Lesson 156:
Peter Salem
An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 7/3/2024
This Independence Day we'll take a look at the life (both real and imagined) of Peter Salem --emancipated slave and war hero of the American Revolution.
Born enslaved in (assumed) October 1750 in Framingham, Massachusetts, Salem was originally owned by one Jeremiah Belknap (who may have assigned his surname after the town of Salem, Massachusetts, which was Belknap's hometown). Later Salem was sold to Lawson Buckminster, who would, by the time of the Revolution, become a Major in the Continental Army. In 1775 Buckminster offered Salem his freedom if he also enlisted, and he is recorded as having been assigned to Colonel John Nixon's 6th Massachusetts Regiment on April 24 of that year.
A few months later, on June 17, 1775, the 6th Mass. Regiment was among the participants in the Battle of Bunker Hill --which is chronicled as having included at least a dozen other freed African Americans. Of greatest significance is Salem's role in fatally shooting Royal Marine Maj. John Pitcairn during the third and final assault on the redoubt on Breed's Hill, which the colonists had hastily constructed under cover of darkness, the previous night. Pitcairn's death caused sufficient confusion amongst the British ranks to give the colonials more time to retreat.
No pictorial representations exist of Salem, with the exception of his inclusion in John Trumbull's 1815 painting, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill, June 17, 1775 --and even today some historians dispute whether this individual is in fact Salem. While Trumbull prided himself on carefully matching likenesses of his subjects (most famously for his 1818 depiction of the signing of the Declaration of Independence), it has never been independently confirmed who may in fact may have been the model for Salem.
My feeble attempt at matching Trumbull's detail in watercolour and pen-and-ink, teases out an embarrassingly stereotypical appearance --wide eyes which suggests "simplicity" (or more charitably, perhaps a response to the intensity of the battle action?), in a figure which is also slightly hunched down (as if ducking or hiding) and partly obscured by the prominence of the more heroically-stanced Thomas Grosvenor at the lower right of the painting. Nevertheless the mere fact that Trumbull included Salem in the painting at all is historically significant; to say nothing of depicting a Black man competently holding a firearm.
Salem opted to re-enlist in 1776 and saw further action at the Battle at Saratoga (1777), and at Stony Point (1779 --a far more successful middle-of-the-night action for the Americans!). Salem was honourably discharged in March 1780, and, now a free man, settled in Leicester where he built a home, and worked as a cane weaver and a chair repairer. In 1783 he married Katy Benson --they had no children. He died in 1816 --two years short of Congress's Revolutionary War Veterans' pension law of 1818-- and was buried in a pauper's grave. However the town of Framingham later erected a gravestone monument to his memory in 1882, and in 1909 the Daughters of the American Revolution established his Leicester home as a historical monument. Salem's gun is preserved and remains on display to this day, at the Bunker Hill Monument and Museum in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
Learn about Trumbull's painting in far better detail at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts:
https://collections.mfa.org/objects/34260/the-death-of-general-warren-at-the-battle-of-bunkers-hill
Next page - Lesson 157: George Robert Carruthers
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