“Selwyn, whose constant flow of exquisite wit made him generally acceptable”

As described yesterday, on Christmas Eve in 1769 the brothers Patrick and Matthew Kennedy got drunk and stomped around the neighborhood of Westminter Bridge in London, clubbing people.

One of those people died: watchman George Bigby.

Within weeks, the Kennedys were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Matthew was about to step on the cart that would take him to the gallows when a reprieve arrived.

The brothers had a sister, Catherine or Kitty, who was one of London’s leading courtesans. (Many discussions of this case amalgamate Kitty Kennedy with another courtesan named Polly Kennedy, née Jones. There are some nice pictures of that woman, but I’m convinced by the historian Horace Bleackley that I shouldn’t use them because they show a different person.)

Kitty Kennedy’s closest gentleman friends were Lord Robert Spencer, brother of the Duke of Marlborough, and the Hon. John St. John, brother of Viscount Bolingbroke. Both men were members of Parliament. St. John, a barrister, actually testified at the brothers’ trial, claiming a prosecution witness had offered not to testify in exchange for £10; by implication, all the witnesses were dubious.

But Kitty had some prominent ex-lovers as well. And even more men who were won over by entreaties from her and her admirers. Among the aristocrats who publicly supported leniency for the Kennedys were the Duke of Manchester, until recently lord of the bedchamber to George III; the Earl of Carlisle; Viscount Palmerston; the Earl of Fife, who was in the British House of Commons because his peerage was Irish; and Sir George Savile, M.P.

But the Kennedy family’s most active champion was George Selwyn (1719–1791, shown above), yet another member of Parliament. Not because Selwyn was enamoured of Kitty Kennedy—he was gay. And not because he was against hanging—Selwyn was notorious for his fetish for watching people die. Rather, Kitty Kennedy’s admirers seem to have convinced Selwyn that her brothers were not the sort of young men who should be hanged.

There was an obvious class prejudice behind the campaign to keep the Kennedys from being executed. They weren’t street thugs, people said; they worked in an auction house, and had a sister who was a social celebrity. And hadn’t Matthew suffered enough in thinking he was about to be hanged?

Of course, other people thought the Kennedys had been drunk, cruel, and violent, and under the law of the day deserved their death sentence, even if only one could have struck the fatal blow.

Horace Walpole was among those who helped push for leniency while reveling in the insider nature of the campaign. For instance, sometime in 1770 Walpole wrote to Selwyn:

After you was gone last night, I heard it whispered about the room that a bad representation had been made at the Queen’s house against the unhappy young man. Do not mention this, as it might do hurt; but try privately, without talking of it, if you cannot get some of the ladies to mention the cruelty of the case; or what do you think of a hint by the German women [i.e., certain ladies in waiting], if you can get at them?

In his memoirs Walpole later described the case this way:

Two Kennedys, young Irishmen, had been charged with, and one of them had been condemned for, the murder of a watchman in a drunken riot. They had a handsome sister, who was kept by two young men of quality.

Out of friendship to them, Mr. George Selwyn had prevailed on six or seven of the jury to make an affidavit that, if some circumstances, which had really been neglected by the counsel for the prisoners, had appeared on the trial, they would not have brought in their verdict murder.

Mr. Selwyn applied for mercy, and the young convict was reprieved; but when the report was made in Council, Lord Mansfield prevailed to have him ordered for execution.

Mr. Selwyn, whose constant flow of exquisite wit made him generally acceptable, applied in person to the King, and represented that Lord Rochford, the Secretary of State, had under his hand assured the pardon; that such an act had always been deemed pardon, and that the prisoner had been made acquainted with it. The King immediately renewed his promise, the criminal was ordered for transportation…

That commutation was made on 17 April. Matthew Kennedy was put on a ship bound for America.

TOMORROW: Shipboard conditions.

“Twill be damn’d hard to die for an old watchman!”

What did the 24 May 1773 the Boston Gazette mean by lumping Ebenezer Richardson’s pardon together with “Kennedys”?

Again, this required some digging in British sources.

Matthew and Patrick Kennedy were brothers convicted of murder in 1770, like Richardson. Unlike Richardson and unlike Edward McQuirk and Laurence Balfe, discussed yesterday, they hadn’t been part of a political brawl. But their case became politicized.

