“In about two Hours the Boy recovered”

Yesterday I reported how on 21 Nov 1762 seven-year-old Gershom Spear had been found drowned off a wharf near Boston’s South Battery.

But also how earlier that month the Boston Evening-Post had reported that a British diplomat in Portugal saved the life of a drowned Dutch sailor by rubbing him with salt.

Gershom’s father, Joseph Spear, tried the same desperate measure, as reported in detail in the 25 November Boston News-Letter:

The following Account of aRecovery after Drown-
ing may be depended on, viz.
Boston, November 25. 1762.

On the 21st of this Instant [i.e., of this month], Gershom Spear, a Boy of about 8 Years of Age, Son of Joseph Spear, fell from a Wharf in this Town, near the South-Battery.—

His Father having occasion to remove a Lighter or Boat at High-Water, discovered the Boy under Water, he immediately got up the Body, and carried it into the House a lifeless Corpse; but having heard the Method of recovering drowned Persons with Salt, he directly strip’d the Cloaths off the Boy, and applied a Quantity of fine Salt, which he kept constantly rubbing the Body with, and applying warm Blankets, Help also being obtained, a Glister [clyster] was infused into the Body, when in about 15 Minutes there were feint Signs of Life discovered by a Moving of the Belly and a small Noise in the Bowels, which soon after was following by a Froth issuing from his Mouth:

The Method was continued till the Water discharged itself freely, and in about two Hours the Boy recovered his Senses so as to speak; and in an Hour or two after was able to give an Account of the Manner of his falling in, which, to the Time of his Father’s taking him up, according to the best Computation, was above a Quarter of an Hour:

However that be, the Boy when carried into the House had no Puls, his Neck stiff, and to all Appearance was dead:—

He is now recovered excepting his Feet, which by the Blood settling there has caused a Soreness that prevents his walking.

Now the Spears didn’t just use salt. They also deployed rubbing, warm blankets, and an enema. And some part of that combination worked.

Little Gershom grew up, became a cooper, married, had several children, and built a successful career in Boston business. But his height of global fame may well have come when the 5-8 Feb 1763 London Chronicle reprinted the story of how he was revived from being a “lifeless corpse.”

TOMORROW: Humane concerns.

[The engraving above shows the saltworks in Salisbury, New Hampshire, engraved for Robert Aitken’s Pennsylvania Magazine in 1776, courtesy of the Library of Congress.]

Gershom Spear “to all Appearance dead”

Last week I mentioned in passing the marriage of Gershom Spear (1755-1816) to Elizabeth Bradlee. The bridegroom almost didn’t make it. On 21 Nov 1762, young Gershom drowned in Boston harbor.

As Thomas and John Fleet’s Boston Evening-Post reported the next day:

Last Evening a Boy about 8 Years old, Son to Mr. Joseph Spear, fell from a Wharf near the South Battery, and was accidentally discovered under the Water ’tis tho’t about a Quarter of an Hour after he fell in; he was taken up motionless and to all Appearance dead…

Fortunately, earlier that month, on 1 November, the Evening-Post had reprinted an extract of a letter about drowning that had appeared in the London press the previous year.

That letter had been sent from Oporto, or the Portuguese port of Porto, by a sea captain named John Bell, master of the British ship Elizabeth. The letter was also reprinted in the 16 Apr 1762 New-Hampshire Gazette, and it said:

Since I have been here, a Dutchman fell into the River, and was taken up from the bottom about three quarters of an hour afterwards; he was carried on board the ship he belong’d to, and orders were actually given for sewing him up in a hamock, in order to bury him.

The British vice consul (Mr. Gabriel Hervey) who is a very humane man, hearing of the affair, took a boat, went on board, laid the fellow by the fire side, and kept rubbing him with common salt till life returned, and the man is now hearty and well.

Mr. Hervey has told me, he has known a dog kept under water two hours, and recovered by being covered with salt; and his lady told me she had recovered a cat.

Evidently the memory of that news article gave little Gershom’s father an idea.

TOMORROW: Can this child be saved?

[The engraving above was made by Robert Pollard in 1787 after a painting by Robert Smirke, and comes courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.]

A Dinner in “Plymouth, the great mausoleum”

On 24 Dec 1770, the Old Colony Club of Plymouth met to celebrate Forefathers’ Day, a tradition that went back a whole year but which commemorated an event a century and a half earlier.

The club first proclaimed Forefathers’ Day in 1769 to celebrate the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth. That had occurred on 11 Dec 1620 according to the Julian Calendar that the English then used. Club members knew that the British Empire had skipped eleven days to catch up to the Gregorian Calendar in 1752, so they calculated that landing must have happened on 22 December in the new system. In fact, it had happened on 21 December; the Julian Calendar had been only ten days behind in 1620.

Forefathers’ Day remained on 22 December, except when it didn’t, as in 1770. In that year the date fell on a Saturday, and the club decided that propriety demanded putting off their celebration until after the Sabbath.

One part of the 1770 celebration was an address by Edward Winslow, Jr. Another was a song written by local schoolteacher Alexander Scammell (shown here) to the tune of “The British Hero” (which I haven’t been able to identify). The lyrics were:

All hail the day that ushers in
The period of revolving time,
In which our sires of glorious fame
Bravely through toils and dangers came,

Novanglia‘s wilds to civilize
And wild disorder harmonize:
To plant Britannia’s arts and arms,—
Plenty, peace, freedom, pleasing charms.

