Eli Wheeler

Eli Wheeler (5 February 1761 to 27 February 1845) was a Massachusetts soldier in the Four-Year War and subsequently a millwright and small farmer near Lexington. An unarmed witness to the fighting on Lexington Common in April 1775, he enlisted in a Massachusetts levy the following summer at fifteen, giving his age as sixteen. His first service included the defeat on Long Island, the evacuation of Brooklyn and the rout at Kip’s Bay. After returning home at the expiry of his enlistment, he entered Colonel John Crane’s Continental artillery in March 1777 and served with the main army through the Philadelphia campaign, Valley Forge and Monmouth.

Wheeler became a gunner in July 1778, but his promotion did not reach the paymaster. When he was discharged on 2 November 1779, both his discharge and his certificate for twenty-five months’ unpaid wages still described him as a matross. He returned to his family’s farm, began learning the millwright’s trade under Thomas Whitcomb in spring 1780, and married Rebecca Stone in 1784. In 1786 they moved to a holding of their own near Lexington, where they raised three children. His certificate was paid in full under the settlement of Continental arrears in 1823, and he made the money over to his eldest son, Samuel, without the payment becoming known in the family. He died at the holding in 1845. The land remained with Samuel’s descendants into the twentieth century, and their memory of him, preserved in a written account by his great-great-great-grandson James Wheeler, centred on the musket he dropped at Kip’s Bay and a spoonful of vinegar taken every Thanksgiving.

Early life

Wheeler was born at his family’s farmhouse outside Lexington in Middlesex on 5 February 1761. Eli was his full given name, not an abbreviation of Elijah or Elias. His father, Samuel Wheeler, farmed and occasionally worked as a carpenter. His mother, Mary Wheeler, born Hastings, came from another local farming household and brought literacy and experience of household accounts to the marriage. Eli and his elder brother Nathan were their only children.

The Wheelers descended from English settlers and had lived in Middlesex for several generations. They owned their farm as a freehold, with manageable debts. Before the war the household was comfortable by local farming standards, but not wealthy. Eli’s education combined intermittent town schooling with reading at home. His facility with arithmetic developed through farm accounts and prices, supported by a natural liking for sums.

Samuel expressed affection chiefly through work and trust, with little conversation about feelings. Mary was more readily intimate with her younger son and often recognised concerns that he had not explained. The brothers’ rivalry did not develop into lasting resentment. Before the war Eli expected to establish a farm and family of his own nearby. His religious belief was sincere, largely unexamined and learned within the household. His understanding of the political dispute came principally from Samuel’s talk about local rights and unfair government, not from a detailed knowledge of constitutional proposals.

Lexington, 19 April 1775

At fourteen, Wheeler was too young to belong to Captain John Parker’s company. He watched the approach of the regulars and the fighting on the Common without carrying a weapon or standing in the militia line. Samuel and Nathan stood with the company and both survived. Their participation did not make Eli an enlisted soldier or a combatant in the opening encounter.

After the regulars had passed, he brought water to Prince Estabrook, an enslaved man who had stood with the company and been wounded in the shoulder. Later that day Eli carried powder behind Samuel during the fighting near Lincoln, as the column withdrew towards Boston. His father eventually sent him home to do the milking. The day gave him direct knowledge of the war’s violence while leaving his ordinary place in the household largely unchanged.

Military service

First enlistment and the New York campaign

In July 1776 Wheeler enlisted before a recruiting captain at Concord in a Massachusetts regiment of levies raised for service in New York. He was fifteen but gave his age as sixteen. He had told Samuel beforehand that he intended to do so. His father accepted the decision without openly endorsing the lie. Nathan remained at home to help with the hay and livestock.

Wheeler’s motives combined duty, curiosity and a desire to be treated as grown. Mary supplied shirts and a Testament; Nathan gave him his knife. His term ran until 1 December. Among his fellow soldiers, Asa Kendall of Bedford, a father of six, provided useful instruction in ordinary soldiering, although his confidence in political rumours was less reliable.

The levy crossed to Brooklyn as a reinforcement on the morning of 27 August 1776. Wheeler saw the defeat on Long Island from the American lines, including the consequences of the British outflanking movement and the repeated attacks of the Maryland troops. He subsequently crossed the East River during the night evacuation, in a boat rowed by men of Glover’s Marblehead regiment. Rain, illness, hunger and uncertainty about the army’s position followed the withdrawal.

