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| The Fratricide at Wyoming by James Charles Armytage, 1860 |
The earliest accounts of “The Fratricide” are found in the journals kept by participants in the 1779 Sullivan-Clinton Campaign against the Haudenosaunee. In his entry for June 23, 1779, Captain James Norris of the 3rd New Hampshire Regiment wrote:
A Young man by the Name of Henry Pensil, who had escaped the Fate of most of his Countrymen, & in the Evening after the Battle had taken refuge on a small Island in the River, was discovered by a Tory who fiercely accosted him with the Appellation of a Damnd Rebel: the poor fellow being unarmed began to implore his pity, fell down upon his knees and entreated him not to stain his hands with his Brothers blood, “John, I am your brother, spare my Life and I will serve you” : “I know you are my Brother” replied the Villain; “but you are a damnd Rebel, Henry, and we are of opposite sides and Sentiments”—in the mean time was loading his gun with great coolness, which after the most moving appeal to his humanity & Justice, with all deliberation he levelled at his breast and shot him! then Tomahawked, & scalpd him! Another young man who lay concealed in the bushes a little way off, & afterwards made his Escape, heard all that passed, and saw the Murderer, who stood up upon a log while he loaded his Gun, and knew him to be the Brother of his unfortunate companion: He also adds that the Savages came up soon after he he'd finished the bloody deed: and cursed his cruelty in the bitterness of their hearts & said they had a great mind to put him to death the same way.Captain Norris’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Dearborn, recorded similar details in his journal a few weeks later but added, “The above account I have from one Mr. Slocum a young fellow belonging to Wyoming who lay in the bushes so near Pencel as to hear all that passed.”
Reverend William Rogers, Chaplin to Enoch Poor’s brigade, recorded the story as told by Lieutenant Colonel Zebulon Butler, the American commander at the Battle of Wyoming:
On a small island in the Susquehannah below the field of action, Giles Slocum, having reached thus far in safety, concealed himself in the bushes, where he was witness to the meeting of John and Henry Pensell, brothers, John was a Tory and Henry was a whig. Henry, having lost his gun, upon seeing his brother John, fell upon his knees and begged him to spare his life ; upon which John called him a damned rebel. John then went deliberately to a log, got on the same, and began to load his piece, while Henry was upon his knees imploring him as a brother not to kill him. " I will," said he, " go with you and serve you as long as I live, if you will spare my life." John loaded his gun. Henry continued, " You won't kill your brother, will you?" " Yes," replied the monster, “I will as soon as look at you, you are a damned rebel." He then shot him and afterwards went up and struck him four or five times with a tomahawk and scalped him. Immediately after one of the enemy coming to him said, " What have you been doing, have you killed your brother?" "Yes," said he, "for he was a damned rebel." The other replied, "I have a great mind to serve you in the same manner," They went off together. In the evening, Slocum made his escape. Slocum is a man of reputation, and his word was never disputed in the neighborhood where he is known. The family of the Pensells came from lower Smithfield on the Delaware, twenty miles above Easton. Henry's widow and seven children are still at Wyoming, in very low circumstances.
Somewhat surprisingly, “The Fractricide” did not appear in the lurid and sensationalist “Poughkeepsie” account that, in the weeks following the battle, was widely published in Patriot newspapers. As a result the story also didn’t make its way into in the early histories of the United States such as John Marshall’s influential Life of George Washington. “The Fratricide,” however, reemerged in the nineteenth century local histories written by Isaac Chapman, William Leete Stone and George Peck.
When Issac Chapman wrote A Sketch of the History of Wyoming in 1818, he included an account that closely mirrored Norris, Dearborn, and Rogers.1 Although Chapman didn’t name the actors of the drama, he contributed to the story by adding: “the tory brother thought it prudent to accompany the British troops on their return to Canada.”
In The Poetry and History of Wyoming, published in 1841, Wiliam Leete Stone echoed the earlier accounts and describe the murderer as a “fiend in human form.” Stone also raised the possibility of an additional witness:
This tale is too horrible for belief; but a survivor of the battle, a Mr. Baldwin, whose name will occur again, confirmed its truth to the writer with his own lips. He knew the brothers well, and in August, 1839, declared the fact to be so. The name of the brothers was Pensil.
