David Bradlee: “Windows broke when I got there”

We’ve come to the last of the men George Gailer sued for tarring and feathering him in October 1769, the man his legal filing identified as a “Taylor” named “David Bradley.”

As it happens, David Bradlee was one of the first individuals in Boston I dug into, about twenty years ago. I wrote a short article about him for the Bostonian Society newsletter then.

Bradlee hasn’t made a lot of appearances on Boston 1775, but I may have been saving him for the Sestercentennial of when his political activity started to appear in the historical record.

David Bradlee was born in Dorchester on 24 Nov 1742, according to Samuel Bradlee Doggett’s History of the Bradlee Family (1878). David was the sixth child and third son in the family, and two more boys followed. Most moved into Boston.

Bradlee became a tailor. On 22 Mar 1764 he married Sarah Watts of Chelsea. Doggett said her father was a judge, but Mellen Chamberlin’s Documentary History of Chelsea shows she was a daughter of Richard Watts, Harvard 1739, innkeeper and militia captain. His father was the judge—Samuel Watts, justice of the peace, member of the Massachusetts General Court and the Council. In other words, David Bradlee married up in society.

David and Sarah Bradlee’s first son arrived on 20 October, or seven months after their marriage. That baby received the name David Watts Bradlee. The couple then had Sarah (1766), Samuel and Mary (twins in 1768, but Mary died at nine months), and eventually another Mary (1770).

As I’ve written, it’s not clear why George Gailer named David Bradlee as one of the people who attacked him on 28 Oct 1769. I’m assuming Bradlee really was involved in assaulting the sailor in some way. But Bradlee had the connections to secure John Adams as his attorney. He and his fellow defendants eventually won their case on default, and he paid Adams 19s.4d.

Well before that lawsuit was resolved, however, Bradlee was present at another riot and involved into another court case about it. He was on the scene on 22 Feb 1770 when Customs officer Ebenezer Richardson shot into a crowd of boys and young men mobbing his house, killing little Christopher Seider.

Robert Treat Paine’s notes on the Richardson trial summarize Bradlee’s eyewitness testimony this way:

Windows broke when I got there. I saw 3 or 4 Stones come out of the Window. I saw one or two Men in the Room with Guns in their hands. R put a Gun on edge of Window. I heard the Gun, and run to the back of the house. R clapt the Gun at me.

In this case, the word “clapt” seems to mean that Richardson had fired a load of powder but no shot at Bradlee—in other words, he fired a blank to scare the man off. Even though Bradlee’s testimony was all about the stones and gunshots coming from inside the house, one has to wonder what he was doing so close to that house to provoke Richardson’s action.

TOMORROW: Two weeks later.

“Pool Spear informs, that last Week he heard one Kilson a Soldier…”

I’ve been looking into Pool Spear, the Boston tailor accused of tarring and feathering sailor George Gailer in October 1769.

A little more than four months after that event, the young apothecary Richard Palmes met Spear near the center of town on the evening of 5 Mar 1770. Palmes had gone out as the alarm bells rang, learned there had been a brawl outside Murray’s barracks instead of a fire, and headed back home. He stated:

I then saw Mr. Pool Spear going towards the Townhouse, he asked me if I was going home, I told him I was; I asked him where he was going that way, he said he was going to his brother David’s. But when I got to the town-pump, we were told there was a rumpus at the Custom-house door; Mr. Spear said to me you had better not go, I told him I would go and try to make peace.

Palmes appears to have had a short temper, so he probably wasn’t the best person to pacify the situation that grew into the Boston Massacre. Indeed, after hearing a shot and seeing a man dead on the ground, Palmes started swinging his walking stick at soldiers and Capt. Thomas Preston.