Derived from British rights and laws
That justly merit our applause,
Darlings of Heaven, heroes brave,
You still shall live though in the grave,—

Live, live within each grateful breast,
With reverence for your names possessed;
Your praises on our Tongues shall dwell,
And sires to sons your actions tell.

To distant poles their praise resound;
Let virtue be with glory crowned;
Ye dreary wilds, each rock and cave,
Echo the virtues of the brave.

They nobly braved their indigence,
Death, famine, sword, and pestilence;
Each toil, each danger they endured,
Till for their sons they had procured

A fertile soil profusely blest
With Nature’s stores, and now possessed
By sons who gratefully revere
Our fathers’ names and memories dear.

Plymouth, the great mausoleum,
Famous for our forefathers’ tomb!
Join, join the chorus, one and all,
Resound their deeds in Colony Hall!

The Old Colony Club broke up just a few years later under the political pressure of the Revolution. Winslow moved to Nova Scotia and later helped to found the new colony of New Brunswick. Scammell became an officer in the Continental Army.

Other organizations in Plymouth later took on the celebration of Forefathers’ Day, including the Pilgrim Society behind the Pilgrim Hall Museum, the revived Old Colony Club, and the Mayflower Society.

This year marks the sestercentennial of the first Forefathers’ Day celebration in Plymouth. The Pilgrim Society and Old Colony Club together are hosting a dinner on Saturday, 21 December. Tickets are available here. I have the honor of being this year’s after-dinner speaker.

Colonial Records of King’s Chapel to Be Published

On Thursday, 5 December, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and King’s Chapel will celebrate the publication of The Colonial Records of King’s Chapel, 1686-1776, two volumes edited by James Bell and James Mooney.

King’s Chapel was the first Church of England parish in New England. The Rev. Robert Ratcliffe arrived in Boston on 15 May 1686 to lead the parish, and the first chapel building opened three years later. Most royal governors sent from London worshipped there.

Of course, the Puritan leaders of Boston were suspicious—of the Anglican establishment, rituals, and such innovations as New England’s first church organ in 1714. But as the town’s population grew and became a little more diverse, Congregationalist leaders had to accept not only King’s Chapel but also Christ Church (now better known as Old North) and Trinity Church.

In 1699 the congregation formed a vestry to represent the congregation and advise the church minister and wardens. After 1733, however, only people who owned pews could vote on church matters. That kept the society in the hands of some of Boston’s wealthiest families.

In the late 1740s those voting members of King’s Chapel decided to replace their wooden building with a larger stone structure. The first step was to make a deal with the town to build a new South Latin School so the chapel could take the land the old schoolhouse stood on. The Latin School thus moved across School Street from its original location, which is on the Freedom Trail.

Then came the construction of the new chapel following a plan of the Newport architect Peter Harrison. The builders actually constructed the present stone chapel around the old wooden walls, then dismantled the lumber and removed it through the windows. The wood was shipped up to Nova Scotia to be assembled into a new church. The whole process took five years, an investment reflecting the wealth of the congregation.

The Revolution caused major disruptions to King’s Chapel. Its last Anglican minister, the Rev. Henry Caner, embarked for Halifax in March 1776, carrying the communion silver, linen, and church records. The congregants who remained had to merge with Trinity Church while the members of Old South Meeting-House, which had been damaged by British dragoons, took over the stone building. For a while the church was called the Stone Chapel because mentioning the king was politically unpalatable.

Some Chapel members who had stayed in Boston tracked down Caner down in Britain by 1784 and asked him to return the church silver. He responded that, since the state of Massachusetts had confiscated his property, he felt no obligation to return anything to Boston. The church finally got the registers back from Caner’s heirs in 1805.

The Colonial Records of King’s Chapel, 1686-1776 is based on those records, including the church’s vestry minutes and lists of baptisms, marriages, and funerals. That information will interest not just church historians but genealogists and people studying other aspects of Boston’s history. Even as King’s Chapel was the wealthiest Anglican church in colonial Boston, it served many people without wealth and connections, including enslaved and free Africans, soldiers, and Irish and French arrivals seeking more familiar forms of worship.

This celebration will take place from 5:30 to 7:30 P.M. in the King’s Chapel Parish House at 64 Beacon Street. At 6:00 editors Bell and Mooney will speak about the publication process. There will be refreshments and books available for sale and signing. The public is invited.

William Eustis Returning to Roxbury

At the start of the Revolutionary War, William Eustis (1753-1825) was a medical student of Dr. Joseph Warren. A son of Dr. Benjamin Eustis, the young man was going into the family business.

Eustis’s training was cut short in 1775 for obvious reasons. He joined the New England army as a surgeon for the artillery regiment, treating the wounded after Bunker Hill and the battles of the New York and New Jersey campaign. In 1777 Eustis shifted to overseeing a military hospital north of New York City.

At the end of the war, William Eustis returned to Boston and began a private practice. He entered politics after the Shays Rebellion, serving several years in the Massachusetts House and Governor’s Council. In 1800 he ran for Congress as a Jeffersonian, beating the future mayor Josiah Quincy; in 1804 those two men competed again, and this time Quincy won. Around 1806, William Eustis sat for a portrait by Gilbert Stuart, shown above.

