Pomeroy, Seth

POMEROY, SETH. (1706–1777). Continental general. Massachusetts. Born on 20 May 1706, he was a member of a family long prominent in Northampton. Seth took up the family trade of gunsmithing and became a solid and prosperous local citizen. He was commissioned a militia ensign in 1743 and a captain the next year. In 1745 the Massachusetts assembly appointed him major of the Fourth Regiment in the Louisburg expedition, and he performed valuable service in repairing captured French cannon for use against the defenders. He spent the next three years as major of the troops defending the frontier in western Massachusetts. At the start of the French and Indian War, he was appointed lieutenant colonel of Colonel Ephraim Williams's regiment of provincial troops from western Massachusetts that was raised for William Johnson's attack on Crown Point. After Williams was killed in the Bloody Morning Scout, he led the regiment in the heaviest fighting of the Battle of Lake George in New York on 8 September 1755 and, according to legend, captured Baron Dieskau, the French commander.

Not interested in local politics but considered by his neighbors to be a firm supporter of American rights, in 1774 he sat on the Northampton committee of safety and represented the town in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which appointed him a brigadier general of militia in October 1774. With Artemas Ward and Jedidiah Preble, he was responsible for preparing the militia for the day that resistance to increased imperial control led to war. His principal service was in helping to raise and train soldiers in western Massachusetts in 1775 and 1776. The sixty-nine-year-old veteran rode from Northampton to Cambridge in a single day to participate in the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775. Carrying the musket he himself had made and had used at Louisburg thirty years earlier, he rode to Charlestown Neck on a borrowed horse, turned it over to a sentry so as not to expose it to enemy fire, and walked to the rail fence, where his presence helped to steady the younger men. In the action that followed, Pomeroy fought as a volunteer, had the stock of his musket shattered by an enemy ball, and "still facing the enemy," withdrew with the forces of Thomas Knowlton and John Stark at the end of the day (Ward, 1, p. 95).

The Provincial Congress named him a major general of militia on 20 June 1775, and the Continental Congress appointed him its first-ranking brigadier general on 22 June 1775, but he declined the latter appointment on 19 July and was superseded by John Thomas. On 19 February 1777, he died of pleurisy at Peekskill while on his way to join Washington's army in New Jersey. Few personal details are known about the man whom legend describes as a tall, lean, and intrepid soldier.

SEE ALSO Thomas, John.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Forest, Louis Effingham, ed. The Journals and Papers of Seth Pomeroy. New York: Society of Colonial Wars in the State of New York, 1926.

Ward, Christopher. The War of the Revolution. 2 vols. Edited by John Richard Alden. New York: Macmillan, 1952.

                         revised by Harold E. Selesky