Part 6

It is highly probable that the Widow Vassall's house at once became the American hospital, and that it was the residence, as it was certainly the prison, of Doctor Benjamin Church. Church had been placed at the head of an army hospital for the accommodation of twenty thousand men, and till this time had seemed a brave and zealous compatriot of Warren and the other leading men of the time. Soon after his appointment, he was, however, detected in secret correspondence with Gage. He had entrusted to a woman of his acquaintance a letter written in cipher to be forwarded to the British commander. This letter was found upon the girl, she was taken to headquarters, and there the contents of the fatal message were deciphered and the defection of Doctor Church established. When questioned by Washington he appeared utterly confounded, and made no attempt to vindicate himself.

The letter itself did not contain any intelligence of importance, but the discovery that one, until then so high in the esteem of his countrymen, was engaged in a clandestine correspondence with the enemy was deemed sufficient evidence of guilt. Church was therefore arrested at once, and confined in a chamber looking upon Brattle Street. Some of his leisure, while here imprisoned, he employed in cutting on the door of a closet:

"B CHURCH, JR."

There the marks still remain, their significance having after a half century been interpreted by a lady of the house to whom they had long been familiar, but who had lacked any clue to their origin until, in the course of a private investigation, she determined beyond a doubt their relation to Church. The chamber has two windows in the north front, and two overlooking the area on the south.

Church's fall was the more terrible because from a height. He was a member of a very distinguished family, and he had been afforded in his youth all the best opportunities of the day. In 1754 he was graduated at Harvard, and after studying with Doctor Pynchon rose to considerable eminence as a physician and particularly as a surgeon. Besides talents and genius of a sort, he was endowed with a rare poetic fancy, many of his verses being full of daintiness as well as of a very pretty wit. He was, however, somewhat extravagant in his habits, and about 1768 had built himself an elegant country house near Boston. It was to sustain this, it is believed, that he sold himself to the king's cause.

To all appearance, however, Church was up to the very hour of his detection one of the leading patriots of the time. He had been chosen to deliver the oration in the Old South Meeting-House on March 5, 1773, and he there pronounced a stirring discourse, which has still power to thrill the reader, upon the massacre the day celebrates, and the love of liberty which inspired the patriots' revolt on that memorable occasion. Yet two years earlier, as we have since discovered from a letter of Governor Hutchinson, he had been anonymously employing his venal pen in the service of the government!

In 1774, when he was a member of the Provincial Congress, he was first suspected of communication with Gage, and of receiving a reward for his treachery. Paul Revere has written concerning this: "In the fall of '74 and the winter of '75 I was one of upwards of thirty, chiefly mechanics, who formed themselves into a committee for the purpose of watching the movements of the British soldiers and gaining every intelligence of the Tories. We held our meetings at the Green Dragon Tavern. This committee were astonished to find all their secrets known to General Gage, although every time they met every member swore not to reveal any of their transactions except to Hancock, Adams, Warren, Otis, Church, and one or two others."

The traitor, of course, proved to be Doctor Church. One of his students who kept his books and knew of his money embarrassment first mistrusted him. Only treachery, he felt, could account for his master's sudden acquisition of some hundreds of new British guineas.

The doctor was called before a council of war consisting of all the major-generals and brigadiers of the army, beside the adjutant-general, Washington himself presiding. This tribunal decided that Church's acts had been criminal, but remanded him for the decision of the General Court, of which he was a member. He was taken in a chaise, escorted by General Gates and a guard of twenty men, to the music of fife and drum, to Watertown meeting-house, where the court sat. "The galleries," says an old writer, "were thronged with people of all ranks. The bar was placed in the middle of the broad aisle, and the doctor arraigned." His defence at the trial was very ingenious and able:--that the fatal letter was designed for his brother, but that since it was not sent he had communicated no intelligence; that there was nothing in the letter but notorious facts; that his exaggerations of the American force could only be designed to favour the cause of his country; and that his object was purely patriotic. He added, in a burst of sounding though unconvincing oratory: "The warmest bosom here does not flame with a brighter zeal for the security, happiness, and liberties of America than mine."

These eloquent professions did not avail him, however. He was adjudged guilty, and expelled from the House of Representatives of Massachusetts. By order of the General Congress, he was condemned to close confinement in Norwich jail in Connecticut, "and debarred from the use of pen, ink, and paper," but his health failing, he was allowed (in 1776) to leave the country. He sailed for the West Indies,--and the vessel that bore him was never afterward heard from.

