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.
The fatigue and heat of the march oppressed the girl soldier more than
did battle or the fear of death. Yet at White Plains, her first
experience of actual warfare, her left-hand man was shot dead in the
second fire, and she herself received two shots through her coat and one
through her cap. In the terrible bayonet charge at this same battle, in
which she was a participant, the sight of the bloodshed proved almost
too much for her strength.
At Yorktown she was ordered to work on a battery, which she did right
faithfully. Among her comrades, Deborah's young and jaunty appearance
won for her the sobriquet "blooming boy." She was a great favourite in
the ranks. She shirked nothing, and did duty sometimes as a common
soldier and sometimes as a sergeant on the lines, patrolling, collecting
fuel, and performing such other offices as fell to her lot.
After the battle of White Plains she received two severe wounds, one of
which was in her thigh. Naturally, a surgeon was sent for at once, but
the plucky girl, who could far more easily endure pain than the thought
of discovery, extracted the ball herself with penknife and needle before
hospital aid arrived.
In the spring of 1783 General Patterson selected her for his waiter, and
Deborah so distinguished herself for readiness and courage that the
general often praised to the other men of the regiment the heroism of
his "smock-faced boy."
It is at this stage of the story that the inevitable dénouement
occurred. The young soldier fell ill with a prevailing epidemic, and
during her attack of unconsciousness her sex was discovered by the
attendant physician, Doctor Bana. Immediately she was removed by the
physician's orders to the apartment of the hospital matron, under whose
care she remained until discharged as well.
Deborah's appearance in her uniform was sufficiently suggestive, as has
been said, of robust masculinity to attract the favourable attention of
many young women. What she had not counted upon was the arousing in one
of these girls of a degree of interest which should imperil her secret.
Her chagrin, the third morning after the doctor's discovery, was
appreciably deepened, therefore, by the arrival of a love-letter from a
rich and charming young woman of Baltimore whom the soldier, "Robert
Shurtleff," had several times met, but whose identity with the writer of
the letter our heroine by no means suspected. This letter, accompanied
by a gift of fruit, the compiler of the "Female Review" gives as
follows:
"DEAR SIR:--Fraught with the feelings of a friend who is doubtless
beyond your conception interested in your health and happiness, I take
liberty to address you with a frankness which nothing but the purest
friendship and affection can palliate,--know, then, that the charms I
first read on your visage brought a passion into my bosom for which I
could not account. If it was from the thing called LOVE, I was before
mostly ignorant of it, and strove to stifle the fugutive; though I
confess the indulgence was agreeable. But repeated interviews with you
kindled it into a flame I do not now blush to own: and should it meet a
generous return, I shall not reproach myself for its indulgence. I have
long sought to hear of your department, and how painful is the news I
this moment received that you are sick, if alive, in the hospital! Your
complicated nerves will not admit of writing, but inform the bearer if
you are necessitated for anything that can conduce to your comfort. If
you recover and think proper to inquire my name, I will give you an
opportunity. But if death is to terminate your existence there, let your
last senses be impressed with the reflection that you die not without
one more friend whose tears will bedew your funeral obsequies. Adieu."
* * * * *
The distressed invalid replied to this note that "he" was not in need of
money. The same evening, however, another missive was received,
enclosing two guineas. And the like favours were continued throughout
the soldier's stay at the hospital.
Upon recovery, the "blooming boy" resumed his uniform to rejoin the
troops. Doctor Bana had kept the secret, and there seemed to Deborah no
reason why she should not pursue her soldier career to the end.
The enamoured maid of Baltimore still remained, however, a thorn in her
conscience. And one day, when near Baltimore on a special duty, our
soldier was summoned by a note to the home of this young woman, who,
confessing herself the writer of the anonymous letter, declared her
love. Just what response was made to this avowal is not known, but that
the attractive person in soldier uniform did not at this time tell the
maid of Baltimore the whole truth is certain.
Events were soon, however, to force Deborah to perfect frankness with
her admirer. After leaving Baltimore, she went on a special duty
journey, in the course of which she was taken captive by Indians. The
savage who had her in his charge she was obliged to kill in
self-defence, after which there seemed every prospect that she and the
single Indian lad who escaped with her would perish in the wilderness, a
prey to wild beasts. Thereupon she wrote to her Baltimore admirer thus:
"Dear Miss ----:--Perhaps you are the nearest friend I have. But a few
hours must inevitably waft me to an infinite distance from all sublunary
enjoyments, and fix me in a state of changeless retribution. Three years
having made me the sport of fortune, I am at length doomed to end my
existence in a dreary wilderness, unattended except by an Indian boy. If
you receive these lines, remember they come from one who sincerely loves
you. But, my amiable friend, forgive my imperfections and forget you
ever had affection for one so unworthy the name of
"YOUR OWN SEX."
No means of sending this letter presented itself, however, and after a
dreary wandering, Deborah was enabled to rejoin her soldier friends.
Then she proceeded to Baltimore for the express purpose of seeing her
girl admirer and telling her the truth. Yet this time, too, she evaded
her duty, and left the maiden still unenlightened, with a promise to
return the ensuing spring--a promise, she afterward declared, she had
every intention of keeping, had not the truth been published to the
world in the intervening time.
Doctor Bana had been only deferring the uncloaking of "Robert
Shurtleff." Upon Deborah's return to duty, he made the culprit herself
the bearer of a letter to General Patterson, which disclosed the
secret.
The general, who was at West Point at the time, treated her with all
possible kindness, and commended her for her service, instead of
punishing her, as she had feared. Then he gave her a private apartment,
and made arrangements to have her safely conducted to Massachusetts.
Not quite yet, however, did Deborah abandon her disguise. She passed the
next winter with distant relatives under the name of her youngest
brother. But she soon resumed her proper name, and returned to her
delighted family.
After the war, she married Benjamin Gannett, and the homestead in
Sharon, where she lived for the rest of her life, is still standing,
relics of her occupancy, her table and her Bible, being shown there
to-day to interested visitors.
[Illustration: GANNETT HOUSE, SHARON, MASS.]
In 1802 she made a successful lecturing tour, during which she kept a
very interesting diary, which is still exhibited to those interested by
her great-granddaughter, Mrs. Susan Moody. Her grave in Sharon is
carefully preserved, a street has been named in her honour, and several
patriotic societies have constituted her their principal deity.
Certainly her story is curious enough to entitle her to some
distinction.
THE REDEEMED CAPTIVE
Of all the towns settled by Englishmen in the midst of Indians, none was
more thoroughly peaceful in its aims and origin than Deerfield, in the
old Pocumtuck Valley. Here under the giant trees of the primeval forest
the whitehaired Eliot prayed, and beside the banks of the sluggish
stream he gathered as nucleus for the town the roving savages upon whom
his gospel message had made a deep impression. Quite naturally,
therefore, the men of Pocumtuck were not disquieted by news of Indian
troubles. With the natives about them they had lived on peaceful terms
for many years, and it was almost impossible for them to believe that
they would ever come to shudder at the mere presence of redskins. Yet
history tells us, and Deerfield to-day bears witness to the fact, that
no town in all the colonies suffered more at the hands of the Indians
than did this peaceful village in Western Massachusetts.