On 24 Dec 1769, the Kennedy brothers, who worked at a London auction house, and three friends went out drinking. The tavern keeper George Mallard testified: “They had two half pints of brandy, a pot of beer, a paper of tobacco, and four half-crown bowls of punch.”

The drinking buddies started wrestling. Mallard tried to break them up. The men attacked the publican, plus two more men who tried to help him. Then they left, carrying away one of the tavern’s iron pokers.

Out on the street, the Kennedy group struck several other people at random. One was a brickyard worker named George Bigby who “served that night as a watchman in the room of one Goodchild.” One witness identified Matthew Kennedy as hitting Bigby on the head, but others were unclear on which man in the bunch did it.

More Westminster Bridge watchmen, a constable, and citizens seized Patrick Kennedy. But as the constable was leading him away to the guardhouse, his friends attacked in a “rescue.” Patrick “got away, but was taken again in Channel-Row.”

Two hours after being struck, George Bigby died. As in the McQuirk and Balfe case, the blind magistrate Sir John Fielding presided over the murder investigation, collecting the poker. Bigby’s brother tracked down one of the Kennedy brothers’ companions. A constable arrested the other.

The four men went on trial at the Old Bailey on 21 February. Patrick claimed that he and his brother had actually been the victims of an attack. The two friends mainly insisted that they themselves hadn’t hit anyone with weapons and otherwise mostly confirmed what prosecution witnesses described. Matthew Kennedy’s testimony was, in total: “I know nothing at all about it.”

In the end, the Kennedys’ two friends were acquitted, but the brothers were both convicted of murder and sentenced “to be executed on the Monday following, and their bodies to be dissected and anatomized.”

In the morning at Newgate, Matthew Kennedy stepped into a cart to take his last ride to the gallows. Then a “respite” from the Crown arrived. The executions were put off for one week, then another.

It seems the Kennedy brothers had a sister, called Kitty Kennedy. She was one of the leading courtesans of the day, with wealthy and politically connected patrons. The picture above, from the opposition Freeholder’s Magazine, depicts Kitty Kennedy meeting with the brothers in the King’s Bench Prison. (Also at the table is Sir Richard Perrott, a baronet of low reputation and an anti-Wilkesite, otherwise unconnected to the case.)

TOMORROW: The personal becomes political.

“Not the only Instances of the unexampled Goodness”

As I quoted yesterday, on 24 May 1773 the Boston Gazette ran a delightfully bitter attack on Commissioner Charles Paxton for finding a job for Ebenezer Richardson in the Philadelphia Customs office.

A couple of paragraphs below that invective, Edes and Gill printed:

Some Time last Week Ebenezer Richardson, Esq; who lately had such a fortunate and surprizing Escape from the Gallows for the Murder of young SEIDER; through the extraordinary Clemency of our pious and gracious Monarch, set out for the City of Philadelphia, being appointed an Officer in the Customs, for this notable Exertions in Behalf of Government———

Balf, McQuirk & Kennedys are not the only Instances of the unexampled Goodness of George the Third.

This writer obviously expected readers to recognize those names, but I didn’t.

Laurence Balfe and Edward McQuirk (or Quirk or Kirk) were accused of hitting George Clarke on the head during a riot sparked by a by-election at Brentford in West London on 8 Dec 1768, as shown above.

The rival candidates in that election were Sir William Beauchamp-Proctor, a Rockingham Whig, and John Glynn, lawyer for the radical John Wilkes. (Glynn won and served in Parliament till his death in 1779.)

A “gentleman of very considerable fortune” testified that he had seen McQuirk and Balfe among Proctor’s supporters on the first day of voting. The two men were carrying clubs, and McQuirk was “very active in the fray.”

That night, the wealthy gentleman spoke to McQuirk and Balfe, letting them believe he was on their side. McQuirk admitted to having been in the brawl and hinted he might have to flee the country. Balfe said he’d been paid “a guinea for going down to Brentford.”

The gentleman took his information to a “parson Horne,” no doubt the political radical John Horne, then still a Wilkes ally. That man arranged for McQuirk and Balfe to be arrested by Sir John Fielding, the London magistrate. Clarke died on 14 December, elevating the charge to murder.

In January 1769 McQuirk and Balfe were convicted of murder at the Old Bailey, with the jury deliberating only twenty minutes. Proctor immediately launched a public campaign for royal clemency, calling this verdict unjust.

