The importance of Phillips in the Kennedy assassination was first recognized by the House Select Committee investigator,
It has long been stated that Phillips played a crucial role in setting up Lee Harvey Oswald as the "patsy," to take the fall when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Without assuming his guilt, our research merely inquires whether he had a family background that would have given him necessary contacts inside Mexico and in Texas to conduct a "rogue" operation to depose a world leader and replace him with his Constitutional successor--the same thing the United States had been doing for decades in other countries.
We do not know what it was that prompted Jane Atlee to settle with her four young children in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where she remained until her death in 1777.
Whether she disclosed to her children the intrigues that had gone on
during her days at the British royal court is also not known. Did her sons,
both of whom would take an active part in the revolution know their
father's connection to the British General who had invaded Philadelphia
the same year Jane died?
Sayre Family--West Jersey to Philadelphia
The branch of the Sayre family from which William Augustus's
sixteen-year-old bride had sprung began in America with Thomas Sayre (born
1597), who brought his family, including three sons from their home in
Leighton Buzzard, England, to Long Island, New York, pursuant to a royal
grant issued around 1638. Unfortunately, this land was also claimed by Dutch settlers,
forcing the Sayres to settle on the opposite side of Long Island, at Southampton, where Thomas died in
1671.
Joseph Sayre (born 1630) "moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, around 1665 and was named
one of the
proprietors in Elizabeth in a deed from Richard Nicholls, the Governor,"
and it was there that his son Daniel, Esther's grandfather, was born in
1685.
Daniel's third son, John Sayre, also born in Elizabeth Town in about 1705, had lived for a time at
56 Broad Street
in New York City, residing with his first wife, Esther Stillwell, daughter of
Nicholas and Elizabeth Stillwell. They lived next door to Francis and Rachel
(LeChevalier) Bowes, with whom they were close friends. In 1735 John, a
tailor doing business from his residence, was admitted as a Freeman of
the city. Esther Stillwell Sayre, died, possibly during childbirth with
daughter, Esther Bowes Sayre, in 1747, several years after the Bowes family had moved west to Philadelphia.
 |
| Map shows where Atlee and Sayre families lived before marriage in 1763. Click to enlarge. |
Francis Bowes, at that time had become actively engaged in Trenton, West Jersey, in the sale--both wholesale and
retail--of items of merchandise such as rum, sugar, indigo and
London steel--according to
notices published in the
Philadelphia Gazette which listed an address on Water Street in Trenton, Nevertheless, after
his death occurred in 1749, his body would be interred at Christ Church cemetery
in Philadelphia alongside Mary, his first wife,
who had died in 1725.
Two months after Francis'
demise Rachel Bowes, still in Trenton apparently, attempted to sell off his lands and other goods by placing an
ad in the Pennsylvania Gazette
in 1750. Possibly she contacted her former neighbor, John Sayre, to invite him to Philadelphia to take over the business left
by his old friend, or perhaps he saw the notices and made his way to
Philadelphia to ask about it. Nevertheless, John Sayre and Rachel Bowes
renewed their friendship and were married on April 8, 1751. Only seven weeks later her three-year-old
son,
John Bowes,
was laid to rest near his father. From that point on, the financial
condition of the couple now living in Philadelphia improved
significantly.
Seven years later Rachel's daughter, Mary Bowes, was wed to John's son,
John Sayre, Jr.,
at Christ Church, the same setting where, in 1763, William Augustus Atlee of Lancaster and Esther Bowes
Sayre were married. Christ Church was the Episcopal church where Benjamin
Franklin and other eminent founders of America in Philadelphia attended services.
Rev. William Sturgeon, who peformed the Atlee-Sayre wedding, had first become rector in 1747, sent by the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the same group which directed the career of Rev. Sayre.
John Sayre, Jr., who had been almost twelve
years of age when his sister Esther was born, was sent back to New York and
trained as a physician
at King's College (now Columbia University) when she was still quite
young. She was a girl of eleven years when her brother returned to Philadelphia in 1758 to marry
his stepsister, Mary Bowes.
Their first child, a daughter, was born there in 1759, followed in short order by
John, James and another Esther Sayre. After birth of the
fourth child in 1763, they left Philadelphia and moved to Lancaster, where John's sister, now Esther Atlee, was living with her new husband. Four years later Rev. Sayre was assigned by the Anglican Society to
mission work in New York. Fireworks began not long after. The revolution had begun.
John, wishing to "remain neutral" during the revolution, despite the fact that his brother-in-law back in Lancaster was an active participant in the planning of the rebellion, found himself accused
of being a British Loyalist for
refusing "to sign the articles prescribed by the Continental Congress," which would obligate the signer to oppose the King with "life and fortune," and to refuse charity to any who chose not to sign. Somehow
Rev. Sayre became "one of the agents
chosen to arrange for the resettlement of the
Loyalists" in St. John, Nova Scotia. We will pick up again here shortly after a brief review of the men with whom Atlee had become associated.