President James Madison appointed Eustis to be his first Secretary of War, hoping to win over New Englanders. With neither the military experience nor the bureaucratic finesse necessary for the job, the doctor lasted right up until there actually was a war in 1812. A couple of years later, Madison made Eustis the U.S. minister to the Netherlands. At least that wasn’t a disaster.

Back in the U.S. of A., Dr. Eustis bought the mansion originally built on a Roxbury hilltop for Gov. William Shirley. He and his wife Caroline, who was also his sister-in-law, lived there for more than forty-five years until her death.

Eustis once again ran for Congress in 1820. Meanwhile, he was also the Jeffersonians’ candidate for Massachusetts governor, losing to a fellow doctor and Revolutionary War veteran, John Brooks. In 1822 Brooks chose not to run again, and the Federalists nominated the archconservative Harrison Gray Otis. That let the Jeffersonians portray Eustis as the moderate, experienced elder statesman. He won the race, and the Federalist Party was wiped out of power in the legislature the following year. Gov. Eustis died in office in 1825.

The Shirley-Eustis House, as the Roxbury mansion is now called, became a pioneering preservation project and museum in the twentieth century. Meanwhile, Stuart’s portrait of Dr. Eustis went into the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—but that institution had so many Stuarts it was hardly ever on display. This year the Met decided to deaccession the painting. Members of the Shirley-Eustis House Association raised the money to bid for it at auction.

Dr. Eustis’s portrait will therefore be welcoming visitors to Dr. Eustis’s house starting in 2020.

The Devil and George Gailer

Here’s a final note on the riotous events of 28 Oct 1769—the merchants’ confrontation with printer John Mein and the tarring and feathering of sailor George Gailer.

In 2011 Dr. Caitlin G. D. Hopkins shared a passage from a letter by Elizabeth Cumings, a shopkeeper who witnessed both events from inside nearby buildings. Cumings, from a Concord family, hadn’t had much formal education, so her spelling offers a fun challenge.

Here’s what Cumings had to say about the attack on Gailer:

it was Dark our house shut up & we alon trimbling lick Courds [“trembling like curds,” I think], when a larg Mob of ful a thousand Man & boys aranged themselves befor our Dorr & on a Kart a Man was Exibited as we thought in a Gore of Blod; & poor meen [John Mein] we was shure was the sufrer but we was happyly mistaken it was an informer they had caught the moment Meen found Shalter, & instintly posted him on a kart tard him all over the town then fathered him all under our windo thin carid him threu the town obliging him to carry the lantren in his hand & calling to all the inhabitince to put Candles in their Windoes

Elizabeth Cumings and her older sister Ame were becoming unpopular for defying the non-importation movement. Hopkins has also shared her analysis of the Cumings sisters’ situation in “Enemies to Their Country”:

After Mein’s escape, the crowd had caught a suspected customs informer, George Gailer, who was beaten, tossed into a cart, and jostled through the streets. At strategic points along the route, men poured buckets of tar over Gailer’s bare skin, scalding his flesh and filling his wounds with hot, gummy resin. When the torturers “aranged themselves befor [the Cumings’] Dorr,” they applied this treatment once more, this time finishing it off with feathers. As they moved away, down Cornhill, someone thrust a lantern into Gailer’s hand, obliging him to stay conscious, lest he drop the flame and set himself afire.

In his legal filing, Gailer didn’t mention the lantern or any fear of being set on fire. Instead, he emphasized how the crowd beat him. And I’m not convinced that the purpose of the lantern was to threaten Gailer with being burned.

Indeed, the crowd could simply have held a flame to the feathers. The Customs officer Owen Richards later testified that in 1770 a mob “put him into a Cart, Tarr’d and Feathered him, then set the Feathers on Fire on his Back.”

Richards’s account was probably the source for the “Recipe” for tar and feathers in Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion including the lines: “Then hold a lighted Candle to the Feathers, & try to set it all on Fire; if it will burn so much the better. But as the Experiment is often made in cold Weather; it will not then succeed.”

My immediate thought of seeing Cumings’s description of Gailer being made to hold a lantern was the Pope Night wagons. In 1767 Pierre Eugène du Simitière sketched three wagons in Boston. In the back of all three was an oversized effigy of the devil, and all three devils held lanterns out in one hand. Du Simitière’s image of the North End gang’s devil appears above, dangling his lantern off the back of the wagon.

Judge Oliver, Isaiah Thomas, and other witnesses also wrote of those devil figures being covered with tar and feathers. In other words, the 29 October mob turned George Gailer into a living preview of one of the effigies that would roll around town on 6 November, a little over a week away.

[Incidentally, this month I got to see Caitlin Hopkins speak about the extended Vassall family and their slaveholding at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters in Cambridge. She has also turned in a report to the Harvard University administration about the college’s links to slavery, which seems like it should be issued as part of the newly announced initiative.]

December Events in Boston

Last week’s analysis of the Boston Tea Party leads us to the annual reenactment of that event and another event coming up in Boston this December.

Saturday & Sunday, 7-8 December, noon to 4:00 P.M.
Meet the Makers: A Colonial Craft Faire
Paul Revere House, Boston

Historical artisans show and sell the items they’ve created over the year in the Education and Visitor Center while R.P. Hale plays period music on the harpsichord and virginal. Inside the Revere House, the period rooms reflect the Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s customs of colonial Boston. All included with regular admission: adults $5, seniors and college students $4.50, and children aged 5-17 $1.

