even more firmly, “My principles are … to sacrifice all lesser considerations to the service of the whole, and in this tempestuous season to throw cheerfully overboard private fortune, private emolument, even my life—if the ship, with the jewel Liberty, may be safe.”13 This was no reckless youth with nothing to lose, but a man of nearly forty, whose success and family were much to risk and whose formerly mild temperament had brought him political position and success.
Deane tried to remain practical despite this revolutionary fervor, serving on various committees throughout the summer and debating with Thomas Paine and Roger Sherman on the positive necessity of clothing the soldiers.14 When news arrived of Arnold and Allen’s success, and his own part in financing the operation, his nickname in Congress became “Ticonderoga.”15 Then on June 14 Deane and a veteran of the French and Indian War named George Washington spent two days drafting rules and regulations for the army. The tall Virginian was preparing to ride to Boston and take command of the various New England militias and promised to stop in Weathersfield. Deane wrote to Elizabeth, “General Washington will be with you soon…. I have been with him for a great part of the last forty-eight hours in Congress and Committee, and the more that I have become acquainted with the man, the more I esteem him.”16 A few weeks later Washington rode through Connecticut, proclaimed in New Haven by cannons, drummers, and a Yale fifer named Noah Webster. The general stopped for lunch at Deane’s house, meeting Governor Trumbull and Jeremiah Wadsworth. Elizabeth Deane set lunch and withdrew to sit with the house slaves, Hagar and Pompey, in the kitchen, while in the best room the three men talked of freedom.
Washington rode on to the siege of Boston, already over two months old. Within the week after the shots were fired at Lexington almost four thousand Connecticut men had marched to join the army assembling around Cambridge. Many of these men came back, since there was little food in April for the huge numbers rushing to defend their homeland.17 But throughout the summer, recruitment for the war effort continued, and it increased with the arrival of Washington to lead and cohere the various militias and companies.
One of those inspired to join that summer was Nathan Hale, who felt restless teaching in New London. Every day thirty-two boys sat on benches at long tables and scraped their slates, staring out the wavy glass windows of the Union School while he taught them Latin and grammar. On Saturdays he taught girls, a practice for which he had been vilified by some of the more conservative people in town. But the trustees of the school, including Nathaniel and Lucretia Shaw, seem to have had no problem with this quirk, inviting him to meals at their huge stone house by the harbor.18 After all, Hale was a respected teacher, “frank and independent in his bearing, social, animated, ardent, a lover of the society of ladies, and a favorite among them.”19
Hale had joined the New London militia the previous autumn, and by the summer of 1775 was promoted to first sergeant.20 But the battle was not at New London, not yet, and even though his contract was nearly up anyway, he decided he couldn’t wait any longer. He wrote to his friend Benjamin Tallmadge about his conflicted feelings of responsibility, and Tallmadge wrote back, saying,
When I consider you as a Brother Pedagogue, engaged in a calling, useful, honorable, and doubtless to you very entertaining, it seems difficult to advise you ever to relinquish your business, and to leave so agreeable a circle of connections and friends…. On the other hand, when I consider our country, a land flowing as it were with milk and honey, holding open her arms, and demanding assistance from all who can assist her in her sore distress, methinks a Christian’s counsel must favor the latter.21
Tallmadge’s letter must have hit a nerve. On Friday, July 17, two weeks after Washington rode through Connecticut, Hale tendered his resignation, and as he left “gave [his students] earnest counsel, prayed with them, and shaking each by the hand, bade them individually farewell.”22 He joined the Seventh Connecticut Regiment as a lieutenant and recruited more soldiers from the area, such as Stephen Hempstead. A year younger than Hale, Hempstead lived in an old 1678 house a few blocks from the schoolhouse, at the bottom of a large hill. He idolized Hale and joined up as his sergeant.23 Nathaniel Shaw gave his protégé Hale a gift of powder and shot before he left.24
At the siege of Boston Hale livened up the dull camp life with sporting events and games, but always meticulous, he carefully wrote down instructions for himself in his diary: “It is the utmost importance that an officer should be anxious to know his duty, but greater that he should carefully perform what he does know.” He settled into a routine, drinking coffee in the morning and brandy at night, drilling his soldiers and preparing for the battles he knew would come.25 Tallmadge visited the siege before returning to his job, where he weighed his options all summer and fall, aching to join up, but careful of his duties, unwilling to take his own advice.
Hale received many letters from friends he had made in New London; he had left behind many broken hearts. Gilbert Saltonstall wrote with tongue in cheek, “The young girls … have frequently desir’d their compliments to Master, but I’ve never thought of mentioning it ’till now—you must write something in your next by way of P.S. that I may show it them.”26 But Hale had left the pleasures of youth behind and was now on his way to becoming a man. Promoted to captain, he dined with Gen. Israel Putnam at headquarters several times, initiated fully into the circle of Connecticut Revolutionaries.27
Jonathan Trumbull, shown here with his wife, Faith, earned the respect of his contemporaries for his civil-work ethic and service in Connecticut government. Stuart, Life of Jonathan Trumbull.
The growing army needed to be supplied, and one hundred miles from Boston, safe in the New England interior, the hilltop town of Lebanon became one of the centers of the revolutionary effort. On the enormous, comet-shaped village green, livestock were gathered, soldiers billeted, and Governor Trumbull’s country store became the “war office,” where he would hold no less than nine hundred meetings of his Council of Safety during the course of the Revolution. Riders hurried to Lebanon from Boston and New York, and Trumbull remained one of the best informed figures in the war.28 In fact, he may have been George Washington’s most frequent correspondent, and the “the mutual friendship and esteem” that grew between the two men helped both.29 Though the religious Connecticutian was twenty years older than the Virginian, they spoke on equal terms, and legend has it that Washington called him “Brother Jonathan,” leading to the use of the term for the common Yankee soldiers during the war. Whether its origin is apocryphal or not, the term began to be used freely and proudly throughout the northern colonies.30
Trumbull saw the Revolution as something of a religious quest. He was also a born egalitarian, with a simple approach to everyday life that stemmed from his puritanical background. At one point he was mocked by Loyalists on Long Island for the baffling habit of getting shaved at the local barber shop, where he “stands among the rest, and among them takes his turn in the chair,” rather than having a servant do this work.31 This dated criticism reveals how strange and new these democratic ideas were, and how the class-conscious British society was easy for someone like Trumbull to reject.
His sons all graduated from Harvard, and like their father became devout advocates for the Revolution. Born in 1740, Jonathan Jr. supervised the family’s Lebanon flour mill and East Haddam shipyard and now became the paymaster for the northern department of the army. The governor’s youngest son, John, only nineteen years old, became an aide to George Washington, and his eldest, Joseph, took the greatest responsibility of all. Joseph lived in Norwich at the outbreak of hostilities and began serving as commissary general of the Connecticut troops in April. He was recommended to Congress by Silas Deane and had done such a fine job so far that they appointed him commissary general for the entire Continental army on July 19.32
The Commissary Department of the
