Private Caesar Ferrit*
Caesar Ferrit, (unknown - 1799), of Indigenous, African, and European heritage, was likely born enslaved on a Caribbean island in 1720. Later, as a freeman living in Massachusetts, Ferrit became a yeoman farmer, Natick resident, and fought at the Battle of Lexington and Concord. On April 19, 1775, Ferrit responded to the Lexington Alarm as a member of Captain Joseph Morse’s Company out of Natick.
Caesar Ferrit and his son John fired upon the British regulars as they marched back towards Boston after the battle at the North Bridge in Concord. They are the only Black and Indigenous soldiers known to have fired on British regulars on April 19, 1775. According to witness accounts recorded in 1830:
Caesar Ferrit and his son John arrived at a house near Lexington meeting house, but a short time before the British soldiers reached that place, on their retreat from Concord. These two discharged their muskets upon the regulars from the entry, and secreted themselves under the cellar stairs, till the enemy had passed by, though a considerable number of them entered the house and made a diligent search for their annoyers.
Caesar Ferrit was one of three Black and Indigenous soldiers known to have fought on April 19, 1775. The other two are his sons, John and Thomas. Like many freemen of Massachusetts, Ferrit continued to fight intermittently from 1775 to 1781. And, like all soldiers, he was paid according to his rank regardless of status (ie. free, indentured, enslaved or apprenticed) at the time of enlistment.
Ferrit married a woman named Naomi Isaac in 1737 in Dorchester. Naomi is recorded to have been a white woman from New England, but she may also have been Indigenous. Caesar and Naomi Ferrit were both free when they were married. Therefore, their children were born free.
Later in his life, Ferrit was recorded as having said that he had the "blood of four nations in his veins,” a reference tohis African and Indigenous Caribbean grandmothers and his Dutch and French grandfathers.
Ferrit died in Natick on May 23, 1799. His name is memorialized on a tablet at the Indian Burial Ground on Pond Street in Natick.
Deeper Analysis: The story of Caesar Ferrit claiming to have the “blood of four nations in his veins,” comes to us from William Biglow’s 1830 History of the Town of Natick. In Biglow’s history, Naomi Isaac, Caesar’s wife, is a “white New England woman.” More recently, others have argued that Naomi Isaac was an Indigenous woman identified as “an Indian girl” who may have moved to Dorchester after joining the church in Cohasset around 1736.
The identities of both Caesar and Naomi, and their children, were complex. Biglow’s retelling of Caesar’s description of his own multiracial identity offers a rare insight into that complexity—even as it is written more than a generation after Caesar’s death in 1799. Racial categories such as “Indian,” “white,” and “dark” are also subjective to the beholder and may not represent the background of the person being categorized.
Note: More often than not, service, vital, and/or other historical records were created and kept by men of English and European backgrounds. They employed a wide range of descriptive terms, such as "mulatto," “negro," and "dark complexion." These terms cannot fully capture any soldier's identity, but they do offer clues. In some cases, the surname of a soldier of color connects him to a Natick family that is well documented. Often, these soldiers are Indigenous men. The biographies in this project make it possible to say more not only about a soldier's identity or background, but also about the life he led in Natick and beyond.