Tales of My Father's

by Rev. Jesse Halsey

Better even than the reading was the story evening hour. 'Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere' was no more attractive (except for versification) than were a dozen oft repeated tales of my Father's.

The favorite one was of how our great grandfather (his name was Jesse) on hearing of the Battle of Lexington, took his one horse farm wagon, pulled out the king bolt and left the rear wheels and body behind when he hitched his horse to the tow front wheels on which he had rigged a seat. On this, he and and his brother sat perched while they drove to Sag Harbor. They joined others and in a whale boat rowed to New London and reached Boston in time for the Battle of Bunker Hill. Great grandfather served with Washington with the rank of Captain until Monmouth where he was wounded near Molly Pitcher's well. He was in the Valley Forge winter.

His orchard and the ruins of his house could be seen when I was a boy. Two miles from home we passed them as we drove to our most remote woodland at Camp's pond. At that pond in his time, this same great grandfather had shot deer with his army muzzle loader. Father's father had had the gun remade from a flint-lock and the barrel shortened by a foot. I have the old gun still; it is over six feet long even now.

This old veteran kept up the good fight long after the war. He used a crutch but tended his farm. One day he got into an argument with a Tory neighbor who said that never could they make a woolen cloth as good in the States as in the old Country. The argument grew hot, the crippled captain knocked the Tory down with his crutch and sat on him till noon when his son came home from the field and took him off!

This great grandfather had a brother--Henry Elias. 'Twas he who shared the bumpy ride on the springless two wheel improvisation. He--Henry Elias--had been a whaling captain and was given privateering papers during the war. When Benedict Arnold, having turned traitor, came with a British force to burn New London, Captian 'Lias was given charge of the artillery to defend the town. The fort in the harbor was abandoned but they fortified the east bank of the Thames-Groton heights. Charles Carleton Coffin in his story of the Revolution tells how Captain Halsey stood by an eighteen-pounder jammed to the muzzle with canister and old chain links. As the British came up the hill he waited until (like General Warren) he could see the whites of their eyes, then he fired his gun. Twenty fell.

Can you imagine the thrill that would give a twelve year old? I suppose this explains why I have never succeeded in becoming a pacifist. Captain 'Lias was killed at Groton Heights and his name is on the monument. When the British general came into the fort to receive the surrender, he called, 'Who commands here?' Colonel Ledyard, the senior American, answered, 'I did not but do now,' and handed his sword to the Britisher, hilt foremost. The British officer grasped the handle and rammed the blade into the vitals of the American. The wounded Americans were loaded and tied onto gun carriages and sent rolling down the hill to the river. It was known to many generations as the Massacre of Fort Griswold and in token thereof a well worn shred of a pamphlet from which my father read to me, I have among my possessions. I can believe tales. Only after twenty years when I found myself in a Scottish University, did I begin to abate my hatred of the British.

[Ed note via Dr. Samuel Warr: During WWII, Rev. Jesse Halsey headed the Bundles for Britain, long before the USA entered the war.]