“Escaped from New Gate Prison at Simsbury, one John Hinson”

Exactly one month after a New Haven court sentenced John Ensign to ten years inside Connecticut’s new prison at Simsbury, as reported yesterday, he disappeared from his underground cell.

On 10 Jan 1774, John Viets, keeper of that New-Gate Prison, wrote out an advertisement for the New Haven newspaper. Here’s the text of the ad as it appeared in the 1 February Connecticut Courant, out of Hartford:

Ten Dollars Reward.

LAST Night escaped from New Gate Prison at Simsbury, one John Hinson, lately committed for Burglary, who is about 5 Feet 8 Inches high, has black Eyes, dark Hair, of a fair Complexion, and about twenty Years of Age—(he was helped out by some evil minded Persons from without).

Whoever will take up said Fellow, and return him to the Subscriber Master of said Prison, or shall discover those that aided him in his said Escape, so that they may be brought to conviction, shall have TEN DOLLARS reward, paid by
JOHN VIETS.

January 10, 1774.

Seven decades later, in 1845, Noah A. Phelps published A History of the Copper Mines and Newgate Prison, at Granby, Conn.. It was based on interviews with Viets’ descendants, so it used his spelling of the escapee’s name (Hinson) rather than what appeared in the newspaper reports of his trial (Ensign).

Phelps wrote:

The first convict received into the prison was John Hinson. He was committed Dec, 22, 1773, and escaped on the 9th of January following, by being drawn up through the eastern shaft by a rope, assisted, it is said, by a woman, to whom he was paying his addresses.

How did the Viets family know this? How confident was Phelps about this information, which he qualified by adding “it is said”?

Despite reasons for less than full certainty, subsequent histories of the Old New-Gate Prison repeat that 1845 account in a definite tone. And it may even be accurate. But in this Boston 1775 series, I’ll emphasize contemporaneous accounts.

Whether or not Viets was right in guessing the escape method, the Connecticut legislature acted quickly to prevent future departures through that shaft. By the end of the month it voted:

Upon the representation of the overseers of Newgate Prison: It is resolved by this Assembly, that said overseers be and they are hereby directed and impowered to cause the east shaft of said prison to be effectually secured with stone or iron, at their discretion, and to cause a log-house to be built and to consist of two or three rooms, one of which to be directly over the west shaft of said prison; taking care to preserve a free communication of air.

Young Ensign was gone, those officeholders might have told themselves, but he’d benefited the colony by providing a useful test of the New-Gate Prison. Now they were making that place stronger. Soon it was ready to receive more convicts.

TOMORROW: Two sets of arrivals.

John Ensign Sent to the New-Gate Prison

On 26 Nov 1773, the Connecticut Gazette of New London reported this legal news:

NEW HAVEN, Nov. 19

A few days since, a young fellow, who says his name is John Ensign, was committed to our goal, for breaking open and robbing Mr. Thompson’s Tavern in East Haven, he being taken in the house, before he had time to get off with his booty.

Brothers named Thompson helped to found East Haven, and I haven’t been able to narrow down which of their descendants ran this particular tavern. One candidate for the scene of the crime is the Stephen Thompson House, shown above in 1939. 

On the last day of the year, the New-Hampshire Gazette ran an item presumably picked up from a Connecticut newspaper, but I haven’t found the original:

One John Ensign was convicted, at the Superior Court at New-Haven, the 9th Inst. for robbing the House of Mr. Thomson of that Place, and sentenced to TEN YEARS Imprisonment in Simsbury Mines, now called New-Gate-Prison, agreeable to a late Act of the Colony of Connecticut.

A long term of imprisonment, as opposed to corporal punishment or execution, was a novelty, warranting coverage even two colonies away.

The 7 Jan 1774 Connecticut Gazette kept up the story:

NEW HAVEN, Dec. 24

The beginning of this Week, John Ensign, was conveyed from the Prison in this Town, to Newgate Prison, in Symsbury.

John Ensign thus became the first prisoner in the colony’s new prison.

