The Departure of Commissioner John Robinson

Although the Boston Whigs indicted the Customs officer for the port of Gaspé; a passing notary; and a couple of bottom-level Customs employees for the Boston Massacre, those men weren’t their real targets.

The anonymous person reporting on events for Customs Commissioner Joseph Harrison wrote:

This affair has struck every friend of Government with Horror and amasement, not Knowing but that it may be their case tomorrow . . . almost Every person in the Province are made to believe, that the Commissioners, and principal Officers of the Revenue were aiders & abettors, in the fireing on the 5th Inst.

In his role as historian, and thus referring to himself in the third person, Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson later recounted:

Another witness, having sworn that he saw a tall man in the Custom house or in the balcony; it was insinuated to the Lt. Governor in Council that this was one of the Commissioners, who soon after left the Province and went to England.—There is no judging, in such times, where the credulity of the People will stop.

Who was this “tall man,…one of the Commissioners”? That was John Robinson.

Back in September 1769, Robinson had gotten into a coffee-house brawl with James Otis, Jr., seriously injuring the leader of the Massachusetts Whigs. That popped him to the top of the Least Popular Customs Commissioner list, beating out perennial Charles Paxton.

In February 1770, after land waiter Ebenezer Richardson killed Christopher Seider, some people whispered that superiors in the Customs service had encouraged him to use violence. Perhaps the Customs sloop sailor George Wilmot, who joined Richardson in defending his house, was acting under agency orders?

Clearly all these events were connected! Obviously Robinson and his colleagues were engaged in a secret transatlantic conspiracy to slowly press Massachusetts into political slavery!

Did anyone question how this conspiracy would benefit from killing an eleven-year-old? Or how a well-known tall man in hiding after the Otis brawl got into the Customs House in the center of town without anyone seeing him? Or why his method of attacking the crowd outside that building was by loading a musket, thrusting it into the hands of a teen-aged servant boy, and ordering him to shoot? (Charles Bourgate insisted he had shot over the crowd’s heads.)

Presumably the Boston activists believed that an investigation in the courts would answer those questions. Or, if we take the more cynical approach, they believed that they simply had to keep the questions alive until they achieved some sort of political victory over the Customs bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, what was John Robinson really up to? He had, as Hutchinson wrote, “left the Province and went to England.” The 22 March Boston News-Letter reported:

Friday last [i.e., 16 March] sailed for London the Captains Robson and Miller; in the former went the Hon. John Robinson, Esq; one of the Commissioners of the Board of Customs.

Robinson carried an important cargo: documents telling the army’s side of the story. Lt. Col. William Dalrymple wrote to his commander on 19 March:

I have sent to England States of the affairs here, as well as of Captain [Thomas] Preston’s case. You will pardon my doing so by any other channel than yours, when you consider that the first impression is always the strongest in such cases, an opportunity offered and I presumed to use it.

“Captain Preston’s case” meant a 2,200-word narrative by the imprisoned captain dated 14 March. Robinson also carried affidavits from twenty-one other army officers and several local eyewitnesses dated 12-15 March. They were all certified by James Murray, the Scottish-born justice of the peace appointed by Gov. Francis Bernard in 1768.

By comparison, Boston town officials started to collect testimony about the Massacre on the morning after—at the town meeting and for coroners’ inquests. But it wasn’t until 13 March that the town voted to commission a report on the event to send to Britain.

Whig magistrates took down depositions over the following week, particularly on 16, 17, and 19 March. Then they collected more. They deposed Charles Bourgate on 23 March. They interviewed three Customs service employees who refuted him on 24 March. Meanwhile, there was a debate in the town meeting about how best to send a fast ship to London with the report. The Short Narrative was finally printed on 30 March, and Capt. Andrew Gardner sailed with it on 1 April.

By that point, John Robinson and his documents already had a two-week head start for the imperial capital.

I think the Massachusetts Whigs learned a valuable lesson from this episode. The next time British soldiers shot and killed locals—at Lexington and Concord in April 1775—the Patriots were much more efficient about gathering testimony, printing it, and speeding it to London. In 1775, Capt. John Derby sailed from Salem on 29 April, ten days after the battle—or about as quickly as it took John Robinson to embark after the Massacre.