Stone never gave “Mr. Baldwin” a first name, but Oscar Jewell Harvey, author of The History of Wilkes-Barre identified him as Sergeant Thomas Baldwin, a Continental soldier in the 1st Independent Westmoreland Company. A few weeks before the Battle of Wyoming, several officers of the two Independent Companies had resigned their commissions and, accompanied by a number of the enlisted, had returned to the Wyoming Valley to help defend their homes. The morning after the battle, Baldwin and the other surviving Continental soldiers fled with Lieutenant Colonel Butler rather than being taken as a prisoner of war.
Baldwin later participated in the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign and was at the Battle of Newtown. In 1782 he led an attempt to rescue a mother and children who had been taken captive by a party of Seneca. Three of the four children were rescued but the mother was killed by her captors. After the war, Baldwin settled in what is now Chemung County, New York, but since he died in 1810, he could not have “declared the fact to be so” to Stone.
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The Fratricide's Fate from George Peck's 1858 Wyoming:
Its History, Stirring Incidents, and Romantic History |
John Pencil fled to Canada with the other refugees, and settled in a wilderness. He was twice chased by wolves, and each time rescued by the Indians. The savages, however, began to think there was something judicial in the matter, and concluded to leave him to the retributions of Providence. They said, " He too wicked — too wicked; Great Spirit angry; Indian no more help him." It was not long before another pack of the ferocious wild dogs scented the fratricide, and this time they were left to satisfy their thirst for his blood. The miserable wretch was killed and devoured, an end well becoming such a monster.
Peck claims that he received these details from a Mrs. Alexander2 who got them from “a gentleman from Canada,” but it is far more likely than Peck invented them. Art historian Darlene Miller-Lanning suggests that Peck included these previous unknown details so as to create a cautionary tale to southern secessionists. Writing just a few years before the Civil War, Peck wanted to “demonstrate the grave moral costs associated with rebellion.”
At the commemoration of the Battle of Wyoming in 1878, Steuben Jenkins, a local politician and lawyer, gave a long-winded, jingoistic, and error-filled speech during which he presented “evidence” that the fratricide never occurred. The evidence was a 1781 petition to the Connecticut Assembly in which a John Pencil and five others requested a discharge, having already served four years with the Continental Army. Obviously, if John was with the Continental Army in 1778 he could not have murdered his brother at the Battle of Wyoming.
Not everybody agreed with Jenkins. In 1885, Horace Hayden in his introduction to the The Massacre of Wyoming: The Acts of Congress for the Defence of the Wyoming Valley wrote:
A century had not passed over the bloody field of Wyoming ere it became necessary for the grandson of Giles Slocum, in a letter now before me, to asseverate the truth of the fratricidal murder of Henry Pencil, received by him from the lips of his grandfather well known as a man of cautious and accurate speech.Oscar Jewell Harvey also examined Jenkins’s evidence and discounted it but for the wrong reason. Harvey concluded that the John Pencil who signed the 1781 memorial was John and Henry’s father. He made this claim despite his familiarity with John Pencil’s 1787 Loyalist Claim for Losses.
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| John Pencil's 1787 Claim for Losses |
The John Pencil who signed the 1781 memorial enlisted in the second incarnation of the 3rd Connecticut Regiment in 1777. The soldiers of this regiment were recruited from the counties of Windham and Hartford, not from Wyoming Valley. The 3rd Connecticut, however, was garrisoned in the valley when it merged with the 4th Connecticut in January 1781. The petition was unsuccessful as John appears on the muster rolls of the merged regiment in 1782.
John Pencil of the 3rd Connecticut was therefore not John and Henry’s father, but neither was he the John Pencil who allegedly killed his brother.
Harvey concluded that both Giles Slocum and Thomas Bennett had witnessed the murder of Henry Pencil. He wrote that the fratricide was “more indisputably authenticated than many other incidents,” neglecting the fact that all of the evidence was hearsay.
One piece of hearsay evidence that Harvey did not consider is the memorial of Joseph Slocum (1776-1855), written in 1839 and submitted to Congress with a petition from the inhabitants of the Wyoming Valley. Joseph was a younger sibling of Giles, and although he was a small child when the Battle of Wyoming occurred, would have heard the story from his brother. Joseph wrote:
Giles escaped to Monockesy island, and buried himself in the sand and bushes, the Indians in search; they found another man, who had also reached the island; heard their conversation; he begged hard for his life, but they slew him. Giles lay till night; when the enemy had returned, he waded back to shore, and there met Nathan Carey, who had escaped; they went together, and safe to Forty Fort.
