Samuel Mosley
New England soldier
Captain Samuel Mosley or Moseley (1641 – in or before 1680) was a New England settler and militiaman.
Life
Origins
Samuel Mosley was born on 14 June 1641 at Mount Wollaston, Braintree, near Quincy, Massachusetts, the son of Henry Mosley (born 1610/11), who had embarked from England on the Hopewell in August 1635. Henry Mosley settled in Braintree and fathered a daughter, Sarah, born in 1638. Samuel Mosley was a cooper by trade, who at some point before 30 May 1665, when the couple signed a contract, married Ann (1647 – after 1691), daughter of Isaac Addington (died 1653) and the sister of Isaac Addington, who was afterwards secretary of the colony. They had a son, Samuel, who died young, and two daughters, who survived their father. In 1675 Mosley was living at Boston, Massachusetts, apparently a man of repute and substance. Through his marriage, he was connected with most of the principal families of the town.
Colonial militia
On the outbreak of the war with "King Philip", the Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag Confederacy, in June 1675, two companies of militia were raised by order of the Boston Council. Mosley supplemented this little force by a third company of volunteers, or, as they were then called, "privateers", a term misunderstood by later writers, who have denounced Mosley as "a ruffianly old privateer from Jamaica". There is no evidence to connect him either with Jamaica or the sea.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18534934. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1641, 1680, 1610 and 1635.
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This entry incorporates text from “Samuel Mosley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.