Two weeks later, the Connecticut Gazette told readers:

NEW HAVEN, Jan. 14

A few Nights since, John Ensign, made his Escape from Newgate Prison.

TOMORROW: The jailer’s tale.

The New New-Gate Prison

Last month I broke off a series of postings about three men Gen. George Washington sent to Simsbury, Connecticut, to be locked up in the New-Gate Prison.

Now I’m returning to that topic, but first I’m going back to fill in the background of that prison.

In the eighteenth-century British Empire, convicted criminals didn’t usually get sentenced to extended prison terms, with the perpetrator housed and fed by the state.

Instead, the most serious offenses, from murder down to major or repeated property crimes, were deemed worthy of death. Lesser infractions might bring corporal punishment like whipping or public exposure. (For assaults, it was often up to the victim to sue for damages.)

In October 1773 the Connecticut legislature voted to convert an unprofitable copper mine into a prison to house criminals for long periods. Henceforth, men convicted of burglary, robbery, and counterfeiting would be confined underground for up to ten years, or for life if they had already been convicted once. They were expected to work the mine. By modern standards that was harsh, but in this era it was an almost experimental reform.

The colony paid to build a blockhouse over the vertical entrance to the mine and to dig out living quarters below. As “Master or Keeper of said prison,” the legislature appointed John Viets (1712–1777), who ran a nearby tavern, shown above. He was a former Simsbury selectman and militia captain, respected in the community. He hired guards, many appearing to be laid-off miners; they were expected to train the prisoners in digging.

The new prison was dubbed New-Gate, after a famous jail in London. Those two places had little in common, but Americans didn’t know many other lock-ups to compare theirs to.

On 9 Dec 1773, a court in New Haven handed down the first sentence sending a man to New-Gate Prison.

TOMORROW: The first prisoner.

“Time turns his Glass, and round the Pole Another Year begins to roll”

In 1775 the British artist John Hamilton Mortimer issued a series of prints titled Twelve Characters from Shakespeare.

One of those portraits showed Edgar from King Lear, in his guise as Poor Tom the madman, as shown here.

Among that character’s lines was “Poor Tom’s a-cold.”

Two hundred fifty years ago today, the young carriers of the Pennsylvania Evening Post quoted that line as they regaled their customers with this poem.

New-Year’s Verses,
Addressed to the CUSTOMERS of
The PENNSYLVANIA EVENING POST,
By the PRINTER’s LADS who carry it.

MONDAY, JANUARY 1, 1776.

“POOR TOM’s a cold”---God bless you, Masters,
And save you all from all Disasters!
Time turns his Glass, and round the Pole
Another Year begins to roll:
Welcome the new, adieu the old,
For every Year Poor Tom’s a-cold.

Sages have said, and Bards have sung,
That long ago, when Time was young,
The World enjoy’d a golden Age:
No Dog-Star kindled then to Rage;
No Summer’s Drought, nor Winter’s Snow,
Forbade the limpid Stream to flow:
No Torrents of descending Rain
With Desolation spread the Plain:
No languid Air, with sickly Breath,
Diffused the pois’nous Seeds of Death:
No Comet’s Blaze, of horrid Light,
Shot thro’ the Curtain of the Night;
No chilling Blast flew howling by,
No Lightnings rent the burning Sky,
Nor Thunder shook the rolling Sphere.
One genial SPRING was all the Year.
Then were the Hills and Vallies seen
Forever blooming, ever green;
And, like the Season, mild and gay,
Man liv’d a Stranger to dismay;
For smiling Peace, with Plenty crown’d,
Gave Health and Joy to all around.
No Din of War, no civil Hate,
Were then the chastening Rods of Fate.
O had I seen those Days of old!
But now, alas! Poor Tom’s a-cold:
But you, who live with Hearts at Ease,
Will surely never let him freeze.
Sweet Madam, Gentle Sir, Good-morrow;
God keep you free from Pain and Sorrow,
And let me hope, ere long, to boast
Good News!----Good News!----in the EVENING POST.