Patriots, Loyalists, or Spies?
The same year Atlee died, a Philadelphia merchant "dealing largely in
supplies for Indian traders" by the name of
Edward Shippen (1703-1781), was elected Philadelphia's mayor. Eventually serving as a judge of the court of common pleas in Philadelphia for five years, Shippen became chief clerk (prothonotary) for a similar civil court in Lancaster. It was in
Shippen's law office in Lancaster, that William Atlee began a study of law, and he, too, would be admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar in 1758, after learning the practice from Shippen.
Shippen himself had studied law from his wife's father,
Tench Francis, Sr., a lawyer in England prior to his emigration in 1720. After working as Lord Baltimore's attorney in Maryland, Francis relocated to Philadelphia about 1739 and became involved there in politics, elected first to the
Common Council of the city. Within two years he was named
colonial attorney general, serving 14 years in that position, before being succeeded by
Benjamin Chew in 1755. [See Note ** below.]
Tench Francis, Jr.--brother of Edward Shippen's wife, Margaret Francis Shippen (
married in 1753)-- continued to operate the
store his father began out of his home on Second Street, which subsequently merged with another one on Front Street. They sold goods imported from Europe and the East Indies, including a large assortment of
books. The two stores were apparently combined into a
single location in 1755. With passage of the Stamp Act in 1765, however, Tench Francis, Jr. (his father having died previously) joined with other
Philadelphia merchants who contractually resolved among themselves to
boycott the importation of any goods from Great Britain.
With his brother-in-law, Thomas Willing, he joined with Benjamin Chew and Robert Morris to established the Bank of North America, which would become the Bank of the U.S. The latter bank was "envisioned by"
Alexander Hamilton, not born until 1755 in the West Indies, who
learned finance from
Robert Morris. Willing was the first president of Philadelphia's Bank of North America, originally located in the home of its first
cashier, Tench Francis, Jr., at
307 Chestnut when it was chartered in 1781.
At that time, all life revolved around THE
revolution. Everyone was forced to take a side. Some, who chose loyalty
to the British--possibly believing the rebels could never win over a
superior force-- would eventually become a major embarrassment, if not
more, to family members who were "patriots" to the revolution. Just as
Peggy Shippen, wife of the famous traitor General Benedict Arnold,
became such an embarrassment to the Francis and Shippen families with
whom Atlee was closely associated, so would his wife's brother, Rev.
John Sayre, Jr., become to the Atlee family.
 |
| General Howe's headquarters were in Richard Penn's mansion, later leased to Benedict Arnold. |
The Philadelphia Mansion
 |
| Click to enlarge. |
When the elder Governor Richard Penn died in 1771, his son Richard Jr. succeeded him as
governor, and the following year he married Mary (Polly) Masters. Polly's father had during colonial days operated a grist mill north of
Philadelphia, possibly in connection with Governor Penn. After his death
in 1760, the property was used "for two
years as headquarters by
Sir William Howe, and upon whose site Robert Morris afterward erected the house where President Washington resided."
The Penns were married in London and soon began raising a family there, giving a
power of attorney
to Tench Francis, Jr. to lease their estates in Philadelphia. The house which Generals Howe and Clinton had used as British military headquarters, being the same one in which Benedict Arnold had lived with Peggy Shippen (aka Margaret Arnold), burned in 1780. Penn's
power of attorney allowed Tench Francis, Jr., to sell the ruins to his banking colleague, Robert Morris, who then purchased the
now unimproved land and
constructed a residence for the new President of the United States. The location and
description of the house were set out in a
centennial address given by Nathaniel Burt in 1875.
An
ownership map
which dates to 1777 shows the location of that residence originally built for the mother of Polly Masters,
Mary Lawrence Masters, daughter of
John Lawrence and wife of William Masters. By zooming in on the
City of Philadelphia rectangle,
we can also see the names of
Willing, Shippen, Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin Chew throughout the
wards between Second and
Fifth Streets, from
Chestnut to Locust, where the revolution was headquartered, and where the
Declaration of Independence was penned. Note, incidentally, the
proximity to Ranstead Street, where the first Atlees had lived when he
first
arrived in Philadelphia from Barbados.
