“The town relying on the honor and faith of General Gage”

On 27 Apr 1775, in another session of Boston’s ongoing town meeting not preserved in the official records, a committee of selectmen and eminent gentlemen told voters how they had carried out their mandate from four days before.

As printed in the 26 June Boston Gazette:

They reported as follows, viz.

The committee waited on his excellency General [Thomas] Gage, with the papers containing the account of the arms delivered to the select-men, and the return made to them by the constables of the town relative to the delivery of arms in their respective wards.

After long conversation on the subject of the inhabitants removing themselves and effects from the town; his excellency being obliged to attend other business, left the affair to be settled with Brigadier General Robinson, who after further conference, and reporting the substance of it to General Gage, returned to the committee, and declared to them that General Gage, gives liberty to the inhabitants to remove out of town with their effects; and desires that such inhabitants as intend to remove, would give their names to the selectmen, and signify whether they mean to convey out their effects by land or water, in order that passes may be prepared; for which passes, application may be made to General Robinson, any time after eight o’clock to morrow morning; such passes to be had as soon as persons wanting them shall be ready to depart.

VOTED, That the foregoing report be accepted, the town relying on the honor and faith of General Gage, that he will perform his part of the contract, as they have faithfully performed their part of it.

Then the meeting was adjourned to monday next, ten o’clock in the forenoon.

A true copy, examined
Per Henry Alline, jun. Town Clerk, P. T.

I’ve found no record of another town meeting session on the following Monday, 1 May, but such adjournments were a legal way around the restrictions of the Massachusetts Government Act.

This is one of many places I’ve seen the surname of brigadier general James Robertson (1717–1788), the British barrack master general, rendered as “Robinson.” Was this the result of some collision between his Scottish accent and the Boston accent?

Robertson had already served many years as a military administrator in New York, and he would go on to be promoted to lieutenant general and royal governor of New York before the end of the war.

The town clerk pro tem. who took down these minutes was Henry Alline (1736–1804). Different sources say he had been trained as a “housewright and gauger” or “bred a Scrivener,” but he made his living as a notary public and clerk for such organizations as the Plymouth Company and the Kennebeck proprietors. In 1791 the Columbian Centinel reported that “his bodily health is such as renders a stationary business necessary and agreeable.”

In other words, Alline was a natural bureaucrat. After marrying in 1764, he was able to support a growing family; his society didn’t provide a lot of openings for those skills compared to ours, but it rewarded men who could do the job. Evidently in this emergency the town called on Alline to fill in for absent town clerk William Cooper.

In July 1776 Henry Alline had his family inoculated against smallpox and witnessed the reading of the Declaration of Independence from the Town House balcony, as he described in this letter at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

In 1791 Alline succeeded Nathaniel Green as the Suffolk County registrar of deeds. He held that job for five years until retiring because of failing eyesight. Then his son William, born in 1770, won election and served until 1821. Then William’s son Henry was registrar of deeds until 1860. That’s almost seventy unbroken years of the same family holding the position.

TOMORROW: Counting the guns.