Advocates for mercy pointed out that the prosecutors never accused either defendant of hitting Clarke. Indeed, there was no evidence Balfe hit anyone, just that he was in the crowd. The Earl of Rochford also reported there was “some doubt whether Clarke’s death happened in consequence of the blow he received.”

On 10 March, the Crown pardoned McQuirk and Balfe.

Proctor was a supporter of the Marquess of Rockingham, and Rockingham had been mostly supportive of America during this first term as prime minister in 1765–1766. Furthermore, the case against McQuirk and Balfe really was flimsy, and they were obviously pawns in a much bigger game. We might therefore expect colonials to support clemency for them.

However, American Whigs were enamored of John Wilkes. They suspected any attack on his party as oppression by the establishment. Thus, Edes and Gill could present “Balf [and] McQuirk” as an example of George III or the ministers around him abusing the royal pardon power to benefit political supporters, just like Ebenezer Richardson.

TOMORROW: The case of the Kennedys.

“A proper Person to be employed in the REVENUE”

On 10 Mar 1772, as described yesterday, Massachusetts’s high court delivered a royal pardon to Ebenezer Richardson, convicted twenty-three months earlier of murder.

According to one of the judges on that court, Peter Oliver, “The Prisoner fled the Town immediately on his Discharge; the Rabble heard of it, & pursued him to execute their own Law upon him, but he happily escaped.”

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson reported to his predecessor, Sir Francis Bernard, that the “poor fellow who has been in close prison more than two years…hapned to be discharged when the Inhabitants of the Town were engaged in an Affair at their annual meeting & by this means we saved a tumult at least if nothing more.”

Richardson still had family north of Boston in the Woburn/Stoneham/Reading area, so he probably lay low there. I haven’t found clues about his second wife Kezia and their children.

For a decade before his conviction Richardson had worked for the Customs service. The Commissioners of Customs appear to have eventually found another place for him—a distant place.

Or, as Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette put it on 24 May 1773:

As an additional Affront to the Feelings of his Countrymen; as an aggravated Outrage on the Sensibility, Humanity, Virtue and Justice of this People; as a Master Stroke of rancorous Enormity, to put to the Rack the most obstinate Quietist: BE IT KNOWN;

that the cringing, smiling, fawning, bowing CHARLES FROTH, Esq; a Wretch, who from his earliest Puppy-hood, thro’ the lingering Progress of a too-long protracted Life, to a Period when he withers on the Crutch of Decrepitude, might challenge his recording Angel to produce one single Action, that sifted to it’s Motive, would not effectually consign him to eternal Infamy; has, O! unparalelled Effrontery! O! the detestable Parricide! has appointed that execrable Villain, the condemned Vagabond; the rank, bloody, and as yet unhanged EBENEZER RICHARDSON, an Officer in the Customs in the Port of Philadelphia.

And what is infinitely aggravating, and renders the Transaction much more atrocious; the Murderer is distinguished by a particular Recommendation to the Collector and Comptroller of that Port; declaring the Miscreant to be a distinguished Friend to Government, a proper Person to be employed in the REVENUE, and ordering them to reward him with a Guinea per Week.——

As the said Ebenezer Richardson is now placed on the Ladder of Promotion, we may expect him one of the Honorable Board of Commissioners, in a few Years; where he may probably make as distinguished a Figure as the Rest of his BRETHREN.

“Charles Froth” was the Whigs’ usual insult for Customs Commissioner Charles Paxton (shown above), who had employed Richardson as a confidential informer soon after he moved to Boston. As you might guess, Paxton was about as unpopular as Richardson himself.

TOMORROW: Shifting to Philadelphia.

The Sentencing of Ebenezer Richardson

On 21 Apr 1770, as recounted back here, a Suffolk County jury found Ebenezer Richardson guilty of murdering young Christopher Seider.

The judges had instructed the jurors that all the evidence indicated Richardson had fired his gun in self-defense as a crowd attacked his house and family, so the worst they could convict him of was manslaughter. Judge Peter Oliver insisted that the facts showed Richardson was innocent of any crime.

The jurors ignored those instructions and came back with a guilty verdict. And the law provided only one punishment for a convicted murderer: death.

Instead of passing that sentence immediately, the judges adjourned the court.