Some people in Church's time, as well as our own, have been disposed to doubt the man's treachery, but Paul Revere was firmly convinced that the doctor was in the pay of General Gage. Revere's statement runs in part as follows:

"The same day I met Doctor Warren. He was president of the Committee of Safety. He engaged me as a messenger to do the out-of-doors business for that committee; which gave me an opportunity of being frequently with them. The Friday evening after, about sunset, I was sitting with some or near all that committee in their room, which was at Mr. Hastings's house in Cambridge. Doctor Church all at once started up. 'Doctor Warren,' said he, 'I am determined to go into Boston to-morrow.' (It set them all a-staring.) Doctor Warren replied, 'Are you serious, Doctor Church? They will hang you if they catch you in Boston.' He replied, 'I am serious, and am determined to go at all adventures.' After a considerable conversation, Doctor Warren said, 'If you are determined, let us make some business for you.' They agreed that he should go to get medicine for their and our wounded officers."

Naturally, Paul Revere, who was an ardent patriot as well as an exceedingly straightforward man, had little sympathy with Church's weakness, but to-day as one looks at the initials scratched by the prisoner on the door of his cell, one's heart expands with pity for the man, and one wonders long and long whether the vessel on which he sailed was really lost, or whether he escaped on it to foreign shores, there to expiate as best he could his sin against himself and his country.

A VICTIM OF TWO REVOLUTIONS

In the life of Colonel James Swan, as in that of Doctor Benjamin Church, money was the root of all evil. Swan was almost a fool because of his pig-headedness in financial adversity, and Church was ever a knave, plausible even when proved guilty. Yet both fell from the same cause, utter inability to keep money and avoid debt.

Colonel Swan's history reads very like a romance. He was born in Fifeshire, Scotland, in 1754, and came to America in 1765. He found employment in Boston, and devoted all his spare time to books. While a clerk of eighteen, in a counting-house near Faneuil Hall, he published a work on the African slave trade, entitled, "A Discussion of Great Britain and Her Colonies from the Slave Trade," a copy of which, preserved in the Boston Public Library, is well worth reading for its flavour and wit.

While serving an apprenticeship with Thaxter & Son, he formed an intimate friendship with several other clerks who, in after years, became widely known, among them, Benjamin Thompson, afterward made Count Rumford, and Henry Knox, who later became the bookseller on Cornhill, and finally a general in the Continental army.

Swan was a member of the Sons of Liberty, and took part in the famous Boston tea-party. He was engaged in the battle of Bunker Hill as a volunteer aid of Warren, and was twice wounded. He also witnessed the evacuation of Boston by the British, March 17, 1776. He later became secretary of the Massachusetts board of war, and was elected a member of the legislature. Throughout the whole war he occupied positions of trust, often requiring great courage and cool judgment, and the fidelity with which every duty was performed was shown by the honours conferred upon him after retiring to civil life. By means of a large fortune which fell to him, he entered mercantile business on a large scale, and became very wealthy. He owned large tracts of land in different parts of the country, and bought much of the confiscated property of the Tories, among other lands the estate belonging to Governor Hutchinson, lying on Tremont Street, between West and Boylston Streets.

His large speculations, however, caused him to become deeply involved in debt. In 1787, accordingly, he started out anew to make a fortune, and through the influence of Lafayette and other men of prominence in Paris, he secured many government contracts which entailed immense profit. Through all the dark days of the French Revolution, he tried to serve the cause of the proscribed French nobility by perfecting plans for them to colonise on his lands in America. A large number he induced to immigrate, and a vast quantity of the furniture and belongings of these unfortunates was received on board his ships. But before the owners could follow their furniture, the axe had fallen upon their heads.

When the Reign of Terror was at its height, the _Sally_, owned by Colonel Swan, and commanded by Captain Stephen Clough, of Wiscasset, Maine, came home with a strange cargo and a stranger story. The cargo consisted of French tapestries, marquetry, silver with foreign crests, rare vases, clocks, costly furniture, and no end of apparelling fit for a queen. The story was that, only for the failure at the last moment of a plot for her deliverance, Marie Antoinette would also have been on the sloop, the plan being that she should be the guest at Wiscasset of the captain's wife until she could be transferred to a safer retreat.

However true may be the rumour of a plot to bring Marie Antoinette to America, it is certain that the furniture brought on the _Sally_, was of exceptional value and beauty. It found its resting-place in the old Swan house of our picture, to which it gave for many years the name of the Marie Antoinette house. One room was even called the Marie Antoinette room, and the bedstead of this apartment, which is to-day in the possession of the descendants of Colonel Swan, is still known as the Marie Antoinette bedstead. Whether the unhappy queen ever really rested on this bed cannot, of course, be said, but tradition has it that it was designed for her use in America because she had found it comfortable in France.

