Bell-Ringing in 1740s Boston

In my research into Thomas Williston, sexton of the Old Brick Meeting-House from the 1740s to the early 1770s, I came across a petition in the town meeting records that gives a taste of daily life in Boston.

On 14 Mar 1744 Williston and four fellow “Sextons & Bellringers” laid out how they rang their churches’ bells each day.

They weren’t ringing every hour—after all, it would be tough to get any big project done if you had to break off each hour to go to the belfry. Instead, they rang at certain hours only.

The town paid Williston to wind the Old Brick clock since telling the time was more of a secular function than a religious one. By the same rule, the town paid the sextons to ring them bells. But those men were paid at different rates.

Specifically:

• Isaac Peirce, Old North Meeting-House – 1 P.M., 9 P.M., 5 A.M. – £4.10s for each quarter of the year.
• Nathaniel Band, New South Meeting-House – 9 P.M., 5 A.M. – 50s. (£2.10s).
• Joseph Simpson, Hollis Street Meeting-House – 9 P.M., 5 A.M., 1 P.M. – £3.15s.
• John Roulstone, Old South Meeting-House – 1 P.M. – 30s. (£1.10s).
• Thomas Williston, Old Brick Meeting-House – 5 A.M., 11 A.M., 9 P.M. – £4.10s.

If I were Simpson, I’d ask why I’m being paid less than Peirce and Williston for ringing the same number of times a day. Not being Simpson, I can imagine some reasons for that difference: an easier bell, less seniority, the church being in a less densely populated part of town and thus serving fewer people. But I’d still ask.

Instead of quibbling among themselves, those five men presented a united front and all together asked the town for more money:

the Petitioners would Represent to the Town that the aforesaid Allowance for the Service aforesaid is so very small, being but about Three pence Old Tenor for each Ringing, that the Petitioners Apprehend they are not by any means Recompenced for their Time & Service and as the Petitioners Allowance is no greater now than has been for about Thirty Years past and Provisions & all Necessarys of Life more than twice as Dear as they were Thirty Years since, they Apprehended the Town would think it reasonable to Increase their Allowance

The meeting empowered the selectmen “to Consider…the Ringing of the Bells, and of the Allowance to be made to the Sextons.” That year’s selectmen included Thomas Hutchinson, Thomas Hancock, and Samuel Adams’s namesake father.

In May 1744 some citizens asked for “the Bell at the New Brick Church at the North End” to be rung at 11 A.M. as well, with its sexton paid. The selectmen took up that question, too. But I can’t find any record of their answer. In May 1745 the town “Voted, that the Bell ringers within the Town be paid for the same as formerly,” so it doesn’t look good for the sextons.

March 1745 had brought the news that “the Old Brick Church Bell…is now broke.” Joseph Marion proposed that the Old South Meeting-House bell be rung more often to fill in the broken bell’s times. The meeting “after some debate” approved that plan. But two days later the town reconsidered and decided the bell at Faneuil Hall, normally rung to signal the start and end of business hours, should be used instead. In May Middlecott Cooke proposed that Boston contribute to the cost of fixing or replacing the Old Brick bell “which was lately broke as he apprehends in the Service of the Town.”

In 1746 Samuel Hunstable asked to be paid for ringing “the Bell of the Meeting house at the westerly part of the Town.” The town meeting put him on the same basis as the other bellringers, but also specified that he increase the number of times a day he rang that bell: 5 and 11 A.M., 1 and 9 P.M.

Finally, in July 1747 the town approved a new payment schedule:

• Ten Pounds old tenor p. Annum, for once a Day.
• Twenty Pounds—p. Ditto for twice a Day and
• Thirty Pounds—p. Ditto for three times a Day.

That was a considerable raise for the sextons, and evidently put them all on the same rate.

TOMORROW: Bell-ringing on occasion.

America 250 Warding off Trumpist Takeover

Nearly a fortnight ago I shared Bert Dunkerly’s Emerging Revolutionary War post about Sestercentennial logos, observing at the end that “the America 250 Facebook feed is being politically partisan and literally divisive.”

A few days later, the nonpartisan U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission in charge of America 250 fired its executive director, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, at Newsweek, and on C.N.N.