Monday, 16 December, 6:30 to 8:30 P.M.
Boston Tea Party Reenactment
Old South Meeting House, Boston

Ticket holders can join in a spirited public meeting to protest the tea tax in the same building where Bostonians gathered 246 years ago. Then the action moves to the waterfront accompanied by fife and drum. Spectators can watch Sons of Liberty storm the brig Beaver and toss crates of tea into the water. The schedule of events is—

6:30: “The Body of the People” meeting inside Old South (ticketed)
6:30: “Friends! Brethren! Countrymen!” gathering outside Old South with a town crier and women of colonial Boston discussing news of the tea crisis (free to the public)
7:30: “Huzzah for Griffin’s Wharf” parade through Boston’s Financial District of Boston to the Waterfront
8:00: “Destruction of the Tea” at Atlantic Wharf (reserved seats for ticket holders plus free seating for the public)

Tickets are $30, $25 for Old South members, and $20 early-bird tickets for members through 30 November. Ticket holders receive general-admission seating in Old South, escorted access to the harbor, and reserved viewing with good sight lines across the channel to watch the destruction of the tea.

Bribery: “seldom, and not properly, used in a good sense”

With bribery in the news, Boston 1775 reader Byron DeLear asked about how the Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood the term.

The U.S. Constitution provides:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The term “treason” is defined elsewhere in the Constitution, and “other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was deliberately unspecific.

To understand “Bribery” we can look at eighteenth-century usage. Here’s the section of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary devoted to the word and its immediate cognates.

Capt. David Bradlee, Wine-Merchant

If there’s not enough evidence to say David Bradlee participated in the Boston Tea Party of 1773, I don’t know what he did between the collapse of George Gailer’s lawsuit in late 1771 and the start of the war.

When Bradlee resurfaces in my notes, however, he was still deep inside Boston’s Revolutionary resistance. In early 1776, he was quartermaster of the Continental artillery regiment. (He may have had this job earlier as well.)

Once the war moved south to New York, Bradlee declined to move with the regiment, recently assigned to young Col. Henry Knox. So did the second-in-command, Lt. Col. William Burbeck, and a significant number of the men.

Bradlee instead became an officer in Massachusetts’s artillery regiment under Col. Thomas Crafts, who had helped to organize Boston’s resistance since the first anti-Stamp Act protest in 1765; Crafts was bitterly disappointed not to receive a colonelcy from the Continental Congress. The second-ranking officer in that regiment was Lt. Col. Paul Revere. The regiment’s major was Thomas Melvill, a veteran of the Tea Party. The regimental surgeon was Dr. Joseph Gardner, who had helped Bradlee carry Crispus Attucks away from the Boston Massacre.

Again, Bradlee was right in the middle of the socially rising mechanics who drove the Revolution in Boston’s streets and public meetings. He now had a military rank, and people referred to him as “Captain Bradlee” for the rest of his life. He joined the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons in 1777.

Bradlee’s connections helped him start building his fortune. On 10 Apr 1778 he joined Melvill and John Hinkley as majority investors in the privateer Speedwell. The ship left Boston harbor in July. After only three days, it captured a British sloop “laden with Sugar, Coffee, Cocoa, Limes, etc.” David Bradlee’s ship had come in.

In Boston’s 1780 tax roll, Bradlee was listed as a tavern-keeper, no longer a tailor. That same year, his younger sister Elizabeth Bradlee (1757-1832) married Gershom Spear (1755-1816), a nephew of Pool Spear, thus uniting the families of two of the people that Gailer had sued ten years earlier.

By the mid-1780s, David Bradlee was recognized as a “wine-merchant,” importing a commodity of upper-class life. He started to rent the basement of the State House to store his inventory, a sign of his continuing connections with the local government. The rent was £17, and the selectmen didn’t collect for two years until he’d finished renovating the space.

In 1794, after nine years, the State House rent was raised to £45, and Bradlee moved out. He bought a large wood and brick shop on the “w[est] side of the…Corn Market,” erected a set of scales outside the front door, and continued selling wine.

Bradlee had carried his family into genteel society. His daughter Sarah married a U.S. Navy captain, Patrick Fletcher. His son Samuel married Catherine Crafts, a daughter of Col. Crafts. His son David W. Bradlee became a member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company and of the Boston Board of Health.

Capt. David Bradlee died on March 6, 1811—“very sudden,” according to one citizen’s diary. He was mourned as a respected member of Boston’s business community and laid to rest in the family’s own tomb, purchased in 1800.

The American Revolution allowed this tailor to become an officer and a merchant. Still, Capt. Bradlee may never have escaped hearing words like those the Rev. Jeremy Belknap attributed to a blacksmith chafing at the demands of a newly-rich tailor: “Come, come, citizen pricklouse, do not give yourself such airs as this! It was but t’other day that you was glad to measure my arse for a pair of breeches.”

Inspecting the Tea Party House

In the 1890s the old Bradlee house at the corner of Hollis and Tremont Streets became known as the “Tea Party House.” Until it was leveled in 1898, it was on lists of what tourists should see in Boston. Even after that, people sold souvenir photos and postcards. The Bradlee home was a setting in the 1899 teen novel When Boston Braved the King.

All that celebrity was based entirely on stories that Sarah Bradlee Fulton’s family shared with the world starting in 1873 but really taking off after 1884. As I’ve noted, there’s no documentation to support the stories.