The Atlees from Lancaster and the Banished Sayre
As you recall, however, Jane Atee had taken her family to Lancaster, a newly created township in Pennsylvania, eighty miles
west of Philadelphia, still part of the
frontier, where her two sons grew up in association with Edward Shippen. By 1774 William Atlee's eldest son was named to a committee in Lancaster with
Edward Shippen and others, to correspond with planners of the revolution in Philadelphia. By 1776 William Augustus Atlee was made chairman of Lancaster's
Committee of Observation & Inspection, which oversaw payments to numerous militias raised to fight in the rebellion. He was also chairman of the
Lancaster County Committee of Safety which stayed in contact with Benjamin Franklin and other organizers in Philadelphia. Colonel
Samuel John Atlee,
William's younger brother, was by then an officer in the military under
General George Washington.
After Esther Sayre's marriage to Atlee in 1763, her brother had also moved with wife and four children to Lancaster, and their next son,
Francis Bowes Sayre, who became a medical doctor after completing study at the Univesity of Philadelphia in 1790, was born there in 1766 (
died 1798). Two more children would also be born at that location before
John was assigned a
mission outpost by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts
in 1768 to an area recently changed to Newburgh from Quassaick. In 1769 he filed a
petition requesting a charter addressed to the acting governor of that province. Once granted, this church was called
St. George's. Rev. John, too busy to confine himself solely to Newburgh,
requested a total of
three church charters during his short missionary tenure, while he also preached at a fourth place called Warwick, 20 miles from where
he lived at Bellomont,
comprising a territory now in Orange County, bounded by the northeast
part of Pennsylvania and northern counties of New Jersey.
Rev. John Sayre
abruptly abandoned the Newburgh mission and took up residence in
Fairfield,
Connecticut. According to J
ames Shepherd in "The Tories of Connecticut,"
Connecticut Quarterly, Vol. 1 No. 2 April, May and June, 1895:
On January 28, 1777, Rev. John Sayer [sic] of Fairfield was before the Governor and Council as a Tory that he might be
ordered to some safe place for confinement. He was sent to the parish of New Britain to be under the care of Col.
Isaac Lee, and not to depart the limits of said society until further orders. In July of the same year the wardens
of the Episcopal church and others at Fairfield, with consent of the selectmen and committee of inspection, petitioned
for his release and return to his people to remain within the limits of Fairfield and give bond with surety for
good behavior, which petition was granted. He was probably the first Episcopal clergyman that ever resided in New
Britain. In a letter he subsequently said: "I was banished to a place called New Britain, where I was entirely
unknown except to one poor man, the inhabitants differing from me both in religion and political principles; however,
the family in which I lived showed me such marks of kindness as they could, and I was treated with civility by
the neighbors."
At the time of his banishment Sayre was serving as
rector of
Trinity Church in Fairfield where he resided with his wife and eight children when it was invaded by British General Tryon and burned. The British fleet took him to the Long Island area of New York until in 1783 he applied for a land grant in New Brunswick, Canada. A brief history of Rev. John
Sayre, Jr., is also set out in "
United Empire Loyalists, Parts I-II," by Alexander Fraser:
 |
| Anglican missionary John Sayre, Jr., British Loyalist to the end. |
The list of members that Claimant James Sayres supplied to the King, unsurprisingly, failed to include his sister-in-law/stepsister,
Esther Bowes Cox (1740-1841), who, following the marriage of John Sayres and Rachel Bowes in 1751, is said to have
made her home with sisters of her mother, the former
Rachelle Le Chevalier:
...youngest daughter and child of Jean Le Chevalier, of the Huguenot colony
in New York City, and his wife, Maria de la Plaine. Jean Le Chevalier
was one of the most prominent of the French refugees of New York, and
must not be confounded as he sometimes was with Jean, son of Pierre le
Chevalier, of Philadelphia. Jean Le Chevalier, of New York, married
Marie de la Plaine, in the Dutch Reformed Church, June 27, 1692, and had
seven daughters but no sons. These children, all baptized in the French
church. New York City, were: Marie, born June 6, 1693; Susanne, March 11, 1695; Esther, February 18, 1696; Marie (2d), baptized May 14, 1699;
Elizabeth, born August 26, 1702; Jeanne, baptized March 7, 1704;
Rachelle, born February 16, 1707, baptized February 22 following,
married Francis Bowes, and after his death (second), as his second wife,
John, son of Daniel and Elizabeth Sayre. The children of Francis Bowes
and Rachel Chevalier were: Theodosius; Samuel; Mary, born March 5, 1739,
married, September 28, 1758, John, son of John Sayre, her stepfather; John; and Esther, born January 6, 1741, died February 10, 1814, married, November 16, 1760, Colonel John Cox, of Bloomsbury....Colonel Cox himself was one of the celebrated men of his day, and rendered good service to the Continental army as assistant quartermaster under General Greene, the latter having made the appointment of John Cox and Charles Pettit to serve under him a condition of his acceptance of the position of quartermaster-general. Not only did Colonel Cox help to provision the patriot army, he also supplied it with a large amount of ordnance from his foundry at Batisto, New Jersey. At his home, "Bloomsbury," now "Woodlawn," the Warren street home of Edward H. Stokes, General Washington had his headquarters, and was entertained when he made his triumphal entry into Trenton, two of Colonel Cox's daughter's, Rachel and Sarah, being among the thirteen young ladies who sang the ode, "Welcome, mighty chief, once more," and another, Mary, being one of the six young girls who strewed flowers in the General's path over Trenton bridge. At "Bloomsbury," the Marquis de Lafayette and the Count de Rochambeau enjoyed the hospitality of Colonel Cox, and had the pleasure of conversing in their own language with Mrs. Cox's French aunts, the Demoiselles Chevalier, the youngest daughters of Jean Le Chevalier, referred to above....[Quoted from Genealogical and Memorial History of the State of New Jersey, Francis Bazley Lee (1910), 264.]