The commission stated that this administrator “initiated a security breach of a Commission social media account, attempted to procure the resignations of multiple commissioners by misrepresenting himself as acting on behalf of Congressional leadership, and engaged in multiple other serious and repeated breaches of authority and trust.” It accused him of having “engaged in unauthorized actions related to Commission approved programming, finances, and communications.”

In particular, weeks ago the commission “removed its website and social media platforms” from this administrator’s control. He then accessed those accounts to send out the Facebook post that I called politically partisan and others like it.

That now-former executive director is twenty-five years old. He was previously an assistant to Melania Trump as First Lady and a producer at Fox News. The Trump White House installed him at America 250 and assigned him to organize the U.S. Army parade in Washington, D.C., on Donald Trump’s birthday. The commission never officially voted to approve that parade, which received criticism for many reasons.

Meanwhile, the White House is proceeding with plans to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence in 2026 with various other forms of trumpery: gladiatorial games on the White House lawn, videos of historical figures created by theocratic propagandists, and pitting state fairs against each other to be designated by Trump as “most patriotic.”

A Last Word on Boston’s Sedan Chairs

Originally I flagged Alun Withey’s blog post about sedan chairs in Britain just because I thought it had interesting details about daily life in the eighteenth century.

But then I got interested in the question of whether those details also applied in Boston.

Looking for sedan chairs locally led me into the smallpox epidemic of 1764, and thus to the name “Williston” appearing over and over in the selectmen’s records. So I had to figure out who Thomas Williston was.

So, having spent nearly a week on what I’d thought was a one-day topic, I’m coming back around to complete this sedan chair trip with some familiar names.

In 1769 the smallpox virus flared up again in Boston, though not nearly as badly as five years before. On 21 June the selectmen’s minutes reported:

Mr. Thomas Cunningham living near Dr. [Jonathan] Mountforts gives information to the Selectmen, that one Joseph Hading who came to his House on Satturday last, from a Vessel which then arrived here from Philadelphia is suspected of having the Small Pox broke out upon him.

Dr. [Joseph] Warren was in consequence of the above information sent to the said Cunninghams house to examine into the same, who having done it, makes Report that the Person has got the Small Pox.

Whereupon the Sedan was sent to carry him to the Hospital at New Boston.

“Mountforts Corner” was the site of a well-known apothecary shop in the North End. The Jonathan Mountfort running it in 1769 was a son of the man with the same name who’d set it up. When he died in 1781, the business passed to his own son, also named Jonathan (born in 1746 and painted as a kid by the young John Singleton Copley, as shown above courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts). That third Jonathan Mountfort died only four years later, but the name survived for at least another decade.

In late July 1769 the selectmen sent the town sedan chair to carry more smallpox victims to the province hospital: “Mr. Jabez Searl,” “a Child a Daughter of Abijah Lewis,” and “Capt. Timothy Parker…between the Hours of Two & Three OClock in the morning.” (Others, such as “a Negro Woman Servant to Mr. William Wingfield,” were simply ordered to be removed to the hospital, and it’s not clear how that happened.)

These people were surprised to be catching smallpox. They must not have volunteered to be inoculated with what doctors believed was a mild strain. Health statistics stretching back decades showed that contracting the disease “in the natural way” was more deadly than being inoculated. And indeed, by 9 August, Searl and Parker had both died.

A few months later, the army drummer Thomas Walker was carried to the hospital in what he called “the Machine for the Conveniency of Removing the Sick.” He didn’t have the smallpox; instead, he’d been injured in the fight between soldiers and ropemakers on 2 Mar 1770. I wonder if that “Machine” was the town sedan chair or if the army had its own equipment.

My next milestone in the story of sedan chairs in Boston comes in 1799. In that year the town established its first board of health. Paul Revere was board president, the silversmith’s highest civic office. On 8 Apr 1800, the selectmen’s records say: “On application from the Board of Health, order’d that the Sedan Chairs belonging to the Town be delivered to them for their use”.

Thus, in eighteenth-century Boston, sedan chairs were ambulances. We can find a few individual sedan owners in the records, but they appear to have been in poor health. The appearance of a sedan chair on your street signified not luxury but illness.

Thomas Williston, Doorkeeper

Yesterday I introduced Thomas Williston, sexton of Boston’s Old Brick (First) Meeting-House starting in the 1740s.

Williston also took on jobs for the town of Boston. Some of those were tied to his work as a church sexton, such as winding his meetinghouse’s clock and burying the dead. Others were civic tasks, as in managing the weekly traffic of farm wagons at the marketplace.

