William Sands
(1757-1776)
MSA SC 3520-16709
Biography:
William Sands was nineteen years old when he enlisted as a sergeant in the First Maryland Regiment's Seventh Company, commanded by Captain John Day Scott, in January 1776. The company was raised in Annapolis, Sands's hometown. He lived in a house on Prince George Street, along with his parents John and Ann Sands, his older brother Thomas, and his younger siblings Ann, John Jr., Sarah, and Joseph. Sands's father was a ship captain, while his mother helped support the family as a seamstress, sewing clothing and sails for residents of Annapolis. [1]
The Seventh Company was stationed in Annapolis, along with five of the regiment's other companies; three additional companies were in Baltimore. Commanded by Colonel William Smallwood, the regiment was the first unit of full-time, professional soldiers raised in Maryland for service in the Continental Army. As a sergeant, Sands was responsible for keeping the soldiers of the company properly aligned during marches and in battle, and ensuring order among the men in camp. Sergeants also had other administrative duties, and Sands was probably made a sergeant in large part because he was literate. [2]
On July 10, 1776, after training for several months in Annapolis, Sands and the rest of the regiment received orders to march to New York to defend the city from an impending British attack. About a week later, the troops arrived Philadelphia, where Sands wrote a letter to his parents, updating them with news from the march. Sands wished to set their minds at rest about one matter. "As for your advise, I am very much obliged to you," he wrote, "but [I] am very sorry anybody should raise such false reports. The girl is not in company with me. She is along with the soldiers in the barracks, with five more women. I have nothing to say to her, and I hope you will not think any more of it." Sadly, the woman's identity has been lost to time, as have the “false reports” being raised. Evidently she was not someone with whom a man of Sands' standing should have been associating. [3]
The Marylanders reached the Continental Army's main camp in New York in early August, and Sands sent his parents another letter. In contrast his first report, this account was made up of clear-eyed reports of military preparations. "Our Maryland Battalion is encamped on a hill about one mile out of New York, where we lay in a very secure place," Sands wrote. "We are ordered to hold ourselves in readiness. We expect an attack hourly." He noted that the regiment "lost a great many of our troops" as deserters along the march, or to illness. He spoke confidently of the measures taken to resist the British, including chevaux-de-frise, underwater barricades designed to block ship traffic, although they did little to obstruct the British Navy. Sands also reported on the arrival of “that damned rascal” Lord Dunmore, colonial governor of Virginia. [4]
It is uncertain when Sands’s letters reached his parents. Perhaps they were carried to Maryland as he wrote them, or brought there later that year. However, it is certain that by the time they read them, William was dead. He was, as a family member added to his last letter, “Killed on Long Island August 27th 1776.” News of his death reached Maryland in about a week, appearing in a Baltimore newspaper on September 4. [5]
Sands's company was spared the worst of the fighting at the Battle of Brooklyn (sometimes called the Battle of Long Island), and was able to retreat to the safety of the American fortifications, including a harrowing trip through the swampy Gowanus creek. The companies that were not able to retreat later held back the British onslaught, keeping them at bay long enough for the rest of the Continental Army to escape, at the cost of many lives. In all, 256 Marylanders were killed or captured by the British; some companies lost as much as 80 percent of their men. The Seventh Company lost only seven men, including Sands. [6]
No details are known about the circumstances of Sands's death. In the 1830s, two long-time Annapolis residents gave depositions that "William Sands was wounded in that Battle...and was carried to a Barn and there placed, and upon their retreat the enemy set fire to the barn, and there the said Sands perished." This story cannot be otherwise documented, however. Neither of the people who told the story had first-hand knowledge of the event. One of them, Joseph Williams, was a soldier the Maryland Flying Camp, and despite his claim of fighting at Brooklyn was actually in Annapolis at the time. The other came from Ann Hollidayoke, who said that her late husband Daniel often told that version of Sand's death. While Daniel probably was in New York at the time of the battle, he was an artificer repairing guns, not a soldier. There are no other accounts of a barn full of wounded Americans being burned, and the event may have just been local lore. [7]
Over the years, the Sands family took great care to preserve William's letters home, which are the only such accounts by an ordinary enlisted man in the Maryland Line in 1776. Some of the paperwork that he compiled in the spring of 1776, including "A List of Tools Belonging to Capt. Scots Company" and a "Wickly report of the State & Strinth of Capt. Scotts Company," also survived. These records, along with many other Sands family records are now in the holdings of the Maryland State Archives. [8]
Owen Lourie, 2019. Special thanks to Ann Jensen.
Notes:
1. Muster Rolls and Other Records of Service of Maryland Troops in the American Revolution, Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 18, p. 15; Ann Jensen, Two Children of Colonial Annapolis (Annapolis, MD, 1976), 1-2, 11; Diary of Ann Sands, 1770-1790, Maryland State Archives Special Collections, Dowsett Collection of Sands Family Papers [MSA SC 2095-2-53, 2/45/13/31.
4. William Sands to John and Ann Sands, 14 August 1776, Maryland State Archives Special Collections, Dowsett Collection of Sands Family Papers [MSA SC 2095-1-18, 0/20/5/28]; David Hackett Fisher, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 83-84.
5. The letter reporting Sands's death was not printed in the Maryland Gazette, Annapolis's newspaper. William Sands letter, 14 August 1776; Ann Sands diary;“Extract of a Letter from New York, Dated August 31, 1776,” American Archives, Series 5, vol.1, p. 1250; "Extract of a Letter From New-York," Pennsylvania Journal (Philadelphia), 4 September 1776; Maryland Journal (Baltimore), 4 September 1776.
6. Mark Andrew Tacyn "'To the End:' The First Maryland Regiment and the American Revolution" (PhD diss., University of Maryland College Park, 1999), 48-73. For more on the experience of the Marylanders at the Battle of Brooklyn, see "In Their Own Words," on the Maryland State Archives research blog, Finding the Maryland 400. Return of the Maryland troops, 13 September 1776, Revolutionary War Rolls, NARA M246, folder 35, p. 85, from Fold3.com.
7. Anne Arundel County Register of Wills, Orphan’s Court Proceedings, 1834-1838, p. 143-144 [MSA C125-22, 1/3/11/40]; Pension of Daniel Hollidayoke, National Archives, Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land-Warrant Application Files, W 9483, from Fold3.com; Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 18, p. 47.
8. Maryland State Archives Special Collections, Dowsett Collection of Sands Family Papers [MSA SC 2095-2-1, 2/45/13/30].
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