One word in a militia file

Until this week everything we could say about James Rigby’s means came from what he was not assessed for.

He is never assessed for acreage, and never for a dwelling he owns. He rents: a tenement at four pounds a year in Upper Chichester, a house and lot at five pounds ten in Lower Chichester. He keeps a cow, and in one year a horse. The only ground he is recorded as owning is five acres and eighty perches in Aston, valued at sixty-six dollars in 1798, with no dwelling on it.

All of that is inference. Then this turned up among four Chester County Lieutenancy cards:

Poverty was a recognised ground for exemption from militia duty. He appeared, pleaded it, and it was allowed. The remark is a finding by the county, recorded in its own appeal book.

A second card, 22 August 1777, Captain James Thompson’s company: remark “to be rass’d out” — erased from the roll — authority “appeal.” He had been struck off at his own request that summer.

Three weeks after that, on 11 September 1777, the Battle of Brandywine was fought eight miles west and he dismissed his scholars. So the militia appeal and the schoolhouse story fall in the same month.

The four cards together are an exemption record rather than a service record: enrolled April 1777, erased on appeal that August, pleading poverty June 1779, still being classed November 1782. Nothing in the file shows him serving.