Capt. Daniel Malcom, Brandy, Wine, and Punch

In the mid-1760s, while John Malcom was trading out of Québec, his younger brother Daniel Malcom was becoming prominent in Boston.

On 24 Sept 1766, three high officials came to his home on Bennett Street in the North End:

• Benjamin Hallowell, Comptroller of the Customs for the Port of Boston
• William Sheaffe, Deputy Collector of the Port
• Stephen Greenleaf, Sheriff of Suffolk County

Those men had brought some lesser Customs officers as well, to do the heavy lifting.

Malcom didn’t really want the honor of their visit. Those authorities had come to search his cellar for brandy and wine allegedly smuggled onto shore without the legal duties being paid.

To be technical, the Customs officers wanted to search Malcom’s whole cellar, while he was happy to show them part of it but insisted he’d rented a locked portion to his friend William Mackay, so it wasn’t up to him to open that. Also, Malcom insisted the writs should name the officers’ source of information, which of course they didn’t want to do. And occasionally he brandished (empty) pistols to make his point.

This produced a stalemate that lasted hours. A crowd grew to watch and/or intimidate the legal authorities. Among the people involved in the incident were John Ruddock, Paul Revere, John Pigeon, John Tudor, Nathaniel Barber, and the boys of the North Latin School. Ebenezer Richardson, whom I’m speaking about tonight, hovered just off-stage.

Ultimately the Customs officials gave up on this particular search, but they used Malcom’s intractability and the threat of crowd violence to lobby for beefing up their powers. Gov. Francis Bernard ordered an inquiry. The many depositions thus created are printed in George G. Wolkins’s “Daniel Malcom and Writs of Assistance,” a study presented to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1924 and now available through JSTOR.

After that event, the Boston town meeting started to name Daniel Malcom to committees on merchants’ issues, particularly complaints about the Customs. Late in 1768 he was on hand for the Liberty riot, and his testimony about events was sent to London and even published in the St. James’s Chronicle.

Malcom, Mackay, Barber, and twelve more friends commissioned Revere to make and engrave a silver punch bowl, now in the Museum of Fine Arts. The text on that bowl celebrates the Massachusetts General Court’s refusal to rescind the Circular Letter of 1768. It’s called the “Sons of Liberty Bowl,” but those fifteen men weren’t the town’s political leaders. Daniel Malcom was the only one at the head of a crowd.

TOMORROW: 1769, a year of change.