His active service in the cause of the Revolution did not begin until June of 1777, when the Massachusetts State’s Train of Artillery for the defense of Boston was reorganized, and the first entry in the regimental orderly book was in the handwriting of Sergeant Major William Russell; a roll of the officers which included the name of “Paul Revere, Lieutenant Colonel.”
Sergeant Major Russell was later appointed adjutant of this regiment and served in the Rhode Island campaign until the end of the year 1778. Thereafter that “ardent temperament” in his country’s cause led him to seek the sea, and the artillery officer entered the naval service as a captain’s clerk on board the Continental ship Jason under the famous Captain John Manley of Marblehead. They were sure of hard fighting who sailed with John Manley. While in command of the frigate Hancock he had taken the British twenty-eight-gun frigate Fox after a severe and bloody action. Later, in the privateer Cumberland, he had suffered the misfortune of being carried into Barbados by the British frigate Pomona, but breaking out of jail with his men at night he seized a British government vessel, put her crew in irons, and sailed her to the United States. Reaching Boston, Captain Manley was given the fine Continental cruiser Jason, of twenty guns and a hundred and twenty men.
It was this vessel and its dashing commander which lured young William Russell from his military service. But the Jason was captured during Captain Manley’s first cruise in her by the swift British frigate Surprise after a hammer and tongs engagement in which the American loss was thirty killed and wounded. Carried as prisoners to England, the officers and some of the men of the Jason were thrown into Old Mill Prison at Plymouth where William Russell kept the journal which is by far the most complete and entertaining account of the experience of the Revolutionary privateersmen and naval seamen who suffered capture that has been preserved.
After two and a half years’ confinement in a British prison, William Russell, having left a wife and children at home, was exchanged and sent to Boston in a cartel, or vessel under a flag of truce. He enjoyed his homecoming no more than a few days when he re-entered the service of his country as a privateersman and was again captured during his first cruise, and sent to the notorious prison ship Jersey in New York harbor. He was not paroled until the spring of 1783, when with health shattered by reason of his years of hardship as a prisoner of war he returned to Cambridge and endeavored to resume his old occupation of teaching. He mustered a few scholars at his home in the “Light House Tavern,” but consumption had gripped him and he died in the following year, on March 7, 1784, at the age of thirty-five. He had given the best years of his life to his country and he died for its cause with as much indomitable heroism and self-sacrificing devotion as though musket ball or boarding pike had slain him.
The Journal of William Russell’s long captivity in Mill Prison begins as follows:[12]
“Dec. 19, 1779. This morning the Boatswain told us to get ready to go on shore to be examined. Went to the Fountain Inn Dock. Examined by two Justices and committed to Mill Prison in Plymouth for Piracy, Treason and Rebellion against His Majesty on the High Sea.[13] This evening came to the Prison, finding 168 Americans among whom was Captain Manley and some more of my acquaintances. Our diet is short, only ¾ pound of beef, 1 lb. of bread, 1 qt. of beer per day per man.”
The East India Marine Society’s hall, now the home of the Peabody Museum
Page from the records of the East India Marine Society, written in 1799