Liberty

Liberty was both an ideal and a call to action to the New Englanders who fought for independence. Colonists likened their revolutionary actions to freeing themselves from an oppressive tyrant. Battlefields ranged from city streets and harbors to rural fields and farms and involved multiple nations, each with its own political agendas. For those who took part in the conflict, the American Revolution represented far more than a war against Britain. People joined the fight for personal reasons, whether to liberate themselves from slavery or prove their heroism. Some of those individuals recorded their experience of war in letters, journals, and engravings, which became cherished family heirlooms. New Englanders also preserved artifacts associated with historic battles as souvenirs of the revolution, such as the objects in this gallery.  

"He intended to Join the Army"

Born around 1754, Cicero spent his adolescence enslaved by Edward and Mary Emerson of Boston. Edward Emerson died in 1769, and a year later his widow married Jonathan Bowman, a member of the Hancock family. The couple brought Cicero to Pownalborough (Dresden), Maine. They lived on the banks of the Kennebec River in a home now owned by Historic New England. 

Jonathan Bowman was a staunch supporter of the revolutionary cause and Cicero was likely affected by his enslaver’s calls for liberty from oppression. On November 1, 1775, Cicero left Bowman 

House, effectively emancipating himself, and enlisted with an artillery company garrisoned near Kittery, Maine. Bowman placed a runaway ad in the newspaper and hired Reuben Colburn to capture Cicero. Colburn tracked Cicero to Cambridge, Massachusetts, apprehending him in December and returning him to Bowman House. It is unknown if Bowman punished Cicero, sold him, freed him, or if Cicero self-emancipated once more and reenlisted in the army.

Runaway ads are often the primary means by which historians recover information about enslaved people in New England. The ad for Cicero describes the attire he wore the night he fled Bowman House. Historic New England reimagined this outfit using historic garments and handmade reproductions. 

Cicero's movements in New England

Cicero’s life is partially reconstructed through account books, letters, and bills for labor – documents written and received by his enslavers. The most revealing source comes from Reuben Colburn, who billed Jonathan Bowman for travel and expenses associated with retrieving Cicero after his bid for freedom.  

1775, November 1
Cicero left Jonathan Bowman and traveled south from Pownalborough (Dresden), Maine.  

1775, November 5
“Cicero Negro” appeared on the muster list for Captain Robert Follet’s artillery company garrisoned near Kittery, Maine. 

1775, November 6
Jonathan Bowman published a runaway advertisement in several local newspapers. 

1775, November — December
Perhaps alerted to the November 6 runaway ad, Cicero left Follett’s company and moved further south to Newbury, Massachusetts, to join Captain Caleb Low’s 3rd Company, 8th Essex Milita Regiment. Eventually, Cicero was transferred to a militia company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, under the command of Captain Moses Nowell. 

1775, December 25
Reuben Colburn left Gardinerstown (Gardiner), Maine, to apprehend Cicero. 

1775, December 30
Colburn followed Cicero’s trail to Cambridge. He arrived there on December 30 and apprehended
Cicero the very same day. In his bill to Bowman, Colburn recorded: “Pd for 2 Boles of Tody At the taiking of Sisrow 0:10:0,” noting the drinks he bought himself and Cicero before setting off on their return to Maine.
Colburn later compensated Captain Low and Captain Nowell for expenses related to Cicero, including enlistment fees, wages paid, and military equipment. 

 “paid Mr. Caleb Low for Sisrow Expenses Down from Newbury 5:5:0” 

 “paid for Sisrow to Cap Nowel at Cambridge 1:15:8”  

1776, January 10
By January 10, 1776, Cicero was back at Bowman House. Bowman paid Colburn a reward of over 22 pounds. 

Deborah Sampson

In 1782, Deborah Sampson (1760-1827) disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment of the Continental Army as Robert Shurtleff. Sampson served for eighteen months before contracting yellow fever. Identity discovered, she received an honorable discharge in 1783. 

Sampson told her story to Herman Mann, who published The Female Review: or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady in 1797. Sampson later embarked on a lecture tour around the country, appearing on stage dressed in full military regalia. With support from Paul Revere, she became the first woman to receive a Federal military pension.  

Deborah Sampson’s only surviving garment is the dress worn for her marriage to Benjamin Gannett in 1785.  