At Kip’s Bay on 15 September, naval bombardment preceded the British landing. Wheeler ran with the other men when the line broke and dropped his musket. He saw George Washington attempt to rally the fugitives, striking at men and officers, but had no personal exchange with him. He reached Harlem Heights and answered the roll that night. The lost weapon was charged against his pay.

His service ended on 1 December 1776, and he walked home. The rout remained a source of shame. During the winter he worked hard on the farm, kept conversation practical and avoided an explanation of his flight. Nathan did not hear the full account until after Eli’s final return in November 1779. Wheeler was at home between enlistments, not with the army during the Trenton and Princeton operations.

Continental artillery and the Philadelphia campaign

On 20 March 1777, Wheeler enlisted at Boston for three years or the war in a Massachusetts company of Colonel John Crane’s Continental artillery. He entered as a matross, responsible for work such as handling drag ropes, carrying cartridges and sponging the gun under a gunner’s orders. The bounty was part of the attraction: he gave a portion to his family and retained the rest for clothing and ordinary needs. The musket lost in 1776 was not charged a second time.

The second enlistment also gave him an opportunity to face the regulars again. Artillery suited his preference for ordered practical work and the immediate application of numbers. Samuel gave him a brief blessing before he left, without opening a discussion of his reasons.

Crane’s artillery served with Washington’s main army in the Philadelphia campaign. At Brandywine in September 1777, Wheeler remained at the drag rope and helped withdraw a gun after the enemy crossed beyond the American position. At Germantown in October, he took part in the unsuccessful employment of artillery against the stone house. In both operations his duties depended on cooperation within the crew, while the course of the battle was outside his control.

He was reliable and exacting at this work, sometimes to the irritation of less careful men. A persistent weakness was his tendency to continue with the first instruction when changing conditions required him to ask for another. Obedience and persistence could therefore become liabilities as well as useful habits.

Valley Forge

Wheeler spent the Thanksgiving of 18 December 1777 at the Gulph on an allowance of rice and vinegar. The army entered Valley Forge in the Province of Pennsylvania on 19 December. Hut building, inadequate clothing, shortages of meat and reliance on fire cake formed the conditions of his winter service. The failure of Congress’s supply arrangements left men hungry and unfit for duty; suffering in the encampment was not simply an unavoidable effect of winter weather.

By late January he was making shoes from rawhide with Nathan’s knife, assisted by an older artilleryman from the Kennebec. His fellow crewman Lem Snow, a seventeen-year-old fisherman’s son from Marshfield, became ill and died of the illness called putrid fever in March 1778. Wheeler was refused admission when he tried to visit him in hospital. Lem’s death remained an important private loss, subsequently marked by a Thanksgiving remembrance rather than a public account of their service.

The arrival of Friedrich von Steuben introduced a different form of instruction. Wheeler watched the drill of the selected hundred men attached to the Guard; he was not one of that company. He observed the explanation of movements, demonstration and repeated practice, beginning with standing, facing and a common step. The prescribed ordinary pace was seventy-five steps a minute, each two feet long; the quick step was a hundred and twenty.

Wheeler and his gun crew practised the step themselves. By the end of April he had watched the larger formation perform movements that the army had previously struggled to execute consistently. He later used the same teaching method in practical work: explain why a task mattered, demonstrate it and repeat it until it was learned. The drill improved collective performance without removing the hunger and deaths of the preceding months.

Monmouth and promotion

At Monmouth on 28 June 1778, Wheeler was seventeen. When a gunner on the hill at the flank died in the heat, the sergeant ordered Wheeler to lay the gun. He continued doing so through the afternoon, directing its fire towards the opposing grenadiers. He did not subsequently attempt to calculate how many men his fire had hit and would not turn the episode into a boast.

The captain made him a gunner in July 1778. The promotion gave him greater confidence in his work and increased his impatience with careless workmanship. It did not reach the paymaster, whose records continued to list him as a matross. His actual duties and his recorded pay classification consequently diverged.

He passed the winter of 1778 to 1779 at Pluckemin in the Province of New Jersey, in better accommodation and with better supplies than at Valley Forge. The artillery subsequently returned to the Hudson Highlands. From July 1779 Crane’s regiment was encamped at the artillery park near Chester in Orange County, Province of New York.

