A Great and Noble Scheme by John Mack Faragher

Author:John Mack Faragher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

IN Boston, Shirley and Monckton worked out the details of the operation. The Massachusetts Assembly would be asked to authorize the recruitment of two thousand men for an enlistment of twelve months. The recruits would be offered “the King’s pay,” a suit of clothes, a blanket, haversack, and 30 shillings bounty money. They would be organized into two battalions, one commanded by George Scott, who was brevetted lieutenant-colonel, the other by the popular militia commander, John Winslow. “He hath the best reputation as a military man of any officer in this province,” Shirley wrote to Lawrence, “and his character in every respect stands high with the Government and people, and he is particularly well esteem’d and belov’d by the Soldiery, so that I greatly rely upon him for success in raising the men.”36

Winslow, a man in his fifties, was a well-to-do farmer from the town of Marshfield in old Plymouth Colony, the scion of one of the more prominent families of New England, great-grandson of a Mayflower Pilgrim and first governor of Plymouth. In 1740, during the colonial conflict between Great Britain and Spain, Winslow was commissioned captain of militia and served in campaigns in the West Indies. With the outbreak of the war with France in 1744, he transferred to regular service in the 40th Regiment and was garrisoned at Annapolis Royal and later at Halifax. He participated in the conquest of Louisbourg in 1745, and commanded the company that reasserted British control at Minas in 1747. He returned home to Marshfield in 1751. In a portrait commissioned about that time, Winslow posed in his powdered wig and officer’s uniform of scarlet broadcloth, edged in gold lace. Slightly stout, with ruddy complexion, he appears a man at ease with himself. “Command in the Military and Civil way in New England has often been in our Family from 1620, the year of the Country’s being first Settled,” he wrote. “I Flatter my Self No Man Can raise in it a Better Regiment or Sooner than it is in my Power to do.”37

He proved to be right. When recruitment began in early February 1755, immediately after the Assembly voted to approve the Beauséjour expedition in secret session, men joined readily at Winslow’s call; within six weeks the quota was filled. As a group the recruits were mostly unemployed young men from seafaring towns along the Massachusetts coast. Many had been to the eastward before, as hands on fishing vessels or merchant transports, and many of their officers had served there during the late war. The recruits were formed into companies and sent off to Boston to the accompaniment of shrill anti-Catholic cant. “Are we willing to give up our Religion, the Religion of Jesus, which we now enjoy in its Purity, and which should be more dear to us than our Lives?” Reverend Isaac Morrill of Wilmington asked the young men of Captain Phineas Osgood’s company. “O! for God’s sake, let us think of our Danger, and labour to prevent our Ruin.

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