This example of carriers’ verse is interesting in how little it says about current affairs. The American colonies were at war with the London government, but the only possible allusion to that was the mention of “civil Hate.”

Earlier American examples of these verses reveled in the patriotism that the newspaper employees and their customers supposedly shared, heaping disdain on foreign enemies like France and Spain. But in a time of civil war, loyalties were more problematic. Better to talk about the weather.

That wasn’t because the printer of the Pennsylvania Evening Post, Benjamin Towne, kept away from politics. He supported the colonial resistance and independence, and a year later his 1777 carriers’ verse celebrated, “Shout, George is King no more.”

Of course, the British army occupied Philadelphia late that year. In 1778 Towne’s carriers offered lines praising Gen. Sir William Howe to the skies.

Five Revolutionary Authors Recommending Five Revolutionary Books

Shepherd is a website founded by Ben Fox to provide a forum for book recommendations, like “little notes from the [indie bookstore] staff about which books are their favorites and why.”

The site offers authors the chance to highlight five books of a particular sort (with some exposure for their own work, of course).

Here are some offerings about America’s Revolutionary era.

Prof. Joel Richard Paul, author of Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution and Without Precedent: Chief Justice Marshall and His Times, on “The best books on the American Revolution.” Mainly solid overviews.

Ray Raphael, author of Founding Myths, Constitutional Myths, A People’s History of the American Revolution, and The Spirit of ’74, among other books, on “The best books to expand and deepen your view of the American Revolution.” Getting beyond the standard stories.

Tom Shachtman, author of The Founding Fortunes: How the Wealthy Paid for and Profited from America’s Revolution, on “The best books on lesser-known figures in the American Revolution and early years.” Following the money.

Prof. James R. Fichter, author of Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776, on “The best books that made me think twice about the American Revolution.” Novel perspectives.

Prof. Richard Bell, author of the new The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, on “The best books on the American Revolution as a World War.” Broader views in space and time.

The Fort Plain Museum bookstore has a Revolutionary War section ranging well beyond its own region in central New York, with generous terms on shipping and the proceeds going to support a historic site.

“Everything he can to build a standing army that he can use domestically”

Earlier this month, Prof. Noah Shusterman, author of Armed Citizens: From Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment, shared an essay through H.N.N. titled “Deploying Federal Troops to U.S. Cities Is a Second Amendment Issue.”

Here’s a taste:

The Second Amendment was meant to prevent events like the Boston Massacre… The amendment was meant to prevent the government from turning its military into an occupying force, as the British were doing when they began stationing troops in Boston. It is also what our current president is trying to do when he sends federal troops into Los Angeles. Or Portland. Or Chicago. Or, eventually, New York and Boston.

The courts have been treating those deployments as Tenth Amendment issues, or as potential violations of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, but back when the Bill of Rights was written, the domestic deployment of federal troops was the Second Amendment issue. And if the courts understood that, we would be in much less of a mess right now. In 2025, the amendment might be about privately owned guns, but when the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, it was about the military — specifically, the threat that a nation’s military could pose to its own people, as it had in Boston during the 1770s, when the British government began stationing troops there. . . .

In the years immediately following independence, neither the state militias’ shortcomings on the battlefield during the Revolution, nor the Continental Army’s successes, made Americans any less wary of peacetime standing armies. Leaders of the founding generation still believed that because a professional soldier relied on his job for his livelihood, his allegiance was to his commander, not his nation. (The current commander-in-chief recently endorsed this view, albeit unknowingly, when he told an audience of military leaders that “if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”) . . .

In Second Amendment terms, this president is doing everything he can to build a standing army that he can use domestically against his own population. If the Second Amendment’s self-proclaimed supporters both inside and outside the courts appreciated the significance of these policies, and how contrary they are to the amendment’s original goals, the nation might be in a better place right now. In deploying federal police and military units as an occupying force, the president is doing precisely what the amendment was meant to prevent.

I write this from Washington, D.C., where the President has summoned over 2,600 National Guard troops from multiple states. While traveling to libraries, I see small groups of young people in uniform pulled away from their homes and jobs to stand around in subway stations and parks. Courts have disagreed about the constitutionality of that order and others, with the President getting even more deference than usual in the federal district.

