Capt. Benjamin Swett

Biography

In 1657 Benjamin Swett brought a boy across the river at Haverhill in Robert Hazeldine’s canoe, helped him onto a horse, and went away with him. Stephen Dow’s mother wanted her son back from the household in which his father had placed him. Swett acted on her behalf. The man claiming Stephen’s service took Swett to court, and the court ordered the boy returned. Benjamin had contested another man’s authority over a dependent child and acted before the dispute had been settled.¹

From Norfolk to Newbury

Benjamin was baptized on May 12, 1624, at Wymondham, an inland town in Norfolk in eastern England. His parents were John Swett and Phebe Benton, who had married at nearby New Buckenham on April 24, 1604. John served as a local inspector of leather in New Buckenham, an occupation he later resumed in Massachusetts. Benjamin grew up among several siblings, including Stephen and Joseph, who would also appear beside him in Newbury’s affairs.²

John had settled at Newbury by 1642. Benjamin probably accompanied the family to this Massachusetts Bay town near the mouth of the Merrimack River. By June 1648 he had married Hester Weare, daughter of Nathaniel Weare, and their first child, also Hester, had been born. More children followed: Sarah, Mary, a second Mary, Benjamin, Joseph, and Moses during their Newbury years. The first Mary apparently died before the second was born in 1654. Seven births over thirteen years brought repeated demands of childbirth, care, and provision into the household.³

On December 7, 1648, his brother Stephen found Thomas Smith, a boy of about twelve, dead in a pit on Newbury’s common. Benjamin sat on the jury called to investigate. After hearing witnesses who had seen the boy on his way to school and at the pit, the jurors concluded that he had fallen in accidentally.⁴

Benjamin acquired public responsibilities while the family was growing. He was admitted a freeman on September 24, 1650, gaining a recognized place among the colony’s political members. On October 14, 1651, the General Court confirmed his election as ensign, a junior officer in Newbury’s militia company. The town had held a new election because its previous choice had been unclear. Local selection and colonial approval both mattered to his appointment.⁵

His property dealings included both land and credit secured on a crop. On May 22, 1650, Henry Dove acknowledged owing Benjamin and Robert Long sixty bushels of merchantable wheat, due at their houses by October 19. Dove pledged the land he rented from Mr. Spencer and the corn growing on it, retaining the right to work and harvest it until payment fell due. In June 1651 Benjamin bought ten acres of Newbury upland from John Spenser and conveyed the same parcel to Edmond Moores three days later.⁶

The courts called on him as a juror, witness, and appraiser, but he also appeared as a defendant. At Hampton on October 4, 1653, Nathaniel Winsley brought a debt claim against him for a small cask of sack, a wine, valued at about £3. The court took no action on the claim. Benjamin’s dealings also included helping to value the estate of Newbury minister James Noyes in 1656 and a disputed animal in 1657: practical judgments about property were part of his public work.⁷

In 1653 the government punished Robert Pike of Salisbury for criticizing restrictions on preaching. Pike lost his political rights and was fined. Benjamin and his brothers Stephen and Joseph joined other Newbury residents in petitioning for relief. When commissioners demanded an explanation, Benjamin defended a free subject’s liberty to petition on behalf of a respected person. He did not withdraw his position. On November 1, 1654, the General Court ordered him and several other petitioners summoned, each under a £10 bond to answer for the alleged offense. The government treated their petition as a challenge to its judgment; Benjamin treated petitioning as a legitimate act.⁸

Around 1655 Benjamin and his brother-in-law Nathaniel Weare took a seven-year lease of John Woodbridge’s Newbury farm. They lived there and worked the land until about 1661 or 1662. A spring used as a watering place lay inside the farm’s fence, along with a small strip claimed by people asserting rights through the neighboring Pike property. The tenants used both. The partnership thus involved more than raising crops: access to water and the practical limits of the land they occupied could themselves become disputed property.⁹