The sister of Mary Bowes Sayre, Esther Bowes, who "played on the spinnet and organ, and was the only lady of the
day who had mastered thorough bass," was selected as the bride of
Colonel John Cox, to whom she was
married on November 16, 1760, in Christ Church, Philadelphia. The Coxes then moved to Bloomsbury Court in Trenton, where Colonel Cox was Assistant Quartermaster under
Major Nathaniel Greene. It has been suggested that Rev. Sayre's widow may have made her way to Trenton to stay for a time with her sister, Mrs. Cox. At any rate, that is where she
died in 1789. [
See also interesting insights from Anne Hollingsworth Wharton,
Salons Colonial and Republican (1900), which paints a vivid picture of life in Philadelphia while it was the seat of the new government.]
Their daughter
Mary Cox (born 1775) would later marry
Colonel James Chesnut from Camden, S.C., while daughter Rachel was wed to
John Stevens of Castle Point, Hoboken, founder of Stevens Institute, where, as I discovered several years ago, Prescott Bush's father,
Samuel P. Bush, would be educated. Not then realizing that John Stevens was also related by marriage to ancestors of David Atlee Phillips, I wrote the following paragraph, excerpted from "
Money and Gunpowder, Part One," posted at my blog,
Where the Gold Is:
Samuel’s
before-the-turn-of-the-century education in mechanical engineering at Hoboken, New
Jersey’s Stevens Institute—where he learned to design
and build steam engines and locomotives—would become useful to America in
building its “gunpowder” and other weapons so necessary in World War I’s
mission to “save the world for democracy”.... Family papers reveal
the closeness between John Stevens and the Founding Fathers in equipping the
military forces during the Revolutionary War and in the country’s subsequent
defense.
Another daughter, named
Esther but called "Hetty," married
Matthias Barton, whose father had long been a clergyman in charge of the church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to which John Sayre, Jr. had moved around 1761, bringing us back full circle to the Atlee clan, whom in the next segment we will follow to Texas, where descendant spy, David Atlee Phillips was born.
--------------
Notes
1. Intriguingly, Christ Episcopal Church would, some four or five decades later, become the venue for the wedding of Beau Walker's widow to Robert Hodgson in 1801.
2. The street bissected by the Liberty Bell is called Ranstead Street, named undoubtedly for Caleb Ranstead (also spelled as Ransted), a furniture dealer, with whom William Atlee was residing at the time of his death in 1744. The house appears to have been quite close to the Philadelphia Bank Building (410 Ranstead/419-25 Chestnut); we previously noted that George E. Walker's "Uncle Tommy" worked at this bank located on Chestnut at 4th Street, for many years. Coincidentally, Caleb Ranstead's name also shows up in the receipt book of Benjamin Chew, a man who was mentioned in Part Two of the Bush/Walker Genealogy:
Chew, Sr. had moved to Philadelphia in 1754, set up a highly lucrative
legal practice, and "owned an elegant town house on South 3rd Street.
Here, he attended St.
Peter’s [Episcopal] Church and associated with many influential people
in the city.
He became involved in other business interests, including iron works
and land speculation."
It was mentioned also that Chew had held the mortgage on the farm Harriet Mercer Bush inherited, and her husband's inability to repay that mortgage which precipitated their move to Illinois.
W. L. was married in 1828 in Gettysburg to Sarah Gilbert, a sister of his younger brother's wife, Delilah. William and Edwin Atlee went into business together in Gettysburg, making equipment for horse-drawn carriages as well as saddles and bridles. In 1840 much of the extended family of Atlees and Gilberts had also relocated to Athens, continuing in the same business begun in Gettysburg--manufacturing saddles, harnesses and other equipment used in horse-borne transportation. But they were no longer Episcopal or Quaker; all of this branch had become Methodists.
