Around Barnstable County’s Courthouse
The building wasn’t large. There was no separate jury room, for instance; juries deliberated in a nearby tavern.
The court records were stored in another building nearby, which burned down in 1827, leaving us records of only a handful of cases from colonial Barnstable County.
On 27 Sept 1774, 250 years ago today, there was supposed to be a court session in this building.
However, back in August the men of Berkshire County had created a new meme for Massachusetts’s Patriot resistance: closing the courts as a protest against the Massachusetts Government Act. That law changed the constitution of the colony and the way juries were chosen.
Over the following weeks crowds shut down court sessions in one Massachusetts county after another, either by entering the building and refusing to let any judges enter, or by surrounding the building so no one dared to try.
On 26 September, men from the counties of Barnstable, Plymouth, and Bristol gathered in Rochester to plan the closing of the Barnstable Courthouse.
On the morning of 27 September about 1,500 people assembled around that small building. They chose a committee to speak for them with Dr. Nathaniel Freeman of Sandwich as the leader.
Deputy sheriff Job Howland moved to ring the bell atop the building to signal the start of the court session. The crowd told him to stop.
Justices arrived to work. The crowd asked them to wait outside while they finished writing an address about the unconstitutionality of Parliament’s latest laws. After that document was read, some of the justices insisted that their own, older commissions were valid and that canceling the session would cause hardships.
Both sides spoke of adhering to whatever the upcoming Provincial Congress or the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia advised. But that didn’t resolve the question of what to do that day, 27 September.
TOMORROW: Signatures and James Otis.
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