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The British and Provincial Conquest of Cuba: Graham

The prominence of Connecticut in the Havana expedition, 1762, has been apparent, and by the courtesy of the Historical Committee we have the advantage of using the advance sheets of the Society of the Colonial Wars' 1895 Year Book, a valuable publication, The Journal of a chaplain with the expedition has the following title page: "Extracts from the Journal of the Reverend John Graham, Chaplain of the First Connecticut Regiment, Colonel Lyman, from September 25th to October 19th, 1762, at the Siege of Havana. Printed by Order of the Fourth General Court of the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of New York, Office of the Society, 37 Liberty Street, New York, 1896."

Committee on Historical Documents: EDWARD F. DELANCEY, WILLIAM G. VER PLANCK, GOUVERNEUR M. SMITH, M.D., ABRAHAM B. VALENTINE, CHARLES ISHAM, Secretary. The Journal is introduced with this note:

This Journal gives, with the fervid and formal religious language of a Connecticut Congregational clergyman of the last century, vivid statements of the sufferings of the British army, regulars and provincials, at the siege of Havana in 1762. It also contains valuable statements of the numbers of the British regiments, and the names of the provincial troops, and the names and strength of the men-of-war engaged in the reduction of that strong Spanish city; facts that are difficult to obtain, except in large public libraries. The Rev. John Graham, who was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1722, and who graduated from Yale College in 1740, was of the same name and profession as his father. The elder Rev. John Graham, M.A., received his degree from the University of Glasgow. He emigrated to Boston in 1718, and married, first, Abigail, a daughter of Dr. Chauncey. At the time of the birth of John, junior, he was settled at Exeter, but removed later to Stafford, Conn., and was subsequently ordained minister over the Church in Woodbury, Conn., where he remained forty-two years-until his death.

The son was, in 1746, minister of the West Parish of Suffield, then in Massachusetts, but since 1752 in Connecticut, and practiced medicine, as well as administering the affairs of his congregation.

In 1761 he accompanied the expedition against Havana, in the capacity of chaplain to the provincial forces, under General Phineas Lyman of Connecticut, an intimate friend of the Graham family. The Connecticut Brigade of twenty-three hundred men joined the regular troops and other provincials at Staten Island, whence the expedition sailed on the 18th of November, 1761. The combined forces, having captured Martinique on February 14th, and Havana on August 13th, 1762, succumbed to an epidemic of fever, by far the deadliest foe they had encountered. The Journal of Graham, although fragmentary, gives a vivid picture of the sufferings of these victors, and of their anxiety to relinquish their conquest.

The author was not always careful to write himself juinor, hence there might be difficulty in identifying him as the chaplain, since his father had already served with Lyman in the operations against Crown Point. Allusions, however, in the Journal to his children, Love and Narcissus, appear to settle this question beyond a doubt. The Rev. John Graham, Jr., like his father, was twice married, the girl and boy he mentions being children by his first wife, Mary Sheldon.

At the outbreak of the Revolution he was an ardent Whig, and so continued to the end. He died in 1790.

Notices of the Grahams may be found in Spagues "Annals of the Pulpit," and in Dexter's "Yale Biographies;" also in Cothren's "History of Ancient Woodbury." Many of the manuscripts and letters of the family were in the possession or the late John Lorrimer Graham, of Flushing, Long Island. The committee are indebted for this Havana Journal to the courtesy of the Rev. B.F. De Costa, D.D., of this city.

New York, Dec. 16, 1895.

The Rev. John Graham's Journal was in two parts, and only the second has been found, but hope of recoving the first has not been abandoned. That which we have and reproduce in full-for it is a broken block of honest history and beyond estimation in value-begins after the capture of Havana, and says nothing directly of the siege, but gives a quaint and vivid picture of the plague which confirms the frightful narrative we have quoted form the historian, Mante.

JOURNAL OF THE REV. JOHN GRAHAM, SHOWING HOW THE PROVINCIAL SOLDIERS PERISHED BEFORE HAVANA OF A FEVER THAT WAS LIKE THE PLAGUE.