This essay was originally published in the 1955 OCHS Yearbook. Please note that this essay was published over 70 years ago. While still useful for general education, language may be outdated and at times offensive. The Oswego County Historical Society does not stand by the language used in this essay. To view the original document, please visit NYHeritage.org.
Read by Miss Elizabeth Simpson, March 15, 1955
Francis Lewis was the name of a civilian whose story, almost by chance, came to be entangled in the web of the history of Oswego during the French and Indian War of two hundred years ago. Unfortunately, this man left behind him no diary, no auto biography. For a contemporary account of his life and evaluation of his character and services, there is available only a personally and politically hostile estimate given by the Loyalist, Thomas Jones, Justice of the Supreme Court of New York Province, in his “History of New York During the Revolutionary War.” To counterbalance such evidence, one must depend upon the naturally eulogistic biography written much later by Lewis’s great granddaughter, Julia Livingston Delafield, or upon such sketches as that of Robert Waln, Jr., published (1825) in Sanderson’s “Biographies of the Signers to the Declaration of Independence” or that of J. A. Scoville appears in Barrett’s “The Old Merchants of New York City,” both of which have the fervor of ol time Fourth of July oratory in praise of a Signer. Scoville’s is today frankly rated as “vivid but inaccurate.” In a study of the name and fame of Francis Lewis, in an effort to form an impartial judgment, it must constantly be kept in mind that it was the same Mr. Justice Jones who wrote of George Washington:
“He may have had virtues,” and that, like any other Loyalist, even a Supreme Court Justice could be bitterly biased against a Revolutionist. On the other hand, it is obvious that great granddaughter Julia was bent upon painting a portrait not only of a nobly patriotic ancestor but of one on the rather higher level of society. And why not, was she not born a Livingston, was not her maternal grandmother Lewis Gertrude Livingston and grandfather Lewis the Governor of New York State? From such diametrically opposite sources, how can one hope to deduce the truth about an actor two centuries after he played his part on the stage of local and national history?
Early Years and Training
“It is necessary and probably safe to accept the family’s account of Lewis’s early years for no other source is available. Born on March 21, 1713, at Landgraff, Glamorganshire, South Wales, he was the son of a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, while his mother was the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Pettingall of the same faith in Caernarvanshire, North Wales. He was the only child of his parents and was left an orphan when but four or five years old. His foster mother was a maiden aunt, named Llandalling, living in Caernavan. A loyal daughter of Wales, she saw to it that young Francis mastered the Cymraeg language of his country. She later sent him to Scotland where he lived with Highland relatives and learned Gaelic, said to be the earliest and purest Celtic dialect. These linguistic attainments are to be kept in mind for the time is said to have come when his very life depended upon them. When the boy was old enough for a public school he was put under the guardianship of his maternal uncle, the Dean of St. Paul’s of London, who placed him in Westminster School where, we are told, he acquired a good English and Classical education.
“When through school, young Lewis served a clerkship in a London merchant’s countinghouse where he gained a “very judicious knowledge of commerce, becoming familiar with the routine of business and learning the existing state of commerce and its laws, thoroughly trained for a commercial life.” This seems an adequate preparation that might serve well both Lewis and his adopted country. But is is here that Justice Jones begins to add confusion in dates and to belittle the importance of Lewis’s position and experience; his version reads: “Lewis was in 1739 (aged 26) a shopman at fifteen pounds per year in the linen draper’s establishment of one Sydenham Ship way” in Bristol, England.
Business Career in America
“Now follows the great granddaughter’s account of Francis Lewis as an American businessman. “Inheriting a modest patrimony at twenty one he invested it in merchandise and in the spring of 1735 sailed for New York. Being unable to sell all his imported goods in that city, he made Edward Annesley, another Welshman, his partner, left him in charge of their New York interests and went to Philadelphia where he disposed of the remaining stock and immediately opened a business house in each of these cities. Two years later, he returned to New York, established a residence and engaged extensively in navigation and foreign trade.” One of his first shipments to Europe was an entire cargo of wheat, regarded at the time as a novelty and a rash speculation but which proved successful.
