This article is part of the 52 Ancestor Challenge. Each week in 2023, I will attempt to spotlight one ancestor from my family tree and provide some details about his or her life.
Week Four
Young Americans: The Rebellious Faith of Moses Spencer and Elizabeth Tinsley By Clint Alley
Let My People Go
When I was a boy, TV came through an antenna. Most of the stations we could get at my house were out of Huntsville, Alabama. I remember one Easter after we opened our baskets, went to church, and spent the afternoon playing outside in the exceptionally fine weather, one of those Huntsville stations played Cecille B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments without commercial interruption.
That was a big deal.
In pre-streaming days, a movie played on television with no commercials was a special occasion worthy of the family all watching together. I can still remember sitting in our living room that night, the sweet breeze of springtime drifting through the open windows, the sound of frogs and night creatures floating on the air, the smell of popcorn lingering from the darkened kitchen, watching Charlton Heston deliver the final warning to Pharaoh Yul Brynner: “Let my people go!”
As we watched, Mom said, “I think we had a relative named Moses, a long time ago, who was in the army.”
I was intrigued. My interest in genealogy had not yet fully-formed, but I was very interested in all things military. I filed it away in my mind to ask my grandparents about. But then Charlton Heston smashed the stone tablets and my attention was drawn back to the screen.
The House of Spencer
The ancestor my mom recalled was my 5x-great-grandfather, Moses Spencer. He was born a subject of King George II on January 5, 1746/7 in Middletown, Connecticut. He would die eighty winters later in Lawrence County, Tennessee, a citizen of the United States.
Much like the Moses of Scripture, he played his part in pronouncing, “Let my people go!” to a king.
But before I tell that tale, can I take a moment to celebrate how unusually airtight Moses’s birth record is?
We can say with a high degree of certainty that Moses was born in Middletown, Connecticut because of four overlapping pieces of evidence. Like a Venn Diagram that slowly focuses into a single circle, the evidence is unusually clear for someone of Moses’s generation.
First, volume 2 of the vital records of Middletown, Connecticut names a Moses Spencer, born January 5, 1746/7.
Second, baptismal records for Middletown record the baptism of a Moses Spencer on January 11, 1746/7.
Third, in his Revolutionary War pension application, Moses states his birthday as January 16, 1744. Which I know is not the same, but is still close given the cavalier attitude people of that time often gave to exact birth dates and years, and also given Moses’s advanced age at the time he answered the question. Even so, the fourth piece of evidence tells us that Moses's memory was probably off.
So what ties this evidence together? One super-unusual name.
What’s In a Name?
The Moses Spencer recorded in the two Connecticut records is listed as the son of a man named Ahimaaz Spencer. Even in a time when Old Testament names were common, ‘Ahimaaz’ (taken from the Book of 2 Samuel, where Ahimaaz, a very fast runner, is the son of Zadok the priest) was still unusual enough to stand out.
So what connects the Moses Spencer in Connecticut to the Moses Spencer of Middle Tennessee?
Ahimaaz seems to have moved with Moses wherever he went for several years. The two appear side-by-side in a 1782 list of taxpayers of Henry County, Virginia. And Moses may have even named one of his sons Ahimaaz
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| Moses, his father Ahimaaz, and a man named John Tinsley (possibly a brother-in-law) all listed next to each other in a 1782 list of taxpayers of Henry County, Virginia. Source: FamilySearch |
This propels the likelihood that my Moses was the same as the Moses of the Middletown, Connecticut vital records to a near-certainty. I think there are too many points of overlap for it to be a mere coincidence.
Born a Ramblin’ Man
Moses moved around. Quite a lot.
In the first four decades of his life, we know Moses lived in Connecticut, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Kentucky. In Virginia, alone, he is said to have lived in Henry County, Amelia County, and Charlotte County. Likewise we know that he lived in at least two separate counties in South Carolina, two separate counties in Kentucky, and two separate counties in Tennessee. During the Revolution he traveled to the outskirts of New York City and fought in one of the most important battles in North Carolina. By the early 1810s, he was in Tennessee, and even in his last years when he was blind and could no longer work, we are still not 100% sure which county he lived in when he died.
Joining the Continentals
According to his pension application, Moses Spencer joined the Seventh Virginia Infantry Regiment of the Continental Army on February 10, 1778 in Charlotte County, Virginia. The pension application and surviving muster rolls in the National Archives both agree on this date, which Moses apparently supplied from memory when he applied for his pension. According to those muster rolls and the helpful abstract from the Muster Roll Project of the Valley Forge Alliance, Moses was present with the Seventh Virginia when it was encamped at Valley Forge in March 1778, and in April it was noted that he was sick, most likely after receiving the smallpox inoculation.
