“An ancedote of a hair’s breath escape” from George R. T. Hewes
After all, people’s memoirs often play up their role in history or their knowledge of events.
What’s remarkable about the Hewes books is that contemporaneous documents often bear out the little shoemaker’s memories. Details he recalled six decades later turn out to be consistent with the records of the time.
For both those books Hewes described how he had gotten into an argument with a Customs officer and suffered an injury, prompting his fellow Bostonians to attack that man. He had his own riot in pre-Revolutionary Boston!
Yet, as the account from the Massachusetts Spy shows, that’s exactly what happened on 25 Jan 1774. Hewes’s memories weren’t fully accurate—for example, he recalled this confrontation happening before the Boston Tea Party instead of six weeks after it. But they’re impressivelt consistent.
Here’s how James T. Hawke recorded Hewes’s memory in A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party:
One day, said he, as I was returning from dinner, I met a man by the name of John Malcom, who was a custom-house officer, and a small boy, pushing his sled along, before him; and just as I was passing the boy, he said to Malcom, what, sir, did you throw my chips into the snow for, yesterday?Hewes’s knowledge was of course more accurate about his own experiences than other details. Malcolm was awarded a sinecure but not a pension, and he lived many more than two years.
Upon which Malcom angrily replied, do you speak to me, you rascal; and, as he raised a cane he had in his hand, aiming it at the head of the boy, I spoke to Malcom, and said to him, you are not about to strike that boy with your cudgel, you may kill him; upon my saying that, he was suddenly diverted from the boy, and turning upon me, says, you d——d rascal, do you presume too, to speak to me?
I replied to him, I am no rascal, sir, be it known to you; whereupon he struck me across the head with his cane, and knocked me down, and by the blow cut a hole in my hat two inches in length.
At this moment, one Captain [Isaac?] Godfry came up, and raising me up, asked who had struck me; Malcom, replied the by standers, while he, for fear of the displeasure of the populace, ran to his house, and shut himself up.
The people, many of whom were soon collected around me, advised me to go immediately to Doctor [Joseph] Warren, and get him to dress my wound, which I did without delay; and the doctor, after [he] dressed it, observed to me, it can be considered no misfortune that I had a thick skull, for had not yours been very strong, said he, it would have been broke; you have come within a hair’s breath of loosing your life.
He then advised me to go to Mr. [Edmund] Quincy, a magistrate, and get a warrant, for the purpose of arresting Malcom, which I did, and carried it immediately to a constable, by the name of Justine Hale [sic], and delivered it to him, to serve, but when he came to the house where Malcom was locked up, it was surrounded by such a multitude he could not serve it.
The people, however, soon broke open the door, and took Malcom into their custody. They then took him to the place where the massacre was committed, and their flogged him with thirty-nine stripes. After which, they besmeared him thoroughly with tar and feathers; they then whipped him through the town, till they arrived at the gallows, on the neck, where they gave him thirty-nine stripes more, and then, after putting one end of a rope about his neck, and throwing the other end over the gallows, told him to remember that he had come within one of being hanged. They then took him back to the house from whence they had taken him, and discharged him from their custody.
The severity of the flogging they had given him, together with the cold coat of tar with which they had invested him, had such a benumbing effect upon his health, that it required considerable effort to restore his usual circulation. During the process of his chastisement, the deleterious effect of the frost, it being a cold season, generated a morbid affection upon the prominent parts of his face, especially upon his chin, which caused a separation and peeling off of some fragments of loose skin and flesh, which, with a portion of the tar and feathers, which adhered to him, he preserved in a box, and soon after carried with him to England, as the testimonials of his sufferings in the cause of his country.
On his arrival in England soon after this catastrophe Malcom obtained an annual pension of fifty pounds, but lived only two years after to enjoy it.
On relating this adventure, the very excitement which the affront must have wrought upon him, evidently began to rekindle, and he remarked with emphasis, I shall carry to my grave the scar which the wound Malcom gave me left on my head; and passing my finger over the spot to which he directed it, there was obviously such a scar, as must have been occasioned by the wound he had described.
A year after that first book, Hewes sat for more interviews with the Bostonian journalist Benjamin Bussey Thatcher, and those conversations produced this version:
John [Malcom]…lived (says Mr. Hewes) at the head of Cross Street, where he worked in some capacity for a man by the name of Scott, when one day, as Hewes was returning from dinner to his shop, (for he continued at hard work all this time—as industrious and as impartial as ever,) he met Malcom at the mouth of the street.This detail about the window appeared in the 27 January Boston News-Letter, but that newspaper retracted it the next week. According to Hewes, he had left the scene by that time. So either he heard a rumor of Malcolm being lowered out a window or read it in a newspaper, or Thatcher found the detail in the newspaper or some report based on it and inserted it into the book.
He was engaged in an altercation with a boy who was dragging a hand-sled before him—the snow being a foot deep, or more, on the ground. The lad complained of his having turned over his chips, the day before, into the snow, and wanted to know what good that could do him.
“Do you talk to me in that style, you rascal!” said Malcom; and he was raising his cane, to give emphasis to his answer, over the boy’s head, just as Hewes came up. The latter was unarmed, and small, but it was no way of his, cost what it might, to see foul play. He stepped up to Malcom without ceremony, and warned him not to strike the lad with that cudgel. Malcom, in a rage already, now left his smaller game, and fronted Hewes:
”And do you presume to insult me, too, you scoundrel!—what have you to do with it?”