“On June 15, 1745, Lewis married his partner’s sister, Elizabeth Annesley, “Heaven’s best gift to Francis Lewis,” in the estimation of their great granddaughter. They had several children of whom only three lived to maturity, Francis, Jr., Ann, and a second son, Morgan, who served in both the Revolution and the War of 1812, attaining the rank of major general. As a civilian he became a member of the New York Assembly, Chief Justice of New York, and in 1804-07 was governor of the state. In his honor the family name is preserved in that of the village of Lewiston and that of Lewis county.”
The shipping business carried Lewis far and wide throughout Europe. Twice he went to Russia visiting all the seaports from St. Petersburg to Archangel. He made other visits to the Orkney and Shetland Islands and to Ireland. Mrs. Delafield considered a most lucrative venture the voyage of one of his ships to North Africa where the Captain rescued the children of an inland chief, two negro boys and their sister, who had been kidnapped and abandoned on an island off the coast. Brought to New York and taken to the Lewis home, they induced their host to fit out a ship and send them back to their family, promising a return cargo to pay him for his trouble and expense. When the ship returned it was laden with gold dust, ivory and other storied riches of Africa. Those are some of the family’s stories of enterprise, adventure and success.
Now listen, if you will, to the conflicting and confusing story as told by Thomas Jones: “Richard Annesley, a bachelor brother of Edward and Elizabeth, was induced by merchants of Bristol to bring Lewis with him to America in 1746 where Lewis worked as his assistant until the death of Annesley. Whereupon Edward, suspecting that Richard’s house keeper, his sister Elizabeth, and Lewis were conspiring to take possession of his entire estate and that Lewis and Elizabeth had married to combine and strengthen their claims, came to America to investigate the situation. The family differences were aired in the public prints for some time and affidavits were taken in preparation for a suit which seems never to have come to trial.” Jones further tells of Lewis establishing a pipe manufactory on Long Island which failed. He gave up the works and compounded with his creditors. His next venture was with Edward Annesley and within about two years this house also became insolvent and everything was made over to the assignees. Lewis obtained credit from merchants in Bristol and established a business of his own in New York. But in 1752 he again went into bankruptcy, compromised with his creditors and obtained a discharge. After this he went as a supercargo up the Baltic Sea. In this way he obtained money to settle in New York where he kept a lodging house. In 1755 his wife managed this business for him while he went as a sutler on the expedition of the British against French held Fort Niagara.
The Oswego Episode
As a matter of fact, Lewis never went beyond Oswego on the way to Niagara; but, according to Jones, he did very well for himself here as a sutler, selling tobacco, pipes, sugar and salt at most exorbitant prices and extorting a great deal of money from the poor soldiery. Of course, Julia Delafield makes no mention of lodging houses, sutlers or extortioners. To her, great grandfather was a contractor. This is her comment: “No doubt, the war interfered with the interests of Lewis as a shipping merchant and induced him to turn his attention in another direction. He obtained a contract for clothing the British army and was in Oswego attending to his business.”
The sutler or contractor—as you may choose—probably had no difficulty in securing transportation to Oswego that summer of 1755 for at last the British had heeded General William Shirley’s plea that old Fort Oswego be repaired and strengthened, that new forts be built, a dock yard be established to build up a British navy on Lake Ontario and reinforcements be hurried to hold the post against French attack and as a base for operations against Niagara and Frontenac. As a consequence, beginning in May convoys were constantly arriving with carpenters, blacksmiths, shipwrights, sailors, armament, food and, as reinforcements, the Jersey Blues led by Col. Peter Schuyler and the recently recruited 50th and 51st Regiments, known as Shirley’s and Pepperell’s under the command of Gen. Shirley. Col. James Mercer arrived August 31st with the artillery contingent. Perhaps civilian Lewis found a place with the latter convoy, for Col. Mercer is said by Mrs. Delafield to have been his friend of long standing.
