We inherit the story of the American Revolution from a far wider range of people and a far more complicated set of connections than we ever acknowledge. Those who call the American Revolution a civil war portray the conflict as a clash of citizens, a struggle over the definition of a new country. But it would be no less accurate to call the revolution a sibling war. It played out in the upheaval of innumerable families formed and split by the same military occupation. Every family wrestled with that conflict in its own way, and every family was forced to make choices as difficult as they were inevitable.
War, peacekeeping, and political administration brought together civilians and soldiers, men and women, children and godparents throughout the British Empire. Those same forces buffeted families, and sometimes tore them apart, as they moved around the Atlantic rim. In an eighteenth-century Anglo-American world in which family and government were closely connected notions, the shooting in Boston marked not the beginning of the American Revolution but the breakdown of a family. Prior to 1772, the language of family had long saturated British political discourse, but in the context of military families it took on new and personal meanings. We think of the American Revolution as a political event, but it was much more like a bad divorce. This family history reminds us of the human bonds as well as the political ones that were broken at the beginning of the American Revolution.
While stationed in Boston with the Twenty-Ninth Regiment, Ensign John Melliquet fell in love with a well-connected local woman, Hannah Newman. Her father was a merchant who had died in 1765; her mother, Margaret, continued their mercantile business while raising Hannah and her seven siblings. The family was no stranger to town politics. As a shopkeeper, Hannah’s widowed mother had signed John Rowe’s 1767 agreement to refrain from buying imported goods, and her uncle was Thomas Cushing, the speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly during much of the later 1760s and early 1770s. John Melliquet wanted to marry Hannah, but in the spring of 1770 it may not have seemed easy for a young woman from such a politically connected family to marry an officer in the occupying force.
After the shooting in March, Melliquet saw that he would have to choose between Hannah and the army. Early in April, he wrote to General Gage to say that he wanted to resign his commission. Gage counseled him not to be hasty: “As to your intention of retiring from the service, I would have you consider well of that matter.” As a stopgap Gage offered the ensign a leave of absence to travel to England. But Melliquet seemed in no hurry to return to his home country, and when the rest of his company left for New Jersey that summer, he and Hannah rode to New Hampshire and got married there.
Four months later, Gage wrote again to him in Boston, scolding him sharply: “when I granted you leave of Absence, I concluded that you intended to go to Europe. I must therefore desire that you will join your regt.” Melliquet hoped to sell his commission and be put on half-pay; that would give him some funds for settling himself in Massachusetts. But Boston was not an easy place to find a purchaser for a commission in the Twenty-Ninth Regiment. Through the spring and summer of 1771, Gage wrote regularly to Melliquet, reminding him, “You have been a long time absent from your Regiment and it is proper that you should join it, which I must beg you will do as soon as you can after the receipt of this letter.” At some point, Gage seemed to think he had found someone to buy Melliquet’s commission, but the arrangement fell through. At last, in December 1771, Melliquet headed to London to see if he could arrange an exchange for his ensigncy in person.
After a year and a half away from his regiment, in the company of Hannah and her family, Melliquet had planted himself firmly in Boston’s merchant elite and its network. And so, when he arrived on the other side of the Atlantic, he went to visit the most famous colonial in London, Benjamin Franklin.
Hannah’s neighbor Jonathan Williams, another successful merchant and Franklin’s nephew by marriage, had furnished Melliquet with a letter of introduction. “The Bearer of this is Mr. John Maliquet who was an officer in the 29 But is now Left the Regiment and marred [married] our Neighbour and Friend Daughter; Speaker Cushing Neice, any Civilities Shall be greatfuly acknoledgd By your Dutyfull Nephew and most Oblig’d Humble Servant.”
Though Melliquet had indeed left the army, on paper he was still one of its officers. Perhaps with Franklin’s help, Melliquet managed eventually to exchange his commission through an arrangement that put him on half-pay as a member of the reserve forces. He returned to Massachusetts and Hannah; within three years they had moved to the town of Waltham, where he supported his family as a tavern keeper. But just as his ties to the army were diminished but still tangible, John’s new family also preserved a reminder of his origin in England. John and Hannah Melliquet named two of their five children for John’s own parents: Ann Barbara, for his mother, and John Henry, for his father.