The next time they met, one judge was ill, so they once again didn’t pass sentence.

In September, the judges called the jurors back into court to ask about their deliberation, whether the angry crowd in the courtroom had influenced them. The judges were seeking any reason to overturn the verdict. But no opportunity presented itself.

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote to his superiors in London, seeking a royal pardon for Richardson. He could have issued a pardon himself as governor, but he didn’t want to take all the heat for that decision.

In February 1771, the London ministry responded by sending back notice that the king (which really meant the privy council) had put Richardson in for a pardon.

Ever the stickler, Hutchison thought that paperwork had to be complete to stand up to scrutiny. He asked for something clearer, more legalistic.

Meanwhile, Richardson was still in the Boston jail. That was when the press referred to him by such epithets as “the rank, bloody, and as yet unhanged Ebenezer Richardson.”

Richardson’s mother died while he was imprisoned.

On 10 Mar 1772, the Boston town meeting scheduled a discussion of William Molineux’s petition that he shouldn’t have to pay back money the town had loaned him to fund a public-works spinning project. Molineux brought supporters to Faneuil Hall to press for his case. Ultimately, justice Richard Dana stated the law didn’t allow for a loan like that to be forgiven. But the town didn’t press for the overdue repayment, either.

That same day (which wasn’t a coincidence), the royal judges summoned Richardson from jail. On 3 March, new paperwork had arrived from London, and Hutchinson passed it on to the judges. The 12 March Boston News-Letter reported what followed:

The Case of Ebenezer Richardson, who by Verdict of a Jury was found Guilty of the Murder of Christopher Seider, having been certified and laid before the King, His Majesty has been pleased to grant his most gracious Pardon, the Evidence of which, in the usual Form being laid before the Judges of the Superior-Court on Tuesday last, and the said Richardson having then entred into Recognizance to plead the said Pardon, when called upon, he was liberated from Prison where he has been confined above two Years.

Ebenezer Richardson was free. But of course he was still the most hated man in Boston.

TOMORROW: Fleeing the town.

Call for Papers for “1775” Conference in Concord

The Concord Museum, the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society, and the Massachusetts Historical Society will hold a conference on 10–11 April 2025 on the theme “1775: A Society on the Brink of War and Revolution.”

This conference will take place at the Concord Museum shortly before the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord.

The call for proposals says:

What challenges did New England society face in this moment, and how did they impact the outbreak of fighting in 1775? The conference organizers seek proposals from scholars across fields whose perspectives may bear new insight into British American society, culture and economy on the brink of its collapse; the origins of the American Revolution; and the outbreak of military conflict.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The political and social origins of the military crisis;
• The impact of the British military on Boston and New England society from the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 and the outbreak of fighting in 1775;
• Visual, material, and print culture connected to the outbreak of the war;
• Native American and Indigenous perspectives on these events and their legacy;
• The impact of the crisis and military mobilization on gender and family norms;
• The experiences of women and children;
• The role of slavery and experiences of enslaved people;
• Religious belief, the pulpit, and the revolutionary crisis;
• The battles of Lexington and Concord, and the siege of Boston;
• The memory and legacy of the battles of Lexington and Concord, including objects, museums, monuments, and their role in national political history and mythology.

Conference organizers ask presenters to submit proposals of no more than 250 words along with a cover letter and a short c.v. by October 15 [that’s three days away!] to Cassandra Cloutier, Assistant Director of Research at the Massachusetts Historical Society, at ccloutier@masshist.org. They are not accepting panel proposals, but will organize presenters into panels.

The conference will cover travel expenses for selected presenters, and the David Center may commission a volume of papers drawn from the conference.

Searching for Revolutionary Charlotte

I was in western North Carolina when Hurriance Helene blew through at the end of September.

Fortunately for me, I was in Charlotte, away from the worst damage by wind and flooding.

After speaking at a convention, I’d planned to spend another day and a half in the Asheville area, just relaxing. Well, that became impossible.

I made new arrangements and saw more of Charlotte. In particular, I checked out the markers along what the city calls its Liberty Walk, obviously inspired by Boston’s Freedom Trail.

Signs, linked by tablets in the sidewalk, mark the locations of long-gone buildings and events. The walk doesn’t pass the sort of historic houses, churches, or civic structures that Boston has preserved. Instead, the city is quite new, with lots of construction and recent skyscrapers styled to recall earlier decades. To be sure, the Settler’s Cemetery, where I took the photo above, dates back to the eighteenth century.

