On October 12, 1776, William Smallwood wrote a dispatch about the Battle of Brooklyn back to Maryland. The commander of the First Maryland Regiment noted that he had “enclosed a List of the Kill’d & Missing amounting to 256 officers inclusive.” [1] Since the goal of this project is to document who those men were, this list is tremendously important to our work. Or it would be, if we had it. But it’s missing, and it hasn’t been seen for perhaps 150 years.
New York Public Library.
In October 1776, William Smallwood sent a report of the regiment’s actions to the state’s leadership. He summarized the Battle of Brooklyn and wrote that he had “enclosed a List of the Kill’d & Missing amounting to 256 officers inclusive.” [1]
While it is a valuable document, that list gives only the number of men killed or captured, by company and rank; it does not give the number of prisoners, since the British had not relayed information about how many Maryland soldiers had been taken prisoner or their names. However, at some point in September or October, Maryland’s commanders compiled a roster that apparently listed the names of the soldiers still present in the regiment. Unfortunately, that document, which would answer so many questions about the fate of the Maryland 400, is now missing.
The last documented sighting of it occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century. The man who saw it was George G. Brewer, the register of the Maryland Land Office from 1827 to 1851, who took great interest in the historical records in his custody. [2] As he put it, “The records of the Maryland troops that served in the War of the Revolution are very imperfect. I know the fact, because, I was the Register of the Land Office of Maryland for 26 years, and had charge of the records of the Revolution, and profess to know something about the records.” [3]
In 1855, Brewer wrote to the U.S. Commissioner of Pensions regarding the military service of Bryan Philpot, who had been an ensign in the Eighth Company in 1776, and nearly drowned while retreating through the Gowanus Swamp at the Battle of Brooklyn. Philpot’s widow Elizabeth was eligible for a pension as the wife of a Revolutionary veteran, but there was some dispute about the documentation of Philpot’s service. To help bolster her claim, Brewer described how “a return made by Col. Smallwood himself…and in this return Col. Smallwood gives the names of the Killed and Wounded [at the battle]. This [was] a return made to reorganize the corps.” [4] Such a reorganization was necessary after the battle since the Marylanders lost so many men that some companies had to be consolidated in order to have enough men to be effective.
National Archives and Records Administration.
If Brewer had seen the list sometime before 1855, what happened to it? No one can say for sure. By the end of the nineteenth century, the storage conditions of the historical records in the Land Office had deteriorated. Motivated in part by concerns for the survival of these records, and in part by his interest in acquiring documents for his personal collection, John Thomas Scharf, register of the Land Office from 1884 to 1892, took many of them into his possession. In the 1890s, he deposited the documents he had amassed at Johns Hopkins University, even though by law they should have gone to the Maryland Historical Society (now Maryland Center for History and Culture). [5]
In the 1960s, Hopkins deposited the records with the Historical Society, and in 1975, a portion of the collection was transferred to the Maryland State Archives, finally returning the documents to state custody. The roster of the Marylanders from the fall of 1776 was not among them. It could have been lost or destroyed through neglect when it was in the Land Office, or while in Scharf’s custody, or at some other time. It may be that Scharf sold or gave it away while it was in his possession, as he was known to do with other documents. Perhaps the roster still exists, misidentified somewhere. [6]
Smallwood’s “List of the Kill’d & Missing” was removed from the custody of the state of Maryland, perhaps by Scharf, and ended up in the hands of Thomas Addis Emmet, a prolific collector of historic records. Emmet’s collection is now held by the New York Public Library, where Smallwood’s report is today.
–Owen
Notes:
2. Even today, the Land Office is affiliated with archival preservation. The Land Office is a unit of the State Archives, and the State Archivist also serves as the Commissioner of Land Patents.
4. Brewer to Minot.
5. Marcia D. Talley, “Morris Leon Radoff: The Man and the Monument,” American Archivist 44, no. 4 (1981), 332-333; Patricia Dockman Anderson, “Laying the Foundations: Herbert Adams, John Thomas Scharf, and Early Maryland Historical Scholarship,” Maryland Historical Magazine 89, no. 2 (1994), 179–181.
6. Talley, 332–333; Anderson, 179–181.
Finding the Maryland 400 
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