“Thus ended the Superior Court”

As I described yesterday, when the Massachusetts Superior Court tried to open a new session in Boston on Tuesday, 30 Aug 1774, all the men chosen for juries refused to serve under Chief Justice Peter Oliver.

John Adams was away at the First Continental Congress, so his former clerk William Tudor described the judges’ response for him: “The Court told them they should consider of their Refusal, and then adjourn’d to next Day.”

The jurors didn’t change their minds. On the morning of 31 August the court sat again. Oliver and associate justices Foster Hutchinson and William Browne were at the Province House, meeting with Gen. Thomas Gage as part of his appointed Council. That body advised the governor to keep his redcoats in Boston and not “send any Troops into the interior parts of the Province.”

Tudor wrote that the justices who remained on the bench

…continued all the continued Actions till next Term. They agreed to let us file Complaints and to enter up Judgement on them; which we had imagined they would not consent to, as some of the Judges the first Day had said that if the County would rise and prevent them doing Business generally, they should decline finishing it partially, and the County must thank themselves for the Inconveniences of their own Madness.

The next day:

One small Point was argued by Mr. J[osiah]. Q[uincy]. and [Samuel] Fitch, a few Complaints read, and after Mr. Fitch, in Complyance with a previous Vote of the Bar, had reccommended four of Us to be admitted to the Atty.’s Oath, the Court adjourn’d to next Day.

Tudor was among the young men hoping to be admitted to the Boston bar at this session.

On the morning of Friday, 2 September, “there were a Number of printed Bills stuck up at the Court house and other Parts of the Town, threatening certain Death to any and all the Bar who should presume to attend the Superior Court then sitting.” Someone with access to a print shop had produced those death threats, making them all the more ominous.

The justices postponed “All the new enter’d Actions” as well as the old ones. Then the jurists noticed that people were taking advantage of the lack of juries to enter appeals, thus postponing judgments against them. Tudor wrote to Adams at length on whether this tactic was valid. “You had but one [case] in this Predicament,” he added.

The court swore in one new attorney: Nathaniel Coffin, Jr., a professed Loyalist. The other three young men hung back. Finally, the justices adjourned. “Thus ended the Superior Court and is the last common Law Court that will be allowed to sit in this or any other County of the Province,” Tudor wrote.

That same day, thousands of rural militiamen gathered in Cambridge in what was later dubbed the “Powder Alarm.” People inside Boston worried about an armed invasion. By evening, it was clear that the rest of the province was no longer going to cooperate with the royal authorities at all.

William Molineux’s refusal to serve as a juror under Chief Justice Oliver in the summer of 1773 had grown into the legislature’s march to impeaching Oliver, crowds closing the courthouses in rural counties, Suffolk County citizens boycotting juries, and finally a halt to all Superior Court business. Colonial Massachusetts’s judicial system was frozen, and in some areas would stay jammed up until past the Shays Rebellion in the late 1780s.