About half of the markers along the Liberty Walk refer to one of two events:

• The Battle of Charlotte on 26 Sept 1780, in which Gen. Cornwallis’s forces seized the town after a short resistance by local militia companies under Col. William R. Davie.
• The so-called “Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.”

In the battle, the markers say, the militia succeeded in delaying Cornwallis’s advance guard. However, there appears to have been no larger effect of such a delay. The Crown forces took the town, camped there, and left after learning that another part of the army had lost at Kings Mountain.

As for the Mecklenburg Declaration, that’s a myth that only people from North Carolina speak up for. Since it’s referred to on the state flag, though, everyone is brought up believing in it.

The strong historical consensus outside of North Carolina is that a Mecklenburg County convention on 31 May 1775 issued twenty radical resolutions, printed in newspapers that same year. There’s no historical dispute about that event, but it gets only one marker on the trail instead of several.

Imperfect memories of that gathering, tinged by later events, grew into a claim in 1819 that locals had made a full-throated declaration of independence from British government on 20 May 1775. There’s no contemporaneous documentation of that putative event. The reconstructed “Declaration” actually provides evidence that it was composed later.

The Liberty Walk has some other miscellaneous markers, such as one for a soldier of African ancestry named Ishmael Titus. However, I couldn’t find that marker, and the audio tour gave no details about what it called Titus’s “remarkable life” after he was born enslaved in 1759.

I therefore looked up information about Ishmael Titus after getting home. That webpage gives an earlier birth year and states that he lived to be about 112. In later life Titus lived in Savoy and Williamstown, Massachusetts. William Cooper Nell described him in The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution. That passage and an application for a Revolutionary War pension (rejected) are the two big sources on Titus’s life, and they don’t always mesh.

Most of the stops on the Liberty Walk are just metal or stone signs, such as one reporting that Gen. Nathanael Greene took command of the Continental Army’s southern forces in Charlotte.

But there is a fully modeled, though less than full-sized, statue of Queen Charlotte with two little dogs. A main avenue through the city still bears the name of Gov. William Tryon, who moved on to New York in 1771. So the royal government still has a presence in the “Queen City.”

Also in Charlotte, the university library where I spoke displays N. C. Wyeth’s painting of Patrick Henry bathed in heavenly inspiration.

The Sloppiness of the “God Bless the USA Bible”

The “God Bless the USA Bible” has been in the news a lot, most recently because of the revelation that all the books have been printed in China.

This Bible includes the King James Version of the English text, thus omitting the deuterocanonical books that appear in the Septuagint and in Roman Catholic Bibles.

On the other hand, this volume includes some texts that aren’t in any Christian canon, as its website boasts:

• Handwritten chorus to “God Bless The USA” by Lee Greenwood
• The US Constitution
• The Bill of Rights
• The Declaration of Independence
• The Pledge of Allegiance

At least, that’s what the publisher claims.

In fact, the volume doesn’t offer the entire U.S. Constitution. That document includes the Bill of Rights and all the other ratified amendments, which have the same constitutional weight as the text composed in Philadelphia in 1787.

This Bible leaves out every amendment after the first ten. Some people have suggested some nefarious intent in omitting the amendments on ending slavery, equality under the law, income tax, Presidential term limits, and the like. But the omission is just due to ignorance and carelessness.

We can see the same sloppiness in how this Bible presents the signatures at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence, as shown in this screenshot from a review video by Tim Wildsmith.

The right-hand column has two sections headlined “New Hampshire,” and there’s no section headlined “New York.” Instead, “New York” appears toward the bottom of the second column in the same style as the signers’ names.

Part of the blame for that mistake belongs to the signers themselves. Some of them sorted themselves out by state, but the New Englanders mixed together on the right, and the Delaware delegation didn’t succeed in separating from Pennsylvania in the middle. There are no state labels on the famous signed copy. Mary Katherine Goddard’s print shop added those for a 1777 broadside, and they appear (in different form) on the National Archives transcript.

Whoever was tasked with preparing this Bible, either in the U.S. of A. or in China, apparently downloaded text with the state labels but then didn’t format it properly.