The original muster roll from April 1778 said that Moses was "sick, present," along with 40 other members of his company, all of whom were new recruits serving enlistments of one year. The method of inoculation at that time was primitive, but effective. The men were given a weakened strain of the virus, usually by scraping infected matter from a sick person's open sores into a small incision made on the arm of the inoculation recipient. The inoculated patient was then quarantined for several days to prevent accidental spread of the disease.
By mandating smallpox inoculation, Washington immediately saw fewer smallpox cases in the army and ensured that there would be no future epidemics in the ranks, helping to bolster recruitment at a time when he badly needed additional manpower.
The Old Valley Road
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| A muster roll from September 9, 1778 Moses is highlighted as "with Artifecers." Source: FamilySearch |
The winter at Valley Forge was a transformational time for Washington's Continental Army. Despite deprivation and hunger, the army spent the winter at Valley Forge drilling and becoming a well-disciplined fighting force. The army which marched out of Valley Forge in June 1778 was, in many ways, not the same force which had entered the valley six months before.
According to his pension application, and corroborated by the muster rolls, Moses was in the brigade of Brigadier General William Woodford at Valley Forge. From a map drawn in 1928 and available on the Library of Congress's web site, we can see that Woodford's brigade encamped just south of the low hill called Mount Joy. Today, the encampment site of that brigade is located at the circle of South Inner Line Drive at the Valley Forge National Historical Park.
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| A map of the Valley Forge encampment made in 1928. The most likely areas where Moses may have lived during that winter are highlighted. Source: Library of Congress |
A muster roll made on September 9, 1778 says that Moses was "with Artifecers." An artificer was a skilled craftsman who served the army as a gunsmith, blacksmith, or wheelwright. Artificers served as an early version of the army's ordnance department.
So, was Moses an artificer? Did he stay with the artificers at Valley Forge? We don't know. I haven't found any other army record that identifies Moses as an artificer, and he never mentioned it in his pension application. No record from any time in his life identifies him as anything other than a farmer, making any claims that he was a skilled craftsman of any sort hard to verify.
The artificers, according to that same map, were encamped near Washington's Headquarters on the Pottstown Road. If Moses stayed with the artificers during the last months at Valley Forge, he would have frequently been just a stone's throw away from the commanding general, himself.
Baptism by Fire
We know that Moses was with the army when it left Valley Forge in June 1778. After a march of some 70 miles, Washington met the army of British General Sir Henry Clinton near Monmouth Court House, New Jersey on June 28, 1778. Moses mentioned in his pension application that he "was in the battle of Monmouth."
When the United States secured recognition and support by the French in February 1778, the British strategy changed. General Clinton's redcoats were ordered to evacuate Philadelphia and march north to New Jersey, where the British Navy was waiting to ferry Clinton to New York, where he could consolidate his force with the British army stationed there.
Washington, who had spent the previous six months rebuilding his army and defending himself against the political foes who sought his replacement as general, was eager to prove that he was a capable commander. Against the advice of many of his top generals, he decided to attack the British as they retreated across New Jersey.
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| The April 1778 muster roll showing Moses Spencer as 'Sick, present' after receiving the smallpox inoculation at Valley Forge. Source: FamilySearch |
He caught them at Monmouth.
Although the battle had no clear victor and the British army succeeded in its escape to New York, the Battle of Monmouth showed the world that the newly-trained and disciplined Continental Army was capable of holding its own against the British. Those present at the battle particularly remembered the brutal heat. As temperatures neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Washington's own horse died of exhaustion beneath him.
Not Worth a Continental
Moses said in his pension application that he was honorably discharged on February 16, 1779 in Middlebrook, New Jersey, which is just a little over 150 miles southwest of his birthplace in Connecticut. The army was in cantonment or winter quarters at Middlebrook at the time of Moses's discharge.
According to his own reckoning, Moses served in the Continental Army for a year and six days. As he later recalled, he was paid for that service "in Continental money, which was so much depreciated as to be of but little benefit to him."
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| An image of a Continental dollar which was printed around the time that Moses Spencer was discharged from the Continental Army. Source: University of Notre Dame Libraries |
The Continental dollar was the paper currency issued by Congress during the Revolution. Like most currencies issued by governments with rocky prospects, it fluctuated wildly in value and its usefulness was dependent on a myriad of factors. According to the Coin and Currency Department of the University of Notre Dame Libraries, "Congress officially valued the currency at $7.42 in Contenental dollars for $1 in specie" at around the time of Moses Spencer's discharge at Middlebrook.
