prisoners of war died while being held captive by the British; it may have been as many 19,000 men.(8) At a local level, it seems that we’re not even sure of how many people from First Parish served in the Revolution. It should be simple to generate such an honor roll of military service — First Parish was the only church in Cohasset, everyone in town belonged to the church, so all we’d need is a list of Cohasset residents who served. However, the only such list I found lists almost certainly includes men from other towns who were recruited by Cohasset to help fill the town’s quota.(9) Given the incomplete records that remain, we may never know exactly how many people from Cohasset served in American Revolution — nor how many of those soldiers and sailors gave their lives in military service.

Yet even though the historical record has gotten a bit muddled over the past two and a half centuries, what’s remarkable is how much we still remember. We still remember Allen Lincoln and Persis Tower, and we still tell their stories when we talk about the history of First Parish. Even if some of the details of the story have been confused or forgotten, we still remember this young couple from First Parish who can be counted among the heroes and heroines of the American Revolution.

Part two: the story of Briton Nichols.

Notes

(1) Historian mark Edward Lender states that “…most combat was local and took place without major British or Continental forces on the scene”; in other words, many soldiers served in militia units. Lender, Citizen Soldiers or Regulars? The Revolutionary Militia Reconsidered,” in Jim Piecuch, ed., Seven Myths of American Revolution (Hackett Publishing, 2003) p. 59. Militia units did not necessarily keep accurate records, and even where good records were kept they may not have survived or may be hidden in local archives.

(2) According to historian Howard Peckham, who carefully reviewed military records kept by the original thirteen colonies, 5,992 soldiers were killed in military engagements, and 832 sailors were killed in naval engagements, for a total of 6,824 battle casualties. In addition, Peckham estimated that 10,00 soldiers died in camp from diseases such as dysentery, and 8,500 soldier and sailors died in British prisoner-of-war camps. Thus, Peckham estimated the total number of probable deaths in service at over 25,000. Source: Howard Peckham, The Toll of Independence : Engagements & Battle Casualties of the American Revolution (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), “Summations and Implications.” However, other historians feel that Peckham underestimated the number of deaths among prisoners of war, see e.g., Edwin G. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners during the Revolutionary War (Basic Books, 2008), p. 317 n. 12; Burrows places the total number of prisoners of war who died at 19,000, giving a total death toll that is closer to 35,000. (Burrows cites the total number of Americans who took up arms during the war as 200,000.)

(3) Victor Bigelow, Narrative History of Cohasset (1898), p. 290. The marriage record showing that John Browne officiated at the wedding may be found here: Entry for Allen Lincoln and Persis Tower, 23 Nov 1775, “Massachusetts, State Vital Records, 1638-1927,” archived on FamilySearch website https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FHQY-G2B accessed 23 May 2025.

(4) According to the Massachusetts State Census of 1855, Sally was born in 1778; so this was not a matter of a christening that was delayed for three years. According to Cohasset Vital Records, she was christened on 18 Oct. 1778.

(5) A search for military records for Allen Lincoln on genealogy website FamilySearch.org turned up two records for military service of Allen or Allyn Lincoln from Cohasset: First, as one of the soldiers who mustered at Hull on June 14, 1776, to serve in the military: Entry for Allyn Lincoln, 14 Jun 1776, “Massachusetts, Revolutionary War, Index Cards to Muster Rolls, 1775-1783″, FamilySearch.org website https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q2RC-LHBT accessed 22 May 2025. Second, as serving in “the Northern Dept.” in 1777: Entry for Allen Lincoln, 24 Aug 1777, “Massachusetts, Revolutionary War, Index Cards to Muster Rolls, 1775-1783,” FamilySearch.org website https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q2RC-9CH6 accessed 22 May 2025.

(6) Entry for Allyn Lyncoln, 17 Mar 1778, “Massachusetts, Revolutionary War, Index Cards to Muster Rolls, 1775-1783,” FamilySearch.org website https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q2RC-2NLM accessed 22 May 2025.

(7) The FamilySearch.org entry for Allen Lincoln lists his date of death as 1778, and place of death as Halifax, Nova Scotia, unfortunately with no documentation. See person entry for “Allen Lincoln” FamilySearch.org website https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/details/LCZP-2JH accessed 22 May 2025.

(8) See e.g. Edwin G. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners during the Revolutionary War (Basic Books, 2008), p. 317 n. 12.

Jump Billy

In November, British singer-songwriter Angeline Morrison released a new song titled “Jump Billy.” I got interested in the song because it tells the story of someone born in America who left during the American Revolution. If you dive into local history, you’re constantly running up against stories of the Tories who left America during the Revolution. But you rarely hear the rest of the story — where they went, and how they fared.