Discharge and unpaid wages

The Peace of Boston ended hostilities on 19 October 1779. Congress began demobilising the army while the permanent constitutional settlement remained to be negotiated. Wheeler received his discharge at the park near Chester on 2 November, aged eighteen. He returned his musket and cartridges before leaving; he did not take an army weapon home.

He received two papers. The first, signed by his captain and Colonel Crane, certified his faithful service from 20 March 1777 and honourable discharge from the army of the United Colonies following the cessation of arms. It described him as a matross. The second was the paymaster’s certificate for 208 and one-third dollars, representing twenty-five months at eight and one-third dollars a month, from 1 October 1777 to 2 November 1779. Payment was promised with interest at such time as Congress should appoint. This too used the matross classification.

Neither document corrected the promotion. Wheeler later concentrated on obtaining the amount already certified rather than seeking recognition of the higher rank in the pay records. He kept copies and sent patient enquiries, eventually helping a few neighbours pursue their claims in the same way. Payment was deferred for more than forty years, and he financed his tools and his land from paid work rather than the certificate. The delay belonged to the wider problem of soldiers’ arrears carried into the Philadelphia negotiations, at which the Union assumed the obligation and left its schedule to Parliament.

He did not take up the western land bounty. Home and local work mattered more to him than establishing himself in the west. On the road he heard a soldier who had served with Sullivan describe the destruction of the Seneca country and the prospect of land there. His refusal of the bounty was chiefly a preference for remaining near Lexington.

Return to civilian life

Wheeler walked home from the Highlands, accompanied for much of the journey by the older artilleryman from the Kennebec. They parted at Sudbury, and Eli continued towards Lexington. He arrived in November 1779 with his blue coat, blanket and papers. Samuel was milking and gave him the work to finish. Mary welcomed him practically, while Nathan’s embrace re-established an intimacy the intervening years had interrupted.

The return brought genuine peace. He largely settled into ordinary life over the following months, although particular reminders sometimes caught him unprepared. In the first year he occasionally had disturbed dreams but usually slept well after a day’s work. His feet sometimes ached in cold weather, without leaving him disabled. Hunger in the army contributed to his careful maintenance of food reserves and dislike of waste.

He insisted on responsibility for his own work and earnings, rather than resuming precisely the position he had occupied before enlistment. He remained willing to help on the family farm but wanted a separate livelihood nearby. He exchanged occasional letters with the Kennebec artilleryman for several years. He also wrote to Lem’s family and visited when he could manage the journey.

Millwright’s work

In spring 1780, Wheeler began regular paid work as a helper to Thomas Whitcomb, an experienced local millwright. Whitcomb explained causes patiently but required poor work to be done again. Wheeler remained chiefly under his supervision for about three years, taking increasing responsibility and working on both grain mills and sawmills.

Measuring and fitting timber parts came readily. Deciding when worn material needed replacement rather than another repair was more difficult. He moved towards independent work gradually, undertaking small repairs while still working with Whitcomb. He kept tools at home and travelled locally to jobs, buying equipment piece by piece from his earnings. Customers paid in money, goods and agreed exchanges, which he recorded carefully.

His first serious professional failure arose while replacing damaged wooden gearing at a local grain mill. He treated the visible fault in isolation and neglected wear in adjoining parts. Rather than admit that the plan was wrong, he persisted in trying to meet the promised completion date. Putting the repair right cost most of several months’ savings, additional unpaid work and the customer’s confidence. He apologised directly and supplied a new estimate, but continued to find realistic promises difficult.

His early reputation was for capable, thorough work and overly confident completion dates. He sought enough regular employment to secure a small farm and eventually support one helper, not a large workshop. Tools were bought gradually, as his paid work allowed.

Personal life

Marriage and household

Rebecca Stone, born 18 May 1763, was the only child of Daniel Stone and Ruth Stone, born Reed, of a modest local farming household. Eli and Rebecca knew one another through neighbouring families and grew closer after his return. Her directness and his practical care allowed them to speak plainly. Their chief difficulty during courtship was his repeated postponement of agreed time together after promising too much work.

They married on 22 November 1784 and began married life in a separate cottage on the Wheeler farm. This kept expenses down while Eli bought tools and they prepared for a holding of their own. Shortly before leaving the cottage, he bought about fifteen acres nearby on credit, once the first payment and essential repairs were manageable. They moved late in 1786, after roughly two years in the cottage, to a small existing farmhouse which they improved gradually.