Moses's money woes were by no means an isolated incident. Runaway inflation ensured that many of those who were fortunate enough to survive the war gave a year or more of their lives to the cause of American independence and came home virtually empty-handed. When Moses returned to Virginia, he likely returned not only minus the profits of a year's lost harvest, but with a pocketful of practically-worthless currency. His family's sacrifice for the young nation was likely one they could feel for years to come.
A Wartime Wedding
A book written in 1876 by John Henderson Spencer, one of Moses's great-grandchildren, implied that Moses was married more than once; once to an unknown woman and then to my ancestor Elizabeth Tinsley.
According to his widow’s pension application, Moses married Elizabeth Tinsley on November 20, 1779 in Henry County, Virginia. The ceremony was performed, as Elizabeth recalled, by a Baptist minister named Dutton Lane, and was witnessed by Elizabeth's father Thomas Tinsley and the family of Rev. Lane.
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| A portion of Elizabeth Tinsley Spencer's sworn statement in her pension application. Source: Fold3 |
According to Elizabeth, there was no surviving record of the marriage because their “marriage notice was published."
At that time in Virginia, there were two legally-recognized ways people could get married. One was by obtaining a marriage license from the county government in the county where the bride lived. The second--the method described by Elizabeth in her pension application--was by the publication of marriage banns, a process which was cheaper, took longer, and which, unfortunately, left few records behind.
A marriage bann was an official notification that a couple planned to marry. Banns were required to be posted for three consecutive Sundays prior to the wedding at the churches of the bride and groom or at militia musters or other community events. This gave the community the opportunity to object if there was something illegal or immoral about the proposed union. This practice, in theory, prevented people from marrying too young or from committing bigamy, the practice of being married to more than one person at a time.
Moses and Elizabeth probably opted for the publication method because they were adherents of a dangerous and rebellious religious movement sweeping the state of Virginia at the time.
They were...
Baptists!
From their inclusion on the roll of Shoal Creek Baptist Church in Oconee County, South Carolina at the turn of the nineteenth century, we know that Moses and Elizabeth were adherents of the Baptist faith, and the fact that a Baptist minister conducted their wedding gives some indication that they probably shared that faith at the outset of their married life. At the end of Moses's year in the Continental Army, they were probably Baptists planning to be married by a Baptist minister, and Baptist ministers in 1779 were still a year away from being legally permitted to perform marriages in Virginia.
Ten Thousand Dissenters
At that time, Baptists, despite being an increasing presence throughout the state, were still officially considered dissenters in Virginia. A dissenter was any Protestant denomination that was not Anglican or, after 1776, Episcopalian. The established church in Virginia was supported by a tax known as the tithe, a practice which survived not only the creation of an independent state government in Virginia but also lived on several years following the American Revolution.
According to Thomas S. Kidd's fantastic History of Baptists in America, the "aggressive evangelism and unwillingness to comply with regulations of the established church made the Virginia Baptists seem like revolutionaries." Many good Anglicans (and later, Episcopalians) saw Baptists as dangerous outsiders.
Throughout the 1760s and 1770s, more than thirty Baptist ministers were jailed for unlicensed preaching. Others were beaten, physically dragged from their pulpits, and one was even urinated on by angry crowds while trying to preach. Dutton Lane, the minister who married Moses and Elizabeth in the autumn of 1779, was harassed by authorities for unlicensed preaching (at least one of whom later joined the Baptist church) and was threatened with violence from angry crowds while in the pulpit, including a drunk who rushed him during a sermon against the dangers of drunkenness.
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| Moses and Elizabeth Spencer in the membership roll of Shoal Creek Baptist Church in Oconee County, South Carolina at the turn of the 19th century. Source: Ancestry |
Still the movement grew. The simplicity of Baptist services and the plainspoken nature of the mostly-uneducated Baptist preachers appealed to regular people of Virginia, many of whom had lost touch with the formality and hierarchy of the established church.
In October 1776, with revolutionary fervor at a fever pitch, the Virginia legislature received the "Ten-Thousand Name Petition," from Baptists and other dissenters demanding full religious liberty and an end to mandatory taxation in support of the established Episcopal church. The petition's signatories represented around ten percent of Virginia's white male population, a huge number that the state's wartime government couldn't afford to ignore at a time when manpower was dwindling.