Here’s a link to Morrison’s studio recording of “Jump Billy” — which she has made freely available on an educational webpage about the life of William Waters.

So why did Morrison write this song? She has long loved the traditional music of the British Isles. As the daughter of a Black Jamaican woman and a White man from the Outer Hebrides, she began to search for traditional songs about Black people like her. By some estimates, circa 1800 there were 20,000 Black people living in London alone — but where were the songs about them?

Morrison did record one traditional English song, “The Brown Girl,” which she imagined might actually be a song about a woman with brown skin (as opposed to a mere poetic description). Then, in the tradition of generations of folk musicians, she decided to write her own songs in the idiom of traditional music, featuring non-White Britishers. In 2022, after having written a number of new songs, she released an album of those songs.

(A side note: if Morrison were working in the U.S. today, she would be accused of violating the recent presidential executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Don’t get me started on how that executive order tells lies about history.)

She is still mining this vein of material, and in her latest song is about the Black sailor William “Billy” Waters. I don’t know if Morrison saw the new book by Mary L. Shannon, Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Yale University Press, 2024) or if she did her own research (or both). In any case, Morrison’s song tells the same basic story that’s told in the book, which goes something like this:

William Waters was born in New York City (probably) around 1775. His family (probably) left New York when the British troops evacuated in 1783; little Billy would have been about eight years old. In 1811, he signed on as an able seaman in the British Royal Navy. Since he signed on as an able seaman, not an ordinary seaman, he (probably) had had previous experience as a sailor. Little else is known about his early life.

In 1812, the captain’s log reports that Waters fell from the from the main spar, broke both legs, and had to have one leg amputated. Waters was invalided out of the Navy with an inadequate pension, as was all too typical at the time. To earn enough money to live on, he turned to busking. He gained fame as a frequent performer outside London’s fashionable Adelphi Theatre. As many buskers did at the time, he adopted a distinctive dress: for Waters, this included his naval coat and a tricorn hat decorated with showy feathers. In his act, he not only sang and played fiddle, but he also danced with great dexterity; this last was considered remarkable due to his wooden leg.

Drawing of a street scene showing a man with a wooden leg dancing and playing fiddle.
Billy Waters, a one legged busker, in a crowded London street. Coloured aquatint, 1822.
Image courtesy: Wellcome Trust Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 .

Waters married and had two children. In spite of his fame, he and his family lived in St. Giles rookery, notorious as one of the worst slums in London. He died in 1823, aged approx. 60. At the time of his death, he was living in the St. Giles workhouse, an institution for indigent people. Presumably, by that time he was no longer able to earn his living busking. So much for his fame —sic transit gloria mundi.

As an able seaman, Waters would have had as good a life as could be expected for a working class man — and he could live in freedom, whereas slavery persisted in New York until well after his death. After he had his leg amputated, the Royal Navy didn’t treat him especially well. Yet in spite of his disability, he was able to earn enough money to allow him to provide for a family.

— And this is just one story telling how the American Revolution played out in the lives of ordinary people. We hear over and over again stories of how the Revolution affected prominent people like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. I like to hear those old stories about those wealthy and prominent people who remained in America. But I also want to hear how the Revolution affected ordinary people, including the ones who left America. It’s hearing all those stories that makes history come alive for me.

(N.B.: Morrison’s song is so new, I couldn’t find lyrics to it anywhere online. I’ll post my own transcription of the lyrics after the jump.)

Continue reading “Jump Billy”

A quirky timeline of UU history

Because Yvonne asked me to, I put together a timeline of UU history. Instead of focusing on White male ministers from wealthy urban areas, my timeline includes people and events from outside the mainstream of UU history.

Unitarians and Universalists in the United States

1773 Caleb Rich (White) becomes minister of a new church in Warwick, Mass., that has a universalist theology.

1775 John Murray (White), Universalist minister, serves as a chaplain in the Revolutionary army.

1779 The Independent Christian Church (Universalist) organized in Gloucester, Mass., one of the earliest Universalist congregations in the U.S.

1785 King’s Chapel is the first Unitarian congregation in the U.S.

c. 1795 The scientist Joseph Priestley (White) holds Unitarian services in Northumberland, Penna.

c. 1795 Prince (no last name), a Black man, joins the church in New Bedford, Mass., as a full member.

1838 Nathan Johnson, a Black Universalist in New Bedford, Mass., shelters Frederick Douglass on the latter’s first night of freedom

1859 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a White Unitarian, opens the first kindergarten in the U.S.

1860 Samuel Jackson, a Black Baptist minister, asks to bring his entire congregation into the American Unitarian Association, but because he and his congregation are Black, he is ignored.

1863 Olympia Brown, a White woman, ordained by the Universalist General Conference. She was the first woman to be ordained by a denomination (rather than just a congregation) in the U.S.

