Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North

17 Death Is Not the Worst of Evils

Death Is Not the Worst of Evils In the weeks immediately after the battles at Concord and Lexington , the population at Ten Hills Farm swelled tenfold and more. First came refugees. By nightfall on April 19, while Isaac Royall watched the unfolding events from his vantage point in Boston , more than one hundred men, women, and children gathered at Winter Hill seeking shelter where John Winthrop once had kept his home. Uncertain of their future, perhaps not even sure whom among them they could trust, they huddled in the dark. Then, by daylight, just as quick as they had come, they scattered. Some moved up the road to stay at Isaac Royall’s house until they found their bearings and could sketch a plan. Others trudged away to stay with relatives or friends or went back home to dwellings they would shortly lose to fire, to cannon shot, and all the other wrenching dislocations of the war. Next came soldiers.Within a week of the Revolution’s start, men and boys came streaming from New Hampshire carrying knives and muskets grabbed in haste. John Stark was among them. He was working at his sawmill when he heard the news. A veteran of the French and Indian War, the forty-five-year-old New Hampshire farmer and mill owner dropped his tools and went straight home. There, he “changed his dress, mounted a horse, and proceeded toward the theatre of action,” the general’s grandson Caleb wrote admiringly in his Memoir and Official Correspondence of Gen. John Stark, published in 1860. As Stark rode south, men called out 17 216 CHAPTER 17 to him that they might volunteer as well. The lean-faced captain, fifteen years removed from combat then, urged them on and told them to meet up with him at Medford. Hundreds followed. Farmers, printers, woodsmen, sailors, carpenters , and priests all pressed forward to the Mystic River, then moved across it to the Benefactor’s property. Within a week, scores of these new soldiers poured into a Medford tavern. There, in a raucous meeting with a show of hands, they made John Stark commander of the force. Next they made him colonel, a rank the New Hampshire Provincial Congress formalized several weeks later when it officially granted him command of the colony’s “first regiment of foot.” John Stark now controlled thirteen companies with a total of eight hundred men. And so as Isaac Royall gathered his belongings and struggled to secure a passage out, his well-kept grounds were smothered by strangers who swept across the farm like a rare migration, eating up existing stocks of food, pushing into any warm place they could find. The farm could not support this unexpected weight. Stark’s men were cold. They were hungry. Many among them fell ill and could not join the morning muster. Even before the troops set eyes on their new enemy, they sank into a crisis. Writing home to the Provincial Council on May 29, 1775, Colonel Stark pleaded for blankets, money, and basic supplies. The siege of Boston was already a month old by then, and more fighting appeared inevitable. The colonel worried his men would not be ready. Taking up a quill in Medford, he outlined his regiment’s many difficulties .“As to fire Arms,” he wrote,“the greatest part . . . [are] furnished .” More guns were expected. But basic shortages remained. “A considerable part of the Regiment is destitute of Blanketts,” Stark wrote urgently, “and [they] are very much exposed.” Some soldiers were unfit for duty. Stark feared more might drop away before the guns were fired. Unless his troops’ most basic needs were met, the colonel warned, “their courage will fail and they will return , and by that means, we shall work our own destruction.” Yet it was bullets, not blankets, the soldiers needed most.And that shortage would be all too clear before the month of June was out. Still, more volunteers arrived. DEATH IS NOT THE WORST OF EVILS 217 Among the newcomers was the Patriot colonel’s eldest son, who grew up in the care of slaves at his grandfather’s house in New Hampshire. On June 16, 1775, one day before the Battle of Bunker Hill, Caleb Stark resolved to slip away. His grandfather (and guardian through adoption) did not want the boy to go. The grandfather, Caleb Page, a wealthy merchant, had already lost one son in...