Giles Slocum, the son of Jonathan Slocum (1735-1778) and Ruth Tripp (1736-1807) was born in Rhode Island in 1759, the oldest of ten children. His family migrated to the Wyoming Valley in 1777 and settled near Wilkes-Barre.
While Giles escaped from the battlefield and possibly witnessed a fratricide, his sister, five-year-old Frances, was taken captive by the Munsee Delaware in November. She was discovered living among the Miami in Indiana decades later. In December, six weeks after Frances was taken, Jonathan Slocum and his father-in-law Isaac Tripp were ambushed and killed.
Despite all this, Ruth Slocum refused to leave the valley. Giles married Sarah Ross in 1780, raised a family, and continued to live near Wilkes-Barre until his death in 1820.
It seems likely that Giles Slocum did witness the death of Henry Pencil on Monoconock Island. What is uncertain is whether the murderer was John Pencil. Did Giles really believe he saw John shoot, tomahawk, and scalp his brother, or did he add these details to make the story more interesting? The account his brother Joseph provided is significantly different than the story Giles told Henry Dearborn and other participants in the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign. Perhaps it is the more accurate version.
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Detail from the Map of Gen. Sullivan's March from Easton to the Seneca & Cayuga Countries. Sullivan's forces encamped at Standing Stone on August 9, 1779. Source: Library of Congress |
So who were John and Henry Pencil?
Johann Bentzel was born in what is now Germany about 1738, possibly in the Palatinate region to the west of the Rhine River. When John and his older brother Henry arrived in Pennsylvania with their parents, their name was quickly anglicized as Pencil, although it was often recorded as Pensel or Pensyl.
Many family historians have wrongly identified John and Henry’s parents as Johannes Bentzel (1704–1770) and Maria Sophia Krieder (1704–1789) who arrived in Philadelphia from Rotterdam in April 1749 aboard the Elliot. This Johannes Bentzel, however, was living in Dover, York, Pennsylvania when he made his will in 1769. In his will he names his wife Sophia and his son Johan Phillip. He refers to Johan Phillip’s brothers and sisters, but does not name them.
John’s Claim for Losses indicates his father would have died early in 1778. In an affidavit that accompanied the claim, Peter Wartman, who lived on the Susquehanna near Tuckhannock said that he “remembers John living on the Susquehanna with his parents.”
A better candidate for John and Henry’s father arrived in Philadelphia from Rotterdam in September 1753 aboard the Edinburgh. Johannes Bentzel is recorded as having taken the Oaths of Allegiance and Abjuration, and directly underneath his name appears Henry Pintzel and Johannes Pintzel. Older male children were also required to take the oath. Johannes Bentzel and his family settled in Lower Smithfield, near Stroudsburg on the Delaware River, and were living there in 1761.
During the Seven Years War, John decided to “take the King’s shilling” and joined the British Army.
In February 1780, Captain Walter Butler of Butler’s Rangers wrote to Captain Robert Matthews, Governor Frederick Haldimand’s military secretary:
I have a man of the name of Pencil, who served formerly in the Royal Americans. He has an old mother who is upwards of seventy who he is obliged to attend constantly. He says if he allowed a little provision for her, he could make out to save as much from his pay for some family taking charge of her; but otherwise he will be lost to the service. He is a man of good character and very fit for the service he is in.The Royal American Regiment was raised in 1756 at Philadelphia. Four companies of the 1st Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Henri Bouquet, participated in Forbes Expedition against Fort Duquesne in 1758, while the remaining six companies were at the Battle of Carillon the same year. The 2nd Battalion participated in the Siege of Louisbourg in 1758 and were at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759.
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| Soldier of The Royal Americans |
It is not known exactly when John joined the Royal Americans, or how long he served, or to which battalion he was assigned. A likely scenario is that he joined the 1st Battalion at Philadelphia during the winter of 1759 when Lt. Col. Bouquet had send out recruiting parties in order to bring the battalion back up to full strength.