So what do I make of the family lore about Fulton, particularly that she, her husband, and her brothers participated in the Boston Tea Party?

On the one hand, there’s definite contemporaneous evidence that Sarah’s brother David was involved in the Revolutionary movement. He was sued for tarring and feathering a Customs sailor. He saw another Customs man aim a gun at him. He lifted Crispus Attucks’s body off King Street. You can’t get more involved in the street-level resistance than that.

Furthermore, as I’ll discuss tomorrow, David Bradlee remained part of that crowd of pushy mechanics-class Patriots as the war began. So if I wanted someone to toss the East India Company’s tea into the harbor in 1773, Bradlee would be one of the first guys I’d go to.

On the other hand, no one publicly connected the Bradlee family to the Tea Party in the first century after the event. David Bradlee lived until 1811. He and his sons remained prominent in Boston’s business community and civic government well into the nineteenth century. If they talked about him helping to destroy the tea, Benjamin Russell or whoever else published the first list of Tea Partiers in 1835 would probably have heard about it.

Likewise, there’s no question that Sarah Bradlee Fulton lived through the American Revolution. She had brothers in Boston during the most tumultuous years. Her house in Medford was close to the siege lines. As a wife, mother, and farmer, she undoubtedly went through a lot of anxiety, and it would be great to know what she experienced. That doesn’t mean she disguised her brothers to look like Indians, scared off British soldiers, or carried secret messages across the Charles River for George Washington.

In the end, I’m not convinced by the legends of Sarah Bradlee Fulton. I can’t disprove them, but that’s not my job. It’s the responsibility of authors retelling those stories to assess and support them with evidence, and the mere fact that some of her descendants grew up hearing those narratives isn’t enough to convince me.

For me the stories about Sarah Bradlee Fulton, her husband, her brothers, and her punchbowl fit into a genre I call “grandmother’s tales.” Fulton was indeed a grandmother, widowed in 1790 and probably helping to raise descendants for her remaining forty-six years. I suspect she told her grandchildren and great-grandchildren stories of the Revolution, inspired by history but exaggerated, massaged, or wholly invented for better effect. Fulton wasn’t necessarily aiming to put herself and her family into the history books. She simply wanted to entertain, education, and inspire those children at home.

But then those children grew up with Grandma’s stories as part of their understanding of their family and their country. As adults, with the centenary of the Revolution coming around, they retold those stories for the public. Because they believed those stories and believed they were important.

With enough insistent retelling, those tales found a wider audience in post-Centennial Massachusetts and America. They hit a chord with the public, especially women looking for a model female Patriot of a certain type.

Meanwhile, evidence for David Bradlee’s street actions, which frankly weren’t so savory, was confined to archives. In 1965 The Legal Papers of John Adams included the documents linking Bradlee to the George Gailer and Ebenezer Richardson mobbings. It took another thirty-five years before someone [well, me] wrote an article stringing all his appearances together. But his sister Sarah was already famous.

TOMORROW: David Bradlee in and after the war.

The Legends of Sarah Bradlee Fulton

Helping her husband and brothers prepare for the Boston Tea Party wasn’t the only patriotic activity that descendants credited Sarah Bradlee Fulton with doing.

In addition, her grandson John A. Fulton, her brother’s great-grandson Samuel Bradlee Doggett, and local hsitorians told these stories about her:

• She “heard the alarm of Paul Revere” from her house in Medford “on the east side of Main street about one hundred and fifty feet south of the bridge, on the south side of what is now [1897] Tufts place.”
• The Fultons’ house then “became the headquarters of General [John] Stark’s New Hampshire regiment.”
• After the Battle of Bunker Hill, “At sunset the wounded were brought into town, and the large open space by Wade’s Tavern between the bridge and South street was turned into a field hospital. Surgeons were few, but the women did their best as nurses. Among them, the steady nerves of Sarah Fulton made her a leader. One poor fellow had a bullet in his cheek, and she removed it; she almost forgot the circumstance until, years after, he came to thank her for her service.”
• “During the siege of Boston detachments of British soldiers often came across the river under protection of their ships, searching for fuel in Medford.” These redcoats seized a wagon load of wood from her husband John Fulton, and Sarah “flung on a shawl and went in pursuit. Overtaking the party, she took the oxen by the horns and turned them round. The men threatened to shoot her, but she shouted defiantly as she started her team, ‘Shoot away!’ Astonishment, admiration, and amusement were too much for the regulars, and they unconditionally surrendered.”
• Gen. George Washington gave Maj. John Brooks, later a Massachusetts governor, dispatches to deliver “inside the enemy’s lines.” Because John Fulton was too sick to do that, Sarah walked alone “to the water-side in Charlestown” and “rowed across the river,” returning home at dawn.
• Washington visited the Fultons in thanks for this mission, and they served him punch from a “new punch-bowl” with a “little silver-mounted ladle.” Descendants saved the bowl, ladle, and chair Washington sat in.
• The Marquis de Lafayette visited the Fultons decades later.

As with the lore about the Tea Party, no one has offered contemporaneous or documentary evidence to support any of these stories.

To be sure, we wouldn’t expect formal documentation on some of these events, but the historical record offers reasons for doubt. For example, what records survive put Col. Stark at the Admiral Vernon tavern and the Isaac Royall House in Medford. The idea that squads of British soldiers were landing in that town, full of Continental troops, to seize wagonloads of wood is outlandish even before we get to Fulton cowing an armed squad into giving up.

