Chesapeake Legends and Lore from the War of 1812

Ralph E Eshelman, Scott S. Sheads

• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781626190719
• eBook ISBN: 9781625845245
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the two hundred years following the War of 1812, the Chesapeake Campaign became romanticized in tall tales and local legends. St. Michael's on the Eastern Shore of Maryland was famously cast as the town that fooled the British, and in Baltimore, the defenders of Fort McHenry were reputably rallied by a remarkably patriotic pet rooster. In Virginia, the only casualty in a raid on Cape Henry was reportedly the lighthouse keeper's smokehouse larder, while Admiral Cockburn was said to have supped by the light of the burning Federal buildings in Washington, D.C. Newspaper stories, ordinary citizens and even military personnel embellished events, and two hundred years later, those embellishments have become regional lore. Join historians Ralph E. Eshelman and Scott S. Sheads as they search for the history behind the legends of the War of 1812 in the Chesapeake.

Maryland

Maryland Eastern Shore

DORCHESTER COUNTY

Cake on a Silver Platter and a Goose on a Teapot

A legend from Taylors Island is that Polly Travers, accompanied by her friend Mary Gadd, had her slave row them out to a Royal Naval vessel to seek the release of her husband, John Travers, who had been captured along with his boat. Legend claims that her plea was successful in gaining the release of John but not his boat. The slave who rowed Polly out to the ship was not allowed onboard. According to the legend, during the negotiations, someone served the slave a piece of cake on a silver platter. After the cake was eaten and Polly, Mary and John embarked the rowboat for their joyous voyage home, the silver platter was forgotten, and it too was taken ashore.⁶ The platter is said to have been engraved with “The Marlborough,” the name of the ship, a seventy-four-gun Royal Navy ship of the line.* More likely the platter, if inscribed, would have had “HMS Marlborough,” its proper name. Because this legend includes full names and because Marlborough was part of Rear Admiral George Cockburn’s squadron, this story may have some basis to it, but it is hard to conceive of the British serving a slave a piece of cake on a silver platter. If the platter exists, perhaps the descendants of the family can produce a photograph of it to confirm this presently unproven legend.

Is this Polly Travers’s teapot? Ralph Eshelman photograph.

A second legend about Polly Travers is that when the British threatened to raid the family farm on Taylors Island, Polly hid valuables, including an heirloom silver teapot, under the nest of a setting goose. Every farm family knew one did not disturb a setting goose since she could be ferocious in protecting her nest.⁷

Descendants of the Travers family allowed Ralph Eshelman to examine the teapot. The pot is not silver but appears to be plated or Britannia metal.* It is stamped on the bottom “JAMES DIXON & SONS 1832.” James Dixon and Thomas Smith began metalworking in England circa 1806. When William Frederick Dixon, the eldest son of James, joined the firm in 1823, the name of the company was changed to James Dixon & Son. When James Willis Dixon, the second son of James, joined the firm in 1835, the name was changed to James Dixon & Sons.⁸ It is unclear whether the 1832 on the bottom of the teapot is a date, but because this company did not become James Dixon & Sons until well after the War of 1812, this teapot cannot be the pot Polly hid under a setting goose. The family owns two other teapots, one of which is marked 1844 and the second bears no date but appears to be from the late nineteenth century. Either the story is purely a family legend or over time, the teapot claimed to have been Polly’s was misidentified.

Polly was born Mary C. Dove on April 18, 1777, and married John Critchett Travers on April 5, 1797. A lifelong resident of Taylors Island, she died in 1857. Over the generations, she became known as “Aunt” or “Grandmother,” depending on who was telling the tale. It is interesting that we have two tales about Polly, each involving pieces of silver. One was a platter supposedly given to Polly’s slave and the other a teapot that reputedly belonged to Polly’s family. A family member stated that it was family tradition that the Marlborough platter had been buried with the teapot under the setting goose. We have no tangible evidence to support either of these stories, but the legends of the cake served on a silver platter and a teapot hidden under a setting goose are among the scores of fascinating stories based on the War of 1812 in the Chesapeake.

There are several similar tales of hiding valuables from the enemy by burying them. At the Fassitt House (see “The Corn Stalk Ruse at Mount Ephraim”), the owners buried their silver and then somehow forgot the exact spot. At the Trotten House (see “Poison Incidents”) in North Point, the owners planted cabbages on the disturbed soil to conceal the location.⁹ At the Todd House (see “British Soldiers and the Todd House Graveyard”), also in North Point, a grave was supposedly dug up because silver was believed to have been buried there.

The Battle of the Ice Mound and the Becky-Phipps Cannon

In early February 1815, HM sloop of war* Dauntless, anchored on the Patuxent River on the western shore of the bay, launched a ship’s tender* commanded by Lieutenant Matthew Phibbs and manned by a midshipman, thirteen sailors, three Royal Marines, a black man and a black woman who served as a cook. On a very cold day, they proceeded toward the small town of Tobacco Stick (present-day Madison), located on the eastern shore of the bay. The tender was armed with a twelve-pound carronade,* in addition to small arms the crew carried.

Battle of the Ice Mound, the last engagement of the war in Maryland. © Gerry Embleton illustration.

On February 6, the crew from the tender had pillaged the area, taken seven sheep from the farm of Moses Geohagan and burned several vessels. As the tender began its way back across the Chesapeake, it encountered considerable drift ice, and Phibbs decided to spend the night in the lee off nearby James Island until daylight. Early on February 7, they discovered that the tender had become ice-bound and they were frozen in. News of the tender’s plight reached Private Joseph Fookes Stewart, a shipyard owner and planter who lived on James Island and served in Captain Thomas Woolford’s detachment of the 48th Maryland militia.* Steward decided to engage the tender with a small group of fellow local militiamen. After a two-hour musket barrage, the British crew surrendered.