The holding supplied household provisions, kept a cow and produced a little surplus for sale or exchange. Mill work took priority. Eli paid for farm help when he could afford it; when he could not, work was sometimes left undone and the holding supplied less. The arrangement did not remove the household’s exposure to irregular trade earnings.

Rebecca kept the household accounts and made smaller purchases. They discussed larger commitments together. Her reluctance to spend on useful improvements could allow repairs to become more expensive, and her criticism became cutting when she was anxious about money or exhausted. Eli’s overcommitment repeatedly disrupted agreed plans. After quarrels they returned to the practical problem and made another arrangement, without permanently resolving these habits. Reading aloud together, when evening work allowed, was a shared pleasure.

Children

The couple had three children and no others. All survived childhood and reached adulthood.

Eli was a warm and playful father but had a temper when promises or instructions were ignored. He wanted each child to learn reading, writing and useful arithmetic. Household work sometimes interrupted their schooling. His preference for explaining and demonstrating tasks coexisted with impatience when the children did not follow what he considered a clear instruction.

Samuel, the eldest, worked the holding with his father from boyhood and took over its daily running as Eli’s mill work slowed, remaining there with his own household after Rebecca’s death. The adult lives of Joseph and Elizabeth are not recorded in the papers that came down through Samuel’s line.

Parents and brother

Nathan married Abigail Bowman, the eldest Bowman daughter, on 18 October 1780. He gradually took over daily work on the main Wheeler farm while Samuel retained ownership. Eli’s separate holding did not end his obligations to the older household. Nathan supplied more day-to-day help to their parents; Eli contributed work, goods and money as he could.

The brothers disagreed over the amount each could give, without developing lasting resentment. Their different working arrangements meant that apparently reasonable expectations could impose unequal demands. Mary and Rebecca were affectionate towards one another, although Mary’s habitual advice sometimes felt like supervision to Rebecca. Rebecca maintained regular visits and exchanges of help with her own parents while largely keeping the couple’s private quarrels to herself.

Faith and remembrance

Wheeler continued religious observance after the war while remaining privately uncertain about belief. Rebecca believed sincerely but did not expect every doubt to have an easy answer. Her confidence did not settle his questions. When he spoke plainly about service, she listened without requiring a heroic account or treating the conversation as a complete resolution of its effects.

Nathan was the first person outside the army to hear the full account of Kip’s Bay, after the final homecoming. Eli spoke candidly within a small circle but did not publish a memoir. A spoonful of vinegar became a quiet Thanksgiving remembrance of Lem; in time his household understood whose absence it marked.

On attending the meeting house after his return, Wheeler noticed Prince Estabrook in the back gallery. The racial separation contrasted with their shared experience of military service. He began speaking with Prince as a neighbour but did not publicly challenge the arrangement. Personal recognition did not amount to opposition to the institutions maintaining the inequality.

Later life and death

The settlement of his claim

The outstanding Continental arrears were settled by an act of the American Parliament in 1823, which paid surviving claimants who could prove a certified debt the full amount with the interest their certificates had promised. Wheeler was sixty-two. He surrendered the original certificate at the Treasury’s office in Boston and was paid in full. The copy he had kept since 1779 remained among his papers.

He made the money over to Samuel, who used it towards land adjoining the holding. Neither appears to have spoken of the payment within the family. The copy of the certificate passed down Samuel’s line as though the debt had never been paid, and his descendants believed into the twentieth century that the army had never settled with him. The payment is recorded in the Treasury’s register of arrears for 1823.

Last years

Rebecca died at the holding in March 1837, aged seventy-three. Eli remained there with Samuel’s household for the rest of his life. He did small repair work while his hands allowed and kept the Thanksgiving spoonful every year. It was in these years that his grandchildren heard the story of Kip’s Bay from him directly, and the family’s habits of speech about it took their settled form.

He died at the holding on 27 February 1845, aged eighty-four, and was buried beside Rebecca at Lexington.

Descendants

The holding

The fifteen acres of 1786 passed to Samuel and remained with his descendants. Successive generations added land, including the purchase made with the arrears money, and by the twentieth century the holding had become a dairy farm on the Bedford side of the town. The main Wheeler farm descended separately through Nathan’s family.