Nonetheless, the legend of Sarah Bradlee Fulton had a lot of appeal in the late nineteenth century. This was the period of Colonial Revival, when dramatic and sentimental stories of the Revolution were popular. It was also a time of growing activism by women, whether or not tied to suffrage. A story about a woman taking an active role in the resistance to the Crown, while remaining within the feminine sphere, served a cultural need.

The Daughters of the American Revolution was founded in 1890. A few years later, women in Medford formed a chapter they named after Sarah Bradlee Fulton. All the quotations above come from the speech of Helen Tilden Wild at that chapter’s formal inauguration in January 1897, as published in the D.A.R.’s American Monthly Magazine.

That ensured that Fulton had a constituency to keep her legend alive. In 1900 the Medford D.A.R. chapter graced the town cemetery with the stone marker shown above, calling Fulton “A Heroine of the Revolution.” She was also dubbed “Mother of the Boston Tea Party.” In 1919 the Bloomington, Indiana, D.A.R. chapter produced a three-act play about Sarah Bradlee Fulton to benefit wounded soldiers and sailors.

Monuments to Sarah Bradlee Fulton remain today. In addition to that stone marker, Fulton Street in Medford is named for her. Since 2006, the punchbowl she supposedly used when Washington visited has been in the collection at Mount Vernon. Fulton has her own Wikipedia page, and many other webpages hold her up as an exemplary female Patriot.

And it’s all based on family lore published a century or more after the events.

TOMORROW: Assessing the Bradlees.

“A family mansion with a history of the stirring times”

Yesterday I quoted a letter that appeared in the Boston Evening Traveler on the day after the centenary of the Boston Tea Party. It described how a young woman named Sarah Bradlee helped prepare her four brothers and future husband to disguise themselves as they destroyed the tea and to conceal themselves afterward.

That letter offered no evidence for its story beyond the belief of a descendant, and there were discrepancies between its details and the historical record. Nonetheless, a young Bostonian named Samuel Bradlee Doggett picked up on the tale. He spent decades repeating, and perhaps improving, the account.

In his 1894 book A History of the Doggett-Daggett Family, Doggett described himself this way:

Born [29 May 1858] and always living in a family mansion with a history of the stirring times of the Revolution, and associated in early life with those who could tell of those times, he developed an interest in ancestry, which resulted first in a short account of the Bradlee family, printed in 1878, and since that time in the accumulation of material for the present work.

The house Doggett referred to appears above in a photograph from the Digital Commonwealth collection. Nathaniel Bradlee built that home about 1770, and it stood on the corner of Hollis and what became Tremont Street until 1898.

The Traveler letter said Sarah Bradlee was active “at her father’s house,” which would have been difficult since he’d lived in Dorchester and died five years before. Doggett fixed that by stating that Bradlee had disguised the men in her brother’s house—the very house he lived in.

As a genealogist Doggett also corrected the timing of Sarah Bradlee’s marriage. She and her husband, John Fulton, married more than a decade before the Tea Party rather than afterward. In Doggett’s telling, the fact that she lived in Medford and had small children didn’t stop her from going to her brother-in-law’s house in Boston to help on the night of the Tea Party.

Doggett first printed his version of the lore as a single sentence in his History of the Bradley Family (1878), quoting from the Traveler letter (while leaving out the awkward incongruous bits). A few years later he communicated with Francis S. Drake, who retold the story in Tea Leaves (1884), incorporating detail that first appeared in the Traveler letter.

According to Drake, all four Bradlee brothers “lived in the house yet standing, on the southerly corner of Hollis and Tremont Streets.” (Nathaniel did, and Josiah, aged nineteen, might have. David and Thomas were married with families and homes of their own.) The Tea Leaves version:

Their sister, Sarah, assisted her husband, John Fulton, and her brothers, to disguise themselves, having made preparations for the emergency a day or two beforehand, and afterwards followed them to the wharf, and saw the tea thrown into the dock. Soon returning, she had hot water in readiness for them when they arrived, and assisted in removing the paint from their faces. As the story goes, before they could change their clothes, a British officer looked in to see if the young men were at home, having a suspicion that they were in the tea business. He found them in bed, and to all appearance asleep, they having slipped into bed without removing their “toggery,” and feigning sleep. The officer departed satisfied. Mrs. Fulton helped to dress the wounds of the soldiers who were in the battle of Bunker Hill. She died in Medford, Mass., in 1836, and is the authority for the above statement.

Since Doggett wasn’t born until 1858, there must have been some intervening transmission to him. There were direct descendants old enough to have heard from Sarah Bradlee Fulton herself, such as grandson John A. Fulton of Cambridge.

The most dramatic detail of this story—how “a British officer looked in” suspiciously—makes little sense since in 1773 the one British regiment in Massachusetts was stationed out on Castle Island. Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie provided a report on the tea destruction for the royal government from that perspective, but he wrote nothing about officers searching houses in Boston.

Other versions of the tale presented that detail in different ways. The 1873 Traveler version said, “a spy or officer…put his head within the door.” In an 1893 Boston Post article that referenced Doggett, “an indignant Britisher…insisted on doing a thorough search.” An 1897 article for the American Monthly magazine by Helen Tilden Wild, reprinted in the Medford Historical Society Papers, said, “a spy…peered in at the kitchen window.”