In June 1754 the town government offered another job: “Mr. Thomas Williston is appointed to attend the Select men in the room of Mr. John Savel who by reason of Age and Infirmities cannot attend the business.” Williston was also given “the care and Oversight of all the Watches in the Town.” And he was still the sexton at the Old Brick.

Thomas Williston’s official title was doorkeeper at Faneuil Hall. As such, he continued to patrol the marketplace, arranged to illuminate the building after the capture of Montreal in 1760, and the next year took down “the Potts & other Iron Ware” from the walls and hung “the Town Ladders” there instead.

But being doorkeeper also involved a lot of running around Boston. In 1758 the selectmen empowered Williston to enforce the town’s newly revised by-laws, including speed limits on vehicles. They sent him out on the water to warn ship captains against unloading “French neutrals” or possible smallpox patients. Along with Deacon William Larrabee, Williston was assigned to warn newcomers out of town—though he did that for only a few months, Robert Love’s Warnings reports. At different times Williston summoned new officeholders, tax collectors, and heads of fire companies to meet with the selectmen at Faneuil Hall.

For the annual inspection of the schools, Williston contacted the many respected gentlemen chosen for that committee. He also visited the two grammar-school masters to obtain the names of the graduating scholars so the selectmen could invite their parents to a dinner at Faneuil Hall. (Students leaving the three writing schools didn’t get a party.)

Some of Williston’s assignments overlapped with his roles as gravedigger, bellringer, and watchman. For example, in March 1761 he informed tomb owners they were responsible for paying to repair a wall of the burying ground. But he could also be told to deliver the seals to the newly elected sealers of leather, inspect leaning chimneys, and warn property owners about dangerous drains.

Williston’s busiest months on record were during the smallpox epidemic of 1764. He appears over and over in the selectmen’s minutes: tracking down reported patients, moving some to the hospital at New Boston in the town sedan chair, installing flags and guards (including his brother Ichabod) outside quarantined homes, hiring and dismissing nurses, smoking homes and clothing, and burying the dead under special arrangements to contain the disease. Thomas, his brother John, his other brother Ichabod, and Ichabod’s wife Elizabeth all got extra pay during those months.

After army regiments arrived in Boston in October 1768, Thomas Williston had the task of telling British officers that the selectmen wanted to speak to them—a potentially volatile clash of authorities. In November he summoned two officers accused of having “insulted & interrupted” the Dock Watch; those officers apologized for being drunk. In July 1770 “Mr. Williston, Door-keeper to the Select-men,” carried a letter from a town committee to Capt. Thomas Preston in the town jail. In September, some sick soldiers came back from Castle Island to enter “the Hospital in the Common”; the selectmen had Williston summon regimental surgeon Charles Hall for consultation.

In sum, Thomas Williston was well known in Boston, the liaison between the town’s highest elected officials and citizens of all sorts. He was based at Faneuil Hall and the Old Brick Meeting-House, but he could show up anywhere in the course of his duties.

On 18 Feb 1773, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy reported the death of Thomas Williston, “sexton of the Old-Brick, and doorkeeper of Faneuil hall.” He was buried in the Granary Burying Ground with his wife Sarah, who had died on Christmas Day in 1771.

Four days later the selectmen met in Faneuil Hall. Those men, “taking into consideration who was a proper Person to fill up the place of Mr. Thomas Williston, who for a number of years had attended them on the Towns Business; Agreed to give the Offer of the office to Mr. William Barrett Sexton of Dr. [Samuel] Coopers Church” on Brattle Street.

Williston’s successor as sexton of the First Meeting-house and, as of 31 March, as a town-approved gravedigger was Josiah Carter. As I discussed here, he had also been a town watchman. However, Carter lasted in that sexton’s job less than two years after Williston’s demise.

Thomas Williston, Sexton

Thomas Williston (1710–1773) was one of colonial Boston’s busiest public servants in the mid-eighteenth century.

Under the prevailing ethos, that wasn’t the status a working- or middling-class man was supposed to aspire to. Society admired “independence,” which meant running one’s own farm or business well enough to support a family, employ others, and own real property. It didn’t view doing tasks for a salary as ideal. But that’s how Thomas Williston worked for most of his adult life.