Following this action, Stewart submitted a petition for prize money to Congress, and on April 29, 1816, he and his comrades were awarded $1,800. This last engagement of the war in Maryland has come to be known as the Battle of the Ice Mound, named after the mound of ice used by Stewart’s men to defend themselves during the engagement. The carronade from the tender was taken as a trophy and nicknamed Becky Phipps, for the tender’s captured black cook, Becky, and the commander, Lieutenant Phibbs. The cook’s name was actually Becca, and the commander’s name was Phibbs. Over time, Becca Phibbs became corrupted to Becky Phipps. It seems strange that a cannon would have been named after a British lieutenant and a black cook, but perhaps there is more to this story than we know.

The carronade became a war memorial and was used in American political celebrations. On the night of Tuesday, November 12, 1912, news was received on Taylors Island that Woodrow Wilson had been elected president of the United States. The jubilation was described as follows:

[A] number of enthusiastic Democrats decided to press it [the carronade] into service. It was hastily swapped out and its touch hole cleaned, and it was loaded and touched off. Again & again it was fired off, the charges of powder increasing each time. When it was loaded for the fourth time with two pounds of powder, it was filled up with marsh turf and oyster shells, and these rammed in until the old gun was loaded clear to the muzzle. Then it was touched off. The cannon rose in the air and turned a dozen somersaults, and parts of it went shooting off in every direction. One piece weighing about 200 pounds went sailing off and has not since been seen. The remainder of the old gun was found, but it is nothing more than scrap iron. It will never be fired again.¹⁰

In 1950, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and other citizens collected what remained of the exploded carronade, assembled what they could and had the gun mounted at its present site. On July 9, 1961, a DAR marker was installed, but interestingly, it has the date of the capture of the tender as 1814, not 1815. On May 23, 1999, a year after a new Taylors Island Bridge was completed, the Maryland State Highway Department, in cooperation with the Grace Foundation of Taylors Island, re-dedicated the site by remounting the cannon, constructing a pavilion over the gun and installing a Maryland Historic Roadside Marker with the correct date of capture. The Becky Phipps tale is true, but the names have become changed over time.

Did Pewter Spoons Help Capture a British Vessel?

In 1909, a newspaper reported that when the Dorchester County militia* attacked a “small fleet” that entered the Little Choptank River, the militia melted pewter spoons to make bullets since they were short on lead balls for their muskets. The article credits Colonel John C. Jones (1755–1848) as the leader of the militia band that captured one of the enemy vessels. Following is an extract from that article:

The British had entered the Chesapeake and were terrorizing the people along the bay and some of its tributaries. One small fleet, consisting of three transports, two of which were loaded with supplies for troops, and the third with troops, entered the Little Choptank River for safety during a storm. While being at anchor, the weather suddenly became intensely cold…and the wind banked ice on the shore, the ice flows being 8 to 10 feet high. Colonel Jones, whose plantation was on the river not far from the marooned vessels, took the situation in hand promptly. He sent his colored servants in all directions and summoned the people from the country within several miles.

About 40 [illegible] farmers and fishermen had gathered by nightfall with their old ducking and squirrel guns and ammunition, the bullets had been molded from pewter spoons. Colonel Jones led his men to the shore and when the [British] soldiers and sailors began to show themselves on deck of the transports the next morning, firing again from the ice banks…the British held out only about 36 hours, when a white flag was raised.¹¹

This story was brought to light upon the death of Colonel Jones’s granddaughter, Miss Georgiana Fisher, in 1909. After having read the Becky-Phipps cannon entry above, this story should sound familiar because it is a later version of the Battle of the Ice Mound that took place on February 7, 1815. Did the militia really melt pewter spoons to make bullets for the engagement? Based on the misinformation in the article, it is doubtful, but it does give a nice twist to the Battle of the Ice Mound story.

Here are the problems. It was not a small fleet that got stranded in the ice; it was only a small tender.* The biggest concern is that there is no record of a John C. Jones having played any role in this action. His 1848 obituary states, “The deceased served his country with distinction as lieutenant in the ‘Old Maryland line’ in the war of the Revolution.”¹² Having been born in 1755, he would have been a young man during the American Revolution. There was a John Jones who served as lieutenant colonel in the Dorchester County 48^th Regiment, who would have been sixty years old at the time of the action, but none of the records pertaining to those present at the Battle of the Ice Mound includes a John Jones.¹³

It must be inferred that over time, the story became entangled between what Jones did in the American Revolutionary War and what he did in the War of 1812. It is doubtful that a sixty-year-old officer hid behind an ice mound to lead the local militia on a terribly cold day in February. All the accounts clearly indicate that Joseph Stewart of James Island organized and led the attack. Because of these inconsistencies, it is believed that the pewter spoon tale was subsequently added to the story to embellish it, but this cannot be verified.

KENT COUNTY

Captain Parker and His Whiskey-Filled Coffin

In the aftermath of the Battle of Caulks Field, which took place during a full moon early in the morning of August 31, 1814, discussion centered on who fired the fatal shot that killed Captain Sir Peter Parker, commander of the British force. On October 18, 1902, a granite monument was erected to commemorate the battlefield. At that time, the Baltimore Sun reported, “The claim is made for Henry Urie that he killed Sir Peter Parker.” Urie is said to have pointed out an officer wearing white pantaloons, at which point he declared, “I’m going to shoot him.”¹⁴ The story continues:

This heroic leader was shot in the leg by Henry Urie, a Rock Haller [from nearby Rock Hall], so we were told by Justice Robert Calder [in 1902], whose father fought at Caulk’s Field. Urie was strategically located, Justice Calder said, on the over hanging ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Maryland
• Virginia
• Washington, D.C.
• Endnotes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• About the Authors