In 1896 a number of American newspapers, including the Omaha World-Herald, printed an article describing a conversation with Doggett, his father, and John A. Fulton at age 91. The writer presented Sarah Bradlee Fulton’s story in her voice, not saying whether her descendants supplied those words or the journalist came up with them. In this version, “some soldiers or spies” came into the kitchen of that old house on Hollis and Tremont. Again, there was no evidence offered to corroborate that detail beyond the belief of descendants and its dramatic power.

TOMORROW: The legends of Sarah Bradlee Fulton.

The Bradlee Family and the Tea Party

Last week I discussed David Bradlee, a tailor who showed up at three violent episodes in Boston within five months of late 1769 and early 1770.

Bradlee has also been linked to the Boston Tea Party, along with his brothers, brother-in-law, and sister Sarah. Indeed, Sarah Bradlee Fulton has been latterly dubbed the “Mother of the Boston Tea Party.”

That’s a relatively recent tradition. The earliest printed link between the Bradlee family and the destruction of the East India Company tea that I’ve found appeared in the 17 Dec 1873 Boston Evening Traveler—i.e., a century and a day after the actual event. It was a letter from someone in Medford who signed herself “E.M.G.”

A little digging tells me that letter came from Eliza M. Gill (1851-1924), a schoolteacher in Medford and later clerk at the town hall. She was the longtime secretary of the Medford Historical Society and a co-founder of the town’s chapter of the Daughters of American Revolution.

On the hundredth anniversary of the Tea Party, Gill wrote this letter to the Traveler editors:

I venture to send you the following facts of family history imparted to me by descendants, still living, of men who took part in the Boston tea party.

On the evening of the 16th December, 1773, Miss Sarah Bradlee, at her father’s house, assisted her four brothers, Nathaniel, Josiah, David and Thomas Bradlee, and John Fulton, whom she afterwards married, to disguise themselves as Indians, and saw them start to go to the wharf to take part in throwing the tea overboard.

She soon after followed and witnesses the emptying of the tea chests into Boston harbor. Before its conclusion, however, she returned home, and filling the copper vessels with water, had everything ready on the arrival of her friends, to remove all appearances of their disguise. In ten minutes nothing could be seen that would give any clue that any member of that household had participated in the bold affair. The light in the house, however, attracted the attention of a spy or officer, who put his head within the door, but seeing nothing to excite suspicion, left the party unmolested. The descendants of John Fulton are living in Medford, by one of whom the above was related.

That same evening Peter Harrington, a patriotic and enterprising citizen of Watertown, left his home also to go to Boston and take part in the same affair. His descendants are living in Watertown and Medford, one of whom I am, being the grand-daughter of his twelfth and youngest child, Eliza Harrington.

The letter didn’t offer evidence of the Bradlees’ or others’ participation in the Tea Party. Gill simply stated that at the outset as a fact. She asked readers to take her word as a descendant of Peter Harrington that he had helped to destroy the tea.

The Bradlee family story, also taken from a descendant, offered more vivid details. However, those details created holes. Gill said Sarah Bradlee was active “at her father’s house.” Her father had lived in Dorchester and died in 1768. Gill said Bradlee “afterwards married” John Fulton. That couple had married in 1762 and settled in Medford ten years later, having five children by the time of the Tea Party.

TOMORROW: But that didn’t stop the story from spreading.

New Podcast Interviews

A couple of history conversations I’ve had this fall are available as podcasts for your critical listening.

Matt Crawford at the Curious Man’s Podcast and I discussed The Road to Concord. Here’s the Apple link and a direct connection to the MP3 file.

In the studios of WBZ radio, Bradley Jay and I talked about the Boston Massacre and the Massachusetts Historical Society’s new Sestercentennial exhibit about that event. Here’s the link to the podcast version.

The image above is the colored engraving “Friends by the Ears,” published by Robert Sayer in Britain in October 1786.

“Tarr her all over from Head to Foot”

This investigation started earlier this week when Dr. Melissa Johnson tweeted a question on behalf of her students: “Were any women ever tarred and feathered?”

I have Benjamin H. Irvin’s 2003 New England Quarterly article “Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768-1776” on my hard drive, so I looked at the list of incidents from 1766 to 1784 at the end. I replied: “No women tarred, but in March 1776 a crowd of Connecticut women threatened a new mother with the treatment for naming a baby after Thomas Gage. Also, women at a quilting bee in Kinderhook stuck molasses & grass on a youth in Sept 1775.”

A couple of hours later Irvin himself noted that the article noted two mid-century incidents he’d found in the secondary literature but hadn’t been able to pin down. (He added, “My suspicion is that the evidentiary record of tarring and feathering is incomplete. Maybe vastly so.”)

Irvin did his research before Google Books, Archive.org, the Hathi Trust, the Readex newspaper database, and other online databases grew so large. Was it now possible to trace back those references? I set out to try.

The first event appeared in the venerable Carl Bridenbaugh’s Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776 (1955): “Bolder prostitutes went aboard privateers, one receiving a ducking from the yardarm and a tarring and feathering from the skipper of the Castor and Pollux.”

The second was from Alice Morse Earle’s Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (1896): “And we read of a woman who enlisted as a seaman, and whose sex was detected, being dropped three times from the yard-arm, running the gantlope, and being tarred and feathered, and that she nearly died from the rough and cruel treatment she received.”