The legislature obliged by exempting Baptists and other dissenters from having to pay the tithe tax in support of the established church, a move which placated Baptists for the moment but which stopped short of official disestablishment of the state church.
The movement reached its crescendo with Thomas Jefferson's Statue of Religious Liberty, which he wrote in 1776 but which was not presented to the Virginia Legislature until 1779, the year Moses and Elizabeth were probably married by the Baptist preacher Dutton Lane.
The statute languished in the legislature for years while the state government took on the more immediate threat of winning the Revolution. The statute encountered particularly strong opposition from Federalist Patrick Henry, a conservative and a political foe of Jefferson who wanted the state to allow taxpayers to choose which church to support with their tax money, but with the assurance that all tithes would be given to Christian churches.
It wasn't until 1786, after James Madison published a very popular pamphlet in support of religious liberty, that the Statute became law, and a few years later, was a direct influence on the First Amendment to the Constitution and the concept of a "wall of separation" between church and state which was so immensely popular among Evangelicals who had been ostracized by the official state churches.
Jefferson saw his authorship of the Statute of Religious Liberty as one of his most valuable additions to American history, and had it included in his epitaph. Jefferson's stalwart belief in religious liberty won him the lifelong love of Baptists nationwide. It was also the reason that he received a 1,200-pound wheel of cheese from a grateful Baptist congregation after he was elected president.
The discrimination faced by Baptists and other dissenters in Virginia had far-reaching repercussions. Five decades later, when Elizabeth tried to apply for a Revolutionary soldier's widow's pension after Moses's death, she was denied it because she could produce no proof her marriage. Since she had no marriage license and no witnesses to the marriage could swear to its validity, she was unable to draw any benefits from Moses's wartime service.
Volunteer Spirit
According to his pension application, after he was discharged from the Continental Army, Moses "served his country...as a volunteer militiaman, and fought against the enemy at the Battle of Guilford." Fought on March 15, 1781 just forty miles south of Moses's home in Henry County, Virginia, the Battle of Guilford Courthouse was a British victory which cost the British commander Lord Cornwallis nearly a quarter of his army and which propelled the war toward its final act.
Several Virginia militia regiments participated in the battle at Guilford Courthouse. We know from Thomas Jefferson's correspondence with Brigadier General Robert Lawson that Jefferson (then governor of Virginia) ordered several counties' militias called up to support General Nathaniel Greene's movement into North Carolina to face off against Cornwallis, including "a fourth part" of the Henry County militia.
Was Jefferson's order the catalyst for Moses's re-entry to the war? Elizabeth stated in her pension application that her first child was born on February 9, 1781, and that Moses joined the army on its way to Guilford Courthouse "a few days after the birth" of that child. Jefferson's letter to Lawson, indicating that several counties' militias were already in the field, was written on February 25.
An existing muster roll of the men who responded to Jefferson's call for militia from Henry County that spring does not include Moses's name, but it is possible that he went with another county's militia, or perhaps that he fell in with Greene's Continentals for the short march to Guilford Courthouse.
Whatever the circumstances, Moses was definitely in the right place at the right time to have participated in the battle. As a trained veteran of the Continental Army, Moses was probably an asset to the local militia, many members of which had received only sporadic and ineffective training at county muster days throughout their adult lives.
The British held the field when the Battle of Guilford Courthouse ended, and Moses and his neighbors slipped back across the state line home, but Lord Cornwallis lost more men than he could afford to lose in the fight, and he changed his strategy to compensate. By moving toward the Virginia coast, Cornwallis hoped to be resupplied by the British fleet. Instead, he was trapped by Washington and the newly-arrived French army at a little village called Yorktown, where he surrendered in October 1781, effectively ending British resistance in the Revolutionary War.
The "Art and Mystery" of Farming
With the end of the war, Moses moved south. He went first to North Carolina, then to South Carolina where his son Thomas said the family spent "fifty years." It was in South Carolina that Moses and Elizabeth were included on the church roll of Shoal Creek Baptist Church. Moses moved next to Kentucky, and then shortly thereafter to Lawrence County, Tennessee, which was organized in 1817 and where I and countless numbers of his descendants were born and raised.
Moses spent the final years of his life in both Lawrence and Maury Counties. It was to this area that his son Thomas returned after fighting the British in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. What must those conversations have been like? To hear two generations of veterans comparing Monmouth with New Orleans!