On 21 Aug 1715, five-year-old Thomas’s parents brought him to Boston’s First Meeting-House to be baptized along with four siblings. It looks like their mother had just been admitted to the meeting to allow that rite. That belated baptism began a lifelong link between Thomas Williston and that church, called the Old Brick.

On 3 July 1733 the minister of the Old Brick married Thomas Williston and Sarah Wormell. Thomas became a full member of that meeting in November 1734, just in time for the baptism of the couple’s first child, born in January 1735. Sarah joined two years later.

Thomas and Sarah had eight more children baptized at the Old Brick between 1738 and 1752, coming in regularly every two or three years. In the “too much information” category, the last five of their children (four births, two being twins) all had birthdays between 20 and 30 August, so we know Sarah Williston had a regular conception window.

I haven’t found sure evidence of what profession Thomas Williston was trained in. (In Robert Love’s Warnings, Cornelia Hughes Dayton identified him as a cordwainer, or shoemaker. However, in the 1748 deposition of “Thomas Williston, cordwainer,” published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the deponent identified himself as fifty years old rather than thirty-eight. So is this the same man?)

In 1741 Thomas Williston became the sexton of the First Meeting-house. He maintained the building, ordered supplies, and carried out errands at the direction of the minister and church leaders. In 1749 the congregation had a big business meeting that ran long. Among its decisions were “that ten Pounds old Tenor be an Addition to Mr Thomas Williston’s Salary as Sexton” and that “Mr Williston should have a list of the large committee and warn said Committee to meet at the adjournment of this Meeting.”

Sextons didn’t get paid much. Indeed, they were proverbially poor. So it’s no surprise that Williston looked for other sources of income. On 9 Mar 1742 the Boston town meeting considered his petition:

Setting forth, That he had been Sexton of said Meeting house the Year past and had Constantly Attended his Duty and it has been an Ancient Custom that the said Sexton should have the Benefit of Publishing the Banns of Matrimony when Capable and most of the Congregation are desirous that he should have the Benefit of Publishing if he had the Order of the Town Meeting for the same

That petition is in fact the earliest evidence I’ve found of Williston’s employment. The meeting had “Considerable Debate” on his request to collect those marriage fees and then voted that “the said Petition should be Dismissed.”

Williston continued to look for public employment. In 1743 the selectmen appointed him to stop “Carts Trucks &c.” from outside Boston from disrupting the market at Faneuil Hall and to keep tents off the Common during militia training day. He worked as a gravedigger—a common task for sextons—and a town watchman.

In 1744 Boston paid Williston £5 Old Tenor for “Winding up the Clock of the Old Brick Church the year past”—though that clock was on the meetinghouse roof, it was a public resource. In 1749 the town tasked him with tracking down the relatives of corpses that had been unearthed during the expansion of King’s Chapel.

The steady job of a sexton looked good enough that Thomas’s younger brother John became “Sexton and Bellringer” at the Old North Meeting-house in March 1747, and their younger brother Ichabod sexton at King’s Chapel from 1754 to 1761. Ichabod also joined the town watch until June 1768 when he was replaced for neglecting that duty.

TOMORROW: On the town payroll.

Boston’s “Sedan for Removing the Sick”

Lining up the sparse mentions of sedan chairs in colonial Boston reveals a clear pattern: they were used to transport sick people.

In 1674 the Rev. John Oxenbridge of the First Meetinghouse suffered a stroke while preaching the Thursday Lecture and “was carried home in a Cedan.”

Thirteen years later, Judge Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary: “Capt. Gerrish is carried in a Sedan to the Wharf and so takes Boat for Salem, to see if there he may find amendment of his Distemper.”

In May 1715, the newly reappointed governor Joseph Dudley was bed-ridden with gout. At the end of the month, Sewall wrote, he came to Boston and “was carried from Mr. Dudley’s to the Town-House in Cous. [William? Jeremiah?] Dummer’s Sedan: but twas too tall for the Stairs, so was fain to be taken out near the top of them.”

Yesterday I listed five times sedan chairs were advertised for sale in eighteenth-century Boston newspapers. I don’t think it was coincidence that four of those ads were estate sales, and the fifth seller died within two years. Those men might have acquired sedans as they or their wives became too ill to walk around.

Boston also had a public sedan chair, operated by the town itself. In March 1739, the Boston selectmen took note of “A Sedan, or Chair belonging to the Hon. Edward Hutchinson Esqr. which the Town has had the loan of for a considerable time.” One of those local elected officials was Thomas Hutchinson, and the sedan owner was his uncle. The selectmen decided that the chair “be effectually Repaired, and made fit for Use, in the best and frugal manner.”

