“Informed against for his participation in the destruction of the tea”

In the late nineteenth century, the Boston historian Francis S. Drake collected lore about the Boston Tea Party from lots of families.

Drake published those stories, along with many documents, in the book Tea Leaves (1884). One entry read:

——— ECKLEY,

A barber, was informed against for his participation in the destruction of the tea, and committed to prison. The Sons of Liberty supported him while in confinement, and also provided for his family. He was finally liberated, and the person who informed against him was tarred and feathered, and paraded through the town with labels on his breast and back bearing his name, and the word “informer” in large letters.

Some books on the Tea Party repeated this information without adding to it. No one has brought forward more evidence to corroborate this oral tradition, even from places we should expect to find it.

People don’t get “committed to prison” for long enough to need outside support without getting put on records. We know royal authorities in both Boston and London were very eager to find out who organized the destruction of the tea. Gen. Thomas Gage and Adm. John Montagu even secretly transported Samuel Dyer across the Atlantic because they thought he had useful information. But no source at the time mentioned this barber or the dismissal of his case.

To tar and feather someone and parade him through town was also a highly public act. When a Boston mob abused John Malcolm that way in January 1774, it was widely discussed in both New England and Britain. That same period offers no record of a tarring and feathering connected to the Tea Party like this.

Here’s my theory: This is a distorted memory of Joseph Akley’s dispute with Owen Richards in 1770-71, attached to the Tea Party because by the mid-1800s that was Boston’s most famous and respectable Revolutionary protest, the one families wanted to have an ancestor participating in.

This lore reversed the order of events, and probably exaggerated Joseph Akley’s tribulations, but we can recognize those events from the story of the mobbing of Owen Richards.

First, we know Richards was tarred, feathered, and paraded around town. People called him an ”informer.“ He recalled, “they also fix’d a paper on my breast, with Capital Letters thereon, but [I] cannot Recollect what it contained.”

The tradition referred to “ECKLEY…A barber.” Joseph Akley, whose name was spelled many different ways, was a barber later in life, after the peruke wigs he was first trained to make went out of style.

There’s no evidence Akley was accused of helping to destroy the tea or locked up, but Owen Richards did accuse him of a crime and haul him into court in 1771. Boston’s Whig leaders, including John Adams, John Hancock, and newspaper writers, did get involved in fighting against Richards’s accusations.

I suspect that some stories about that documented dispute, overshadowed by bigger Revolutionary events, got passed down in the Akley family or circle. Over time they faded until people in the late 1800s didn’t even remember the barber’s name precisely. But they remembered something about tarring and feathering, and legal jeopardy, and help from the Sons of Liberty. They hung those baubles of memory off the larger story of the Tea Party, and Francis S. Drake conglomerated the “Eckley” story with the rest.

TOMORROW: Joseph Akley in the war.