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| The indenture recorded by Moses in 1822. Source: FamilySearch |
According to the apprenticeship indenture recorded in the Lawrence County Register of Deeds' Office, Moses agreed to teach "the art and mystery of farming" to 14-year-old Elias Cromer. The apprenticeship was to last until Cromer was 21 years old, and stipulated that Cromer was to "faithfully serve [Moses's] lawful commands...and to behave himself as a faithful child ought to do." Moses would supply the boy with "sufficient victuals, clothing, and twelve months' schooling" in addition to teaching him to farm, rewarding him upon his 21st birthday with a "horse saddle and bridle and suit of clothes."
Unfortunately, Moses would not live to see the end of young Elias's education in the "art and mystery" of farming, and we don't know if he ever got that suit of clothes.
The old patriot died on March 29, 1826.
The only person he mentioned in his will was his wife Elizabeth, whom he named as both his sole heir and his executrix. By 1824, when the will was written, he was living in Maury County, but, in true form for him, he moved back across to Lawrence County shortly before his death.
Moses's payment for his service to the United States, deferred in so many ways, was rewarded in ** when he was awarded a pension for his Revolutionary service in the amount of $96 per year, or $8 per month, barely more than he made as a private in the Seventh Virginia Infantry.
On September 1, 1843, Elizabeth--back in Lawrence County again--applied to obtain a pension of her own as a Revolutionary War widow, but she was foiled by the fact that she had no "documentary proof" of her marriage to Moses. In fact, Elizabeth would never see a dime of her pension money. After she died in 1849, her son Thomas made inquiries into why her claim had been denied.
According to the documents available in Elizabeth's pension application file, Thomas's efforts appeared to be successful, and her estate was awarded her pension amount posthumously in 1851.
Works Cited
'An Indenture from Amy Mansel to Moses Spencer,' Deed Book A, p. 65. Lawrence County Register of Deeds. Lawrence County, Tennessee. Dated 22 Jun 1822, Recorded 7 Jul 1822.
Ancestry.com. Connecticut, U.S., Church Record Abstracts, 1630-1920 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: 2013.Original data: Connecticut. Church Records Index. Connecticut State Library, Hartford, Connecticut.
Ancestry.com. Connecticut, U.S., Town Birth Records, pre-1870 (Barbour Collection) [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006.Original data: White, Lorraine Cook, ed. The Barbour Collection of Connecticut Town Vital Records. Vol. 1-55. Baltimore, MD, USA: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1994-2002.
Babits, Lawrence E., and Joshua B. Howard. Long, Obstinate, and Bloody: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Boehm, J. “Mammoth Cheese.” Monticello.org, October 1997. https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/mammoth-cheese/.
“Continental Currency.” Continental Currency: January 14, 1779. Accessed February 6, 2023. https://coins.nd.edu/colcurrency/currencytext/CC-01-14-79.html#:~:text=Detector%20bills%20were%20printed%20in,dollars%20for%20%241%20in%20specie.
Farrell, Cassandra. “Early Virginia Marriage Records.” Research Notes Number 26. Library of Virginia, July 2010. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/guides/Research_Note_26.pdf.
Kidd, Thomas S., and Barry Hankins. Baptists in America: A History. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Read, James H. Memorial and Remonstrance, 2009. https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/870/memorial-and-remonstrance.
Scott, Morgan. History of the Separate Baptist Church: With a Narrative of Other Denominations. United States: Hollenbeck Press, 1901.
Smallpox, Inoculation, and the Revolutionary War. National Parks Service. Accessed 3 Feb 2023. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/smallpox-inoculation-revolutionary-war.htm#ftn23
Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives U.S., Southern Baptist Church Records, 1750-1899 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2022. Original data: Microfilm Church Records. Nashville, Tennessee. Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives. sbhla.org
Spencer, Elizabeth Revolutionary War Widow's Pension Application. No. W-41. "United States Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Applications, 1800-1900." Database. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 2 Feb 2023. From "Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Application Files." Database and images. Fold3.com. http://www.fold3.com : n.d. Citing NARA microfilm publication M804. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1974.
Spencer, John Henderson. Autobiography of John Henderson Spencer, 1876.
Spencer, Moses Revolutionary War Pension Application. No. W-41. "United States Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Applications, 1800-1900." Database. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 2 Feb 2023. From "Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Application Files." Database and images. Fold3.com. http://www.fold3.com : n.d. Citing NARA microfilm publication M804. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1974.
"United States Revolutionary War Rolls, 1775-1783." Database with images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 2 February 2023. Citing NARA microfilm publication M246. Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Services, 1980.
Valley Forge encampment,to June 18, 1778. [1928] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71000868/.
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