If Lewis persisted in his determination to go with the troops against Ft. Niagara, he must have embarked with a force of six hundred on September 26th and, like them, endured the tortures of seasickness on a little overcrowded river or lake boat for thirteen days, unable either to sail or to disembark on account of the violence of a lake storm. When the expedition was abandoned for that year and Lewis saw Gen. Shirley set out for Albany, leaving Col. Mercer in command of the post, he promised to stand by his friend for the winter and to act as his aide, says Mrs. Delafield. If that was his position, he may have escaped the worst experiences of the private soldiers. But even for the higher ranks and their aides what a winter that of 1755-56 proved to be—bitterly cold with some of the rank and file sleeping in floorless barracks or in the open on the ground. Lewis must have seen soldiers, sailors, lumber jacks and shipbuilders frost bitten, struggling under heavy tasks on short rations—”a pint of flour, put in litely and half a pound of pork” a day per man. He must have heard of desertions and have seen recaptured deserters shot at the head of their regiments. He must have seen men dying of fevers, black scurvy and dysentery or tomahawked and scalped by the French Indians scouting ever nearer the forts. In the spring he saw the three hundred and fifty survivors looking like living skeletons hardly able to stand. Knowing these conditions, Lewis must have been almost amazed to see the strongly stockaded Fort Ontario across the river completed when spring came. The smaller stockade a half mile to the southwest of Fort Oswego, named Fort George,— (the soldiers called it “Fort Raskell”)—was still unfinished and was being used as a cattle pen to within three days of Montcalm’s attack. Lewis could see new ships built and launched, but French ships as well that boldly sailed back and forth in defiance of the forts and the British navy.
But it is not for us to tell of Montcalm’s campaign of 1756 against Oswego. That story has been well told by our members, the land operations by John M. Gill in the 1939 Year Book and the naval activities by Edwin M. Waterbury in that of 1951, while, in the 1941 edition, Mr. Macdonald drew on the 1756 diary of Stephen Cross, shipbuilder from Newburyport, Massachusetts, for his experiences and observations at Oswego. Later this year we shall, doubtless, have other papers dealing with this period of Fort Ontario’s past of two centuries and plans for its future.
Captive And Prisoner Of War
But from the three earlier papers and from Stephen Cross’s diary we may put ourselves in Francis Lewis’s place both as a civilian at the fall of this British outpost and as a prisoner of war in France. On August I31h he saw the successful French attack, heard Col. Mercer order Fort Ontario abandoned and watched the French flag rise on its ramparts. In the early morning of the 14th he saw his friend Col. Mercer fall at his side, shot down by a British cannon captured from Braddock at the Monongahela. Then Col. Littlehales took over the command and gave the order for Fort George to be evacuated. Lewis found himself crowded into Fort Oswego with 1600 others, men, women and children. He had the good sense to obey the victors after the surrender and took refuge in Fort Ontario. Else he would probably never have lived to sign the Declaration of Independence. He must have found his refuge a bedlam the night of the 14th for some of the defeated troops within were mad with drink and the Indians without were howling like “Hell hounds” for captives and booty, as Stephen Cross expressed it.
Montcalm well knew that he must get his Indians on their way to Montreal if he wanted to save his prisoners alive and sent them off the next morning with thirty prisoners in lieu of booty. And one of the thirty was Francis Lewis. He was carried away before the burning of the forts and shipping, before the priest Piquet planted on the ruins a cross inscribed “In hoc signo vincunt” and a pole bearing the arms of France with the Vergilian inscription Manibus date lilia plenis—”Bring me lilies in handsful”, and before “Oswego reverted, for a time, to the bears, foxes, and wolves,” as Parkman wrote in his “Montcalm and Wolfe.” Perhaps Lewis in Montreal heard the Te Deum sung in honor of the French victory, the greatest yet won by French arms in America and, perhaps, he saw the captured regimental flags hanging in the churches and by that sign knew that the 50th and 51st had ceased to exist as British Regiments. How highly France valued this victory is indicated by the medal struck in 1758 by Louis XV “Ruler of the world”, commemorating his triumphs at Wesel on the lower Rhine, Oswego, Port Mahon on Minorca, and St. David in India. The Society is fortunate to possess one of the original medals which Mr. Slosek has put on exhibition tonight.