It looks like Pool Spear took his own advice and didn’t stay to see what happened near the Customs office that night. But the next morning he went to Faneuil Hall, where there was supposed to be a town meeting, to share a story. The town meeting records say:

Mr. Pool Spear informs, that last Week he heard one Kilson a Soldier of Pharras Company say, that he did not know what the Inhabitants were after, for that they had broke an Officers Windows (meaning [landlord] Nathaniel Roger’s Windows) but that they had a scheeme on foot which would soon put a stop to our proceedure—that Parties of Soldiers were ordered with Pistols in their Pockets, and to fire upon those who should assault said House again, and that Ten Pounds Sterling was to be given as a Reward, for their killing one of those Persons, and fifty pounds sterling for a Prisoner—

Spear’s testimony wasn’t used in the town’s report or the trials as Palmes’s was, but it reflects the conviction of many Bostonians that the soldiers were eager to hurt people.

The next glimpse of Pool Spear that I’ve found comes from the siege of Boston. He and his wife Christiana were staying in her home town of Pembroke with six children. In March 1776, the Rhode Island Quaker philanthropist John Brown gave them £2 as charity.

The Spear family moved back into Boston after the British evacuation. Late that year Pool (now spelling his name “Poole”) was among scores of Bostonians who signed a petition on behalf of Hopestill Capen, a Sandemanian Loyalist who had helped to preserve their property during the siege but was locked up in the Boston jail on suspicion of disloyalty.

In 1779, the Boston town meeting elected Pool Spear, then forty-four years old, to be a constable. Often the meeting chose recently married young men for this office as a joke, and those men declined because they wanted to stay home. Spear accepted and was reelected in 1780 and later. The Fleets’ pocket almanac for 1782 lists him as a deputy sheriff of Suffolk County. Those jobs were more about delivering writs than patrolling the town, but it’s still a striking shift from being accused of tarring and feathering a man to working as a law-enforcement officer.

Also in 1779, the Independent Chronicle newspaper reported that the Spears were living in a house that the state was confiscating from the late Loyalist absentee John Borland. Six years later, Spear was in the Boston jail himself because of a debt to Borland’s estate, as brought to court by Richard Cranch. (See this note from the Adams Papers about Cranch’s tangled relationships with the Borland properties.) The court case may have involved that Boston house or Spear’s duties as a sheriff. In any event, the Massachusetts General Court passed a special law freeing Spear.

Pool Spear died in 1787, aged fifty-one. His widow Christiana helped to administer his estate. He didn’t leave her a lot of money, but he didn’t leave her in debt.

Unboxing Pool Spear

Yesterday I noted the difficulty of finding out more information about a sailor with a common name. Luckily, the next person on George Gailer’s list of people who tarred and feathered him in October 1769 has an unusual name: Pool Spear.

Even with the alternative spelling of Poole, it’s easy to track someone who sounds like a toy the Nerf company sends to families posting “unboxing” reviews on YouTube.

In 1864 the New England Historical and Genealogical Register published a confusing “Spear Family Record.” Fortunately, that article offers enough leads to other records that confirm Pool Spear was born 21 Sept 1735 in Hull.

Pool was the younger son of a captain of a packet ship to Philadelphia who died of smallpox in May 1738, when the boy was three. His older brothers included Joseph, a lighterman; Gershom and David, coopers; Nathan, one of the Bostonians who complained about Capt. John Willson in 1768; and Paul. How the parents decided to have successive boys named Paul and Pool is unclear.

In late 1755 Spear did three months of militia service at Crown Point, New York, in Capt. Thomas Stoddard’s company. The men chose him to be an ensign. Back home, Pool became a tailor. I’ve seen estimates that about one in seven mechanics made clothing in some way during those pre-industrial times.

In May 1761, at the age of twenty-five, Pool Spear married Christiana Turner from Pembroke. The family listed their children as Joseph, Daniel, Oliver, Paul, Christiana, and Abigail. However, I’ve found no published church records to confirm that.

In February 1768, Spear declared bankruptcy, part of the wave kicked up by Nathaniel Wheelwright’s failure three years earlier. He listed as his trustees his brother David Spear, Edward Blanchard, and John Soren. That episode was the only time Spear’s name appeared in the Boston newspapers before the war.

