“A general aversion to truth, honesty, peace and good order”

Yesterday I quoted a letter published in the Boston Evening-Post and Boston Gazette in July 1770, alleging that supporters of the Marlborough importer Henry Barnes had roughed up a “young lad” with “edged weapons.”

On 25 July someone using the pseudonym “An Honest Ploughjogger” wrote to the printers of the Gazette angrily refuting those charges. Edes and Gill waited until 6 August before running the letter, which didn’t match their usual political line. Maybe it was just to fill their extra page that day, but eventually the printers acceded to the request at the top of that letter:

Please to give the following a Place in your next, and you will oblige several of your constant Readers, as well as Friends to Peace and good Order.

IN the Boston Evening Post of the 23rd of July current, a piece was published, dated at Marlboro’, being an infamous scandalous libel, without any connection, good sense, and scarcely one word of truth in the whole. No notice would have been taken of it, had the true characters of the authors been as well known abroad as they are at home.

Every man of honesty looks upon himself even degraded, when either of them speak well of him; one of them is an old man, very enthusiastical both in religion and politics, and sometimes delirious at times, ever since he lay with a g—l at Rutland; the other, the father of the young man (said to be wounded) is a low liv’d dirty worthless fellow as ever existed, meddling with every bodies business, and much neglecting his own; deals out often scraps of latin and law; pretends to have all sorts of sense, but never yet discovered the least degree of common sense, and seems to have a general aversion to truth, honesty, peace and good order.

Later the letter stated the name of the second man: Alpheus Woods (1727-1794), a farmer who had just been named to Marlborough’s five-man committee to enforce the non-importation boycott. He would continue to be politically active into the 1780s. His gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find a Grave.

The letter never named the first man. People in Marlborough and neighboring towns presumably recognized the references to and “old man,” “enthusiastical…in religion” and in a relationship with a young woman in Rutland. But there were lots of “New Light” worshippers in Massachusetts, and Marlborough had lots of links to Rutland, where many younger sons had moved for fresher farmland. I looked in the records of the Marlborough meeting and the Marlborough Association of nearby ministers digitized at New England’s Hidden Histories, and didn’t spot clues to this man’s identity.

So the most I can pull out of those references is another example of how small-town feuds could intersect with imperial politics. This dispute wasn’t just about non-importation and how to protest the Townshend duties. It was also about this letter writer’s dislike of Alpheus Woods’s “scraps of latin and law” and the other neighbor’s enthusiasms.

As this passage makes clear in addressing the effigies of Henry Barnes:

As to the first part of their piece, relating to the old horse and the hay bags, &c. we shall take no further notice of it than only as one of those hay bags or men of straw was hang’d up and then burnt, it seems to be an emblem of the last describ’d author; who for his immorality is now hang’d up by the church, and whether he will be made better, or finally burnt, is at present very uncertain.

That boils down to, “Yes, people burned Barnes in effigy, but you’re even more disgraced.”

Then the letter offered a completely different narrative of the evening when the “young lad” was accosted, starting:

As to what they published relating to the affair of the 17th current, there is not one word of truth in the whole account, but quite the reverse; the truth of the case is, that divers of the persons mentioned in the aforesaid piece, accidentally came into Marlboro’ street that evening, and they being credibly informed that a mob who call’d themselves sons of liberty, were to meet that night at Alpheus Woods, in order to destroy Esq; Barnes’s buildings and substance, and had given it out freely, that if Mr. Barnes should oppose them, that they would cut the throats of all his family that night.

In sum, both sides claimed the others were looking for trouble.

TOMORROW: How the night turned violent.