Posts by DonHagist:
John Tom, 21st and 23rd Regiments, escapes and absconds
December 13th, 2013By Don Haguist.
John Tom was an Irish blacksmith born in 1757 who joined the British army as a teenager. By June of 1775, he was a private soldier in the 21st Regiment of Foot, the Royal North British Fusiliers. This was one of the regiments sent to Quebec in 1776, initally to relieve Canada from the threat of rebel takeover and then to go on the offensive towards Lake Champlain. The 21st participated in the 1777 campaign that started with a flourish, driving American forces from the region of Lake Champlain, seizing Fort Ticonderoga, and pressing towards Albany. The effort floundered in October at Saratoga, and the army including private John Tom of the 21st Regiemnt became prisoners of war.
The prisoners were sent first to barracks outside of Boston, and the following summer father inland to Rutland. Somewhere along the line John Tom absconded; the circumstances of his escape aren’t known, nor exactly where he had been held, but he was advertised in a Connecticut newspaper in June 1778:
Run away the 26th of May, inst. one John Tom an Irishman belonging to the 21st British regiment, taken at the Northward in September last by trade a Blacksmith, had on when he went away a short blanket coat striped vest tow cloth trowsers, about 5 feet 6 inches high, light complexion 21 years of age fore teeth rotten. Whoever will take up said runaway, and secure him in any goal or return him to the subscriber, shall have 5 dollars reward and all necessary charges paid, by Ez’l Williams Dep. Commiss. Prisoners.
[Connecticut Courant, 9 June 1778]
However he managed to escape, it was effective: before the end of the June he was already in New York and had joined a new regiment, the 23rd Regiment of Foot, or Royal Welch Fusiliers.
Many British soldiers made daring escapes, risking life and limb to make their way through hostile territory and rejoin their comrades, either finding the regiment they’d originally belonged to or joining one in the place where they found safety. After putting so much at risk, we can only wonder why some of these men didn’t stay. After only fifteen months in his new regiment, John Tom deserted from the British army, never to return. He and another man with whom he absconded gave a brief intelligence report to an American officer:
Two deserters from the Welsh Fusileers, which they left last Thursday was a week are arrived but give little information except that the recruits which arrived for theirs & the 7th regiment, which lay together did not exceed one hundred & ten men for the two several whereof were sick many of them old and pressed men. Every thing had been moved out of Fort Independance, the platforms taken up but the works not destroyed. The two regiments, which lay at Spiking Devill Hill; with the Yagers in front at Courtlands house had orders to move within their new lines. Every hill on York island is fortifyed as strong as possible.
The information they gave about recruits was reasonably accurate at least as to numbers: the 7th Regiment had just received 55 recruits, and the 23rd had received 49. Illness had broken out among the some 1300 recruits that had just arrived for the army, and by this stage of the war some recruits were indeed in 30s and early 40s. But only 13of the recruits for the 7th and 23rd were “pressed men”, all of them put into the 23rd Regiment.
It is unfortunate that John Tom gave no reason for abandoning the army he’d worked so hard to rejoin only a year before.
William Baylis, 53rd Regiment, escapes the butchers
August 20th, 2013By Don Hagist.
The early military career of William Baylis, a laborer from Anvill in Staffordshire, is not known. Born in 1741, he joined the army at a young age in 1755 and apparently was discharged again twenty years later; we’ve found no record of where he served.
Like many career soldiers, after being discharged he enlisted in the army once again, this time joining the 53rd Regiment of Foot. The 53rd was in Ireland at the time, but Baylis may have enlisted with a recruiting party somewhere else in Great Britain. He joined his new regiment in Dublin on 21 April 1775 and probably expected a routine career given the length of time he’d already served.
Soldiers in Ireland, however, faced an imminent danger. Bands of ruffians attacked lone soldiers in the night, savagely cutting their achillies tendons with razors or cleavers in order to cripple the hapless soldiers. The practice was called houghing (pronounced “hocking”), a reference to the joint in an animal’s leg corresponding to the human ankle; many of the attackers were Dublin butchers who worked in Ormonde Market. Modern scholars debate the motivation of these attacks, whether they were explicit responses to British treatment of the Irish, anti-military statements related to the American war, or simply extensions of the turf wars that plagued 18th century Ireland. For whatever reason, many unsuspecting soldiers were maimed between 1772 and 1788, primarily in Dublin in 1774, 1775 and 1776. The widespread attacks even even spawned a few instances of self-inflicted wounds by soldiers hoping to avoid wartime deployment and instead obtain a pension.
At about 9PM on 28 November 1775, William Baylis was making his way along the dark street towards Gallows Green in downtown Cork on his way home to the barracks where his regiment was quartered. According to a local newspaper,
On Saturday night last about nine o’clock, William Baylis, private soldier in the 53d regiment, was inhumanly assaulted by some bloody villains unknown, who came behind him and knocked him down, as he was coming peaceably to his barracks, and cut him desperately in two places on the left leg, with an intention to hough him, but providentially the tendent achilles was missed. This horrid action was committed in the street leading to Gallows green, by ruffians supposed to be butchers, who immediately after made off into some of the cabbins in that street.
Although some houghers were caught and punished severely, usually executed, there is no evidence that these attackers ever answered for their crime. Baylis was fortunate that his assailants missed their mark. Not only was he not crippled, he recovered fully and was able to embark with the 53rd Regiment when it sailed for Quebec early the following year. The veteran soldier was fit enough to be transferred into the regiment’s grenadier company in early 1777. With this company he served in the grenadier battalion of Burgoyne’s army on the 1777 campaign towards Albany; the grenadiers were often engaged in heavy fighting.
By the end of the campaign Baylis had become a prisoner of war, but it is not clear whether he was among the soldiers surrendered at Saratoga or was taken at some other time. Regardless, he spent over four years as a prisoner of war before finally being repatriated in 1782. The extensive hardships he’d endured made him a prime candidate to be discharged when hostilities ended, but he did not choose that option. William Baylis remained in the ranks of the 53rd Regiment until June 1790 when he was finally discharged at the age of 49, having served 34 years and three months as a British soldier and by this time suffering from “chronic Rheumatism.” He was granted the pension that he’d narrowly avoided receiving fifteen years earlier.
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