“I will call it an error and presumption
because I swerved from the accustomed 
flowry path of female delicacy
to walk upon the heroic precipice of 
feminine perdition” 

– Deborah Sampson Gannett, 1802 

No Longer in Disguise

Historic New England’s collection includes the wedding dress Deborah Sampson wore when she married Benjamin Gannett in 1785. The dress was passed down in the Gannett family before arriving at Historic New England in 1998. Originally designed as an open robe, revealing the petticoat underneath, in the late eighteenth century the gown was altered into a round gown, with a skirt that closed across the front. It is interesting as a rare surviving example of a wedding dress from eighteenth-century New England, but it is also a tool with which to tell Sampson’s story. While it would have been powerful to display textiles representing Sampson as both a soldier and a wife and mother, her military uniform has been lost to history. When understood in the context of the supporting texts left by Sampson and others about her life and role in the American Revolution, her wedding dress prompts us to reconsider how she was remembered by the public and portrayed by historians in her own time and today.

Sampson walked a fine line between traditional womanhood as a mother and wife and the more masculine roles of war veteran and public lecturer. In the speech she gave across the country, likely written by her biographer Herman Mann, Sampson apologized for breaking from gender norms to disguise herself as a man to fight in the war. She also revealed herself to be a proponent of a set of beliefs that, in same year the United States celebrated its bicentennial, historian Linda Kerber labelled “Republican Motherhood”: The idea that women were responsible for cultivating morality and patriotic ideals in the next generation of American leaders, which afforded them political influence even without formal political power. “The rank you hold in the scales of beings is, in many respects, superior to that of man,” Sampson declared in her stump speech. “Nurses of his growth, and invariable models of his habits, he becomes a suppliant at your shrine, emulous to please, assiduous to cherish and support, to live and to die for you.”

Sampson’s balancing act was carefully calibrated to appeal to her era’s feminine and masculine norms. To be taken seriously, Sampson could not appear so feminine as to have her claims to veteran benefits declined. On the other hand, she could not present herself as too masculine, or she might be seen as a threat to patriarchal society. Rather Sampson, probably with Mann’s help, made choices for her public presentation that would garner her respect and attention. She may have argued that women had power, but she was also “willing to acknowledge what I have done, an error and presumption. I will call it an error and presumption because I swerved from the accustomed flowry path of the female delicacy to walk upon the heroic precipice of feminine perdition.”

This balance between the masculine and feminine extends to Sampson’s appearance in visual culture, in the early republic and today. In 1797, Mann commissioned a portrait of Sampson for the front page of her biography. Joseph Stone, an artist from Framingham, Massachusetts, was chosen to complete the portrait. Stone depicted Sampson wearing a white dress with a golden band under her bust, a gold necklace, and her hair down. Sampson is dressed in feminine clothing, but her face bears a strong jaw and chin, masculine features typical of Stone’s style. While the choice of artist was likely due to accessibility and affordability, Stone’s portrait of Sampson likely strengthened Mann’s readers’ perceptions of her as a strong-willed woman. Two hundred years later, on November 11, 1989, the town of Sharon, Massachusetts, unveiled a life-sized sculpture of Sampson by Lu Stubbs in front of the public library. Stubbs’s Sampson has a soldier’s military coat hiding her colonial dress and a more feminine face than in Stone’s portrait.

In 1797, Sampson was depicted only as a woman. In 1989, she was presented as both a woman and a soldier. In Myth and Memory, Historic New England will share her full story as teacher, soldier, wife, mother, and advocate.

Fall 2024 curatorial intern Mackenzie Landsittel was a contributing author for this post.

“I am sensible it is a long time since I wrote to you. (I need not say.) It is not because I have forgot you or my dear children. I am greatly concerned for you, but have it not in my power at present to take any care of you, or even pay you a visit. There is very strict orders at present against the soldiers leaving the army to visit their home, and it will not do for officers to ask leave of absence when soldiers are denied.” 

– Timothy Bigelow to Anna Bigelow, July 30, 1775

Timothy Bigelow’s letters to his wife, Anna, describe the regimental life of Continental Army officers, from daily drills and exercise to building fortifications and mandatory public worship. He also relayed news of men deserting their posts and disease making its way through the camp. Despite these challenges, Bigelow assured his wife that the “Satisfaction of being engaged in my Country’s Cause” made his time in service “agreeable.”   

Bigelow’s letters also provide a glimpse into how colonial women managed their families and households during wartime. Anna Bigelow not only took in tenants while her husband was away but ran the farm in Worcester, Massachusetts, and conducted business with neighbors. In addition, she occupied her time making and sending clothing to her husband, whose letters include requests for garments such as linen breeches for the hot weather and something fine to wear for General Washington’s visit. He even requested that their son Andrew be “fitted out in as respectable a manner as other children in the neighborhood,” signaling his desire to maintain the family’s good reputation while he was away. 

Behind the Exhibition

In the eighteenth century, colonists used hollowed-out vessels made from ox or cattle horns to carry their gunpowder for a flintlock musket. Fitted with a plug at the base and a stopper in the spout, the curved form of the powder horn fit around the waist of its user comfortably when worn with a long strap over the shoulder.