Journey To Montreal
Reticent as he may have been, Francis Lewis could hardly have failed to tell his family of his strange journey to Montreal with the Indians and their other prisoners. Mrs. Delafield retells it somewhat as follows: Each night at the end of the long day’s travel camp was made, fires lighted, and a prisoner slain as a sacrifice in celebration of the victory. This happened so often that Lewis felt that his turn must come soon; but he betrayed no sign of fear and made no effort to escape. His two guards were satisfied to bind only his arms and to allow him to walk about unshackled while they talked with each other. Lewis understood their words recognizing their likeness to the Welsh of his childhood. The Indians were so pleased when he joined in their conversation that they treated him like a friend and brother. It is said that he was the only one of their prisoners who lived to reach Montreal. There they gave him over to the protection of the French Governor, begging that their prisoner be released and allowed to go home. The Governor refused their request and sent Lewis with other prisoners in his custody to France. Most scholars brush aside, as a legend, the tale of Welsh speaking Indians; but Mrs. Delafield insists that it is true. She is right when she declares that there were many other such reports. There were stories of Indians, fair of face and blond or red of hair, whose dialects resembled the Welsh language. They were reputed to be descendants of colonists brought to America in 1170 AD by Madoc, a Welsh prince, the hero of Southey’s long narrative poem published in 1805. In 1582, Sir George Peckham even based Great Britain’s claim to North America on Madoc’s voyage and discoveries. Enough credence was given to the story of such Indians existing in the far West that Thomas Jefferson referred to them in writing to Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Be that as it may, his Indian guards brought Lewis alive to Montreal. After that, without the protection of his friend, Col. Mercer or of his Welsh speaking Indians, he must have shared the Welsh experiences of other civilian prisoners of war like Stephen Cross who arrived from Oswego on the 26th of August. The two may well have been in the same contingent of 170 who started for Quebec on the 31st with one loaf of bread and one pound of pork per man that had to last them until September 4th when they reached Quebec. Conditions there were considered not too bad—shelter was adequate, there was room for open air exercise, rations were better and a kindly old man was their jailer.
If Lewis and Cross were signed to the same group of 144 ordered to embark on October 5th for the voyage down the long reaches of the St. Lawrence and across the Atlantic to France, both now learned in the hard way what it meant to be a prisoner of war. Their shipboard quarters were in the lower hold on a platform of loose boards laid over the water casks about four feet under the lower deck and too small for all to lie down. Relief was found only when those who chanced to have two blankets would sling one as a hammock from spikes in the deck beams, just clearing the body of the man lying below. They were allowed on deck for one half hour twice a day to draw their rations of moldy, wormy bread, scraps of beef from the heads of cattle four days per week and on the other three beans boiled in the skimmings from the crew’s meat kettles. Hatches were left open about one quarter of their size, in decent weather but in storms the prisoners were confined below with hatches battened down, breathing air so foul that they all but suffocated and one man went mad. As a precaution they were forced to give up all their knives and razors. Stephen did not blame their guards for such precautions and the close confinement for the prisoners outnumbered the crew and had decided to rise against them and take over the ship at the first opportunity.
In France
Forty three days out from Quebec the ship reached the harbor of Brest and landed its passengers on November 17th. They were held there a month and then ordered out on a march for forty leagues to Dinan, a medieval walled town fifteen to seventeen miles inland from St. Malo. Dinan’s grand castle was to be their permanent prison until England and France should sign a “Carteel,” as Stephen called it, for the exchange of prisoners. The march to this prison lasted about ten days on which they marched from nine to twelve miles a day with no break for food or rest. At night they were lodged, wet and cold as they usually were, in heatless stables. Instead of rations each man was given six and three quarter sous per day with which to buy what food he could from the inhabitants, one quarter being held back to pay for the straw on which he was to sleep. One who had money or something that could be sold for money was permitted to lodge sometimes at a tavern where he might pay for food, drink, heat and bed in addition to paying a French soldier to guard him.
At Ninan each man was given eleven pounds of straw on which to sleep for eleven nights. Besides the usual rations of bread, meat and horse beans, each mess of eight men was allowed sixteen ounces of butter. In addition each man received one sou per day for the purchase of extra food in accordance with the will of a French Admiral’s widow. The sympathetic woman had also provided in her will for an acre of ground to serve as a burial plot for the dead not communicants in the established church of France. Stephen noted that the plot was well dug over before the exchange of prisoners allowed him to leave Dinan.
The diary ends in January 1757 when the writer was ill in the hospital where many were dying; but he survived as did Francis Lewis.