The President claims this authority based on laws speaking of “invasion” and “rebellion,” neither of which applies, and he also claims he’s acting against “crime.” This same President is a convicted criminal who pardoned about 1,600 people for attacking the U.S. Capitol on his behalf in January 2021.

Wartime with “A New-York Freeholder”

“A New-York Freeholder” didn’t continue his newspaper debate with Israel Putnam, quoted over the last two days.

Hugh Gaine had published long essays from the “Freeholder” addressed “To the Inhabitants of North-America” in five successive issues of the New-York Gazette from 12 September to 10 October. One of those essays even crowded out other items.

The main target of the “Freeholder” was the Continental Congress and the ideology that led to it. His last essay criticized military preparations in New England and calls for non-importation. He treated Putnam’s letter about the “Powder Alarm” as simply a symptom of a deeper problem.

The “New-York Freeholder” was the Rev. Charles Inglis (1734–1816), recently made the senior curate at Trinity Church in New York. He was a native of Ireland but attached to the Anglican Church, even arguing for the unpopular idea of bishops in North America.

(This was not the Charles Inglis who commanded H.M.S. Lizard in 1770–71, H.M.S. Salisbury in 1778–80, and H.M.S. St. Albans in 1780–83, and who made one previous appearance on Boston 1775.)

According to the Rev. Mr. Inglis, he ceased his “Freeholder” essays after deciding that the Congress was hopelessly committed to “revolt and independency,” based on its adoption of the Suffolk Resolves and the proclamations it issued in mid-October 1774. So he never responded to Putnam.

After Thomas Paine issued Common Sense in early 1775, Inglis composed a reply titled The Deceiver Unmasked, printed by Samuel Loudon. Soon after copies were advertised for sale, Patriots broke into Loudon’s shop, seized all the copies, and burned them. Inglis was able to have the pamphlet reprinted in Philadelphia under the title The True Interest of America Impartially Stated.

In mid-1776, Gen. George Washington attended Trinity Church. As the minister told it, a lesser American general asked him to omit the usual prayers for the king from the service. Inglis defiantly refused. A few months later, the British military kicked the Continentals out of the city.

Inglis spent the rest of the war inside British-occupied New York, having become the rector of Trinity Church. In June–July 1782 he pulled out the “New-York Freeholder” name again for six essays in Rivington’s New-York Gazette.

The next year Inglis and his family moved to Britain, though most of the Trinity Church congregation went to Halifax. In 1787 the Crown sent him back across the Atlantic to be bishop of Nova Scotia—the first Anglican bishop in North America.

“Under the hieroglyphical similitude of tropes and figures?”

As a prominent gentleman in Connecticut, Israel Putnam couldn’t ignore what “A New-York Freeholder” wrote about him in the New-York Gazette, as quoted yesterday.

However, Putnam faced a couple of challenges in replying. First, if he appeared to be flying off the handle, that would simply validate what the “Freeholder” had written.

Second, Putnam wasn’t a highly educated man, and in particular his spelling and punctuation were even more irregular than the eighteenth-century norm.

Even Putnam’s biographers acknowledge that he probably had help in shaping his reply in the 7 October 1774 Connecticut Gazette of New London, either from a friend or from printer Timothy Green. Because it doesn’t look like his usual writing.

The preface reads:

Mr. GREEN,

As my letter to Capt. [Aaron] Cleveland, wrote in consequence of the late alarm, has circulated far and wide, and made unfavourable impressions on the minds of some, ’tis desired that you and the several printers in the other colonies upon the continent, would give the following piece a place in your paper, and you will oblige
Your humble Servant,
ISRAEL PUTNAM.

POMFRET, 3d. October 1774.