Claims over children, and plans for land

Stephen Dow’s case brought several kinds of household authority into conflict. His father, Thomas Dow, had placed him with Thomas Davis of Haverhill, farther up the Merrimack from Newbury. Witnesses described an arrangement lasting until Stephen was eighteen, in which Davis would maintain him and teach him reading, writing, and stone masonry. Other testimony said the father had declined to bind the boy formally because Davis was too occupied with other work to teach him the trade. By the time of the dispute, Thomas Dow was dead and his widow, Phebe, wanted Stephen with her.¹

Benjamin demanded that Davis establish his right to retain Stephen or release him to his mother. Davis maintained that a visit to Swett’s household had been permitted, not a permanent departure from his service. Robert Hazeldine saw Benjamin ferry Stephen across the river at Haverhill in Hazeldine’s canoe and help him onto a horse. Phebe testified that Stephen had returned to her and wished to stay, but that Davis pulled him away violently. The question was not simply where the boy preferred to live: it was whether his father’s arrangement gave Davis an enforceable claim to his work and upbringing.¹

Several witnesses defended Davis’s household, describing adequate food, warm clothing, and instruction from his wife. One said Benjamin had refused an offer to submit the dispute to impartial arbitrators. At the Ipswich court session beginning March 31, 1657, Davis prevailed: Stephen was ordered returned. Davis also acknowledged his obligation to teach the boy to read and write and to train him as a stone mason according to his capacity and the opportunities of the place. The proceeding recorded Davis’s obligations while upholding his claim to Stephen’s service.¹

Benjamin’s own household responsibilities extended to his widowed mother, Phebe. On April 14, 1658, he and Hester sold John Woolcutt a Newbury house with seven acres of arable land, an orchard, barn, garden, and cow yards, together with six acres of marsh or meadow, for £80. Woolcutt already occupied the property. The sale reserved Phebe’s right to live in the bakehouse and come and go freely for four years. If she chose to leave sooner, Woolcutt could take it over immediately; otherwise his unrestricted possession would begin when the term expired. The provision protected a place for her while allowing Benjamin and Hester to dispose of the larger property.¹⁰

In February 1658/9 Benjamin probably joined another petition, this time concerning one of his own children. A group of inhabitants asked the Ipswich authorities to investigate John Godfrey, whom they suspected of causing extraordinary losses and afflictions after disagreements with them. Benjamin Swet was named in connection with his child. The petition sought official inquiry into what the families regarded as unnatural harm.¹¹

Meanwhile Benjamin and Nathaniel Weare joined a proposal to establish a new English town at Pennacook, inland on the upper Merrimack in the vicinity of present-day Concord, New Hampshire. The petitioners sought a tract twelve miles on each side, three years to decide whether to proceed, and seven years free of public charges if they settled. On May 18, 1659, a committee of the General Court recommended a smaller grant, eight miles on each side—sixty-four square miles. The accepted conditions required a decision by October 1660 and the settlement of twenty families within two years thereafter. Those conditions were not fulfilled, and the grant was forfeited. Benjamin’s participation remained an unsuccessful settlement venture.¹²

In May 1660 he traveled to Nantucket, the island south of Cape Cod, where he and Weare were at Thomas Macy’s house during negotiations over an Indigenous girl’s service. An Indigenous intermediary called Mr. Harry asked John Bishop whether he wanted a girl to live with him. Bishop wanted ten years. Benjamin and Weare later testified that, after repeated consultation among the Indigenous participants, the girl, Mall, agreed to five years, with another five only if she wished to remain.¹³

That account of consent was contested. Mall subsequently came into the care of John Hathorne at Lynn, on the Massachusetts coast northeast of Boston, after being found on the road toward Boston. Hathorne resisted Bishop’s attempt to recover her. Speaking on Mall’s behalf, he challenged the interpreter’s accuracy and Harry’s authority, described her as about sixteen, and said her mother had neither known of nor consented to the arrangement. Mall herself denied agreeing to it. Benjamin and Weare swore their testimony at Ipswich on September 25, 1660; the court ordered Mall returned to Bishop. In Stephen Dow’s case Benjamin had challenged a household’s claim to a child. In Mall’s, his testimony supported the account on which a contested claim to service rested.¹³

