William Jasper and the Resistance

First in Boston 1775 postings and then in this article for the Journal of the American Revolution (also printed in this volume), I posited that Dr. Joseph Warren’s crucial informant on the night of 18 Apr 1775 was a British-born cutler named William Jasper.

I also laid out that argument in this talk for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts in April.

In collecting information about William Jasper, I looked for ties between him and the Boston activists. Of course, he couldn’t appear too close to Dr. Warren’s network in 1774–75 or else he wouldn’t have made a good spy. But I kept hoping for some documented link between Jasper and Boston’s resistance movement.

This summer I stumbled back into this page of signatures on a non-importation agreement from October 1767, protesting the new Townshend duties. It’s at Harvard’s Houghton Library.

And there’s William Jasper’s signature. He pledged to join this boycott several months before his June 1768 marriage to Ann Newman, previously the earliest sign I’ve found that he’d moved from New York to Boston.

What’s more, William Jasper’s signature appears right after John Pulling’s, and on the same sheet as Paul Revere. Those men were probably all in the same neighborhood, or even at the same neighborhood meeting. This sheet thus includes the signatures of three men involved in spreading the alarm on the night of 18 Apr 1775.