In the spring of 1759, the 1st Battalion was tasked with providing the garrison for the newly constructed Fort Pitt as well as for other forts in the Ohio Country. This duty continued for the rest of the war.
After the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the 1st Battalion was reduced in strength by one company. Five companies were stationed at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, one company was stationed at Fort Detroit, and detachments from the remaining three companies garrisoned Fort Pitt, Fort Bedford, and Fort Michilimackinac, as well as several smaller forts in the Ohio Country.
During Pontiac’s War in 1763, many of the smaller forts garrisoned by the 60th were captured. Fort Detroit was besieged from May until October. Fort Pitt was besieged for several weeks until a relief column commanded by Lt. Col Bouquet defeated the indigenous forces at the Battle of Bushy Run. The relief column included the five companies of the 1st that were stationed at Lancaster. Whether John Pencil participated in any of these events is uncertain.
At some point John obtained a discharge and returned home to Lower Smithfield. He was on the Susquehanna by 1772, as both John and his brother Henry appear on the List of Settlers dated September 1772. John was soon joined by his parents as both he and his father appear on the April 1773 petition to the Connecticut Assembly requesting the formation of a new county to serve the needs of the settlers.3
The precise location of John’s home on the Susquehanna is unknown but one source records that he lived at Standing Stone, named for a four metre tall sandstone monolith located on the west bank of the Susquehanna about 20 miles downstream from Tioga Point. He is missing from the 1776 Tax List for Westmoreland County, but the 1777 Tax List places him in the North District, also known as the “Up the River” District. His Claim for Losses, however, mistakenly records that he was “late of Tryon County, New York.”
In his claim he states that he had a small house and six acres cleared, and had 12 sheep, two cattle, and five horses.
John’s brother Henry married Sally Fuller (1737–?), the daughter of John Fuller, about 1768. Their first child, Catharine, was born in 1770 followed by Henry (1772-1833), Joseph (1777-1885) and Hannah (1778–?). There may have been three more children. Rogers recorded seven in his journal when Brigadier General Hand’s troops were encamped in the Wyoming Valley during the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign. Because Henry does not appear on the surviving tax lists, the location of his home in the Wyoming Valley is not known.
John and Henry may also have had a sister, Eliza, who married John Jacobs (1748-1831) about 1771. John and Eliza lived in Hanover Township downriver of Wilkes-Barre. There is evidence that John served in the Hanover Company of the 24th Regiment of Connecticut Militia, that he was wounded during the Battle of Wyoming, and that Lt. Col. Denison helped him escape to Forty Fort. Eliza is said to have fled her home after the capitulation of Forty Fort by following the path from Wilkes-Barre to Easton, carrying her baby and leading a cow. John and Eliza lived in Hanover Township after the war.
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| Soldier of Butler's Rangers |
Many of the inhabitants “up the river” supported the British during the Revolutionary War and left their homes for Fort Niagara in the early spring of 1777. John, however, remained on the Susquehanna for another year. The 1778 pay list for Butler’s Rangers records that he enlisted on June 1, 1778, a month before the Battle of Wyoming.
John likely would have been present at the Battle of Newtown in August 1779. Whether he participated in other actions such as the Battle of Klock's Field in 1780 or the Battle of Johnstown in 1781 is uncertain.
In March 1783, John married Eva McNott, a widow with five children, at the Machiche refugee camp near Trois-Rivières, Quebec. Eva was the daughter of Geradus Dingman and Saartje Jansen. Geradus settled on the Susquehanna near Unadilla, New York about 1770, as did Eva and her first husband James McNott. In October 1778, Unadilla was destroyed in retaliation for the destruction in the Wyoming Valley. Eva fled to Canada with her husband, children, and parents, and was sent to Machiche. James enlisted in the 2nd Battalion of the King’s Royal Regiment of New York but died at Machiche in 1779 before he could report for duty. Both of Eva’s parents, and possibly one of her children also died at Machiche as the Loyalist returns for 1779 show six children rather than the five that appear in later returns.
John’s mother was also at Machiche when he married, having arrived from Montreal in the summer of 1781. Several of the returns describe her as a “very old woman.” John may have brought his widowed mother with him to Niagara before he enlisted in Butler’s Rangers. She may still have been at Niagara when Captain Butler wrote his letter, but by November 1780 she was billeted in Montreal. She was still at Machiche in December 1783.