That sedan chair became part of Boston’s public-health infrastructure. On 4 Jan 1757 the selectmen voted “that the Sedan for Removing the Sick be broke to Peices” and “Mr. [Isaac] Cazneau make a good Serviceable Sedan at the Charge of the Town.” Cazneau was a saddler.

In 1760 the Massachusetts General Court bought land in the sparsely populated western point of the Boston peninsula called “New Boston” for a new hospital. Four years later, the town suffered a serious smallpox epidemic. That appears in the selectmen’s records with an uptick in orders for the sedan chair to carry people to that hospital.

• 16 Jan 1764: “Information was given the Select men by Dr. [Phillip] Cast, that One Hallet who came from Newfoundland a Month past, and Boards at Mrs. Nicholsons in Fitches Alley, has the Symptoms of the Small Pox upon him whereupon the Select men endeavour’d to perswade him to consent to his being removed, and having obtain’d such consent, he was accordingly removed in the Sedan to the Province Hospital at New Boston.”
• 20 Jan 1764: “The Select men having prevailed with Mr. Adams to consent that his Child should be removed from his House to the Hospital at New Boston, they at about 12. OClock that Night took Mr. Williston and a number of hands with the Sedan to said House, when they received the Wet Nurse and Child and carried them to said Hospital”.

Similar entries appeared through August of that year.

TOMORROW: “Mr. Williston.”

(The picture above shows a sedan chair used to carry medical patients in La Paz, Bolivia, now in the Wellcome Collection in London.)

Sedan Chairs in Boston

Years back, I had reason to look into whether colonial Boston had sedan chairs.

That question was complicated by how colonists used the term chair to refer to small two-wheeled carriages. Writing in London, Dr. Samuel Johnson included among his definitions of the word chair “A vehicle born by men; a sedan.” But the American antiquarian Alice Morse Earle cautioned in Stage-Coach and Tavern Days, “The chair so often named in letters, wills, etc., was not a sedan-chair, but was much like a chaise without a top.“

Bostonians knew what sedans were. Back in 1646 a privateer captain named Thomas Cromwell had presented Gov. John Winthrop with a luxurious chair he had captured from a Spanish ship. The governor described it as “a very fair new sedan (worth forty or fifty pounds where it was made, but of no use to us).” Then the colony needed to appease Charles de Menou d’Aulnay, the French governor at Louisbourg, so Winthrop sent off the sedan chair. It was the right gift for a European aristocrat, but “no use” in Boston.

Fashions changed, but Boston remained a compact town with high labor costs, a relatively egalitarian society, and a legacy of Puritan distaste for too much luxury. Sedan chairs never caught on.

I searched my eighteenth-century Boston newspaper databases for the word sedan. Most hits referred to the French city, some to gossipy reports on the London elite, and lots to other words entirely (still a few bugs in the system). From 1700 to 1785, there were only five mentions of sedan chairs.

• July 1729 auction at the house of Col. Edward Chearnley—“One Sedan.” Chearnley was selling off a large number of luxury goods, including books and musical instruments. He died two years later on Barbados.
• June 1745 auction at the house of James Hubbard, which another newspaper said was from “the Estate of Francis Righton”—“a Sedan.”
• December 1753 and March 1754 sale of goods from “the late Ebenezer Holmes of Boston, Merchant, deceased”—“a very handsom Sedan.”
• May 1763 sale from “the late Major-General [Edward] Whitmore”—“a Sedan Chair lin’d with Velvet.” Whitmore was an army officer from Britain who had drowned at Portsmouth two years earlier.
• February 1769 sale from “the late Mr. John Smith”—“A handsome Sedan Chair to be sold very cheap.”

No chairmen advertised their services, the way stagecoach owners did. No local coachmaker or importer advertised sedan chairs for sale. One of the notices for the Francis Righton estate sale didn’t even bother to mention the sedan among the goods offered. In sum, all signs indicate there wasn’t much public demand for those contraptions.

Nevertheless, the town of Boston owned some sedan chairs.

TOMORROW: The knock at the door.

Sedan Chairs in Britain

Last month Dr. Alun Withey wrote about the business of sedan chairs—small enclosed seats carried through city streets by two or four serving men.