Colonel Swan, having paid all his debts, returned in 1795 to the United States, accompanied by the beautiful and eccentric gentlewoman who was his wife, and who had been with her husband in Paris during the Terror. They brought with them on this occasion a very large collection of fine French furniture, decorations, and paintings. The colonel had become very wealthy indeed through his commercial enterprises, and was now able to spend a great deal of money upon his fine Dorchester mansion, which he finished about the year 1796. A prominent figure of the house was the circular dining-hall, thirty-two feet in diameter, crowned at the height of perhaps twenty-five feet by a dome, and having three mirror windows. As originally built, it contained no fireplaces or heating conveniences of any kind.

[Illustration: SWAN HOUSE, DORCHESTER, MASS.]

Mrs. Swan accompanied her husband on several subsequent trips to Paris, and it was on one of these occasions that the colonel came to great grief. He had contracted, it is said, a debt claimed in France to be two million francs. This indebtedness he denied, and in spite of the persuasion of his friends he would make no concession in the matter. As a matter of principle he would not pay a debt which, he insisted, he did not owe. He seems to have believed the claim of his creditor to be a plot, and he at once resolved to be a martyr. He was thereupon arrested, and confined in St. Pélagie, a debtor's prison, from 1808 to 1830, a period of twenty-two years!

He steadfastly denied the charge against him, and, although able to settle the debt, preferred to remain a prisoner to securing his liberty on an unjust plea.... He gave up his wife, children, friends, and the comforts of his Parisian and New England homes for a principle, and made preparations for a long stay in prison. Lafayette, Swan's sincere friend, tried in vain to prevail upon him to take his liberty.[9]

Doctor Small, his biographer, tells us that he lived in a little cell in the prison, and was treated with great respect by the other prisoners, they putting aside their little furnaces with which they cooked, that he might have more room for exercise. Not a day passed without some kind act on his part, and he was known to have been the cause of the liberation of many poor debtors. When the jailor introduced his pretended creditor, he would politely salute him, and say to the former: "My friend, return me to my chamber."

With funds sent by his wife, Swan hired apartments in the Rue de la Clif, opposite St. Pélagie, which he caused to be fitted up at great expense. Here were dining and drawing rooms, coaches, and stables, and outhouses, and here he invited his guests and lodged his servants, putting at the disposal of the former his carriages, in which they drove to the promenade, the ball, the theatre--everywhere in his name. At this Parisian home he gave great dinners to his constant but bewildered friends. He seemed happy in thus braving his creditors and judges, we are told, allowed his beard to grow, dressed à la mode, and was cheerful to the last day of his confinement.

His wife died in 1825, and five years later the Revolution of July threw open his doors in the very last hour of his twenty-second year of captivity. His one desire upon being released was to embrace his friend Lafayette, and this he did on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville. Then he returned, July 31, to reinstate himself in prison--for St. Pélagie had after twenty-two years come to stand to him for home. He was seized almost immediately upon his second entrance into confinement with a hemorrhage, and died suddenly in the Rue d'Échiquier, aged seventy-six. In his will, he donated large sums of money to his four children, and to the city of Boston to found an institution to be called the Swan Orphan Academy. But the estate was found to be hopelessly insolvent, and the public legacy was never paid. The colonel's name lives, however, in the Maine island he purchased in 1786, for the purpose of improving and settling,--a project which, but for one of his periodic failures, he would probably have successfully accomplished.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 9: "History of Swan's Island."]

THE WOMAN VETERAN OF THE CONTINENTAL ARMY

Deborah Sampson Gannett, of Sharon, has the unique distinction of presenting the only authenticated case of a woman's enlistment and service as a regular soldier in the Revolutionary army.

[Illustration: DEBORAH SAMPSON GANNETT.]

The proof of her claim's validity can be found in the resolutions of the General Court of Massachusetts, where, under date of January 20, 1792, those who take the trouble may find this entry: "On the petition of Deborah Gannett, praying compensation for services performed in the late army of the United States.

"Whereas, it appears to this court that Deborah Gannett enlisted under the name of Robert Shurtleff, in Captain Webb's company in the Fourth Massachusetts regiment, on May 21, 1782, and did actually perform the duties of a soldier in the late army of the United States to the twenty-third day of October, 1783, for which she has received no compensation;

"And, whereas, it further appears that the said Deborah exhibited an extraordinary instance of female heroism by discharging the duties of a faithful, gallant soldier, and at the same time preserved the virtue and chastity of her sex unsuspected and unblemished, and was discharged from the service with a fair and honourable character; therefore,

"_Resolved_, that the treasurer of the Commonwealth be, and hereby is, directed to issue his note to said Deborah for the sum of £34, bearing interest from October 23, 1783."

Thus was the seal of authenticity set upon as extraordinary a story as can be found in the annals of this country.