John appears on the November 30, 1783 Niagara Return with his new bride and her five children. When Butler’s Rangers disbanded in June 1784, he brought his family to the Bay of Quinte Region. The October 1784 Cataraqui return shows John settled in Township 3 (Fredericksburgh). With him is an additional adult woman, presumably his mother. The 1786 Return shows two women and an additional boy under ten. John and Eva had one child together, John, born about this time.
As a result of his 1787 claim, John received only £54 in compensation as the commissioners discounted his claim that his father had received “1000 acres on the Susquehanna” in 1767 and had gifted it to John about 1771.
John received patent to the east half of Lot 11 Concession 5 in Frederickburgh Township on May 17, 1802. He appears as a witness to two marriages in 1802, but does not appear on the 1808 assessment roll for Fredericksburgh. He likely died between 1802 and 1808.
He definitely wasn’t eaten by wolves.
“The Fratricide” is just one of the many stories that grew in the aftermath of the Battle of Wyoming. Of course, there is no evidence that woman and children were burned alive in their homes, that Parshall Terry cut off his own father’s head, or that Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant) led the indigenous warriors. Whether a loin-cloth clad, middle-aged, Munsee Delaware woman named “Queen Esther” executed prisoners after the battle is debatable. But despite the abundance of hearsay evidence that supports John Pencil killing his brother, reasonable doubt still exists.
Notes:
1 Although written in 1818, Isaac Chapman’s work was published posthumously in 1830.
2 Hannah Alexander nee Hibbard (1778–?) was an infant when her father was killed at the Battle of Wyoming. Her mother later married Matthias Hollenback (1752-1829) who escaped the massacre by swimming across the Susquehanna.
3 The Susquehanna River valley north of Sunbury was claimed by both Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and was the setting for several armed clashes during the Pennamite-Yankee Wars. In 1776 the Connecticut Assembly established Westmoreland County even though the area was already in Pennsylvania’s Northumberland County.
Sources:
Chapman, Isaac A. A Sketch of the History of Wyoming. Wilkes-Barre, Sharp D. Lewis, 1830.
Cook, Frederick, editor. Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779. Auburn, New York, 1887.
Crowder, Norman. Early Ontario Settlers: A Source Book. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1993.
Harvey, Oscar Jewell. A History of Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, Vol. 2. Wilkes-Barre: Wyoming Historical and Geological Society, 1909.
Hayden, Horace Edwin (ed.). The Massacre of Wyoming: The Acts of Congress for the Defence of the Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, 1776-1778: With the Petitions of the Sufferers by the Massacre of July 3, 1778, for Congressional Aid. Wilkes-Barre, 1895.
Jenkins, Steuben. Historical Address at the Wyoming Monument, 3d of July 1778, on the 100th Anniversary of the Battle and Massacre of Wyoming. Wilkes-Barre, 1878.
Jones, J. Kelsey. Loyalist Plantations on the Susquehanna. Unpublished, 2013.
Library and Archives Canada. Haldimand Papers. MG21, Volumes B164, B166, B168, B188, B202.
Library and Archives Canada. Land Petitions of Upper Canada, 1763-1865. RG 1 L3.
Marston, Daniel P. Swift and Bold: The 60th Regiment and Warfare in North America, 1775-1765. Master’s Thesis, McGill University, 1997.
Miller-Lanning, Darlene. “Dark Legend and Sad Reality: Peck’s Wyoming and Civil War,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Autumn 1998) pp. 405-444.
National Archives of the United Kingdom. American Loyalist Claims, 1776–1835. AO 12–13.
Peck, George. Wyoming: Its History, Stirring Incidents, and Romantic Adventures. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1858.
Smy, William A., editor. The Butler Papers: Documents and Papers Relating to Colonel John Butler and His Corps of Rangers. Brock University Library Archives & Special Collections, 1994.
Strassburger, Ralph Beaver and Hinke, William John (1934) “Pennsylvania German Pioneers: Volume 1, 1727-1775.” Proceedings of the Pennsylvania German Society, Vol. 42.
Stone, William L. The Poetry and History of Wyoming: Containing Campbell's Gertrude. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1841
Watt, Gavin K. Loyalist Refugees: Non-Military Refugees in Quebec 1776-1784. Milton, Ontario: Global Heritage Press, 2014.