The first line of the ensuing essay makes clear what it was really responding to: “In Mr. [Hugh] Gaine’s New-York Gazette of the 12th of September…”

Putnam described how the rumor of a British military attack on Boston had reached him through “Capt. Keyes”—most likely Stephen Keyes (1717–1788, gravestone shown above courtesy of Find a Grave). Keyes had heard the news from “Capt. Clarke of Woodstock,” who heard from his son in Dudley, Massachusetts, who heard from an Oxford man named Wilcot, who heard from his father and also found confirmation in Grafton.

With “only four gentlemen,” Putnam rode toward Boston, traveling “about thirty miles from my house.” In Douglas, Massachusetts, the party met the local militia captain, probably Caleb Hill (1716–1788), who with his company had just returned from their own march to “within about thirty miles of Boston.” Having thus learned that the earlier report was false, Putnam returned home, spreading the new word.

Putnam posited that the false alarm started with Customs Commissioner Benjamin Hallowell having “informed the army that he had killed one man and wounded another” while escaping from Cambridge. Hallowell’s own account of the “Powder Alarm” said nothing of the sort.

As for presenting himself as a gentleman in prose, Putnam acknowledged that he’d written his letter passing on that misinformation in haste and not in high style; he said he “aimed at nothing but plain matters of fact, as they were delivered to him.”

But Putnam also showed himself capable of deploying complex sentences and classical allusions in response to the “New-York Freeholder”:

Paying all due defference to this author’s learning, and his undoubted acquaintance with the rules of grammar and criticism, I would beg leave to ask him, whether he does not betray a total want of the feelings of humanity, if he supposes in the midst of confusion, when the passions are agitated with a real belief of thousands of their fellow countrymen being slain, & the inhabitants of a whole city just upon the eve of being made a sacrifice by the rapine and fury of a merciless soldiery, and their city laid in ashes by the fire of ships of war, he or any one else could set down under the possession of a calmness of soul becoming a Roman senator, and attend to all the rules of composition, in writing a letter, to make a representation of plain matters of facts, under the hieroglyphical similitude of tropes and figures? . . .

Now I submit it to the determination of every candid unprejudiced reader, whether my conduct in writing the aforementioned letter, merits the imputation of imprudence asserted by said writer; or whether they would have had me tamely set down, and been a spectator to the unhuman sacrifice of my friends and fellow-countrymen, or (in other words) Nero like, have set down and fiddled, while I really supposed Boston was in flames, or exerted myself for their relief?

Well, when he put it that way…

TOMORROW: Who was the “New-York Freeholder”?

“This letter betrays the state of the poor Colonel’s mind”

One of the key nodes in the spread of the “Powder Alarm” was Israel Putnam. On 3 Sept 1774 he summoned the militia in eastern Connecticut and sent urgent messages to other parts of the colony.

On 6 September one of those messages arrived at the First Continental Congress. Robert Treat Paine recorded that from Putnam’s letter “we were informed that the Soldiers had fired on the People and Town at Boston.”

In fact, British soldiers had done no such thing. That became clear over the next few days.

Whigs spun the false alarm into a Good Thing, saying it showed how the populace was united and ready to defend Boston in an actual military emergency. “It is surprising and must give great satisfaction to every well-wisher to the liberties of his country, to see the spirit and readiness of the people to fly to the relief of their distressed brethren,” said an item in the 9 September Connecticut Gazette.

But other newspaper writers were more critical. Most of the front page of Hugh Gaine’s New-York Gazette on 19 September was filled with an open letter “To the Inhabitants of North-America” from “A New-York Freeholder” that said in part:

Col. PUTNAM’s famous letter, (forwarded by special messengers to New-York and Philadelphia) and the consequences it produced, are very recent and fresh in our memories. He informs Capt. [Aaron] Cleaveland [of Canterbury]---

“That the men of war and troops had fired on Boston—that the artillery played all night—that six were filled at the first shot, and a number wounded—that the people were universally rallying from Boston as far as Pomfret in Connecticut—and he begs the captain would rally all the forces he could, and march immediately for the relief of Boston.”

The evident confusion of ideas in this letter betrays the state of the poor Colonel’s mind, whilst writing it, and shews he did not then possess that calm fortitude which is so necessary to insure success in military enterprizes. . . .

