“John Malcom returns thanks to Almighty God”

Like pretty much everything else in colonial Boston, the mobbing of John Malcolm had a religious aspect.

Malcolm’s parents had migrated from Ireland in 1721, and before that the family was from Scotland. When he married and had children in the 1750s, Malcolm did so in the Rev. John Moorhead’s Presbyterian meeting-house.

(That congregation eventually evolved into the Arlington Street Church. Its surviving eighteenth-century records have been digitized by Harvard, and the image above comes from a book of baptisms. Good luck using that source.)

In 1769, Malcolm made a career change and joined the Customs service. His first station was in Newport, Rhode Island. The Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles recorded in his diary the difficulties Malcolm found in worshipping there:

24 [Feb 1770]. I am told that Mr. Malcom last week signified his Desires to some of the Brethren of the first Cong. Chh. here to partake with them in the Lord’s Supper last Lords day. His motion was declined.

He is an officer in the Customs here: lately removed from Boston & settled here, & with his Family attends that Meeting. Tho’ a Congregationalist, yet not Member in Communion. with any Congrega. Chh: yet to qualify for an office had received the Sacrament at an Episcopal Chh., I think in Boston.

It is the declared principle of our Churches to receive to occasional Communion, any sober Communicants from any protestant Chhs., as Episco., Bapt., &c., if they should desire it. He pleaded this right. But the scruple arose on his Morals, which are exceptionable.

There’s no clue about what made Malcolm morally objectionable, if it wasn’t simply joining the Customs service. In 1771 he attended Stiles’s own meeting six times before leaving New England for his next assignment.

This episode shows a couple of things. First, Malcolm wanted to be part of a congregation. He preferred independent meetings, though reportedly was willing to take communion in an Anglican church if it would help his career with the royal government. I haven’t seen any evidence about where the Malcolm family was worshipping when he was back in Boston in the winter of 1773–1774.

The first newspaper essay to discuss religion in connection to the January 1774 crowd attack on Malcolm in fact never appeared in a newspaper. But in announcing that he declined to print that essay in the 3 February Boston News-Letter, Richard Draper got the main point across:

VERITAS, his Observations on the Method of Punishment inflicted on J. Malcom, in a Place professing the Christian Religion, cannot be inserted.—He concludes “I would have every one punished that is deserving of it.—But would not have it to be said by the INDIANS, We are SAVAGES.”

In other words, the violence of the attack on Malcolm made Bostonians look bad, even to people that community stereotyped as violent.

During his recovery, Malcolm himself released a couple of public statements. The Boston Evening-Post was the first to publish one, on 14 February:

Yesterday se’nnight [i.e., Sunday, 6 February] the following Note, it’s said, was sent to several Churches in this Town, viz.

“John Malcom desires Prayers of the Christian People of this Congregation, that the vile abuse received on the 25th Day or Evening of January last past, from a vile rebellious Mob, without Provocation, may be sanctified to him and his Family; and that he may bless God that his Usefulness is still spared, and that he is greatly recovered from his dreadful Wounds and Bruises he then received from the bloody and cruel Hands of these cruel Mortals here below.—

May God forgive them!

Just above that item the Fleet brothers printed a warning to peddlers not to sell tea, that paragraph ending with the threat of “a modern Dress.—Remember Pedlar Malcom’s Fate!” So that writer wasn’t in the same forgiving mood.

On 17 March, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy published Malcolm’s next message:

Last Sunday se’nnight [i.e., Sunday, 6 March], the following curious note was sent to several churches in this town, and we hear was read at one of them, viz.

“John Malcom returns thanks to Almighty God, that again he is able to wait on him again in the public worship, after the cruel and barbarous usage of a cruel and barbarous mob in Boston, on the 25th evening of January last past confined him to house, bed and room.

“March 6, 1775.”

I haven’t found any response to these items questioning Malcolm’s faith or choice of denomination, or arguing against the point they all made about how Jesus told people to treat their enemies. Most people seem to have preferred to let that topic drop.