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On March 8, 1775,
farmer Thomas Ditson, Jr., a 33-year-old husband and father to 5 children,
went from Billerica to Boston to sell some vegetables and to purchase a
gun. Around this time, it was
common knowledge among the British soldiers stationed in Boston that some
of the colonists were buying guns in anticipation of a possible war with
Britain for their independence from British rule.
The British soldiers were routinely being harassed by colonists
with taunts and rock-throwing for their hatred of British rule.
To the colonists, the British soldiers represented the King’s
oppression and so they willingly made those soldiers’ lives miserable.
With that knowledge, it is easily understandable as to why the British
soldiers in Boston would regard the colonists with suspicion when it came
to them buying any kind of arms. Thomas
Ditson probably wasn’t out to supply himself with ammunition for any
kind of war. He just wanted
to sell his vegetables and buy a gun possibly for hunting purposes only. However, the British
soldiers in Boston felt the need to make an example in order to frighten
the colonists from any thought of breaking from British rule.
So they looked for someone such as Thomas Ditson who was interested
in buying a gun. Col. Nesbit
of the King’s army asked one of his soldiers to find a colonist to sell
his musket to with the probable hope of using this colonist to place false
accusations of bribing a soldier to desert the British army and join the
rebel colonist cause. The soldier agreed to Col. Nesbit’s request and came upon
Thomas Ditson as he was looking to buy a gun. The soldier offered his
musket for sale to Thomas Ditson for 5 dollars.
Thomas was interested and followed the soldier to his quarters so
he could buy the musket. That’s when the
trouble began. As the soldier pretended to sell his musket to Thomas Ditson,
he suddenly let out a cry that there was a rebel trying to purchase a
king’s arm from a king’s soldier and that he was also trying to tempt
this very same soldier to desert and join the colonists’ rebel cause!
One can only imagine what was going through the mind of Thomas
Ditson with this false accusation as he was quickly seized by a sergeant
and several officers of the British army and rushed to the barracks!
There he was tarred and feathered from head to foot, placed in a
cart, and paraded through the streets of Boston surrounded by a party of
officers and Col. Nesbit’s soldiers of the 47th regiment. The
British soldiers sang a sarcastic rendition of Yankee Doodle to humiliate
him and frighten any colonists thinking of rebelling against their mother
country. Thomas Ditson
wasn’t released from his humiliation until they reached the Liberty Tree
in Boston. There the British
let him go to deal with his tarred and feathered body.
I can only imagine the pain of trying to remove tar and feathers
from your body – especially after it’s been dried. Billerica selectmen
upon hearing of the events from Boston demanded an appropriate and harsh
response from the British general Gage, to his men who were involved in
the incident – “Or else,” the Billerica selectmen warned, "we
will use a different style from that of petition and complaint.”
General Gage’s reply towards the incident proved unsatisfactory
to the Billericans. To add
more insult, the British soldiers commemorated the event with new words to
the song of Yankee Doodle: “Yankee
Doodle came to town to buy a firelock. Needless to say, this
wasn’t the response the Billericans were hoping for.
It infuriated them – infuriated them so much so that when talk of
the rebellion escalated, numerous Billericans joined in the rebel cause
simply because of the outrage they felt towards the British soldiers for
their mistreatment of one of their townsmen. One of those who
joined in the cause was a neighbor and friend of Thomas Ditson. On April
19, 1775, this neighbor quickly grabbed his musket from above the family
hearth-stone and marched his way to Concord to fight the British. Today
his name is now forever a part of the history of the American Revolution
because of his heroic death in the Battle of Bunker Hill.
His name was Asa Pollard. Thomas Ditson did
manage to procure a musket and with it fought many of the battles in his
country. He survived the
Revolutionary War but seems to have left Billerica around 1784 as his name
is not on the town tax records after that year.
Most likely he had moved to Woburn as some of his family had moved
from Billerica to the town. After the Revolutionary War, Thomas Ditson had
4 more children but lost a son to the sea. -Binny Sources: 2. Beneath
Old Rooftrees by Abram English Brown; pp. 14 – 15, 239 - 246; 1896;
published by Lee and Shepard Publishers 3. Billerica Centennial Celebration 1855 – Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Incorporation of Billerica, Massachusetts; pp. 140 – 141; 1855; published by S. J. Varney of Lowell, MA.
copyright
2005
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