“I am no scoundrel, Sir,” said Hewes,—“and be it known to you”—
Malcom, at this, levelled a blow with his cane, which struck Hewes over the top of his head, cutting a hole two inches long through his hat, and brought him to the ground.
One Captain Godfrey came up at this moment, and helped him to rise. There was a bad wound on his temples, and the blood ran down his face in streams. “Who did this?” cried Godfrey, in a voice of thunder.
Hewes was known for a good Son of Liberty, as well as Malcom was for a Tory, and the by-standers, who were fast gathering by this time, quickly interfered. Malcom contrived to get a weapon into his hand and keep them at bay, till he could flee to is house, where he fastened himself in.
Hewes, meanwhile, had gone to Dr. Warren (Joseph) [footnote: in Orange-Tree Lane.] who was a relative (his grandmother’s sister’s son) and an old acquaintance of his; and the Doctor, after dressing his head, had advised him to get a warrant out against Malcom. He got one, accordingly, of Justice [Richard] Dana.
Constable Hale undertook to execute it. He found the house surrounded by a crowd of people. Malcom, from his back window, begged him to let him alone till morning, as he was afraid they would tear him to pieces, if he ventured out. He concluded to do so, and Hewes went away with him.
This, probably, only made the matter worse. The people became more furious, while Malcom, on the other hand, armed himself to the teeth, with sword, pistols, and broad-axe, took possession of the upper story, and threatened destruction to the first person who trespassed on the premises.
An acquaintance of his got in at the back-door, at length, by deceiving his wife, by a stratagem induced him to put his weapons by, seized him by the back in that condition, and hallooed to the people, who stood waiting to help him, which they did with a relish. They got a horse-cart, and lowered him out of the window by ropes into that.
They called for feathers, and two pillow-cases-full were shortly produced—probably from Malcom’s own stores. They started for Henchman’s Wharf, and there took in a quantity of tar, the purpose of which…was soon explained by their stripping poor Malcom naked above the breast, and plastering over his upper extremities.Hewes’s memory appears to be the only source for the statement that Malcolm preserved samples of his own skin (though Ann Hulton did write that “They say his flesh comes off his back in Stakes [steaks]”). Again, it’s not clear how Hewes would know that as a fact without any other record of it surviving. But authors love to include it.
Thence they carted him to Butcher’s Hall [i.e., the Customs house]; thence to Shubael Hewess,’ who kept a butcher’s-market at that period on the Main Street, in a wooden house near the Old South Church, with a jutting upper story, which still stands there (and was pointed out by our veteran, on his last visit to the city.)
Here, as in King Street, a flagellation was tried. Then, they drove to Liberty-Tree—to the gallows on the Neck—back to the Tree—to Butcher’s Hall again—to Charlestown ferry—to Copp’s Hill,—flogging the miserable wretch at every one of these places, if not some more—a fact which the papers of the day overlook, for obvious reasons, though the Gazette acknowledges that he was “bruised” in such a manner “that his life is despaired of.”
Hewes states that when they left him at the door of his own house, after a four-hours’ torture, the poor creature was almost frozen, and was rolled out of the cart like a log. Dr. [Silvester] Gardiner, who met Hewes soon after, told him that it took three days to get his blood into circulation again; adding, in the same breath, the consolatory compliment, that he, as the cause of it, would infallibly be hanged, and ought to be.
The Doctor…was doubtless ignorant of one or two things which it is but justice to his patient to mention. Hewes could not be blamed, certainly, for complaining to the Justice and taking the warrant, had he done it at his own suggestion, instead of Dr. Warren’s, or any body’s else. The assault was unprovoked and outrageous; and the wound so serious that the indentation it made in his skull is as plainly perceptible to this moment as it was sixty years ago. Indeed, as the Doctor told him when he dressed it, it was within one of his life. “Cousin Hewes,” said he, good-humoredly, “you are the luckiest man I know of, to have such a skull—nothing else could have saved you;” and nothing else did. It was the narrowest of all his dodgings of death.
Nor was he accessory in any way to the disgraceful treatment which Malcom received; so far from it, that when he first heard of his miserable situation, his instant impulse was to push after the procession as fast as he could, with a blanket to put over his shoulders. He overtook them at his brother’s house and made an effort to relieve him; but the ruffians who now had the charge of him about the cart, pushed him aside, and warned him to keep off.
Malcom recovered from his wounds, and went about as usual. “How do you do, Mr. Malcom?” said Hewes, very civilly, the next time he met him. “Your humble servant, Mr. George Robert Twelves Hewes,” quoth he—touching his hat genteelly as he passed by. “Thank ye,” thought Hewes, “and I am glad you have learned better manners at last.”
Nor was that the only benefit which accrued to this unfortunate politician. The frost caused an affection which caused a considerable portion of the skin to peel off. This, with a quantity of the Tar and feathers that adhered to him, it is understood he carefully preserved, boxed up, and carried with him to England, as a testimonial of his sacrifices for the royal cause.
Again, on details of his own experience, Hewes could be remarkably reliable. For example, there’s the constable he summoned to serve a writ on Malcolm, noted as “Constable Hale” and “Justine Hale” (which historian Alfred F. Young guessed was a typo for “Justice Hale”). Among the men the Boston town meeting elected as constables in 1773 was Augustus Hail.
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