Lovell, a teacher at Boston’s South Grammar School, was imprisoned by the redcoats for spying after the Battle of Bunker Hill. Washington, under instructions from the Continental Congress, proposed exchanging him for Philip Skene, a royal official of upstate New York and Vermont.
“I fully intended to have given” Lovell his “Liberty,” Howe writes, but now that “cannot take Place.” Lovell will be taken with the British when they withdraw from New England in March.