Deborah Sampson was born in Plympton, Plymouth County, December 17, 1760, of a family descended from Governor Bradford. She had many brothers who enlisted for service early in the war, and it was their example, according to some accounts, which inspired her unusual course.

If one may judge from the hints thrown out in the "Female Review," a quaint little pamphlet probably written by Deborah herself, and published in 1797, however, it was the ardent wooing of a too importunate lover which drove the girl to her extraordinary undertaking. Two copies of this "Review" are now treasured in the Boston Public Library.

In the first chapters, the author discourses upon female education and the like, and then, after a sympathetic analysis of the educational aspirations of the heroine (referred to throughout the book as "our illustrious fair"), and a peroration on the lady's religious beliefs, describes in Miss Sampson's own words a curious dream she once had.

The young woman experienced this psychic visitation, the author of the "Review" would have us believe, a short time before taking her final step toward the army. In the dream, a serpent bade her "arise, stand on your feet, gird yourself, and prepare to encounter your enemy." This, according to the chronicler's interpretation, was one underlying cause of Deborah's subsequent decision to enlist as a soldier.

Yet her mother's wish that she should marry a man for whom she felt no love is also suggested as a cause, and there is a hint, too, that the death in the battle of Long Island, New York, of a man to whom she was attached, gave the final impulse to her plan. At any rate, it was the night that she heard the news of this man's death that she started on her perilous undertaking.

"Having put in readiness the materials she had judged requisite," writes her chronicler, "she retired at her usual hour to bed, intending to rise at twelve.... There was none but the Invisible who could take cognisance of her passion on assuming her new garb."

She slipped cautiously away, and travelled carefully to Bellingham, where she enlisted as a Continental soldier on a three years' term. She was mustered into the army at Worcester, under the name of Robert Shurtleff. With about fifty other soldiers she soon arrived at West Point, and it there fell to her lot to be in Captain Webb's company, in Colonel Shepard's regiment, and in General Patterson's brigade.

Naturally the girl's disappearance from home had caused her friends and her family great uneasiness. Her mother reproached herself for having urged too constantly upon the attention of her child the suit of a man for whom she did not care, and her lover upbraided himself for having been too importunate in his wooing. The telephone and telegraph not having been invented, it was necessary, in order to trace the lost girl, to visit all the places to which Deborah might have flown. Her brother, therefore, made an expedition one hundred miles to the eastward among some of the family relations, and her suitor took his route to the west of Massachusetts and across into New York State.

In the course of his search he visited, as it happened, the very place in which Deborah's company was stationed, and saw (though he did not recognise) his lost sweetheart. She recognised him, however, and hearing his account to the officers of her mother's grief and anxiety, sent home as soon as opportunity offered, the following letter:

"DEAR PARENT:--On the margin of one of those rivers which intersects and winds itself so beautifully majestic through a vast extent of territory of the United States is the present situation of your unworthy but constant and affectionate daughter. I pretend not to justify or even to palliate my clandestine elopement. In hopes of pacifying your mind, which I am sure must be afflicted beyond measure, I write you this scrawl. Conscious of not having thus abruptly absconded by reason of any fancied ill treatment from you, or disaffection toward any, the thoughts of my disobedience are truly poignant. Neither have I a plea that the insults of man have driven me hence: and let this be your consoling reflection--that I have not fled to offer more daring insults to them by a proffered prostitution of that virtue which I have always been taught to preserve and revere. The motive is truly important; and when I divulge it my sole ambition and delight shall be to make an expiatory sacrifice for my transgression.

"I am in a large but well regulated family. My employment is agreeable, although it is somewhat different and more intense than it was at home. But I apprehend it is equally as advantageous. My superintendents are indulgent; but to a punctilio they demand a due observance of decorum and propriety of conduct. By this you must know I have become mistress of many useful lessons, though I have many more to learn. Be not too much troubled, therefore, about my present or future engagements; as I will endeavour to make that prudence and virtue my model, for which, I own, I am much indebted to those who took the charge of my youth.

"My place of residence and the adjoining country are beyond description delightsome.... Indeed, were it not for the ravages of war, of which I have seen more here than in Massachusetts, this part of our great continent would become a paradisiacal elysium. Heaven condescend that a speedy peace may constitute us a happy and independent nation: when the husband shall again be restored to his amiable consort, to wipe her sorrowing tear, the son to the embraces of his mourning parents, and the lover to the tender, disconsolate, and half-distracted object of his love.

"Your affectionate

"Daughter."

Unfortunately this letter, which had to be entrusted to a stranger, was intercepted. But Deborah did not know this, and her mind at rest, she pursued cheerfully the course she had marked out for herself.