James Wheeler

James Wheeler, Eli’s great-great-great-grandson in the line of Samuel, was born on the farm in 1923. He volunteered for the Royal American Army after the attack on Honolulu in December 1941 and served as a private and loader in a battery of field howitzers in the Second Great War: in the Cauldron of Kassel in 1943, in the Cotentin from the landing of Operation Rollo in June 1944, through the hedge country and the winter in Flanders, and in the Battle for the Île-de-France and at Paris in 1945. He returned to the farm in October 1945.

Between March and November 1946 he wrote a private account of his service in five composition books, at the kitchen table of the farm. He showed it to nobody. Late in his life he gave it to the Lexington Historical Society, with the family’s papers: Eli’s discharge, the copy of his pay certificate, and the paybook James had carried through the war. The account is the principal record of what the family remembered of Eli.

Memory in the family

By the twentieth century the family’s knowledge of Eli had narrowed to a few things, and the account records each of them.

The best known was the musket. Any Wheeler who dropped anything, a jug, a hammer or a forkful of hay, was told that it would come out of his pay, and the saying was traced in the family to Kip’s Bay. James’s grandfather explained Eli’s second enlistment by saying that it was harder to drop a cannon. The family maintained that Eli had been a gunner, although the paper in the tin box in the parlour called him a matross, and it held that the paper had never been paid.

A pocket knife kept in the family was called Nathan’s knife and was said to have been in the family since the war. Whether it was the knife Nathan gave him in 1776 cannot be established.

The Thanksgiving spoonful of vinegar was still taken at the farm’s table in the 1940s, by every member of the household, for Lem Snow. The family knew Lem’s name, his age, that he came from Marshfield and that he died at Valley Forge, and nothing else about him.

Character

Wheeler was practical, numerate and attentive to the quality of work. His adult appearance was sandy-haired, blue-eyed and freckled, about five feet ten inches in height, with a wiry build and broad hands developed through labour. He preferred local security and family life to distant opportunities. Becoming a gunner strengthened his confidence in practical work.

His exactness worked best where a task could be examined, explained and repeated. It worked less well when a promise needed revision or circumstances had changed. He often confused keeping his word with refusing to reconsider what fulfilment required. The same habit could affect a gun crew, a repair customer or an evening promised to Rebecca. Affection was genuine, but neither practical care nor willingness to work prevented him from imposing avoidable burdens on other people.

Failings

Wheeler obtained his first enlistment by lying about his age, with Samuel’s prior knowledge. At Kip’s Bay he abandoned his weapon and ran with the retreating men. The loss of the musket was charged against his pay, and his shame delayed an honest account of the rout to his family.

His principal professional failing was persistence after his original judgement had become untenable. At the grain mill he allowed a promised deadline to govern an inadequate repair plan, making the customer bear the initial disruption and himself the cost of correction. A direct apology did not immediately make his later estimates realistic.

At home he overpromised work, displaced agreed time with Rebecca and became angry when instructions were ignored. The household’s plans had to accommodate these decisions, while his own insistence on being reliable could obstruct the changes reliability actually required. His recognition of Prince Estabrook as a neighbour also stopped short of publicly challenging the racial hierarchy of the meeting house.

He did not tell his household when his claim was paid. The silence left his descendants with a false account of how the army had treated him, and for more than a century the family repeated it.

Assessment

Wheeler’s service illustrates several distinct conditions of the Continental army: short enlistments in the early campaigns, work shared within artillery crews, failures of supply, improved instruction and demobilisation without prompt payment. The difference between his gunner duties and matross paperwork is important because it distinguishes the army’s practical recognition of work from its administration of wages.

His civilian circumstances were similarly dependent on particular arrangements rather than general prosperity. Paid instruction under Whitcomb, gradual purchases of tools, a cottage on family land and a small holding bought on credit made an independent household possible. Repair losses, overcommitment and competing responsibilities limited its security. His return brought real peace, but did not settle his grief or his religious uncertainty, and his claim was settled only when he was past sixty. The household he and Rebecca established provided ordinary pleasures alongside continuing financial and personal difficulties.

The family’s memory of him, as his descendants kept it, preserved the loss of the musket at Kip’s Bay and the death of Lem Snow. It did not preserve his promotion, his instruction under Steuben’s drill or his laying of the gun at Monmouth, and it held his claim to be unpaid after it had been settled.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The Four-Year War
• The Philadelphia Negotiations
• George Washington
• The Second Great War
• Province of Massachusetts Bay
• Daily Life in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth
• People

Categories

People · Founding Generation · Four-Year War · Massachusetts · Artillery · Farming and Trades