Another of the news stories about this Bible is how Oklahoma’s school superintendent solicited bids for Bibles with “only the King James Version” but also “copies of The United States Pledge of Allegiance, The U.S. Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution, and The U.S. Bill of Rights” (P.D.F. download). After criticism that that was an obvious ploy to send $3 million in public funds to the publisher of the “God Bless the USA Bible,” the state government amended its specifications.

Of course, the “God Bless the USA Bible” would not have met those specs if Oklahoma had strictly applied them since it includes only part of the U.S. Constitution.

Not to mention that this state government appears to be favoring one form of religion over others, in violation of one part of the Constitution the volume actually does contain.

More Angels in Old North Church

Old North Church in the North End has announced another eye-opening part of its project to preserve and restore parts of its interior to how it looked in the eighteenth century.

The building, more formally Christ Church, was one of Boston’s Anglican places of worship. Its minister and parishioners didn’t inherit Puritan attitudes toward decoration. The Colonial Revival archetype of the colonial New England meetinghouse as plain and white didn’t really apply.

The church explains:

For much of its history, the church boasted a rich color scheme with ornate and intricate designs. A highlight of Old North’s early decor was artwork from John Gibbs, an accomplished painter and congregation member. Between 1727 and the 1730s, Gibbs painted a series of beautiful angels in the balcony arches of the sanctuary. Gibb’s stunning artwork was covered over with white paint during a 1912 renovation and has been hidden for more than a century…until now.

We are thrilled to share that a 6-month restoration project is now underway to uncover the angels that Gibbs painted in the 18th century. An initial paint study in 2017 partially restored one of Gibbs’s angels, and now expert craftspeople are painstakingly removing layers of paint to reveal the rest of the angel and four additional angels. Later, a talented artist will paint replica angels on removable veneers to adorn the rest of the arches, giving us a glimpse of the sanctuary as Paul Revere would have seen it as a young bellringer.

This fall, visitors to Old North Church will have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to watch long-hidden history being revealed. This sort of paint restoration is rare in the United States; you would typically have to go to Europe to see a similar project. We invite you to visit us throughout October and November and watch the conservation team in action.

Lead conservator Gianfranco Pocobene took the photo above this month, stating, “I am using different solvent gel and free solvent combinations from what the original team used in 2017, and so far I’m very pleased that I’m able to completely remove the overpaint without damaging the original paint surface.”

In other art restoration news, the Lexington Historical Society has received a grant from the Wyeth Foundation of American Art to support the conservation and reinterpretation of Emanuel Leutze’s “The News of Lexington.” The German artist painted that canvas in 1852, one year after he created his iconic image of Gen. George Washington crossing the Delaware.

“Quite free from Lifes Distressing Care”

In August 1774, a woman named Mary Nasson died in York, Maine, at the age of twenty-nine.

Mary’s husband, Samuel, commissioned a slate gravestone with a carved portrait and these words:

Here rests quite free from Lifes
Distressing Care,
A loving Wife
A tender Parent dear;
Cut down in midst of days
As you may see,
But—stop—my Grief!
I, soon, shall equal be,
When death shall stop my breath
And end my Time;
God grant my Dust
May mingle, then, with thine.

Samuel Nasson also arranged for a large stone to lie over the grave, probably to stop animals from digging up his wife’s remains.

Unfortunately for the couple’s memory, that stone appears to have inspired people in the early nineteenth century to think that it was placed to keep her from rising from the dead. Books and then websites came to refer to Mary Nasson as a witch.

In an essay at Early American Studies Miscellany, “Not a Witch: Public History in a Maine Graveyard,” Daniel Bottino and Hannah Peterson state:

Visitors to the grave today marvel at the stone slab, which according to stories available online was put there to keep Mary’s maleficent ghost from rising from her coffin and bewitching the townspeople of York. No matter how many attempts are made to clean the slab, it is always cluttered with coins and a wide variety of various tokens.

There is no evidence that Mary Nasson was ever considered a witch during her lifetime, a fact that has not stopped the popularity of the witch’s grave legend. She was an ordinary woman; that is what makes her story interesting. The historical fantasy of Mary as a witch distracts us from learning about the lives of women like Mary in early New England and presents an erroneous image of her which would have shocked both her and her family.

Bottino and Peterson have tried to set the record straight for the public by using ghost tours and other staples of public history to discuss the facts.

