“This BOWL commemorative of Events prior to the American Revolution”

In August 1768 a Boston Gazette item, quoted back here, announced that Nathaniel Barber had commissioned a large silver bowl “for the Use of the Gentlemen belonging to the Insurance Office kept by” him. These weren’t his clerks, it appears, but his investors.

That group in turn invited “a Number of Gentlemen of Distinction in the Town” to drink toasts with them. The bowl’s engraving celebrated the 92 members of the Massachusetts General Court who refused to rescind the Circular Letter of 1768.

That newspaper item didn’t name the artisan who created the silver bowl: Paul Revere. Nobody then knew he’d become more famous than Barber or any of the other men whose names he engraved on the vessel.

Several of those gentlemen participated in the Boston Sons of Liberty’s dinner in Dorchester in August 1769. To be sure, there were nearly 300 other men there, too, including Revere and most members of the “Loyall Nine.”

At some point in the middle of the nineteenth century new words were engraved around the bowl below Revere’s original words and pictures:

This BOWL commemorative of Events prior to the American Revolution, was purchased of the Associates whose names are inscribed upon its surface, by Wm. MACKAY, one of their number, from whom upon the demise of the latter, in Feby 1832, it became the property of Wm. MACKAY, his Grandson in direct line, a Resident of the City of New York.

The Associates were Citizens of Boston.

Then someone added to the flat bottom of the bowl:

* at whose death in 1873, it
passed into the hands of his
Brother ROBT. C. MACKAY of
Boston

And finally, even later:

and ROBERT C. MACKAY on Mar. 11, 1902
transferred it to MARIAN LINCOLN PERRY
of Providence, Rhode Island
a great great grand-daughter of
JOHN MARSTON
one of the fifteen associates

The term “Associates” also appears in the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings reported on a special meeting on 16 Dec 1873, when the Rev. George E. Ellis displayed that bowl for other attendees. Thay report referred to “the Fifteen Associates, belonging to Boston, for whom the bowl was made.”

It appears the M.H.S.P. article picked up the word “Associates” from the later carving around the bowl, while the engraving on the bottom may have taken the phrase “the fifteen associates” from the M.H.S.P. article.

In any event, nowhere on the bowl did the phrase “Sons of Liberty” appear, and the original newspaper report from 1768 didn’t use that term.

TOMORROW: Crossing the streams.