Exploring the Story of Samuel Dyer

This week I have two articles up on the Journal of the American Revolution:

• “The Return of Samuel Dyer: An Attempted Assassination in Revolutionary Boston”
• “The Secrets of Samuel Dyer”

These are two parts of the same research project. To borrow the summary from the second article:

in October 1774 a sailor named Samuel Dyer returned to Boston, accusing high officers of the British army of holding him captive, interrogating him about the Boston Tea Party, and shipping him off to London in irons. Unable to file a lawsuit for damages, Dyer attacked two army officers on the town’s main street, cutting one and nearly shooting another—the first gunshot aimed at royal authorities in Boston in the whole Revolution. Those actions alarmed both sides of the political divide, and Dyer was soon locked up in the Boston jail. Everyone seemed to agree the man was insane.

But there was a lot more going on than Bostonians could see. And Dyer resurfaced in an unexpected way.

Originally I wrote up this story for The Road to Concord, but it has only a passing connection to that book’s focus, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s cannon. Still, the events involved many of the same players and further raised tensions in October 1774. Dyer’s attack could even have started the war in a way quite different from how we remember it.

To spread the word about this project, I’ll do a couple of audio interviews in the next few days.

On the morning of Friday, 7 April, starting at 10:00 A.M., I’ll be Jimmy Mack’s guest on the Dave Nemo show on Sirius XM, discussing the months leading up to April 1775. This will be part of the show’s “Revolution Road” segment featuring writers from the Journal of the American Revolution.

On Sunday, I’ll discuss these articles with Brady Crytzer for the Dispatches podcast. That episode will drop later this month.