Pool Spear was aged thirty-four during the attack on Gailer in late 1769. The other men I’ve been able to identify were all in their twenties (assuming Daniel Vaughan was the younger of the two candidates). However, that wasn’t the last political disturbance Spear was present for.

TOMORROW: Pool Spear and the Boston Massacre.

The Mysteries of David Province

When George Gailer sued for damages after being tarred and feathered, he named four people from Boston: “David Bradley, Pool Spear, Taylors, and David Provence Infant and Edward Mathews Mariner.”

I’ve come up blank on “Edward Mathews[,] Mariner.” Ordinary sailors don’t leave a lot of records, and this man’s name is too common.

For David Province I have limited information about his childhood. David’s father, John Province, married Sarah Prince in late December 1747. Brattle Street Meetinghouse (shown here) recorded that they had Mary in 1752, Sarah in 1757, and twins Abigail and Elizabeth in 1763. However, there’s no sign of a son named David in those published records.

In 1758 Sarah (Prince) Province’s father, a ship’s captain named John Prince, died. His estate included a house and land on Milk Street, an enslaved man named Jack, and a two-masted, fully rigged boat. But he left only 20s. to his daughter Sarah, saying he had already supported her in life. He left a larger sum—£13.6s.8d.—to her children. That bequest may have been a way to make sure her husband John Province didn’t control much of his estate.

In September 1760 Thomas Hutchinson, in his capacity as a probate judge, assigned John Province to be guardian for his son David Province, who was under the age of twelve. In other words, Province ended up controlling any bequest from his father-in-law to his son anyway, but he had to keep accounts under court supervision.

(I note the possibility that David Province was John Province’s son by another woman, born after his marriage to Sarah Prince. That would be unusual, but could explain the anomalous details. Of course, there might just be gaps in the surviving records.)

The Province family lost their home in the great fire of 1760—the one that had started at the Sign of the Brazen Head. [Whatever happened to that storyline, anyway?] But the Province children were among the fortunate Bostonians who received public support. That September, John Province bought new real estate on Lynde Street.

By 1767 John Province was established securely enough to join the Scots Charitable Society. Later he took in apprentices through the Overseers of the Poor. He died in 1792 at the age of 72, and the Columbian Centinel reported that the funeral would be out of his home in West Boston. His will mentioned two married daughters, one in Nova Scotia and one in Albany, but no son.

Indeed, I found no records of David Province after the 1770 lawsuit, in which he played only a minor [!] part. He was probably the right age to serve in the military during the war, but he’s not listed in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors… He may have died before 1775.

As to the attack on George Gailer, the most pertinent information about David Province may be that his father was a tailor. That’s stated in both the probate and Overseers records. David may therefore have been an apprentice tailor. Two of the three Boston men in the lawsuit were tailors, the only men not connected with the maritime trade.

Why, I wondered, were tailors so interested in tarring and feathering a sailor for informing on a smuggler? Then I realized that might not be the right question. Out of all the crowd that attacked him, how did Gailer learn the names of two or three tailors? The answer might have something to do with how Gailer “took Shelter in a House” for most of the day before being grabbed. Perhaps workers in a nearby tailor shop kept a watch for him, or something like that.

TOMORROW: Pool Spear and the long arm of the law.

“Voices from the Boston Massacre” Exhibit at M.H.S.

The Massachusetts Historical Society has opened a new exhibit called “Voices from the Boston Massacre,” displaying documents and artifacts from its collection illuminating that Sestercentennial event of 5 Mar 1770.

The exhibit includes trial notes and letters from the collections of such attorneys as John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, and Samuel and Josiah Quincy, Jr. There’s a full series of Massacre engravings by Henry Pelham, Paul Revere, and the artists who copied them. We can see the musket balls that Edward Payne dug out of his doorway after he was wounded in the arm. We can read parts of the newspaper reports, orations, and memoirs of the event.

One document new to me is the recently acquired handwritten memoir of Julia Bernard Smith, daughter of Gov. Francis Bernard. He left Massachusetts in August 1769, but his family remained behind until December 1770, in part because the children were still in school.

