Martin Wheeler
MSA SC 3520-17717
Biography:
Martin Wheeler (or Wheelen) was a twenty-two-year-old Irish immigrant when he enlisted as a private in the Eighth Company of the First Maryland Regiment on January 24, 1776. The regiment was Maryland's first contingent of full-time, professional soldiers raised to be part of the Continental Army. The Eighth Company was raised in Baltimore in early 1776 under the command of Captain Samuel Smith, and trained there that spring and summer. Two other companies from the regiment were located in Baltimore as well, while the rest were stationed in Annapolis. In July, the regiment was ordered to march north to New York, to protect the city from invasion by the British. [1]
On August 27, 1776, the Americans faced the British Army at the Battle of Brooklyn (sometimes called the Battle of Long Island), the first full-scale engagement of the war. The battle was a rout: the British were able to sneak around the American lines, and the outflanked Americans fled in disarray. As the Maryland troops fought their way towards the American fortifications, they were forced to stop at the swampy Gowanus Creek. Half the regiment, including the Eighth, was able to cross the creek and escape the battle. However, the rest were unable to do so before they were attacked by the British. Facing down a much larger, better-trained force, this group of soldiers, today called the "Maryland 400," mounted a series of daring charges. They held the British at bay for some time before being overrun, at the cost of many lives, losing 256 men killed or captured. Because the Eighth was able to escape the battle early, it lost only about six men. [2]
How Wheeler fared at the battle is not known. It is not even certain if he was present on the battlefield that day. On August 7, Wheeler was one of nearly a dozen men who deserted from the regiment, just after it left Philadelphia on its trek northward. The Eighth Company lost three other soldiers who deserted at the same time, and desertions plagued the regiment all summer. However, Wheeler's departure was not permanent, and he eventually returned to the army in 1776, although when he did so is not clear. He resumed his service by the winter, but at some point was transferred to an army hospital in Philadelphia, suffering from an unknown illness or injury. When he arrived there is not recorded, but by mid-December he was described as "convalescent," indicating that he had begun to recover. [3]
Wheeler's enlistment came to an end in December 1776, and he reenlisted in the First Maryland Regiment. He did not spend very much time in the army, however. He was reported as a deserter on May 27, 1777, and does not again appear in any records of the Maryland Line. [4]
However, in 1830, Wheeler, then in his mid-seventies and living in Muskingum County, Ohio, applied for a Federal veteran's pension. He was vague about his service in 1776, perhaps because his memory of those details had faded, but he gave an account of what happened to him after he went missing in 1777, although he did mention that he had deserted. In July 1777, about two months after he had left the American Army, Wheeler was found by the British, who evidentially determined that he was a soldier. He was "taken a prisoner in the State of New Jersey," and held in captivity in New York City. Conditions for captured Americans were notoriously awful, and disease and starvation were rampant. [5]
No doubt desperate to avoid a prolonged stay on a prison ship, Wheeler took the "the only means of making my escape from a cruel captivity [and] I enlisted in a British Corps, then stationed on Staten Island, in order to desert from them the first opportunity, but was obliged to remain with them five or six months, when an opportunity presented and I deserted from them." He was not the only captured Maryland soldier to be conscripted into the British army under such coercion. Eventually, Wheeler wrote, he made his way to a Continental Army encampment, where he was given "a pass to return home, and there to remain untill called for, which never took place." [6]
Wheeler's tale is difficult to document, and probably garnered little sympathy from the pension office, as they knew that he had deserted some two months before his capture. Accordingly, his claim for a pension was denied. After his rejection, he made a final appeal, conceding that he had not actually been given permission "to go home until called for." The truth, Wheeler insisted, was actually that he had reenlisted in the First Maryland Regiment in 1779, serving through the end of the war. He had even received his all-important discharge certificate, but unfortunately "my house many years ago was consumed by fire and my Discharge consumed with it." [7]
It is hard to say for sure what really happened to Martin Wheeler. Everything he described--capture by the British, impressment into the British Army, loss of his discharge--truly happened to many men. But with little outside evidence to bolster his claims, along with a pair of desertions, Wheeler's veracity is easily doubted. Perhaps aware of that, he wrote that he had sought to find witnesses to his army service, and had made "inquiries to see if I could find out any of the Old Soldiers who served with me, but find that they are all Dead or gone out of my reach." [8]
There is no record of Wheeler's life after the early 1830s.
Owen Lourie, 2018
Notes:
[1] Muster Rolls and Other Records of Service of Maryland Troops in the American Revolution, Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 18, p. 641; Compiled Service Records of Soldiers Who Served in the American Army During the Revolutionary War, NARA M881, from Fold3.com; "Eight Pounds Reward," Philadelphia Evening Post, 10 August 1776.
[2] Mark Andrew Tacyn “’To the End:’ The First Maryland Regiment and the American Revolution” (PhD diss., University of Maryland College Park, 1999), 48-73; Return of the Maryland troops, 13 September 1776, Revolutionary War Rolls, NARA M246, folder 35, p. 85, from Fold3.com. 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.
[3] "Eight Pounds Reward"; 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, 00/20/05/28]; "List of Sick Soldiers in Philadelphia, December 1776." Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, Vol I., 528.
[4] Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 18, p. 172.
[5] Pension of Martin Wheelen (Wheeler). National Archives, Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land-Warrant Application Files, R 20323, from Fold3.com.
[6] Wheeler pension.
[7] Wheeler pension.
[8] Wheeler pension.
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