Powder horns were also works of art, engraved with ornate designs and inscriptions made by their owners or professional artisans working in military camps as early as the 1740s. On the most basic level, decorated powder horns were a means of personal identification for soldiers. They also served as canvases for soldiers to document the world around them. Popular decorations ranged from geographic maps and military forts to animals and whimsical creatures. Horns carved during the Siege of Boston (1775-1777) depicted fortifications, city views, and encampments in Roxbury, Charlestown, and Cambridge; soldiers marching and engaged in battle; and plenty of patriotic imagery. This decorative tradition lasted until the Continental Army, led by George Washington, began equipping troops with cartridge boxes for loading gunpowder, diminishing the need to carry a horn.

After the American Revolution, veterans and their families preserved powder horns as souvenirs of military service. Carved decorative horns told stories of the owners’ involvement in military campaigns, and their descendants sometimes added notes to uncarved horns to document the provenance. By the early twentieth century, fake horns flooded the collector’s market, either carved to resemble eighteenth-century decoration or sold with falsified histories.

While Historic New England does not typically collect military artifacts, powder horns blur the lines between decorative folk art, souvenir, and militaria. As I was putting together Myth and Memory: Stories of the American Revolution, I encountered at least a dozen examples in the collection, each with their own unique histories, but only three powder horns had explicit connections to the American Revolution. I approached these powder horns with a skeptical eye, wondering if I could verify their revolutionary attributions. The object files were not very helpful, as all of them were donated by collectors between the 1920s-1940s with little documentation.

With scant provenance, I turned to the objects themselves to see what they revealed.

The first powder horn features engravings of animals, architecture, and miscellaneous designs. The horn also bears the inscription “IAMES REILEY” (James Reiley) rendered in a bold calligraphic style. The donor was Miss Margaret Wyman and the horn belonged to her grandfather, although there appears to be no direct family relation to James Reiley. In his correspondence, William Sumner Appleton described the carving as “one of the simpler variety, probably the work of some New England farmer.”

There are a few features that help attribute this horn to the Siege of Boston: the large, bold lettering of James Reiley’s name relates to a decorative carving tradition attributed to John Bush, a free man of color from Shrewsbery, Massachusetts, who served at Fort William Henry in New York. Bush’s decorated powder horns served as inspiration for artists and amateur carvers in the 1770s.

Reiley’s horn also has attachments that Joel Bohy (a consultant for the National Park Service) identified as belonging to an artillery priming horn for a cannon, including the sling swivel mounted to the horn. Sling swivels allowed users to attach a sling to the powder horn, and Joel identified the unique shape as having once belonged to a British musket. It was likely adapted by Reiley for his powder horn.

The final piece of the puzzle was the name itself. Knowing that this horn was used in an artillery company, I could use veterans records available through Ancestry.com to locate James Reiley in the archive. I believe the owner of this horn is a James Reiley who served in Colonel John Crane’s Continental Artillery Regiment. Reiley participated in military campaigns in New England, New York, and New Jersey. His name was on a list of men mustered by Nathaniel Barber, Muster Master for Suffolk Co., in 1777.

The second horn is bare, with a note inscribed in ink on the body: “Powder Horn used in Revolution / owned by Tuck Family / of Nashua.” Stephen T. Moore donated the horn in 1941, but there appears to be no ancestral tie to anyone named Tuck, nor to the state of New Hampshire.

The diminutive size of this horn raised a flag; likely too small for the army, but might have been used for hunting. I was also unable to track down a “Tuck” from the Nashua area who served in the American Revolution. It’s possible that this Tuck lived elsewhere, and the family later moved to Nashua; it is also possible that the Tuck family acquired the horn as a relic and labeled it for posterity. Either way, its military attribution is shaky. The handwritten note was probably reason enough for Stephen Moore to collect and donate it to Historic New England in the early twentieth century.

The third powder horn does its best to convince you of its history: “JUNE 17, 1775/ W. WILAND/ LEXINGTON/ HIS HORN/ CHARLESTOWN” is carved on the body, along with an engraving of a soldier planting a flag on a hill. However, this horn screams “fake,” from the crude carvings to the lack of any documentation of a “W. Wiland” ever living in Lexington, let alone serving in the Massachusetts Army. This horn was made to attract a collector, likely in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. It was apparently good enough to dupe Wickliffe Draper, who donated the horn to Historic New England in 1934.

Taken together, these three powder horns highlight the major themes of the Myth and Memory exhibition. I decided to display them together and tell their stories to show how history, memory, and mythology coalesce in the collecting and preservation of artifacts from the American Revolution.

Written by Erica Lome, Curator of Collections