Hampton

Around 1662 or 1663 Benjamin and Hester moved north from Newbury to Hampton, settling in the part of the town now called Hampton Falls. Hampton lay on the New Hampshire coast but was then governed within Massachusetts Bay’s old Norfolk County. Four more children were born there: Hannah in 1664, Elizabeth in 1667, John in 1670, and Stephen in 1673. Across the two towns, Hester had borne eleven recorded children over twenty-five years. They were not all children living together at one time; the eldest daughter married in 1668, five years before Stephen’s birth.¹⁴

Benjamin’s property included rights in Hampton’s common pasture. By 1670 he had conveyed to Samuel Tilton, a Hampton carpenter, a share of the cow common previously purchased from Richard Swaine. He reserved his interest in two shares if land within the town’s ring of commonage should later be divided. A common share was a right in collectively used land, and reserving a future division kept a property interest beyond the immediate sale.¹⁵

His military title had advanced to lieutenant by April 12, 1664, when he served as foreman of a trial jury at Salisbury. That October he sat on the grand jury at Hampton, which considered accusations for prosecution. He also served as a Hampton selectman in 1666, 1670, and 1675–1676, helping to conduct the town’s affairs. These duties placed him repeatedly among neighbors deciding questions of property, conduct, and local government.¹⁶

The enforcement of judgments could draw on the same practical knowledge. In January 1670/1 Benjamin and John Partridge appraised land tendered by Henry Greenland in proceedings involving Walter Barefoot’s debt to Harlackendine Symonds. Later that year, a lawsuit involving Benjamin, Abraham Drake, and Henry Green against Barefoot and Greenland produced an October 10 order to seize Barefoot’s property at Kittery Point, across the Piscataqua River from Great Island, now New Castle, and two thousand feet of Greenland’s pine boards. The court’s reach extended across the coastal settlements, turning claims into orders against land and goods.¹⁷

Benjamin also participated in a remonstrance dated May 31, 1671, objecting to the General Court’s appointment of Robert Pike as sergeant-major of the county. This time Pike benefited from the government’s choice. The objection concerned who should choose the military officer: the people or the colonial court. Benjamin’s earlier defense of Pike and his later opposition to the appointment both involved the limits of authority.¹⁸

The eastern war

War brought more immediate responsibilities. In 1675 a man known as Goodman Robinson was killed while traveling from Exeter toward Hampton; his son escaped and reached Hampton with the news. The next day Lieutenant Swett led a dozen townsmen into the woods to search for Robinson and found his body. The danger lay on the approaches to Benjamin’s own community.¹⁹

That winter he helped raise and conduct recruits for the Narragansett campaign, directed against the Narragansett people in what is now Rhode Island. He was probably attached to Captain Joseph Gardiner’s company during the campaign that culminated in the attack on the fortified Narragansett settlement on December 19, 1675, commonly called the Great Swamp Fight. By January 17, 1675/6 he was organizing men for the continuing campaign. Orders sent recruits under him and directed Captain Daniel Fisher at Dedham, southwest of Boston, to arrange their movement onward. On February 1 the council authorized an allowance of £3 for him.²⁰

King Philip’s War, named for the Wampanoag leader Metacom whom the English called Philip, continued in the eastern settlements after the main fighting in southern New England had subsided. Along the coast of present-day Maine, communities depended on fortified houses and garrisons while attacks disrupted farms and travel. Swett commanded the garrison at Wells, northeast of Hampton, in the spring of 1677. On April 29 he sent eleven soldiers out after an Indigenous man appeared nearby. The party encountered an ambush: two soldiers were killed and a third mortally wounded. Swett responded by sending help. The relief force reportedly shot five or six opponents before they withdrew. A small apparent opportunity outside the garrison had exposed his men to a prepared attack.²¹