Back In America
The cartel was at length signed and both Cross and Lewis were exchanged and returned to America, Cross to Newburyport and Lewis to New York. It is probable that their paths did not again meet. Justice Jones supplies the information that Lewis resumed his lodging house keeping and had among his lodgers an old worn out Judge of the Admiralty Court. With him, Lewis conspired to be appointed claimant to all recaptured privateers, the profits to be divided between the two. regardless of the claims of the original owners. As a result, when peace came, Lewis was the richest man in New York, carried on a large trade and acquired great influence in the city. Mrs. Delafitld’s only suggestion as to the source of her ancestor’s affluence is the statement that on his return from captivity he was awarded five thousand acres of land by the Colonial Government in acknowledgement of his military services; but she fails to specify the nature of those services. Whatever the source, Lewis seems to have had adequate means to enable him to retire from business with an expressed determination to devote the rest of his life to the service of his country. He moved his family from New York and established them on an estate at Whitestone, L. I. His only return to business was brief, from 1771 to 1774, aimed at the establishment of his son, Francis, Jr., in the dry goods business.
Patriot Or Rebel?
From the end of the French and Indian War to the outbreak of the Revolution, Lewis is declared by his friends always to have cooperated with the faction resisting the encroachment of Parliament on the rights of the Colonists. Following the Stamp Act of 1765 he was among the first to join the Sons of Liberty. He represented New York in the so called Stamp Act Congress that claimed for the Colonists all the rights and liberties of the King’s subjects in Great Britain It was hinted that he knew more about New York’s Tea Party than appeared on the surface. Tension grew greater in New York against the Quartering Act and the Assembly refused appropriations for Gage’s troops. Yet Jones declared that when British troops were landed in Boston and quarters demanded for them, Lewis sent his English son in law to Gen. Gage to seek a contract for supplying those troops. Failing to get the contract, Lewis long concealed the negotiations but when the facts were discovered, the report spread like wildfire. When the “mob” in New York called it treason and demanded the full truth, Lewis denied it upon his honor and appearing openly in the presence of all “the riffraff and low fellows headed by the republican faction swore upon the Holy Evangelists of Almightv God that the report was totally and aboslutely false.” Then it was that Lewis became “a warm Whig, sower of sedition, a promoter of factions, insulter of Loyalists, encouraging mobbing to the utmost, and one of the most violent rebels.”
Members Of The Second Continental
Congress Signer Of The Declaration Of Independence
Robert Waln, Jr., saw Lewis as a patriot only. “The patriotism, firmness, integrity and abilities of Mr. Lewis for almost half a century pointed him out to his fellow citizens as a fit representative to the Continental Congress and on the twenty second of April, 1775, he was unanimously elected a delegate with full power to concert and determine such measures as should be judged most effectual for the preservation and re-establishment of American rights and privileges and for the restoration of harmony between Great Britain and the Colonies.”
Lewis was continued as a delegate for the year 1776 when the demand for independence as opposed to reconciliation grew more and more intense; but the best that could be said of Lewis was that “he was a good man who never quit his chair.” This silence in debate was probably not his fault and may not have reflected his own convictions but merely the failure of the New York assembly to revise its instructions to its delegates and the delegates’ interpretation of their duty to say nothing until such instructions reached them. This lack of action drove John Adams almost to frenzy. He called it criminal, mulish blindness. He wrote “What is the reason that New York is still asleep or dead in politics and war, have they no sense, no feeling, no sentiment, no passions? Is there anything in the air or soil of New York unfriendly to the spirit of Liberty? For God’s sake explain to me the causes of our miscarriage in that Province.” And President Witherspoon of Princeton said, “The distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts remarked to me as we came in that the Colonies are ripe for Independence. I would like to add”— and he looked directly at the New York delegation—”that some Colonies are rotten for want of it.” The debate continued with Lewis and his colleagues still silent—on July 2nd twelve Colonies voted for independence, New York abstained; on July 4th the drafted copy of the declaration was approved, still with no vote from New York members. Finally the New York assembly voted for independence on July 9th and the news of their action reached Philadelphia the fifteenth. Alsop, one of the New York delegation, wrote an indignant letter of resignation for he would not serve a State that had deliberately closed the door to reconciliation upon just and honorable terms. But Francis Lewis wrote his name on the engrossed parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence, probably on the second of August, 1776. It is said by an admirer, “he affixed his signature—with a pride and exaltation only equalled by the ardour with which he supported its adoption.” Silence must have given consent and in this case spoken louder than words. Let it was in that same year of 1776 that Thomas Jones declared that Lewis for his own profit led Congress into one of its most foolish acts, that Congress ordered built six warships—or maybe only two—in the Hudson above the highlands from where they could never put to sea while the British held New York harbor and awarded Lewis the contract for their construction. “The contract was a good one and Lewis made money” was the comment of Jones.