Later in life, Smith wrote: “Captain [Thomas] Preston had performed at my Father’s Concerts and was well known to us.” I knew Preston was generally well regarded, but I had no idea he was musical.

This exhibit holds personal meaning for me. Twenty years ago, I was drawn into the study of Revolutionary Boston through the figure of Christopher Seider, the young boy killed eleven days before the Massacre by Customs officer Ebenezer Richardson.

As I wrote back here, I spent years looking for a broadside that a newspaper said Christopher had in his pocket when he died, and I finally found it in the M.H.S. catalogue. Now that broadside is in a display case near the beginning of the exhibit, illustrating Christopher’s importance in the events that followed. And the label cites my work identifying its significance.

There are also a couple of video displays in this exhibit. One shows actors reading various witnesses’ accounts of the shooting (or, in the case of Charles Bourgate, what he claimed was his account). Another shows historians speaking about the event from Serena Zabin and Hiller Zobel down to myself.

The M.H.S.’s “Voices from the Massacre” website features online resources about the period for researchers and educators. Folks can visit the exhibit at 1154 Boylston Street in Boston every Monday through Saturday from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., and as late as 7:00 P.M. on Tuesdays. It will be up through the Massacre anniversary until June 2020.

Speaking of the Massacre, I’ll be speaking of the Massacre with Bradley Jay on WBZ radio’s Jay Talking Show—what led up to the confrontation on King Street, how it happened, and why it mattered. That conversation will run from midnight to 1:00 A.M. on the morning of Tuesday, 12 November. If our chat is particularly interesting, it will become one of the show’s podcasts.

The Road to Concord Leads on to Townsend

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll speak about The Road to Concord to the Townsend Historical Society.

According to Ithamar B. Sawtelle’s History of the Town of Townsend, Middlesex County, Massachusetts (1878), in that town “The alarm to the minute-men was given on the 19th of April, 1775, by the firing of a cannon on the common about three o’clock in the afternoon.”

In that same paragraph Sawtelle went on to quote what Ephraim Warren (1731-1812) reportedly said to his wife as he rode off to Concord, and to describe what he saw there on 20 April: “a few dead bodies and some wounded British soldiers.” That suggests Sawtelle’s information about the cannon came from the Warren family tradition.

If that story is accurate, and there was indeed a cannon on Townsend common in 1775, it was probably left over from the decades when the town was near the frontier of British settlement and vulnerable to raids by French and Indian forces. I didn’t find mentions of Townsend acquiring cannon in 1774 or 1775 while researching The Road to Concord.

Nonetheless, the fact that even a small Massachusetts town had such a weapon, and men trained to use it, is a big part of the book. In my talk I’ll discuss the conflict over provincial artillery and how it led to the fighting in Concord, and thus to that cannon shot in Townsend.

The Townsend Historical Society will meet on the second floor of the Townsend Town Hall, 272 Main Street. This event is free and open to the public. Parking is behind the building. There will be a twenty-minute business meeting at 2:00 P.M., and I’ll speak when that is over. Afterwards I’ll welcome questions, talk about local history, and sell and sign books.

Searching for Daniel Vaughan

The third Rhode Islander that sailor George Gailer sued for tarring and feathering him in October 1769 was “Daniel Vaun[,] Mariner.”

Unfortunately, as this webpage shows, there were a lot of men with that name (surname also spelled Vaughan and Vaughn) documented in eighteenth-century Rhode Island. I think there are a couple of top candidates.

One is the man whom the Newport Mercury and a headstone both reported dying in March 1800 at the age of 56. This Daniel Vaughan was therefore a contemporary of Eleazer and Benjamin Trevett, the brothers from Newport that Gailer also accused. He could have been another sailor on their father’s ship Success.

This man was also the right age to have been the Daniel Vaughan who became one of the first third lieutenants commissioned in the Continental Navy in December 1775. And he could have been the owner of the Daniel Vaughan house in Newport, built after the war and shown above.

