James O'Hara
MSA SC 3520-18547
Biography:
James O’Hara’s term in the army was not a long one, cut short when he developed a severe illness that had devastating consequences. Although the remainder of his life was marked by many privations, he was also the recipient of unprecedented generosity.
O’Hara enlisted in January 1776 as a private in the Fifth Company. Commanded by Captain Nathaniel Ramsey, the company was raised in Baltimore in early 1776, 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 Fifth, 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 Fifth was able to escape the battle early, it only lost a small number of soldiers. [2]
Sometime before the unit marched to New York, O’Hara “had the misfortune...to take cold while standing sentry at night,” and fell ill, as Charles Wiesenthal, a Maryland military doctor, later wrote. Soon after, O’Hara developed a painful skin infection known as erysipelas, which is caused by streptococci and today is easily treated with antibiotics. Without such treatments, O’Hara soon experienced a rash so severe that “in a few days he was all over deprived of his skin.” [3]
Eventually, the rash spread to O’Hara’s face and rendered him blind. Wiesenthal explained that O’Hara “was in the utmost danger of [losing] his life,” and while he ultimately lived, “his eyes are incurable.” How long O’Hara was with his unit is not clear, and it is uncertain how much fighting he did that fall and winter, though he wrote that he “lost his eyesight at the conclusion of” the campaign. [4]
By December 1776, he was back in Maryland, living in Annapolis and asking for financial assistance. He lacked “any way to have a livelihood,” and had not received any payment for his military service since June. The Council of Safety obliged, granting him his discharge and issuing him six months pay. [5]
O’Hara evidently had no family to help support him--nothing is known about him before his enlistment--and lived in a time with no social safety net. How he supported himself is not known, but he developed a network of supporters who helped him survive. He lived for a time in the Anne Arundel County poor house, and found a number of people willing to write petitions to the state government on his behalf.
In the summer of 1777, O’Hara submitted a petition to the Council of Safety, describing how “it hath pleased the Almighty to Deprive him of the Sight of his Eyes which rendered him Uncapable of Supporting himself therefore he humbly prayeth...for redress as his situation is very Deplorable being Entirely Destitute of Either Money or Friends or habitation.” The Council responded in early August, paying him £34 and giving him permission to collect rations from the military. Such an allowance was extraordinarily unusual in Maryland. [6]
He submitted another petition in 1778--whether he received any aid that year is not known--and in July 1779 he asked the Maryland General Assembly for assistance. Both the House of Delegates and Senate moved quickly to pass a resolution authorizing the governor and council to “grant such Relief to James O'Hara as they may think proper.” It meant that the governor could issue whatever payments to O’Hara as he wished, an unprecedented amount of assistance in eighteenth century Maryland. [7]
While there were provisions to pay disabled veterans small allowances, those amounts paled in comparison to the blank check authorized for O’Hara. It also allowed O’Hara to collect clothing in addition to cash, and about a week after the resolution was passed, he received shoes and a pair of overalls. [8]
The resolution gave O’Hara a measure of financial stability, and on August 17, 1779, ten days after the resolution took effect, he married Mary Yeates. They had at least two children together; their names and birth dates are not known, but one was likely born sometime in 1781. [9]
O’Hara received payments from the state several times in 1780 (the exact amount is hard to calculate because of the rampant inflation at the time). Still, he had no way to earn a living, and while Mary likely worked, she also had to care for her husband, and possibly a child, hampering her ability to earn enough to support the family by herself. As a result, O’Hara continued to petition the governor for further help. [10]
In February 1781, he wrote that he had “not received any Cloathing this four years last,” and to make matters worse, had “the misfortune to be robbed of part of his Small necessaries in October last.” The same day, the council directed that he be paid £75 and be issued “one vest, one pair of Breeches, one pair of Stockings, one pair of shoes & one Shirt” from the state’s military supplies. He received more money a few months later, and then as the fall approached, O’Hara wrote to the governor and council, with “the expectation that you will grant an Old Soldier the necessary relief.” He was “in great need of a blankett, a shirt & pair of shoes, and has got a wife & children, & [not] otherwise provided for.” O’Hara was granted a shirt, shoes, and a blanket, just as he had asked for, though he had also hoped for a coat and money to buy firewood; the blanket never appeared, however, and he received six dollars in the spring instead. [11]
Over the next few years, O’Hara began to receive regular payments, sometimes from the state and sometimes from the Anne Arundel County Orphans Court, which oversaw pensions for disabled soldiers. Still, the family’s troubles continued to mount. For a time, they lived in a house near the State House in Annapolis once owned by the Calvert family, but when the house was converted to barracks for Maryland’s soldiers they had to find new lodgings. [12]
By February 1783, the family was living in “a condemned house called the White Barracks which is in a very ruinous condition.” Another resident of the house, named Ann Peck, kept “a most unruly and bad house...there were upwards of an hundred [people] there Saturday Night last, Fiddling, Dancing, Drinking & fighting, heaving of Brick bats & using fire arms.” O’Hara was particularly upset that the revelers were African American. Eventually, O’Hara and his family did leave that house, but exactly when is unclear. [13]