1876-1878 The U.S. government invites Protestant denominations to manage American Indian reservations; the Unitarians take charge of Ute tribes in Colorado.

1883 Poet William Carlos Williams, a Hispanic Unitarian, is born.

1887 First Unitarian service is held in the Khasi Hills of India, led by Kissor Singh (South Asian).

1895 Eliza Tupper Wilkes, a White Universalist minister, is the first woman to preach in Stanford University’s nondenominational chapel

1917 Adeniran Adedeji Isola (Black) founds the Unitarian Brotherhood Church (Ijo Isokan Gbogbo Eda) in Lagos, Nigeria.

1918 Unitarian minister William Short Jr. is arrested for draft evasion, because he’s doing peace activism; when he appeals to the American Unitarian Association to confirm that he’s a minister, they throw him under the bus.

1922 Abigail Eliot (White), an LGBTQ Unitarian educator, brings the nursery school concept to the U.S.

1923 The first Flower Celebration is led by Norbert and Maja Capek, ministers at the Unitarian church in Prague, Czechoslovakia. This ritual is later wrongly called a “flower communion.”

1930s Probably a third of all Unitarian and Universalist churches close due to the Great Depression.

1932 Poet Sylvia Plath, a White Unitarian, is born.

1937 Unitarians and Universalists cooperate to create a new hymnal.

1937 The American Unitarian Association grows concerned that Leila Thompson, an ordained Unitarian minister, is running for city council in Berkeley, Calif., as a Socialist.

1942 Unitarian minister Norbert Capek dies in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

1947 Stephen Fritchman, a White minister, is forced out of his job editing the denominational magazine due to accusations that he is Communist.

1950s (date uncertain) UU ministers officiated at some of the earliest UU same sex weddings.

1956 Christopher Moore, a White minister at First Unitarian in Chicago, founds the Chicago Children’s Chorus, an interracial chorus which rapidly became one of the best children’s choruses in the U.S.

1950s Religious liberals in the Philippines affiliate with the Universalist Church of America.

1961 The UUA bylaws have six principles.

1961 Unitarians and Universalists consolidate into one denomination.

1965 Year with highest Unitarian Universalist membership in the U.S.

1965-1970 Unitarian Universalism loses half its Black members during the Black empowerment controversy.

1977 Ysaye Maria Barnwell founds the Jubilee Singers, a gospel choir, at All Souls UU church in Washington, D.C., the first Black-led UU gospel choir.

1977 First Unitarian of Los Angeles publishes the first Unitarian hymnal with Black and working class music in it.

1980 The first Water Ritual takes place at a feminist gathering of women. Later, it was wrongly called a “Water Communion.”

1985 The UUA adopts new non-sexist bylaws with seven principles.

2004 Unitarian Universalist Association of Uganda is formed.

2005 Last year of growth in U.S. Unitarian Universalism.

2008 Carleton Pearson, a Black Pentecostal minister who became a Universalist, brings his congregation to the Unitarian Universalist church in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Happy Tea Party Day

Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. There’s a big re-enactment going on in Boston today, but who wants to fight the crowds who will show up to watch (not me). As a replacement for fighting the crowds, here’s a little history about our town’s connection to the Tea Party. This is from E. Victor Bigelow’s 1898 book A Narrative History of Cohasset (p.284):

“It is no small honor that three of our young men [from Cohasset] were among those who boarded the vessels in that last manly endeavor to maintain the bulwarks of fundamental human justice.

“The oldest was Jared Joy, of Beechwood, then twenty-four years of age and afterwards a soldier of the Revolution. His tombstone is in the Beechwood Cemetery, where he was buried in his forty-third year, receives annual decoration at the hands of the grand Army.

“The second was Abraham Tower, twenty years of age, the grandfather of our current town treasurer, and after the Revolution owner of a large commerce at the Cove.

“The third was James Stoddard, a lad of seventeen, afterwards ‘major’ in the local militia. The bits of tea which lodged in his clothing and shoes were scattered upon the floor at his boarding house in Boston the next morning, and caused him no little alarm lest he might be discovered and punished. But honor and not punishment is now measured to all three of these Cohasset boys….”

I especially like the anecdote about James Stoddard. It gives insight both into Stoddard’s emotional state, and insight into the real possibility of punishment for those who participated in the Tea Party.

Declaration of Independence reading

According to tradition, Rev. John Brown, the minister in Cohasset during the Revolutionary War period, gave a stirring reading of the Declaration of Independence from the pulpit of the meeting house to the gathered townspeople not long after July 4, 1776.