Another possibility is an older Daniel Vaughan, born in 1716 or 1722. Such a man appears to have been the right age to have been involved in all of these incidents:

• A Daniel Vaughan was first lieutenant under Capt. Simeon Potter on the privateer Prince Charles of Lorraine during King George’s War in 1744. Potter and his crew sacked a settlement in French Guiana. A priest’s detailed report suggests Lt. Vaughn took the lead in trying to hunt down slaves and plunder villages. Potter eventually stranded a lot of his men and took their shares of the loot, as Vaughan testified in the ensuing controversy back in Rhode Island.
• A Daniel Vaughan was first lieutenant on the Tartar under Capt. James Holmes in 1748 when it captured a schooner carrying sugar. There was another inquiry about that capture since the schooner had been flying a flag of truce.
• In 1764, a Daniel Vaughan was the gunner at Fort George on Goat Island off Newport. The local authorities ordered him to fire cannon at H.M.S. St. John. Ostensibly they were trying to stop the Royal Navy ship from sailing away with sailors suspected of stealing hogs, but the real reason for their animosity was that its captain had clamped down on molasses smugglers. Vaughan’s gun crew reportedly fired thirteen shots, striking the warship’s sails and rigging. This was the first of several examples of Rhode Islanders attacking royal government vessels in the years before the Revolutionary War.

In 1773, a man named Daniel Vaughan—who could have been either of these candidates—testified in the investigation of the burning of H.M.S. Gaspee, the most famous of those Rhode Island attacks. The leader of that assault was almost certainly none other than Simeon Potter, acting with the encouragement of the Browns and the Greenes. Vaughan’s testimony, however, discredited one of the Crown’s only cooperating witnesses. This Vaughan was also involved in salvaging iron out of the destroyed warship.

It’s possible those Daniel Vaughans were related. It’s also possible that another Daniel Vaughan got into the mix. But all in all, I’d say either man’s activities are consistent with helping to tar and feather an unpopular informer in Boston in 1769.

COMING UP: The tailors from Boston.

Tar, Feathers, and the Trevett Brothers

A couple of days ago, I quoted George Gailer’s court filing after he was assaulted with tar and feathers (and other things) on 28 Oct 1769.

That legal document named seven individuals as having taken part in the attack. Those were the people Gailer must have recognized or been told were involved. So, even though he never proved his case against them in court, that’s one of our best indications of exactly who participated in tarring and feathering in Revolutionary America.

And of course I love nothing more than ferreting out info on individuals from Revolutionary New England. So let’s look at those seven names.

Three men were from Newport, whence Gailer had sailed. According to the Boston Gazette, he had arrived on “the Sloop Success from Rhode Island.” Issues of the Newport Mercury from February 1768 show that Eleazer Trevett, Sr., was managing a sloop called Success.

Trevett was a merchant prominent enough to settle other men’s estates and serve on civic committees. He often advertised wine in the Newport Mercury, so it’s notable that the Boston Gazette accused Gailer of informing the Customs office that the Success had “a Cask or two of Wine on board.”

And indeed the first two people on Gailer’s list of attackers—“Eleazar Trevett Junior and Benjamin Trevett, Merchants”—have the same names as two of Eleazer Trevett, Sr.’s sons:

• Eleazer Trevett, Jr. (1743-1782?), followed his father in becoming a merchant captain. By October 1768 he was commanding a voyage to Tenerife, a wine island off the African coast. In June 1770 he brought a ship into Marblehead, only for him and his father to run into a dispute with locals over non-importation. In May 1773 the younger Trevett was wrecked off Antigua. Later that year, as James Roberts has described in a Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes article (P.D.F. download), Trevett got into a legal dispute over mahogany with Aaron Lopez. That lawsuit pushed the captain into declaring bankruptcy in 1774. In the summer of 1775 Trevett sailed again to Antigua. I can’t find information on what he did when the war finally came to Rhode Island, but at some point Eleazer, Jr., was captured by the British and died at the age of thirty-nine in a prison ship off New York.
• Benjamin Church Trevett (1748-1826) reached the age of majority in 1769. He appears to have gone inland, served a couple of terms in Continental regiments raised in Massachusetts and Vermont, and settled in western New York, where he drew a pension from the federal government.

