Richard Wiggin displays a copy of his book about Lincoln soldiers in the Revolutionary War. (Photo: Alice Waugh)
Most Lincoln residents know that the town played a key role in the start of the Revolutionary War as the site of Paul Revere’s capture, but few know very much about the hundreds of men with Lincoln connections who served in the eight-year conflict that followed. Those stories were researched and collected by Lincoln resident Richard Wiggin in a new book, Embattled Farmers: Campaigns and Profiles of Revolutionary Soldiers from Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1775-1783, which will be available at an author’s reception at 5 p.m. tomorrow (Patriots Day) in the Lincoln Public Library.
Wiggin, who grew up in Wellesley, described himself as “a product of the Cold War” who was keenly aware of the liberties and freedoms enjoyed by Americans in contrast to the lives of those living under oppressive governments on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He was deeply affected by the Prague Spring in 1968, when a short period of liberalization in Czechoslovakia was put down by Soviets.
“I lived vicariously for those students and I was crushed when the Russian tanks rolled in,” said Wiggin, who later became fascinated by an earlier and more successful revolution.
The 574-page Embattled Farmers had its origins in 2005 when Wiggin, who has served in various capacities with the Lincoln Minute Men (including five terms as captain), decided to decorate the graves in town of Lincoln revolutionary soldiers and started researching their names and locations. For annual Patriots’ Day ceremonies, town historians had been relying on a list of 40 men believed to have served in the war and buried in one of the three cemeteries in Lincoln, although no one was quite sure where that information came from.
Wiggin started with the archives of the Lincoln Public Library and expanded his sources to include treasurer’s accounts from the post-Revolutionary era in the town vault as well as Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the American Revolution, a multivolume compilation published by the Secretary of the Commonwealth. Fellow historian including Lincoln’s John MacLean, author of A Rich Harvest: The History, Buildings, and People of Lincoln, Massachusetts, also helped.
“My hour or two in the library turned into many, many hours over days, weeks and months,” Wiggin said in an interview in his living room, which is decorated with carefully labeled photos of his ancestors.
Wiggin’s research yielded a total of 256 men from Lincoln who were known to have served in the Revolutionary War (though four of them served for the crown). Each has an entry in Embattled Farmers with details of his war service as well as personal information that results in a richer portrait of the era.
The book also includes a detailed history of the war as well as an account of how the simple farmers and tradesmen of the era were transformed into an ultimately victorious army. However, given the travel and communication speeds of the day, Lincoln was fairly removed from Boston and its years-long ferment over trade and tariff disputes and British occupation.
“Through 1773, this town was very docile and quite happy to be part of the British Empire,” Wiggin said. The town’s most prominent resident at the time, town moderator Dr. Charles Russell, was in fact a loyalist, he added.
The profiles of Lincoln servicemen includes familiar names such as Bemis, Conant, Farrar, Flint, Hartwell, and Peirce, but also many other names and stories, including that of Edward Adams, who served in 1775-76 but was sailing on a privateer (basically a private but government-authorized wartime pirate ship) that was attacked by a British frigate. After a 16-hour chase, the ship was forced to run onto the beach in Chatham, and some of the men aboard, including Adams, escaped in barges or by swimming and then running across the sand dunes. Two weeks after this incident, Adams was back in war service—but on dry land this time.
Wiggin documents several cases where multiples members of the same Lincoln family served in the war. One of these families was headed by John Whitehead, who was at the Old North Bridge in Concord on that fateful April morning in 1775. Whitehead’s first wife died in 1773 and he subsequently moved to Weston and remarried, leaving his two sons at home with his new wife while he went off to war. Shortly thereafter, his sons Daniel, 12, and Elisha, 17, joined their father’s company.
Why did Whitehead’s sons risk their lives and join their father in battle at such young ages? Wiggin discovered a small item in a Boston newspaper that offers a clue: a notice published in April 1777 by Whitehead in which he “forbid[s] all persons trusting my wife, Anna, anything whatsoever, on my account; as I declare I will not pay any debt she may contract after the date thereof.”
“All of a sudden everything came clearly into focus—his two sons were having trouble with their stepmother,” Wiggin said. “This is no longer a service story; it’s a human story of real people dealing with real circumstances.” The saga did not end happily, however; although Whitehead survived the war, both of his sons were dead by the end of the summer.
Although the Revcolutionary War has been extensively studied and documented, Embattled Farmers is unique in its approach of “counting noses” of servicemen from a particular town, Wiggin said. Based on population data (Lincoln had about 775 residents at the outbreak of the war), it would appear that 70 to 80 percent of Lincoln’s males age 16 and older served at some point during the Revolutionary War. While many of those men could be claimed as residents of a different town, thus reducing the percentage to something like 50 percent, this is still significantly higher than the generally accepted percentage of 25 percent for Massachusetts.
Though he can’t prove it without similarly detailed studies from other towns, “I think historians have grossly underestimated the war participation,” Wiggin said.
Embattled Farmers was published by the Lincoln Historical Society with the help of a grant from the Codman Trust. Copies are available at the Old Town Hall Exchange, Something Special, and both visitor centers in the Minute Man National Historical Park, as well as the Concord Museum and the Buckman Tavern in Lexington.