I haven’t been able to find out the exact date when Brown read the Declaration to the people of Cohasset. But the Boston Gazette and Country Journal printed the complete Declaration of Independence on July 22, 1776. John Brown had a copy of that printing, and his copy (with his signature) still exists; it was auctioned by Christie’s in 2003. Since Cohasset was a port town, it seems likely that Brown would have received the newspaper by Sunday, July 28. That may be the date on which John Brown read the Declaration of Independence to the town, when people gathered for Sunday worship.

We decided to commemorate the first reading of the Declaration of Independence to Cohasset townsfolk on Independence Day weekend. So we held our reading on July 2 — not historically accurate, but this wasn’t a re-enactment of the original. Instead of having one person read the whole Declaration, in true democratic fashion we had ten readers, beginning with a 12 year old from our Sunday school.

Fifty people showed up, many more than our usual 15-20 people for summer services. This was a true community event, and somewhere between a third and half of those present were not part of our congregation. Our 1747 Meeting House was originally built by the town, and we feel we hold it in trust for the whole town. So we made this a truly non-sectarian commemoration, with no over Unitarian Universalist content.

We had people across the political spectrum, all of whom gathered together to honor the highest ideals of American democracy. It was a surprisingly moving event. We plan to do it again next year.

Two people standing in front of the high pulpit of the Cohasset Meeting House, with others in pews in front of them, all singing.
Singing “This Land Is Your Land” before the reading of the Declaration. I’m standing at right. Faces have been blurred (except mine) to protect privacy

Happy Patriots’ Day

Massachusetts had a state holiday two days ago, on Monday. No, this state holiday is not the Boston Marathon. No, this holiday is not the holiday which recognizes an obscure Revolutionary War event that just happens to fall on the same date as St. Patrick’s Day. No, this state holiday has nothing to do with — and predates by many years — the federal holiday called “Patriot Day” which commemorates the attacks on 9/11/2001.

Patriots’ Day commemorates the beginning of the Revolutionary War, a.k.a. the War of American Indepence. It is the date on which the first colonist blood of the war was shed — in the town of Lincoln, just after midnight, when one of His Majesty’s troops cut a Lincoln militiaman with his sword. It is the date on which the first colonists in regular military formation received fire from His Majesty’s troops — in the town of Lexington, when the Redcoats fired at an interracial company of militiamen, killing eight and wounding several more. And it is the date of “the shot heard ’round the world” when His Majesty’s troops were first forcibly turned back by the combined forces of several towns at the North Bridge in Concord. (Having grown up and lived most of my life in Concord, of course I think what happened in Concord was most important. My cousins who grew up in Lexington beg to differ.)

And today is the actual anniversary of these events. (Not the state holiday, which always falls on a Monday.) These momentous events happened 248 years ago today. I’ve always felt this is the date which commemorates the beginning of our democracy here in the United States. The militiamen and Minute Men who fought on April 19 were duly authorized by their towns, and by the Provincial Congress. They were under the authority of democratically elected, non-military officials. And they followed a course of action that had been determined by democratic process.

As a pacifist, I’d prefer it if our democracy had had a non-violent beginning. And there’s no doubt the democratic tradition in Massachusetts went back more than a century and a half before this date in 1775. But April 19, 1775, turned out to be the date that people looked back on and said, That’s when it began. So this is my favorite day for waving the American flag and being a patriot. This is also the day each year when I recommit myself to continuing to pursue the still-unfinished democratic project of our country.

And by the way — it’s now just two years to the big blowout party on April 19, 2025. It’s not too soon to start planning your participation in the 250th birthday of our American democracy.

Beams, Concord, Mass.

Carol and I went to the Robbins House, an early nineteenth century historic house at the Minuteman National Historic Park in Concord, Mass. The house was originally occupied by Susan and Peter Robbins, two grown children of Caesar Robbins, and perhaps by Caesar Robbins himself; I say perhaps, because the history and chronology of the house, as set forth on the Robbins House Web site, is not entirely clear to me. This is not surprising, given how poorly documented African American lives of the early nineteenth century were. What’s important to know is that Caesar was an African American man who won his freedom from slavery by serving in the American Revolution, and the house was occupied by his descendants and extended family until about 1870.

We got an excellent tour from one of the interpreters, who told us a great deal about the people who lived there, and about the social history surrounding the house. But I have to admit what interested me was the construction of the house. I was particularly interested in the exposed roof beams in one room, which included both hand-hewn beams and sawn joists. The sawn lumber was manufactured using a vertical saw, not a rotary saw. Why the mix of hand-hewn and sawn lumber? The hand-hewn beams could have been salvaged from an older structure, something that was often done in the early nineteenth century, or they could have been made for that house; the sawn lumber could have replaced older joists, or they could have been original, though sawn lumber would have been more expensive than hewing one’s own beams. When the house was being restored, there were archaeology, dendrochronology, and other architectural studies were carried out; I hope the non-profit organization that operates the house publishes the tests and tells us why there are two kinds of beams.