In the spring of 1775, even as Thomas Cushing represented Massachusetts in the Continental Congress, some of his niece’s former neighbors had not quite forgotten that she had married a British officer. When Hannah went to visit her mother in Boston a month after the battles at Lexington and Concord, the Committee of Safety suspected that she might be collecting information for her husband, “one Mr. Mellicut of Waltham who is an officer in His Majesty’s service under half pay.” Yet the selectmen in Waltham defended their new neighbor. They attested to his “known integrity, uprightness, and good conduct” and concluded that the rumor of his being a spy was from someone who “suspected him to be our enemy, because he is on the half-pay list.” Such an assumption, the selectmen maintained, must have come either from ignorance or “prejudice.” Six years earlier, it was easier for a deserter to blend in to his new community than it was for even a former army officer to live openly with his new patriot family.
In 1771, Abraham and Margaret Glossup of the Fourteenth Regiment baptized their second child, Joseph, in King’s Chapel in Boston. They gave him a private baptism, a common practice when a child was ill. The child survived but the marriage did not. The next summer, Abraham boarded a transport ship for St. Vincent, in the Caribbean, with the rest of his regiment, leaving behind his wife and their two sons. Margaret could not manage long in Boston without her husband. By November of the same year, she and her children had been committed to the almshouse “on the Province charge.” She remained there for nearly two years, finally obtaining a discharge late in the summer of 1774. She stayed out of the almshouse for only four months, and in December she was readmitted. Finally she found a way to provide for at least one of her children, though it cannot have been an easy choice. In 1777, at age six, Joseph was apprenticed to a farmer in Murrayfield (now Chester), Massachusetts, over a hundred miles from Boston. Joseph was indentured to the farmer until he was nineteen. He probably had no memory of his red-coated father.
In 1774, Samuel Quincy and his brother Josiah found that the rest of their families had begun to weigh in on their continued commitment to opposing sides of an argument. When Abigail Adams spent a fall day with the Quincys, she found “a little clashing of parties you may be sure,” as she reported to her husband, John. Most striking was that Samuel Quincy’s wife vigorously disagreed with his increasingly loyalist politics. Hannah Hill Quincy complained to Abigail Adams that “she thought it was high time for her Husband to turn about” from his government party politics. In fact, she continued, “he had not done half so clever since he left her advice.”
Eight months later, Samuel fled to England while Hannah remained in Massachusetts with her brother and her children. Samuel missed his family intensely. In 1777, he wrote to Hannah, “The continuance of our unhappy separation has something in it so unexpected, so unprecedented, so complicated with evil, and misfortune, it has become almost too burdensome for my spirit.” He missed his father as well. “It is now more than eighteen months since I parted with him in a manner I regret,” he lamented. Yet he refused to return to Massachusetts. Not only had his property been seized by the state, but he could not face the anger of his former friends. Hannah’s apparent reassurance to him that he could return without facing the death penalty as a political traitor was outrageous to him. “I have never once harbored such an idea. Sure I am I have never merited from them such a punishment. Difference of opinion I have never known to be a capital offence.” Samuel never saw his wife or children again.
As the wife of a wealthy loyalist and the mother of three daughters, Hannah Flucker had within a few short years successfully married off three daughters: Hannah, the eldest, to Lieutenant James Urquhart of the Fourteenth Regiment; Lucy to Henry Knox, a bookseller in King Street; and Sally to another British army officer. Had Hannah lived long enough to read Pride and Prejudice, she might have exclaimed with Mrs. Bennet at the novel’s end, “Three daughters married! . . . Oh, Lord! What will become of me. I shall go distracted.” But distraction had already arrived. By 1775 Lucy’s new husband, Henry, was fighting the British army at the Battle of Bunker Hill. When the British army left Boston late in 1776, most of the Flucker family left with them; only Lucy and Henry threw their lot in with the Continental army. The three sisters never saw one another again, and though Lucy repeatedly wrote to her mother, now traveling with the British army to Halifax and then England, she never received a reply.
As Lucy wrote in 1777 to her sister Hannah, “How horrid is this war, Brother against Brother—and the parent against the child.” The struggle between the mother country and her colonies was more than a figure of speech; the metaphor contained a genuine truth. The British Empire of the 1770s was built on friendships and families, and thousands of connections among British soldiers and Boston civilians were a part of what sustained that empire. And when families dissolve—when spouses separate, generations quarrel, and allegiances break down—so do the larger structures they support. The physical intimacy of the occupation of Boston had created these families and friendships, and their destruction is the cornerstone of America’s founding.