(They also coauthored an article in Early American Studies’ summer 2023 issue, “‘I Hope I Have a Treasure in Heaven, Because My Heart Is There’: Salvation and Damnation in the Conversion Narrative of Patience Boston.” Boston also died in York at a young age, but in very different circumstances.)

Smith on Abigail Adams on C-SPAN

“I wish I could write to you, much oftener than I do,” John Adams assured his wife Abigail on this date in 1774. “I wish I could write to you, a Dozen Letters every day.”

Abigail’s last letter to John included news of Braintree stepping up its militia practice, a rumor about “a conspiracy of the Negroes,” and criticism of slavery as “a most iniquitious Scheme.”

In her next, she advised:

The People in the Co[untr]y begin to be very anxious for the congress to rise. They have no Idea of the Weighty Buisness you have to transact, and their Blood boils with indignation at the Hostile prepairations they are constant Witnesses of.

This period seems to have been when Abigail Adams started growing into John’s closest political advisor. Telling him about events in Massachusetts while he was away on government business emboldened her to include her own observations, and then opinions.

Because Abigail and John Adams were separated at many crucial periods, and they and their descendants carefully preserved their letters, we can see that relationship evolve. It’s likely that some other politicians’ wives were giving them advice, too. But with Abigail, we know she was.

C-SPAN has just posted the recording of a talk by John L. Smith, Jr., author of The Unexpected Abigail Adams, a biography published earlier this year.

Smith spoke this past June at the Fort Plain Museum’s American Revolutionary War 250 Conference. The museum also sells Smith’s book at a discount.

The Broad Base of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress

The main point I make about the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, convened 250 years ago this month, is that it had more support and participation from the men of Massachusetts than the colony’s chartered legislature.

The provincial census of 1765 listed 186 towns and districts, and more were formed in the following decade. Here’s what I wrote in The Road to Concord about how those towns usually made up the legislature:

Under Massachusetts’s official charter, most towns were invited to send two representatives to each General Court. Very small towns, with fewer than 120 voters, could send only one and did not have to send any. In many places, especially those farthest from Boston, the inhabitants might have trouble convincing a gentleman to leave his farm, or balk at paying that gentleman’s expenses.

Most towns therefore sent a single representative. If a town of moderate size sent no one at all, it was supposed to pay a fine, but that penalty was never levied. As a result, only about two-thirds of the towns participated in a typical General Court before the Revolutionary turmoil.

In contrast, over 180 Massachusetts towns were represented at the first meeting of the Provincial Congress in Salem on October 7, 1774, with only 21 towns listing as having sent no delegate. There was no cap on the number of men who might represent a town in the Provincial Congress, so several towns sent three or more delegates. All told, there were 293 men at the first congress, about twice the legislature’s usual number.

In other words, even though towns had been legally obligated to represent themselves in the General Court, many chose not to. Even though towns had no legal obligation to this new Provincial Congress, many more chose to participate, in defiance of the law, the general, and Parliament. The Provincial Congress was thus a more representative, broader-based body than the preceding legislatures.

Looking back, I’d revise that passage to say that we don’t know how many towns had elected representatives in Salem on 7 October. The newspapers of the time said there were ninety men in all, so the count of towns must have been lower.

However, after the Provincial Congress got down to business in Concord four days later, its official record listed 180 towns. It’s likely that not all elected representatives made it to that start of that session, so that list could have grown a bit over time to that number. Nonetheless, it’s obvious that the congress had a broad popular base and thus, for democrats, more legitimacy.

Honoring Massachusetts’s First Provincial Congress

As I’ve been writing, in early October 1774 the elected representatives of Massachusetts’s towns gave Gov. Thomas Gage one last chance to resume regular legislative sessions and then formed themselves into a Provincial Congress instead.

The congress carefully didn’t claim to be that official legislature. It gave some of its officers different titles, for instance. John Hancock was president instead of speaker, and Henry Gardner was receiver instead of treasurer. (Benjamin Lincoln was still clerk.)

The Provincial Congress also couched its acts as recommendations to the towns instead of requirements. Thus, it was up to the towns to decide to send their tax revenue to Gardner instead of to royal treasurer Harrison Gray. It was up to the towns to reorganize their militia companies, which is why some towns formed minute companies, others didn’t, and the terms for those companies’ training were different.