The eastern war involved distinct Indigenous communities and competing alliances. Men from Christian Indigenous communities in Massachusetts served with the English, including men from Natick, west of Boston, and the Wamesit community of the Merrimack valley. Their opponents included forces associated with Squando, a leader in the Saco and Androscoggin region. The English settlements’ desire for protection existed alongside Indigenous grievances over disarmament, imprisonment, broken agreements, and interference with subsistence and trade. These divisions would shape the expedition Swett was about to command.²²

Four Hampton men were killed on June 13, 1677. Later that month Massachusetts commissioned Swett as captain of English and Indigenous forces sent east, with authority over the expedition’s vessels and crews. His instructions, issued at Charlestown on June 22, directed him to Black Point, a coastal settlement in present-day Scarborough, Maine. He was to establish the opposing forces’ position, consult Major Thomas Clarke and people familiar with local conditions, and attack if an opportunity justified it. Otherwise he was to work southward behind the settlements of Winter Harbor, Wells, and York toward the Piscataqua, replacing garrison soldiers and distributing troops where they were needed.²³

Lieutenant James Richardson had separate orders for a force including Indigenous allies to scout between the Merrimack and Piscataqua rivers. His instructions offered twenty shillings for an enemy scalp and forty for a prisoner. The expedition combined the relief of threatened settlements with scouting and orders that rewarded taking captives and killing opponents.²⁴

Before Benjamin departed, he spoke to Seaborn Cotton and Anthony Stanyan about Hester’s future. He wanted her to have enough to maintain herself comfortably and to help her children without depending on them for her own support. At home, those children ranged from a married daughter to Stephen, still only three.²⁵

Black Point and the household afterward

Swett’s expedition reached Black Point by sea on June 28, 1677. It included men with little preparation for an extended campaign. That very day, Concord’s militia officers petitioned for the return of four young men who had been sent out for a short scouting duty and then carried on toward Black Point; the officers considered them unfit for the service now expected of them.²⁶

On the morning of June 29, scouts reported opposing fighters nearby. Swett advanced with a force of roughly ninety to one hundred English and Indigenous soldiers, including local men. His opponents drew the advancing force into an attack, and its formation broke under fire. Richardson was killed. Swett tried to keep his men together and bring away wounded and dead soldiers as the withdrawal deteriorated. Repeatedly wounded himself, he was killed near the garrison. Dozens of English soldiers and Indigenous allies died with the two commanders.²⁷

The defeat exposed the danger of advancing hastily with inexperienced troops. Swett’s efforts during the retreat could not repair the collapse of his force. The fighting also continued amid attempts at negotiation. A message from Moxes and other Kennebec leaders, received in Boston on July 1, sought peace and renewed trade, complained of English violations of agreements, and distanced its authors from the Androscoggin fighters. They accused Squando of seeking captives to strengthen his own position in negotiations. The communities facing the English were pursuing different aims in the aftermath of the fighting at Black Point.²⁸

Hester received authority to administer Benjamin’s estate on October 9, 1677. Its inventory valued the property at £558 19s., an assessment of the estate rather than a sum of ready money. On March 29, 1678, Cotton and Stanyan gave sworn testimony about Benjamin’s wishes for her support. The family settlement followed on April 9.²⁹

The eldest son, Benjamin, accepted land and a young horse as his double portion—the larger share allotted to him as eldest son. Eight other children were assigned £30 each, payable as they came of age in goods at inventory valuation or corn at the prevailing country price. The settlement therefore provided for nine children as beneficiaries. The estate was to remain in Hester’s hands for her and the children, with responsibility for paying their portions; what remained at her death after those payments was to be at her disposal.³⁰

Hester married Stephen Greenleaf on March 31, 1679, about twenty-one months after Benjamin’s death. She entered that marriage with an estate settlement that joined provision for herself to obligations toward her children: land and a horse for the eldest son, eight promised portions, and the work of administering what Benjamin had left.³¹