Earle described what’s obviously the same incident in Colonial Days in Old New York (also 1896): “And we read of a woman who enlisted as a seaman, and whose sex was detected, being dropped three times from the yard-arm and tarred and feathered.” Note that in this passage, even though she had just discussed running the gantlope, Earle did not say this woman was forced to do that, as in her other book. So right away we can see some slippage in the details.

I found a couple of printed sources that described an event incorporating details that reappeared in both Bridenbaugh or Earle’s accounts, indicating that they were actually describing the same event. One was Clarence Clough Buel’s article in the Century Magazine in 1894: “In one instance a woman tried to palm herself off as a male cutthroat on one of the companion privateers Castor and Pollux; but the ‘Gentlemen Sailors,’ on discovering her sex, ducked her three times from the yard-arm, and ‘made their negroes tarr her all over from head to foot.’”

The second was a passage from William Dunlap’s 1840 History of the New Netherlands, Province of New York, and State of New York, which directly quoted a newspaper item dated 25 July 1743. Dunlap’s transcription deviated from the original text in small ways, most notably in turning the pair of privateers into a single vessel. Since Buel didn’t make that error, he must have seen the original article.

With a date and keywords, it was simple to find the actual news story at the root of all these passages. It appeared in the 25 July 1743 New York Gazette and was reprinted by newspapers in Boston and Philadelphia:

Saturday last the Men belonging to the Castor and Pollux Privateers, having found that a Person who had entered on board them two or three Days before, in order to go the Cruize, was a Woman, they seized upon the unhappy Wretch and duck’d her three Times from the Yard-Arm, and afterwards made their Negroes tarr her all over from Head to Foot, by which cruel Treatment, and the Rope that let her into the Water having been indiscreetly fastened, the poor Woman was very much hurt, and continues now ill.

That text not only pins down the date and circumstances of the incident, but it also shows how the later authors distorted it. To start with, both Earle and Bridenbaugh said this was a tarring and feathering. The original story said nothing about feathers. The feathers were a way to make a victim look more ridiculous when put on public display, but that consideration doesn’t appear to have been part of this 1743 attack. Is there a separate history of tarring as punishment, especially at sea?

Bridenbaugh stated that the “skipper of the Castor and Pollux” attacked the woman because she was a prostitute. Earle said the punishment was because she “enlisted as a seaman.” That difference made Irvin think they were describing two separate events. The original story said the woman intended “to go the Cruize,” or enlist, so Earle’s reading was more accurate. There’s no indication this woman worked as a prostitute. Rather, she was transgressing gender lines.

Finally, both modern authors left out some notable detail. The New York Gazette blamed “the Men” for punishing the woman, not their captains (though the captains undoubtedly held authority). It also offered the detail that the sailors “made their Negroes” put tar on the woman, presumably as a further punishment. Finally, the news story is notable in being sympathetic to the woman, despite her transgression, because of how much she suffered.

“David Bradley, came down with me to the corpses”

On 5 Mar 1770, eleven days after David Bradlee saw Ebenezer Richardson shooting out of his house, there was a confrontation between soldiers and civilians in King Street. That became, of course, the Boston Massacre.

Among the people on the scene was Benjamin Burdick, Jr., constable of the town house watch. He testified about what he saw in multiple forums. Burdick’s most detailed account appears in the town’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, and in part it says:

I then looked round to see what number of inhabitants were in the street, and computed them to be about fifty, who were then going off as fast as possible; at the same time I observed a tall man standing on my left-hand, who seemed not apprehensive of the danger he was in, and before I had time to speak to him, I heard the word “Fire!” and immediately the report followed, the man on my left hand dropped, I asked him if he was hurt, but received no answer, I then stooped down and saw him gasping and struggling with death. I then saw another man laying dead on my right-hand, but further advanced up the street.

I then saw the soldiers loading again, and I ran up the street to get some assistance to carry off the dead and wounded. Doctor Jos. Gardner, and David Bradley, came down with me to the corpses, and as we were stooping to take them up, the soldiers presented at us again; I then saw an officer passing busily behind them. We carried off the dead without regarding the soldiers.

At the soldiers’ trial the shorthand expert John Hodgson, who was a relative newcomer to town and didn’t know everyone, quoted Burdick this way:

When the Molatto man was dead, I went up, and met Dr. Gardner and Mr. Brindley. I asked them to come and see the Molatto, and as we stooped to take up the man, the soldiers presented their arms again, as if they had been going to fire, Capt. [Thomas] Preston came, pushed up their guns, and said stop firing, do not fire.

“Mr. Brindley” is clearly the man Burdick knew as “David Bradley.”

The tailor David Bradlee was thus at three violent political events in Boston in the space of five months: the tarring and feathering of George Gailer on 28 Oct 1769, the fatal confrontation at Richardson’s house on 22 Feb 1770, and the Massacre.

Furthermore, Bradlee was willing to walk under the guns of the British troops to help pick up Crispus Attucks’s body.

We write a lot about the Boston “crowd” and the “Sons of Liberty” as a collective actor, but of course that group was made up of individual people. David Bradlee was evidently one of those people. He did the work of resisting Crown authority at the street level. He was part of the crowd that genteel political leaders like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and William Molineux relied upon.

COMING UP: The Bradlees and the Tea Party.

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.

TOMORROW: The third tailor.

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.