They had an intermediate brother, John Trevett (1747-1823), who served in the Continental marines and left a diary.

It looks like Eleazer and Benjamin came to Boston either on the Success or as soon as they learned that the Customs office had seized that sloop. Unable to retrieve the family property, the Trevett brothers directed or led the attack on Gailer.

In much the same way, Nathaniel Shaw, Jr., had overseen the attack on the Customs ship Liberty and the rescue of his ship Sally back in July.

TOMORROW: The third Rhode Islander.

“Description of the POPE, 1769.”

The Fifth of November was a festival of misrule for eighteenth-century colonial Boston, which locals called “Pope Night.” But the celebration actually followed many strict traditions.

One was that when 5 November fell on a Sunday, as it did in 1769, the holiday was put off until the following day. Thus, Boston’s youth remembered the Fifth of November exactly 250 years ago today.

Another tradition was that the Pope Night wagons would feature effigies of the Devil, the Pope, and one or two hanged men whose identities changed from year to year to keep up with the biggest political enemies.

In 1769 the obvious choice was printer and bookseller John Mein. Since August he had been angering the town’s mercantile and political community. On 28 October he had, in a confrontation with some of those merchants, drawn a pistol and reportedly fired it in the center of town. He then went into hiding, refusing to answer a lawful warrant.

The Pope Night wagons rolled out ten days later. The newspapers and this broadside reported that the following text appeared on the big “lanthorn” (basically a small tent with sides of oiled paper, lit from within) of a main wagon:

Toasts on the Front of the large Lanthorn.
Love and Unity. — The American Whig. —
Confusion to the Torries, and a total Banishment to Bribery and Corruption.

On the right side of the same. —An Acrostick.
J nsulting Wretch, well him expose,
O ’er the whole World his Deeds disclose,
H ell now gaups wide to take him in,
N ow he is ripe, Oh Lump of Sin.
M ean is the Man, M[ei]N is his Name,
E nough he’s spread his hellish Fame,
I nfernal Furies hurl his Soul,
N ine Million Times from Pole to Pole.

Labels of the Left Side.
Now shake, ye Torries! see the Rogue behind,
Hung up a Scarecrow, to correct Mankind.
Oh had the Villain but receiv’d his Due,
Himself in Person would here swing in View
But let the Traitor mend within the Year,
Or by the next he shall be hanging here.
Ye Slaves! ye Torries who infest the Land,
And scatter num’rous Plagues on ev’ry Hand,
Now we’ll be free, or bathe in honest Blood;
We’ll nobly perish for our Country’s Good,
We’ll purge the Land of the infernal Crew,
And at one Stroke we’ll give the Devil his Due.

Labels on each Side the Small Lanthorn.
WILKES and LIBERTY, No. 45.

See the Informer how he stands, If any one now takes his Part,
An Enemy to all the Land, He’ll go to Hell without a Cart

May Discord cease, in Hell be jam’d,
And factious fellows all be dam’d.

From B------- [Bernard?], the veriest monster on earth,
The fell production of some baneful birth,
These ills proceed,—from him they took their birth,
The Source supreme, and Center of all Hate.
If I forgive him, then forget me Heaven,
Or like a WILKES may I from Right be driven.
Here stands the Devil for a Show,
With the I--p---rs [Importers?] in a row,
All bound to Hell, and that we know.
Go M[ei]n lade deep with Curses on thy head,
To some dark Corner of the World repair,
Where the bright Sun no pleasant beams can shed,
And spend thy Life in Horror and Despair.

Effigies,—M[ei]n, his Servant, &c.—A Bunch of TOM-CODS.

I take “his Servant” to mean the “young Lad (belonging to the Office)” who had fired out of Mein’s print shop at the previous procession. How nice that his fellow teenagers remembered him.

