“He had had Hopes of proceeding with them to the Congress”

As I wrote yesterday, in June 1774 the Massachusetts General Court put James Bowdoin (shown here, as a younger man) atop its list of delegates to the First Continental Congress.

Two months later, however, Bowdoin declined the position. According to the 15 Aug 1774 Boston Gazette:

Some Days before the Departures of the Committee for the Congress, Mr. BOWDOIN sent them a Letter acquainting them, That he had had Hopes of proceeding with them to the Congress, but Mrs. BOWDOIN’s ill State of Health, occasioned by a long continued Slow Fever, necessitated him to lay aside all Thoughts of it.

Curiously, the same day’s Boston Evening-Post replaced the words “Mrs. BOWDOIN’s” with “his,” thus reporting that Bowdoin himself was sick. The Boston Post-Boy and later Massachusetts newspapers read the same as the Boston Gazette, indicating the Fleets’ paper was wrong.

On 10 September, Bowdoin repeated that explanation to his son-in-law John Temple, writing of “ye. Congress at Phila., to wch. Mrs. Bowdoin’s illness prevented my going.” Months later, he would complain about his own infirmities preventing him from doing all the political work he wanted to handle, but not in 1774.

Decades afterward, John Adams told Timothy Pickering that “Mr Bowdoin was chosen at the head of the Massachusetts delegation to Congress,” but “His relations thought his great fortune ought not to be hazarded.” That’s just the sort of pressure that the older John Adams prided himself on resisting and sometimes projected onto others.

The contemporaneous evidence suggests that, despite typesetting errors and Adams aspersions, Bowdoin really did stay home because of his wife Elizabeth’s sickness. Of course, that sickness could have been brought on by worrying about her husband and the family fortune.

Bowdoin dropping out opened up a slot in the Massachusetts delegation where John Hancock would have fit nicely. He and Bowdoin were both wealthy and respected Boston merchants. By late July, local newspapers reported, Hancock had recovered from a serious illness and was up and about. He would have loved being called to duty as a delegate by popular acclaim even more than being chosen in the first place.

But perhaps Hancock still didn’t feel up to a long journey. Or perhaps his colleagues saw no way to make him an official provincial delegate since Gen. Thomas Gage had dissolved the General Court and there was no substitute legislature yet.

Whatever the exact reasons, Hancock never attended the First Continental Congress. (But in the spring of 1775 he arrived at the Second as a star. Just as he liked.)