Back to the Ropewalks

In 2020 I presented five men’s perspectives on the fight between soldiers and ropemakers at John Gray’s ropewalk on 2 Mar 1770.

The next day, there was another, smaller fight as a follow-up. So here’s another, smaller post about that fight.

Revolutionary Boston contained more than one man named Archibald McNeil or McNeal. One was a baker who became a Loyalist. Another owned a ropewalk. A third was the second man’s son, a second-generation ropemaker born in 1750, thus not of legal age when the king’s regiments came to town.

Nonetheless, the younger Archibald had learned most of the art and mystery of ropemaking, and he was the boss’s son and heir, so he probably wielded some authority in the shop. Here’s how he described the events of 3 March:

Archibald McNeil, jun. of lawful age, testifies and says, that on Saturday the third instant, about half an hour after four in the afternoon, the deponent with two apprentices were spinning at the lower end of Mr. McNeil’s ropewalk, three stout grenadiers, armed with bludgeons, came to them, and addressing the deponent said, You damn’d dogs, don't you deserve to be kill’d? Are you fit to die?

The deponent and company being quite unarmed gave no answer. James Bayley, a seafaring young man, coming up, said to the deponent, &c. Why did you not answer?

One of the grenadiers, named Dixson, hearing him, came up to Bayley and asked him if he was minded to vindicate the cause?

Bayley also unarmed did not answer till James Young came up, who, tho’ equally naked [i.e., weaponless], said to the grenadier, Damn it, I know what a soldier is.

That grenadier stood still, and the other who had threatened the deponent came up and struck at him, which Young fended off with his arms, and then turning aimed a blow at the deponent, which had it reached might probably have been fatal.

Patrick ——, Mr. Winter Calef’s journeyman, seeing the affray, went into the tan-house, and bringing out two batts gave one to a bystander, who together with Patrick soon cleared the walk of them

“James Bayley, a seafaring young man,” was the sailor named James Bailey who testified at length at the soldiers’ trial about what he saw at the Massacre two days later. At the end of that testimony he added that he’d seen defendant John Carroll “at the Rope walks in the affray there, a few days before the 5th March”—which of course confirms Bailey was there, too.

Ebenezer Winter Calef (b. 1729) was a tanner in Boston. He and his brother Joseph had lost a lot of property in the great fire of 1760, and a family history credits Winter Calef, a bachelor and thus apparently able to devote all his energies to business, with maintaining the family fortunes. (Joseph’s son, also named Ebenezer Winter Calef, became an officer in the Continental Navy.)

I wondered if Patrick, “Calef’s journeyman,” might be Patrick Carr, the leather breeches–maker fatally wounded at the Massacre, but he worked for John Field.

TOMORROW: More fighting on that Saturday.