What the design of this infamous report was—whether to inflame the other colonies, and to learn how they would act on such an emergency if real, or to influence the deliberations of our congress now sitting, I shall not taken upon me to determine.

One thing it has eventually made evident past all doubt, that many in the New-England colonies are disposed and ripe for the most violent measures: For it is certain that some thousands of armed men, in consequence of it, proceeded on their march from Connecticut towards Boston. . . .

These circumstances are mentioned with no other view than to shew that the apprenhension of a civil war is justly founded; and it is no more than justice to say that I think Col. PUTNAM himself was deceived when he wrote the above letter, tho’ still he acted imprudently in writing it. The authors of the report are to me unknown.

The “New-York Freeholder” went on to write about the horrors of a civil war, closing with Tobias Smollett’s poem “The Tears of Scotland,” composed after the Jacobite uprising of 1745. That would have annoyed the New England Whigs, not just because they were telling people that a firm, unified militia response would help stave off civil war but also because they hated being equated with Jacobites.

TOMORROW: How Putnam responded.

“The Powder Alarm” in Essex, Connecticut, on 4 Jan.

I’ll start off the Sestercentennial year with a talk in the America 250 Winter Lecture Series of the historical society in Essex, Connecticut.

My topic on the afternoon of Sunday, 4 Jan 2026, will be “The Powder Alarm: The Breakdown of Royal Rule in New England, September 1774.”

Here’s our event description:

Before dawn on September 1, 1774, the royal governor of Massachusetts ordered some of the colony’s gunpowder moved into army-occupied Boston. That action put thousands of militiamen on the march. As rumors spread, they grew more dire. People in Connecticut heard that the king’s army and navy had attacked Boston. In Milford, a 13-year-old boy went to bed fearing he would “be dead or a captive before to-morrow morning.” But the real result of this event, dubbed the “Powder Alarm” by later historians, was that almost all of New England was free of royal rule—almost two years before the Declaration of Independence.

I’ve spoken about the “Powder Alarm” before, and this time I’ll emphasize Connecticut’s experience through figures like Israel Putnam, Silas Deane, and Joseph Plumb Martin.

Here’s an account of the colony’s reaction from the 8 Sept 1774 Massachusetts Spy:

By letters from Connecticut, and by several credible gentlemen arrived from thence, we are informed that there were not less than 40,000 men, in motion, and under arms, on their way to Boston, on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday last [3–5 September], having heard a false report that the troops had fired upon Boston, and killed several of the inhabitants: Twelve hundred arrived at Hartford from Farmington, and other places forty miles beyond Hartford, on Sunday last, on their way to this place, so rapidly did the news fly. But being informed by expresses that it was a false report, they returned home, declaring themselves ready at a minute’s warning to arm again, and fight for their country, and distressed brethren of Boston.

That report from printer Isaiah Thomas was no doubt exaggerated. In 1774 Connecticut’s total population was just under 200,000. More than half of those people were under the age of sixteen, and half the adults were women, so “no less than 40,000 men” would be virtually the entire adult male population.

Nonetheless, it’s clear the alarm was widespread, reflecting the urgency that people had come to feel about what was happening in Massachusetts. Several other newspaper articles about the “Powder Alarm” also included the phrase “a minute’s warning,” popularizing it just as citizens were discussing how to improve their militia system.

This talk is scheduled to run from 3:30 to 4:30 P.M. in Hamilton Hall at Essex Meadows, 30 Bokum Road in Essex, Connecticut. It’s free and open to the public. The society asks people to register through this page. Doors will open at 3 P.M., and seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis.

(The modern town of Essex appears on the map above as “Putty Pogue” on the Connecticut River.)

John Rowe’s Christmas Gift to Himself

On 25 December 1775, 250 years ago today, the Boston merchant John Rowe began a new volume of his daily diary.

The Massachusetts Historical Society has preserved and digitized that document, so that page is available here with a good crowd-sourced transcription.

