The Patriots of Connecticut

Today is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, on 4 July 1776. But the War of Independence, or the Revolutionary War, is generally held to have started fifteen months earlier, in Lexington, Massachusetts, when a British task force sent to seize rebel arms and ammunition was thoroughly routed by local militiamen. The alarm went out all over New England, and all the neighbouring colonies sent armed troops to besiege the British in Boston.

This included the town of Coventry in Connecticut, whose contribution is recorded in The Record of Connecticut Men in the Military and Naval Service during the War of the Revolution, 1775-1783, edited by Henry P. Johnston and published in 1889. The second name listed of those who volunteered from Coventry is Joseph Talcott. He was my 5x great-grandfather.

When I went to visit his grave in December 2023, a local historian had decorated it with an American flag in commemoration of his war service (which seems to have been brief).

His epitaph says,

This Monument is erected
in memory of Cap. Joſeph
Talcott, who was caſually
Drowned in the Proud Wa-
ters of Scungamug River:
on the 10th Day of June 1789
in ye 62nd Year of his Age.

For man alſo knoweth not his
time, as the fiſhes that are taken in
an evil net, and as the bird that
are caught in the ſnare: ſo are 
the ſons of men ſnared in an
evil time, when it falleth sudden-
ly upon them.

The memory of ye juſt is Bleſsed.

Joseph would have been 48 when he took up arms against the British in 1775; not a young man for a revolutionary moment. (The phrase “casually drowned in the proud waters” is intriguing as well.

He had a son and two living daughters in 1775. His older daughter Eunice, born in 1759 in nearby Hebron, certainly already knew her future husband David Hibbard, also born in Hebron four years earlier in 1755. In 1777 he was the drummer boy for Latimer’s Regiment, which briefly reinforced the Continental Army during the Saratoga campaign.

David Hibbard got religion and moved to Vermont with Eunice Talcott, though it is not clear in which order, and they married there in 1779. He lived to the age of 89 and was a deacon of the Congregational Church. They were my 4x great-grandparents, and some day I hope to go and see where they lived and died, at the upper end of the Connecticut River.

The Loyalists of Maryland

The Hibbards were the ancestors of my grandmother’s Massachusetts-born father, Henry Deming Hibbard. Her mother’s father, Samuel Morris Wickersham, was from Pennsylvania Quaker stock, and his grandparents seem to have sat out the war, possibly for religious reasons.

On the other hand her mother’s mother, born Frances Wyatt Belt, was from an elite family in Maryland. (See my 2024 trip there.) Maryland was a late convert to independence, and changed its instructions to its delegates to the Continental Congress at almost the last possible moment at the end of June 1776, enabling the unanimous adoption of the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago today.

One of Frances’ great-grandfathers (so my 5x great-grandfather) was John Beale Bordley, the owner of half of Wye Island, who saw which way the wind was blowing, freed his slaves and moved to Philadelphia. Another of her great-grandfathers, Walter Dulany was also a senior figure in the colonial administration, who died in 1773 just before the war started. His son of the same name was a Loyalist officer during the war, and consequently the Dulanys’ land was all confiscated.

Walter junior and his sisters, including my 5x great-grandmother Catherine, got some of the land back eventually, and Walter sold the family home in Annapolis to the American government; that property is now the site of the U.S. Naval Academy. The Revolution was not kind to those who ended up on the wrong side; revolutions rarely are.

The Dulany patriarch, my 6x great-grandfather Daniel Dulany the Elder, had moved to Maryland from what is now County Laois in Ireland in 1703. I found his grave outside St Anne’s Church in Annapolis in 2024.

The Wild Goose

My other three grandparents were all Irish, and their ancestors must have been indirectly affected by the War of Independence as the major geopolitical event of the era. When F and I went looking for family history in the Church of Ireland graveyard at Aghadowey near Coleraine in 2025, we found none of the McIlroys that we were looking for, but a lot of gravestones erected in memory of locals who had emigrated to the newly independent USA and died there – mostly in Philadelphia.

We do have one hint of direct involvement. An earlier Nicholas Whyte, born in about 1755, my 4x great-uncle (my 3x great-grandfather’s younger brother) joined the Knights of Malta in 1774, presumably to take him out of the lines of inheritance under the Penal Laws. We have a portrait of a young man in a red uniform, wearing a Maltese Cross, which is labelled as being of a different relative, but I think it must be him. (Sorry; I don’t have a copy to hand.)

But the list of officers of Dillon’s Regiment, an Irish battalion who fought as part of the French army on the American side of the Revolutionary War, includes a rather interesting name:

“Le Chevalier WYHTE SEISLIP (Nicolas)” is very suggestive of my relative, who could be described as a Knight / Chevalier thanks to his Maltese connection, and whose father was born in Leixlip, easily mis-transcribed as “Seislip” by a French scribe who also found it difficult to spell “Whyte” correctly.

Unfortunately I have no record of the end of this earlier Nicholas Whyte’s life. Dillon’s Regiment mainly fought in the Caribbean theatre of the war (which is generally forgotten today), but did participate in the unsuccessful siege of Savannah, Georgia, in 1779. Perhaps he settled in the newly independent United States, or even in France where there were plenty of Whyte relatives – indeed the secretary of state of the French navy during the war of independence, Antoine de Sartines, was the son of a Whyte cousin. An argument from absence is that Nicholas is not mentioned in his older brother’s 1814 will, which suggests that he had died without children by then; but that’s far from conclusive.

A lot of commentators are quite reasonably using today to reflect on the current (depressing) state of American politics. But I just wanted here to think about the past, and to make the point that the texture of history is more instructive and indeed exciting than simple myths about good guys and bad guys.