Nonetheless, this was a big and unmistakable step toward self-government. The congress was the de facto government of Massachusetts until July 1775, when a newly elected General Court took over, acting as if the governor was absent (instead of holed up inside besieged Boston).

Next week we’ll see two commemorations of the first convening of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, on the 250th anniversaries of the inaugural session in Salem and the day when a larger group got down to business in the Concord meetinghouse (shown above, as rendered by Ralph Earl and Amos Doolittle).

Monday, 7 October, 6:00 to 8:00 P.M.
250th Anniversary of the First Massachusetts Provincial Congress
Hawthorne Hotel, Salem

Essex Heritage is the main host of this event. The program promises:

• welcome remarks from Jonathan Lane, executive director of Revolution 250 Massachusetts.
• brief lecture on the significance of the date by local historian Alexander Cain.
• presentation of federal, state, and local citations commemorating the bravery of those who met at Salem in 1774.
• keynote address by Robert A. Gross, author of The Minutemen and Their World.
• brief question-and-answer session with the speakers.

There will be light refreshments and a cash bar. Register for this free event here; space is limited.

Friday, 11 October, 9:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.
The 2024 Massachusetts Provincial Congress: “Exploring Democracy—Our Rights and Our Responsibilities”
First Parish and the Wright Tavern, Concord

The featured speakers will be four noted scholars:

• Robert A. Gross
• Woody Holton
• Manisha Sinha
• Lawrence Lessig

The event flyer says attendees can buy boxed lunches and there will be a reception afterwards. It’s not clear when the presentations will be. Register here to attend.

“Now resolve themselves into a Provincial Congress”

The ninety men assembled in Salem on Wednesday, 5 Oct 1774, as described yesterday, waited for Gen. Thomas Gage or another royal official to appear.

No one did.

So the next day they met under their own authority, and the day after that they approved their first resolves. These said, in part:

The members aforesaid so attending, having considered the measures which his excellency [the governor] has been pleased to take by his said proclamation, and finding them to be unconstitutional, unjust, and disrespectful to the province, think it their duty to pass the following resolves: . . .

2dly. That the constitutional government of the inhabitants of this province, being, by a considerable military force at this time attempted to be superseded and annulled: and the people, under the most alarming and just apprehensions of slavery, having, in their laudable endeavors to preserve themselves therefrom, discovered, upon all occasions, the greatest aversion to disorder and tumult, it must be evident to all attending to his excellency’s said proclamation, that his representations of the province as being in a tumultuous and disordered state, are reflections the inhabitants have by no means merited; and, therefore, that they are highly injurious and unkind. . . .

4thly. That some of the causes assigned as aforesaid for this unconstitutional and wanton prevention of the general court, have, in all good governments, been considered among the greatest reasons for convening a parliament or assembly; and, therefore, the proclamation is considered as a further proof, not only of his excellency’s disaffection towards the province, but of the necessity of its most vigorous and immediate exertions for preserving the freedom and constitution thereof.

Upon a motion made and seconded,

Voted, That the members aforesaid do now resolve themselves into a Provincial Congress, to be joined by such other persons as have been or shall be chosen for that purpose, to take into consideration the dangerous and alarming situation of public affairs in this province, and to consult and determine on such measures as they shall judge will tend to promote the true interest of his majesty, and the peace, welfare and prosperity of the province.

Back at the start of August, Virginian politicians had gathered as an unofficial legislature in defiance of Gov. Dunmore, who was conveniently off prosecuting his war in the west. They called that gathering the Virginia Convention.

In North Carolina, the royal governor, Josiah Martin, and his appointed Council had made clear they wouldn’t convene the legislature until the spring of 1775. Therefore, towns sent delegates to New Bern to meet on 25–27 August. This was the first body to call itself a provincial congress. That gathering sent delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, condemned the Coercive Acts on Massachusetts, promised a boycott, and asserted loyalty to the king.

The new Massachusetts Provincial Congress delegates did two official things on Friday, 7 October:

• Elected John Hancock of Boston as chairman and Benjamin Lincoln of Hingham as clerk. Massachusetts’s legislative leaders Thomas Cushing and Samuel Adams were in Philadelphia, leaving Hancock as the most prominent member of Boston’s delegation in Salem.
• Decided to meet in Concord, out of reach of the Royal Navy, on 11 October.

TOMORROW: Commemorating the legislating.