Rowe wrote:

Monday December 25. 1775 Christmas Day — The Weather A Little Moderated but Cold W W —

I went to Church this morning. Mr. [William] Walter Read prayers & Mr [Samuel] Parker preachd A very Good Sermon from the 2d Chapter of St Lukes Gospell and 14th. Verse Glory to God in the Highest and on Earth Peace Good Will towards Men.

I dind at home with Mrs. Rowe the Revd Mr Parker & Jack Rowe and spent the Evening at home with Richd Greene Mrs. Rowe & Jack Rowe

I Staid & partook of the Sacrament

The Mony gather’d for the Use of the Poor of this church amo to Sixty Dollars —

Rowe was an Anglican, a vestryman at Trinity Church. Unlike the colony’s more numerous Congregationalists, he and his fellow parishioners observed Christmas. But of course Christmas in a besieged town wasn’t a terrifically joyous occasion; “Peace [and] Good Will towards Men” were in short supply.

Rowe’s diary entry for this day is innocuous. This volume raises questions mainly in how the previous volume, covering the days from 1 June to 24 December 1775, is missing. What did Rowe do during the siege? How closely did he cooperate with the royal authorities? What sentiments did he express about the Battle of Bunker Hill and other fatal fights?

The only previous volume of the diary to go missing covered 18 Aug 1765 to 10 Apr 1766, a gap starting shortly before the attack on Thomas Hutchinson’s house. (The lieutenant governor suspected Rowe was somehow behind that attack.) Rowe’s numbering indicates that he filled 138 pages in those eight months.

In contrast, Rowe wrote only 72 pages in the missing volume from late 1775, which would be by far the shortest volume in his journal. Still, those pages would be good to have.

We know John Rowe altered a 1775 diary entry to reverse what he first wrote about the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s fast day. We know his description of his speech during one of the 1773 tea meetings doesn’t match what an observer in the room reported. It’s easy to imagine, therefore, that Rowe at some point looked at what he wrote about the Stamp Act and its opponents, and about the early months of the war, and decided that those pages no longer reflected his views. Or how he wanted people to view him.

John Malcom, Counterfeiter?

Watching the recent American Revolution documentary series by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, my ear snagged on a detail about John Malcom.

The show said that Malcom, the Customs service officer severely mobbed, tarred, feathered, and whipped in Boston in January 1774, had gotten in trouble for counterfeiting a decade earlier.

Since I’ve collected newspaper reports about John Malcom for a series of postings I really must get back to, I was surprised at not having come across a report of that crime. Whig printers enjoyed publishing stories about Malcom’s behavior after he joined the Customs service. They had even more reason to pull out embarrassing old stories after the attack on him. But no newspaper described Malcom as a counterfeiter.

In Scars of Independence (2017) Holger Hoock wrote of Malcom: “He had become notorious across the colonies after being arrested for debt and counterfeiting in 1763.” Given the lack of newspaper mentions, the captain definitely wasn’t notorious for such a crime. In fact, after further research I’m dubious the man was ever charged with counterfeiting at all.

The earliest mentions of such a crime appear the work of Dirk Hoerder: his 1971 doctoral thesis, “People and Mobs, Crowd Action in Massachusetts During the American Revolution 1765–1780,” and his 1977 book, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780. The latter says of Malcom: “In 1763 he had been apprehended in Boston for debt and counterfeiting.”

The citation for that sentence appears to be Suffolk Court Files 84397, which is a court case listed as Malcom v. Butters. That doesn’t look like a criminal charge for counterfeiting, though it could well be a debt dispute. I haven’t seen that paperwork, though.

Based on newspaper reports, Capt. John Malcom spent little time in Boston in the 1760s. He had moved to Québec and commanded trading voyages to the West Indies. Of course, Malcom might have been charged or sued during a brief stopover in his home town.

Yet we have to be careful we have the right John Malcom. The 15 October 1772 Boston News-Letter announced the death of “Mr. John Malcom, Labourer,” as did the following Monday’s Boston Post-Boy and Boston Evening-Post. Obviously that wasn’t the Customs officer attacked in 1774. But he might have been the debtor of 1763.

