Elisha Leavitt - Battle of Grape Island

Battle of Grape Island

During the so-called 'Provision War' at the outbreak of hostilities, as British officers struggled to find sympathetic citizens who would supply their army with food and drink, the Tory Elisha Leavitt stepped forward to offer British troops hay, vegetables and cattle. His actions infuriated locals passionate about the Continental cause. Leavitt's ownership of Grape Island then brought him unwelcome prominence.

Realizing that British officers needed pasturage for their horses during the Siege of Boston in 1775, Leavitt offered them the use of Grape Island. But when British forces landed on the island in their sloops, the alarm was sounded on the mainland. Shortly afterwards hundreds of militiamen from the South Shore assembled at Weymouth, opposite Grape Island, and began firing on the British. Eventually the militiamen landed on Grape Island in skiffs, forcing the British to flee. The angry colonists, in retaliation for Leavitt's actions, burned the wealthy Tory's barn to the ground and confiscated his cattle. "This glorified skirmish", wrote historian Edward Rowe Snow, "has gone down in the history as the Battle of Grape Island."

The incident was closely watched by many observers in the Boston area, including John Adams's wife Abigail, who noted the "widespread confusion" in her hometown the day of the encounter – the closest the American Revolutionary War had come to the Adams family residence. Abigail wrote to her husband on May 24, 1775: "...it seems their Expidition (sic) was to Grape Island for Levets hay." Abigail Adams praised several members of her husband's family, who were among the hundreds of Continental militiamen who drove off the British soldiers. "I may say with truth, all of Weymouth, Braintree, Hingham, who were able to bear arms, and hundreds from other towns within twenty, thirty, forty miles of Weymouth."

Following the Grape Island skirmish, enraged citizens turned up on the doorstep of Leavitt's mansion to set it alight or "for the purpose of doing violence to his person", according to the History of the Town of Hingham. But the avuncular Leavitt averted trouble and defused the mob by rolling out a barrel of rum and "dispensing its contents liberally."

"The gentlemen aforesaid", says the Hingham history, referring delicately to the assembled mob, "were received by Mrs. Leavitt in elegant dress, and urged to walk in and partake of the wine. This unexpected and politic Courtesy disarmed the fury of the Whigs, and the threatened violence was drowned in good cheer."