“The licentiousness & barbarism of the times”

Another way to look at the mobbing of John Malcolm in January 1774 is through the issue of the rule of law.

At the end of her account of the event, friend of government Ann Hulton wrote:

These few instances amongst many serve to shew the abject State of Governmt & the licentiousness & barbarism of the times. There’s no Majestrate that dare or will act to suppress the outrages. No person is secure there are many Objects pointed at, at this time & when once mark’d out for Vengence, their ruin is certain.

Yet the Massachusetts Spy ended its Whig version of events by saying:

See reader, the effects of a government in which the people have no confidence!

For Hulton, the riotous attack on Malcolm showed that the people of Boston had no respect for the law, or common decency.

And as John Rowe’s diary entry shows, the crowd could intimidate justice of the peace Belcher Noyes from interfering with their violence.

However, people in the crowd would probably have said they were enforcing the law, not breaking it. It was Malcolm who had defied the law by refusing to obey a constable’s writ. It was Malcolm who had started the violence by clubbing George R. T. Hewes. It was Malcolm who had corrupted the law by abusing his authority as a Customs officer.

And as for waiting for the legal system to address Malcolm’s behavior, the Spy story said his attackers expected he would enjoy impunity like “[Ebenezer] Richardson and the soldiers [at the Massacre], and the other friends of government.”

It seems significant that all those cases involved grown men attacking children: Richardson shooting Christopher Seider, Pvt. Hugh White clonking Edward Garrick on the head, and Malcolm threatening the unnamed child whom Hewes defended. (To be sure, all those attacks on children started with children wising off to the men, but that wasn’t a crime.)

We can see the same sort of dueling accusations of lawlessness today. People on both sides of the political aisle say the other side routinely breaks the law and gets away with it through corruption. That makes it all the more important to look at actual evidence, not just rhetoric, since anyone can wail about “the abject State of Governmt.” 

(The picture above is a 1775 engraving of the attack on Malcolm, built off the previous year’s smaller scene shown here. Once again, tea plays a big part in how Londoners understood the event. Another early image of Boston’s destruction of the tea appears at right, and in the lower center a man is urinating into a teapot.)