Going to Work for the Feds

In exploring the Creating a Federal Government website, I saw a fair number of familiar names.

Then as now, government officials appointed military veterans to civilian posts. Thus, I see significant appointments in the U.S. Customs department going to:

• Thomas Melvill (1751–1832, shown here) of the Boston Tea Party and the Massachusetts artillery regiment, holding various positions in Boston from 1789 until 1830, just two years before his death. (Melvill actually started working in Customs in 1786, before the Constitution put the office on a new footing.)
• John Popkin (1743–1827), lieutenant colonel in the Continental artillery, who worked for the Customs for at least a decade after his farm in Bolton failed and he needed to support his family.
• John Foster Williams (1743–1814) of the Massachusetts navy ship Protector, commanding a revenue cutter.

Likewise, a lot of men who were active in Boston’s Whig movement before the war got posts in the state government during and after it.

I also saw some familiar names which turned out to be men with appointments a generation or more after the Revolution. I wonder if they’re descendants of the Patriots, named after a Revolutionary ancestor and perhaps leveraging the family name and connections.

On interesting example is Francis C. Whiston (1798–1878), a Customs employee from 1824 to 1828. He later related how the Marquis de Lafayette handed him a masonic apron after laying the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument in 1825.

Francis C. Whiston’s grandfather Obadiah Whiston was a blacksmith in pre-war Boston, ready to tussle with British soldiers during the 1768–1770 occupation. In late 1774 he helped to hide two of the militia cannon I wrote about in The Road to Concord. But in January 1775 the Patriot leaders heard rumors he was talking about switching sides and divulging where those guns had been taken, so they cut him out of the network. The blacksmith had to leave town with the British military in March 1776.

I don’t know if Obadiah Whiston’s wife and sons stayed behind or sailed away with him and returned, but his grandson was working for the federal government fifty years later.

TOMORROW: Sorting out Lovells.