♂James Dudley

James Dudley (11 June 1690 – before 28 May 1746) was a cooper and militia officer of Exeter, in the Province of New Hampshire^W, who served as a lieutenant in the New England army that took the French fortress of Louisbourg^W in 1745, in a siege that he and his fellow officers said their men had borne “almost naked, quite lousy”. A grandson remembered him as “of a merry turn of mind”. The family history tells how, soon after he came home from the war, he was found dead at his own door by one of his daughters, who had heard him groan. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son John Dudley (1725–1805).

Family

A family history published in 1886 makes him the third son of Stephen Dudley and Sarah Gilman of Exeter, and a great-grandson of Thomas Dudley^W, governor of Massachusetts Bay, through the governor’s son the Reverend Samuel Dudley, minister at Exeter. A genealogical dictionary of the first settlers of New England, published in 1860, gives the same birth date, 11 June 1690, among Stephen Dudley’s children. In June 1710, during Queen Anne’s War^W, his younger brother John was killed by Indians in the woods near Exeter.

A family history published in 1886 gives Mercy Folsom, a daughter of Deacon John Folsom of Exeter, as James Dudley’s only wife, and says that she survived him. The 1886 book reckons that the couple had been married about thirty-two years when he died, which would place the marriage about 1714. The same book lists eight children of the marriage, four sons and four daughters, among them John Dudley, born on 9 April 1725, and a genealogy of the Folsom family published in 1882 places the children’s births in the part of Exeter that later became Brentwood.

Land and trade

According to the family history, his father gave him a twelfth share of the six hundred acres that the town had granted to his grandfather, the Reverend Samuel Dudley; the book dates the gift to January 1711 on one page and to 1703 on another, and says that in the deed Stephen is called “planter” and James “cooper”. In 1712 his uncle James Dudley, a merchant of Exeter, gave him another twelfth share of the same grant, calling him his “well beloved kinsman”. The family history also says that in March 1718 he bought an eighth part of Freetown from his brother Stephen, and that some of that land passed to his son John and was still held by descendants in the 1880s; it names him and three of his brothers among the original purchasers of Gilmanton, although its author thought that none of them ever lived there. He worked as a cooper, and the inventory of his estate, printed in the family history, lists his cooper’s tools, a house and shop, a gun, and notes of debt owed to him by several men, one of them his son John.

Soldier

A history of Exeter published in 1888 prints the rolls of the scouting parties that Captain Nicholas Gilman led out of Exeter in the summer of 1710, and a James Dudley served in them with Samuel and Stephen Dudley, from 23 to 25 June and again on 5 July. The family history identifies him as this James, and calls the captain his uncle.

The siege of Louisbourg, 1745

Louisbourg was the great French fortress town on Île Royale^W, now Cape Breton Island. When France gave up mainland Acadia to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht^W in 1713, it kept Île Royale and built Louisbourg there as its stronghold in the old Acadian lands, guarding the fisheries and the approach to the St. Lawrence. New Englanders knew the place simply as “Cape Breton”. In 1744 New Hampshire raised a regiment under Colonel Samuel Moore for its capture, and the family history says James Dudley was commissioned a lieutenant in it by the governor of the province; the family historian had seen the rolls himself at the Massachusetts State House. The history of Exeter names him as one of the town’s lieutenants in the expedition, which took the fortress in June 1745^W.

The siege was hard on the New England men. The family history, quoting a military history of New Hampshire, prints a declaration that James, his brother Captain Trueworthy Dudley and other officers made under their hands: that their men were volunteers, who had proved themselves “gallant and brave to the last degree” and had endured the siege without flinching while they were “almost naked, quite lousy, amid shot and shell”, at times going twenty-four hours “without a morsel of meat”, with nothing better to drink for most of the siege than “ill-tasting, purging water”. After the fortress fell, 706 of the 1,945 New England troops there were sick. In November 1745 James and Trueworthy were among eight commissioned officers of the New Hampshire forces, seven of them men of Exeter, who signed a petition to the General Assembly setting out what the history of Exeter calls the “shameful defects” of the commissary. The town itself voted in February 1746 to excuse the men of the first embarkation against Cape Breton from that year’s poll tax, the first time it had granted volunteer soldiers such relief. A man who had known the soldiers told the family historian that Lieutenant Dudley “discharged his duty as a subaltern officer with ability”.

Death and estate

According to the family history, he came home with the expedition and died suddenly at Exeter soon afterwards. He had spent an evening at a neighbor’s house and left it apparently in his usual health, and one of his daughters, hearing a groan at the door, found him lying dead near it. He was fifty-five, not the fifty-six that the family history gives. The probate record shows that he had died before 28 May 1746, the day administration on his estate was granted to his son John, his widow Mercy Folsom renouncing in John’s favor. The family history’s date of 4 September 1746 cannot stand against it. The author declined to guess at the cause, and did not know where his gravestone was.

He left no will, and his son John administered the estate. The family history says that among the debts John paid was £39 18s. that his father had borrowed from his grandfather, John Gilman, in 1724, and that in July 1747 John sold several of his father’s pieces of land at public auction at John Marsh’s inn in Brentwood to meet the debts. A grandson remembered him, in the book’s words, as “of a merry turn of mind”.