Further confusing matters is how a “John Malcom, alias Malcolm,” was convicted of passing counterfeit bills in Maryland—back in 1743. (Kenneth Scott’s Maryland Historical Magazine article “Counterfeiting in Colonial Maryland,” which can be downloaded in a P.D.F. here, misdates that case as in 1734.)

Normally I find Hoerder’s work to be very thorough and reliable. In this case, however, I think that he (if you’ll excuse the expression) tarred the wrong John Malcom with the wrong misdeeds.

“In free countries, the law ought to be king”

Next month sees the Sestercentennial of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, printed by Robert Bell in Philadelphia on 9 January (to judge by the first newspaper advertisement the next day) and then reprinted at the end of the month because of popular demand.

The New York Times has observed the occasion by publishing an appreciation by Boston University professor Joseph Rezek, “The Pamphlet That Has Roused Americans to Action for 250 Years.”

Rezek’s a literature scholar, so he pays particular attention to Paine’s rhetorical style. Here’s a taste:

The first section of “Common Sense” narrates the origins of government with a classic Enlightenment experiment, asking: What was it like in the state of nature, before governments were instituted among people? “Let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth” in a “state of natural liberty,” Paine wrote, sounding like a schoolteacher. Then kings arrive, like snakes in the garden.

“Mankind being originally equals,” Paine went on, their “equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance.” Look at the “present race of kings,” he declared, and “we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang.” Eager to make his ideas intelligible to readers who had never philosophized before, Paine used imagery he thought they could relate to.

Ripping up monarchy by the roots, he asserted that William the Conqueror did not establish an “honorable” origin for English kings when he invaded in 1066. “A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it.” This frank and gritty language is from the tavern, not the library.

Of course, it’s not just the lèse-majesté insults that made Common Sense powerful, as shocking as they probably were to some British colonists. It was how Paine wielded them in service of compelling political ideas, urging Americans to put their principles of liberty into practice. A monarchist could toss around epithets and still have no better argument than “Because the king said so.”

In 1776, Paine looked toward the future. Today, many Americans are looking to the past to help navigate what really does feel like “a new era for politics.” Right after Paine declared “the law is king,” he also qualified that statement: “In free countries, the law ought to be king.” Laws in the United States have often been unjust, and just laws have often been unequally enforced. Perhaps Paine understood that the idealistic political experiment he hoped to help launch would always be a work in progress.

Because there will always be snakes. Most of us know damn well they’re snakes, and most don’t get taken in.

Here’s the link.

New Foreword for Stark’s Loyalists of Massachusetts

American Ancestors has just reissued James Henry Stark’s The Loyalists of Masssachusetts with a new foreword by me.

I came across a copy of Stark’s Loyalists of Massachusetts in my local library when I was early in my research on eighteenth-century Boston. I was struck by its combination of detailed research on exiled families and apparently still-hot resentment at how the whole Revolution thing turned out.

One notorious detail of this book is an illustration of Paul Revere on horseback—complete with fringed buckskin coat, beard, and vicious snarl.

In researching the publication of The Loyalists of Massachusetts for this foreword, I realized that Stark didn’t commission that and the other full-page illustrations. He reused them from an earlier history of the Revolution. He did, however, change the captions to make their message more pointed.

Stark published through his own printing company, which he had cofounded with a former “spirit photographer.” That gave him the freedom to devote hundreds of pages to “The Other Side of the American Revolution,” as his subtitle said.

I also looked into the reception of the book in 1910. Some reviewers thought Stark, a childhood immigrant from Britain, was too harsh on the Patriots. The press magnified that controversy. The argument became a front-page story in newspapers well outside New England as editors enjoyed the spectacle of elite Bostonians arguing over their ancestors’ actions.

Another of Stark’s interests was yachting. In fact, he was on a cruise when the controversy over his book broke out. I think he’d be pleased that the cover of this new edition shows Sir Isaac Coffin, alumnus of Boston’s South Latin School and admiral in the Royal Navy.