“Immediately struck Mr. Malcom in the Head”

Despite setbacks like being held prisoner by the French Navy in 1764, Capt. John Malcom appears to have prospered in Québec in the mid-1760s.

By early 1767 he had bought a “country house,” perhaps rising in status from merchant captain to landed gentleman.

There was one hitch to enjoying that house, however: it was already occupied by Lt. James Burns of the 52nd Regiment and his family.

That regiment had arrived in Canada in August 1765. Burns rented the house “in the country near Québec,” he later told Gen. Thomas Gage, “as lodgings were at the time dear in the town, and [I] as a subaltern, could not bear too heavy an expense.”

Months later, as John Gilbert McCurdy recounted in Quarters, Malcom bought that house.

At the time, it looks like Lt. Burns’s wife was still nursing a new baby. He described her as “confined to her bed, having had both her breasts laid open.”

Malcom told Burns that he had to vacate the property in three days or “become tenant to him.” Which frankly doesn’t seem unreasonable, but perhaps the captain was abrupt or suddenly raised the rent or demanded earlier payment than the previous property owner.

What happened next in February 1767 was reported in the press, including the 16 March Boston Gazette, presumably copying information from a Québec newspaper:

Saturday Night last, as Captain John Malcom, together with his Son and Daughter, was going from Town to his Country-House, in a Cariole, he was met on the Road, between the Wind-Mill and St. John’s Gate, by Lieut. Burns, of the 52d Regiment, walking into Town, with a large Club in his Hand;

upon his meeting Mr. Malcom he struck his Horse and overset his Cariole;

Mr. Malcom ask’d him what he meant by such Usage, to which Mr. Burns made answer, That he would FINISH him, and immediately struck Mr. Malcom in the Head, and by the Stroak broke his Club; but notwithstanding Mr. Malcom and his Daughter asking him his Reasons for so barbarous an Assault, he struck him a second Time, which knock’d Mr. Malcom down, and continued knocking at Mr. Malcom, with the Remains of the club, until he saw two Men come up, upon which he immediately went away.

The same story was reprinted in several other newspapers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and smaller cities. However, I don’t have any more information about this incident aside from Burns having to explain his side of the story to Gage the next year. Perhaps Canadian sources would tell more.

I can’t help but compare this to Malcom’s famous run-in with George R. T. Hewes in early 1774, except in that case Malcom was the one wielding a stick, hitting the little shoemaker on the head. In that confrontation Malcom insisted that Hewes was too lowly to criticize him, a gentleman; Hewes replied with a remark that questioned Malcom’s social status. For the captain, hitting Hewes with a stick wasn’t simply satisfying in itself, but it also signaled that the shoemaker was of lower social status, not worthy of a genteel challenge.

Up in Québec, Lt. Burns was a British gentleman, at least in his own eyes, and even if he did feel pressed for money. And he may have seen Malcom—raised in provincial Maine, a working mariner until quite recently, and yet now his landlord—as a parvenu who deserved to be put in his place.

TOMORROW: Meanwhile, back in Boston…