Samuel Swift, Established Lawyer

Samuel Swift was a member of colonial Boston’s legal establishment—son of a Milton militia colonel and town representative (gravestone shown here), graduate of Harvard College, trained in the law by Jeremy Gridley.

Swift was a member of the St. John’s Lodge of Freemasons. John Adams recorded dining with him several times. John Rowe listed him as socializing with “the Possee,” a merchants’ club. 

Swift also maintained friendly relations with Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, who had an estate in Milton. In fact, two weeks after the Tea Party, Swift sent the governor a note (now lost) which prompted this reply:

I am obliged to you for the favorable opinion you express, in your letter of the 30 Dec, of my general disposition, and I think you will be satisfied of the propriety of my conduct in the particular instance you refer to, when I put you in mind that I have taken a solemn oath, as Governor, to do every thing in my power that the Acts of trade may be carried into execution. Now to have granted a pass to a Vessel which I knew had not cleared at the Custom house would have been such a direct countenancing & encouraging the violation of the Acts of Trade that I believe you would have altered your opinion of me and seen me ever after in an unfavorable light. I am sure if I could have preserved the property that is destroyed, or could have complied with the general desire of the people consistent with the duty which my station requires I would most readily have done it.

Reading backward, it appears Swift wrote that he generally admired Hutchinson’s adherence to the law, but that he should have been more flexible in this case. By that time, the most fervent Boston politicians had decided Hutchinson was two-faced and corrupt, so they wouldn’t have sent any praise.

Swift’s name appears on many Boston town committees over the years, but those rarely involved radical political action. He was in the group designated to invite James Lovell to deliver an oration commemorating the Massacre in April 1771, and the group tasked with responding to the remarks in the “Hutchinson Letters” in 1773. On those committees Swift’s role was to add establishment heft, not to plan tough action.

Swift’s letters to John Adams show that he grew more radical in the last months before the war. On 20 Oct 1774 he even said, “I am no Swordsman but with my Gun or flail I fear no man more especially my Cause being Good as I think other wise I would not engage.” Still, Swift wrote more in those letters about the wording of pamphlets and about food than about military preparations.

On 13 Mar 1775, Swift also told Adams, “I am in a Measure Confin’d,” hinting at some infirmity. He was fifty-nine years old. Nonetheless, on 3 April when Boston had a town meeting and Samuel Adams was busy at Concord, the inhabitants chose Swift to be their “Moderator of this Meeting Pro Tempore.”

Two weeks later, the province was at war. Two months after that, Adams complained about not having received a letter from Swift since he had departed for Philadelphia.

On 30 August, Samuel Swift died inside besieged Boston.

In his last decades, John Adams, now a former President, wrote letters listing Swift among the Boston lawyers who had advocated resistance to the Crown’s new laws. Adams was pushing a version of the Revolution which emphasized Massachusetts moving before Virginia, the legal profession leading the people instead of being pulled along, and, incidentally, himself near the center of events.

Adams’s telling did include Swift, but that man’s name appeared at the end of a long list of other men. In another letter, Adams recalled that when he said the bar shouldn’t provide a polite farewell address to Hutchinson at the end of his time as governor, “Samuel Swift Esquire, as if appalled and astonished, Sat mute.” I’m not saying any of Adams’s memories was fully reliable, but they were definitely mixed.

TOMORROW: A descendant seeking answers.