The celebrants also made sure to mention George Gailer (“the Informer”) and the departed royal governor, Francis Bernard.

With this holiday coming so soon after the busy 28th of October, town authorities feared that it would be especially rowdy. But channeling public anger at those vanquished political enemies made the holiday a little more orderly than it had been before the Stamp Act.

TOMORROW: Naming names.

[The picture above is a sketch of the South End’s Pope in 1767 by Pierre Eugène du Simitière, now in the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia.]

“Grosly threatning to Hoist him up in the Cart”

The 28 Oct 1769 tarring and feathering of sailor George Gailer was a public event in Boston. The mob meant to humiliate Gailer for giving information to the Customs service and to intimidate anyone else who might consider becoming a whistleblower. Today we’d call that obstruction of justice.

We know how much noise the procession made from the way gentlemen wrote about it. Province secretary Andrew Oliver described “a great noise of halloing & huzzaing by people who I could easily perceive shifted their Stations, by the Noise coming from different quarters successively.” He called the event a “tumultuous affair.”

Merchant John Rowe wrote:

In the evening a large Mob Assembled & got hold of one George Greyer an informer who they stript naked & painted him all over with Tar & then covered him with Feathers & put him in a Cart & carried him thro’ all the main Streets of the Town huzzaring &c and at nine dismissed him—this matter occasioned much terror &c in some fearfull People among the Inhabitants—When this happened I was with the Possee.

All that occurred in a town that contained about 800 soldiers who had been sent there specifically to protect the Customs officers. So how did the military react to that disturbance?

We know the army and navy were helpful in hiding printer John Mein from both the mob and the civic authorities who hunted him late that same afternoon. But the army doesn’t appear to have made any move to save Gailer.

Here’s the account of Cpl. Thomas Burgess of the 29th Regiment, taken down by a justice in Amboy, New Jersey, in the summer of 1770:

A numerous Mobb assembled in King Street Boston, who proceeded up to the Main Guard, in pursuit of one Mr. Mein A Printer insisting that said Mein had taken refuge there and wanted to get him out.

That dureing the time of the said Mobb being at the Main Guard the relief was ordered out to go Sentry, the Mobb being very numerous would not fall back in order that said Relief (of which this Deponent was one) might form According to Military Discipline, upon which the Officer of the Guard Lieutinant [James] Basset ordered said relief off to their respective posts and not to Offend any one.

That said Deponant was planted at his Majesties Custom House, and shortly after heard A Mobb in some part of King Street who Directed their way towards the Custom House with an uncommon Noise and stoped at his post, haveing a Naked Man in A Cart who they called an Informer.

That said Mobb left his Post at that time, but soon returned again makeing a full Stop as before, haveing the above mentioned Man in the Cart all over Tared and Feathered.

That the said Mobb gave three Shouts, and kept closeing on this Deponant, whereupon he this Deponent desired them to Desist and keep off his Post, the Mobb then directed their way though Royal Exchange Lane and some of them Broke some Windows in the Custom House where upon this Deponant desired a second time that the[y] would desist upon which the Mobb surrounded said Deponant who thinking himselfe in danger began to load his Firelock thinking to fright the Mobb away but to no Effect for they closed him up and struck at and abused him most grosly threatning to Hoist him up in the Cart and use him as the did the Man they had tared and Feathered

So the presence of armed sentries throughout Boston certainly didn’t deter this mob. Burgess saw the crowd carting Gailer around without his shirt and then saw the procession return after the sailor had been “all over Tared and Feathered.” According to the corporal, people even threatened him with the same treatment.

In 1773 the 29th Regiment listed Lt. James Bassett as twenty-three years old with eleven years of service. That means in 1769 he was as young as nineteen, though he had been in the army (at least nominally) since the age of twelve. Bassett was officer of the day again on 5 Mar 1770, when there was more trouble between the crowd and the sentry at the Custom house.

TOMORROW: Pope Night in 1769.