On the Massachusetts North Shore
John Freeman, son of enslaved Peter and Jane Freeman of Ipswich, enlisted into the militia of the Revolutionary War in the year 1777, and served in Rhode Island, Providence and Cambridge.
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Throughout the Revolutionary War, Joseph Hodgkins sent letters home from the battlefronts to his wife, Sarah Perkins Hodgkins.
In September 1776, the vulnerable Continental Army under George Washington evacuated New York after a devastating defeat by the British Army. One of Washington's favorite generals, Benedict Arnold, miraculously succeeded in postponing the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that might have ended the war. Thomas Franklin Waters wrote about Arnold's march through Ipswich on the way to Quebec "The… Continue reading Benedict Arnold and the Fate of the American Revolution
In John Adams’ 1765 opposition to the Stamp Act, he referenced the citizens of Ipswich who resisted a tax imposed by the Crown in 1687. An Ipswich town meeting on August 11, 1768 approved of "the Conduct of those Gentlemen of the late House of Representatives...when it was required of them at the Peril of their Political Existence." The Town meeting on Dec. 28, 1772 supported the rights of the Colonists as British subjects, and established a Committee of Correspondence to communicate resistance with the Committees of other towns. Delegates from throughout Essex County arrived in Ipswich on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 1774, and by unanimous vote, bound themselves together in establishment of the Provincial Congress for the common safety.
Of the men from Chebacco parish who were in the battle at Bunker Hill, the names of six are known: James Andrews, Benjamin Burnham, Nehemiah Choate, Aaron Perkins, Jesse Story Jr., a minor who was killed, and Francis Burnham who was wounded. Two Chebacco boys, Aaron Low and Samuel Proctor, belonged to a Gloucester company which reached Cambridge on the afternoon of the 16th.
March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams to John Adams: "In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors."
Historic Ipswich 