Committee Work
Lewis was returned to Congress for 1778 and 1779. Silent though he may have continued to be in debate, his partisans considered his services invaluable in the less spectacular work of Congress in committee and Jones does not seem to have denied it. Lewis is said to have been indefatigable in such tasks and to have acted uniformly with prudence and precision; “in his employment in the secret services and particularly in his purchases of clothing for the army, the importation of arms and ammunition and in contracting for provisions he displayed the peculiar qualifications which might be expected from his commercial abilities. As a member of the committee on settlement of claims his professional knowledge was equally valuable and correct.” He was also assigned to committees to draft a treaty with the Iroquois, to organize a navy, establish a hospital, to inquire into the state of the Army and the means for supplying its needs and to establish a system of expresses to expedite official communications. Mrs. Delafied credits the failure of the so-called cabal against Washington to her great grandfather’s energetic opposition and leadership.
Retirement
Lewis was granted leave of absence from Congress in April 1779 and that practically ended “his public career after a long, laborious and energetic display of his patriotism and abilities which had procured for him the distinguished honour of a seat in the most illustrious assembly that the world had ever witnessed.” The sickness and death of his wife in 1779 may well have been his reason for seeking the leave of absence. Two years before, the British had plundered his Long Island home, destroying books, papers and unmovable property. They had held his wife as a prisoner until she was exchanged through the intervention of Gen. Washington. The failure of her health and her death were considered the direct outcome of these experiences.
On his retirement from Congress the only public positions he held were on the Board of the Admiralty and as Vestryman of Trinity Church, New York. According to Mrs. Delafield nearly all of his property had been “sacrificed on the altar of patriotism and he found himself reduced from affluence to a state of near poverty. His real estate brought little more than enough to discharge his debts and he had left scarcely $15,000.”
Jones declared that at the close of the war, Lewis and his sons speculated in soldiers’ certificates buying a forty shilling certificate for six pence and “with this kind of trash bought Loyalists’ confiscated estates in New York City and State to the value of many thousands of pounds,” and that trash “had cost them scarcely as many shillings.” In a recent article by Catherine Crary Snell on such transactions in “New York History,” the name of the son Morgan Lewis frequently appears.
Old Age and Death
Lewis’s later years were spent with the families of his sons in New York. He renewed his acquaintance with heroic poetry, the songs of the Celtic bards. He knew Butler’s Hudebras by heart, indicating a taste for satire. He was familiar with the works of Fielding, Richardson and Fanny Burney; but he warned his descendants to read no novels before they were fifty.
The shock to his nervous system due to a fall caused his death in his ninetieth year on December 30th or 31st, 1802 at 26 Cortlandt Street. He was buried in Trinity Churchyard, the only Signer to be buried in Manhattan, but lies there in an unidentified grave. Even in death, his detractors taunted him that no eulogy or tribute to his memory was published; but death notices did appear in the “Evening Post” of January 3rd, 1803, and in the “Spectator” of the 5th.
One can almost hear Julia Delafield as he paid her tribute. “It would be hard to find so long a life with so pure a record—that he was repeatedly elected to high places of trust was the result of his well established character for judgment, integrity and patriotism.” “He bequeathed to his posterity a name that shall long flourish in the annals of liberty affording an example of virtue, constancy and personal sacrifice.” But it is hard to imagine J. A. Scoville pouring forth his pane gyric, “The country can produce a million Governors, Justices of the Peace, Presidents but only one Francis Lewis, signer of the Declaration of Independence.” — “A political genius”, “greater than the Barons of the Magna Charta.” “If the Chamber of Commerce knew what is for its glory in coming times, it would raise any amount required to erect a monument six hundred feet high with a statue on top to be seen by the mariner, looming larger and larger as he approaches the city, to honor Francis Lewis, the peer of John Hancock.” “His history shall be as familiar to all New York as the Lord’s Prayer.” “From any city but New York, he would be deified.”