“In full compensation of the damage he sustained”

For more than a week now I’ve traced Henry Howell Williams’s quest for compensation after the Battle of Chelsea Creek in May 1774 destroyed his estate on Noddle’s Island in Boston harbor.

In 1788, the Confederation Congress’s board of treasury sent him back to Massachusetts. After all, those commissioners said, his livestock had been taken and his farm burned before the Continental Army legally existed. This was a state matter.

I don’t have access to Massachusetts legislative journals from that period, but Williams must have submitted a petition during the session that started in May 1789.

On 23 June, Gov. John Hancock and state secretary John Avery signed off on this resolution passed by both houses of the General Court:

Resolved, that the Treasurer of this Commonwealth be and he hereby is directed to issue his note in behalf of the Commonwealth in favor of Henry Howell Williams, for the sum of two thousand pounds and interest thereon from date of the same in full compensation of the damage he sustained from having his stock and other property taken from him or destroyed in consequence of orders given by the commanding officer of the Massachusetts troops [Artemas Ward] in the month of May, 1775, and that the same be charged to the United States.

Williams would get £2,000. That wasn’t all he’d asked for, but it was more than half, and more than his own estimate of the value of the livestock he said the army had confiscated.

Massachusetts would supposedly try to get reimbursed for that payment from the federal government. I doubt it ever saw money back, but I don’t know how to track that now that Williams’s name was probably no longer attached to the request.

Williams had been seeking such compensation since the summer of 1775. He had asked each of these bodies for money:

• Massachusetts Provincial Congress.
• Massachusetts General Court under the provincial charter, seeking relief.
• Massachusetts General Court, seeking a loan.
• Congress of the U.S. of A. under the Articles of Confederation, through its agent.
• Congress of the U.S. of A. by direct petition.
• Massachusetts General Court under the constitution of 1780.

Some men might have been satisfied with £2,000. But not Williams.

Three years later he went back to Massachusetts legislators and asked if that “full compensation” from the state meant he couldn’t also ask the new federal government for money. Five members of the committees that had considered his claim in 1789 signed off on a document dated 14 Feb 1792 saying their resolution was

by no means and in no sense to preclude any further grant, Which The Federal Legislature, or any other government, May think proper to make said Williams.

So Williams sent yet another petition off to the new national capital of Philadelphia.

TOMORROW: In the room where it didn’t happen.