O’Hara continued to receive small payments from the state and Anne Arundel County during 1783. However, in late December, Mary died, leaving James widowed with two young children. He must have had some kind of assistance available at the time, as it would have been nearly impossible for him to care for the children on his own. A few weeks after Mary’s death, James again turned to the governor for help, writing that "since his wife died all the effects he had in the world have been stolen. He is at present wanting all the conveniences of life for himself & children...if your honours do not help him he must inevitably perish with children this winter." [14]
O’Hara and his children spent the early part of 1784 living in the Anne Arundel County Poor House (they may have moved there earlier, but there is no record of when they arrived). By May, however, they were told they had to leave, a more typical example of the limits of eighteenth-century charity. Once again, however, the state interceded on O’Hara’s behalf, and paid for his lodging with a man named Henry Wood. The family lived with Wood for three months, then with Samuel Callahan, and finally with Vachel White, with the state covering his board the whole time. [15]
Despite the charity the O’Haras received in 1784-1785, it proved to be a black time for the family. One of the children died in the spring or summer of 1784. In the spring of 1785, O’Hara himself fell ill, dying around April 18. The state paid for his final expenses, just as they had supported him before, reimbursing Vachel White for “attendance on [O'Hara] in his Sickness, a Coffin, sheet and funeral Expenses and Board of his Child from the 18th April to the 17 June 1785.” What became of the surviving child after their father’s death is not known. Presumably they were taken in by someone or made an apprentice until adulthood. [16]
How O’Hara was able to marshal such support for himself remains a mystery, just as the authors of his many petitions are unknown. Evidently, he had powerful advocates who were able to successfully plead his case to the highest levels of government, a government which was well-practiced at ignoring and denying petitions from desperate Marylanders. O’Hara’s standing as a veteran doubtless helped his cause, and other wounded soldiers are granted their back-pay, including Private James Murphey of the Third Company, who lost a leg at Brooklyn. What O'Hara received, direct financial assistance from the state for nine years, ending only because of his death, went far beyond that. His situation was well enough known that Benedict Swingate Calvert, half-brother of Frederick, Lord Baltimore--“Squire Calvert”--gave him a place in his mansion near the State House.
There were certainly limits to the state’s generosity. O’Hara and his family never received enough money to truly support them. After Mary died the family’s situation seems to have deteriorated, showing that she likely was working to help support her husband and children. Nevertheless, O’Hara worked hard to make sure his government did not forget him, and made them acutely aware that he had become disabled fighting for the cause of American liberty
Owen Lourie, 2023
Notes:
1. James O'Hara to Governor and Council, 1778, Maryland State Papers, Series A, box 12, item 85, MSA S1004-14-2034.
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.
4. Wiesenthal to Jenifer; James O'Hara to Governor and Council, 1778, Maryland State Papers, Series A, box 12, item 85, S1004-14-2034.
5. Wiesenthal to Jenifer; Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 12, p. 523.
6. James O'Hara to Council, 1778, Maryland State Papers, Series A, box 8, item 78, MSA S1004-8-4;
Journal and Correspondence of the Council of Safety January 1-March 20, 1777 and Journal and Correspondence of the State Council March 20, 1777 - March 28, 1778, Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 16, p. 324-325.
7. House Journal, July 1779, p. 141-142; Senate Journal, July 1779, p. 68.
9. Anne Arundel County Court, Marriage Licenses, 1777-1813, p. 8, MSA C113-1.
10. Journal and Correspondence of the State Council, 1779-1780, Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 43, p. 87, 158, 321.
11. Journal and Correspondence of the State Council, 1781, Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 47, p. 487, 541; Journal and Correspondence of the State Council, 1780-1781, Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 45, p. 296, 297, 423, 661; Journal and Correspondence of the State Council, 1781-1784, Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 48, p. 142.
12. Anne Arundel County, Orphans Court Proceedings, 1782-1784, p. 4, 8, 10, 11, 13, MSA C125-2; Anne Arundel County, Orphans Court Proceedings, 1777-1779, p. 3, MSA C125-1; Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 48, 315, 452, 508, 524, 532, 534; Intendant of the Revenue, Orders on the Treasury, 1782-1783, Intentant's Orders 1, p. 71, 81, S167-1; James O'Hara to William Paca, February 1783, Maryland State Papers, Series A, box 47, item 114, MSA S1004-66-8669; "Governor Calvert House," Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties, AA-692.
13. James O'Hara to William Paca, February 1783, Maryland State Papers, Series A, box 47, item 114, MSA S1004-66-8669
14. James O’Hara to Governor & Council, 16 January 1784, Maryland State Papers, Series A, box 50, item 7, MSA S1004-70-14750
15. James O’Hara to Governor & Council, 10 May 1784, Maryland State Papers, Series A, box 50, item 12, MSA S1004-70-14889; Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 48, p. 535; Journal and Correspondence of the State Council, 1784-1789, Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 71, p. 4, 20, 34.
16. Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 71, 34.
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