Writing from a London perspective, Withey says:

The use of sedan chairs was heavily regulated throughout the eighteenth century, with strict rules about pricing and location. Under Acts of Parliament, including one in 1800 under George III, operators of sedan chairs – called ‘Chairmen’ – in large towns such as London, Edinburgh and Dublin needed to have a licence from town authorities.

Pricing, of course, varied according to the distance and duration of the journey. The physical effort involved in carrying a (potentially corpulent elite!) person, in a large box, several feet off the ground must have been huge. Inclines and hills, uneven pavements or muddy roads, moving laterally or stopping to avoid obstacles – not to mention the distance – all added to the strain.

The customer expected speed, no matter what the weather or conditions. This was a full-body workout. Try walking up and down the length of your gym carrying a 30kg dumbbell in each hand for 30 mins, wearing heavy clothes and a hat and that might begin to give an idea of the experience.

They certainly suited the urban environment. In crowded city streets they could move around more easily than coaches, possibly even reaching their destinations more quickly. Like modern taxi cabs they were generally single use, from one destination to another, rather than return journeys. But town regulations suggest that they could also be booked by the day to include multiple journeys.

The Glasgow Almanack of 1795 listed prices for common trips across the city. A basic price of sixpence was applied before you even went anywhere. Every mile from the ‘Cross of Glasgow’, for example was charged at two shillings. Prices for specific locations varied from sixpence to two shillings, based on the distance but also perhaps the nature of the roads and hills. A ‘chairman’ was able to charge sixpence for every hour they had to wait for a customer once engaged, and extra fees applied to trips made between 3pm and 11pm.

In sharp contrast to those large cities on the British Isles, Boston didn’t try to regulate sedan chairs and chairmen. My search through the official records of the town and the colony turned up no attempt to control their operation and pricing. There was never a need.

TOMORROW: Addressing the chair.

A New Ministry Off to the Races

At the History of Parliament blog, the Georgian Lords welcomed Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri of the University of Aberdeen to discuss the equestrian genesis of the Marquess of Rockingham’s ministry:

By the spring of 1765, George III was determined to be rid of his overbearing minister, George Grenville, who had been in office since April 1763. The task of taking the pulse of the political nation, fell to the king’s uncle, William Augustus, duke of Cumberland. . . .

Cumberland had toured the great country houses in the summer of 1764, including Chatsworth, Wentworth Woodhouse and Woburn, discovering that the Whigs remained unenthusiastic about a return to power without [William] Pitt. The stalemate seemed unbreakable. Yet the solution would not be found in the names listed in the London Gazette, but in the pages of the Newmarket Calendar.

By the 1750s and 1760s horse racing had become a central ritual of aristocratic and political life. Already favoured by Charles II in the seventeenth century, by the 1740s Newmarket was the undisputed capital of the turf. The Racing Calendar, first published in 1727 by John Cheny, recorded results and pedigrees, turning the turf into a semi-official world of statistics and reputations. Ascot, founded in 1711 by Queen Anne, had by the 1760s become a highlight of the London season, attracting large crowds and royal patronage. (Morton, 56–61) Both courses were more than sporting venues: they were theatres of status, where political alliances were cultivated over wagers, where a minister could be sounded out between heats, and where a successful stable enhanced a nobleman’s standing. As one contemporary put it, ‘the turf is the true parliament of our nobility’. . . .

By 1765, Rockingham was already a figure of considerable weight within the Whig aristocracy, though not yet tested as a statesman. Born into immense wealth and heir to Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire, he inherited his title in December 1750. In politics he aligned with the ‘Old Corps’ Whigs grouped around Newcastle, and from 1752 served as a gentleman of the Bedchamber to George II and George III, before resigning in 1762 in protest over Newcastle’s dismissal. . . . Like Cumberland, Rockingham was a passionate breeder and owner of racehorses, and he became known as ‘the Racing Marquess’. (Albemarle, i. 165)

Cumberland was equally at home on the turf, and in June 1765 he held court at Ascot, where the outlines of a new administration were hammered out. As well as Rockingham, the new ministry was to include Augustus Henry Fitzroy, 3rd duke of Grafton, a great-grandson of Charles II. Not yet 30, Grafton brought youth and royal blood; Rockingham brought wealth, influence, and respectability. Their conversations at Ascot and Newmarket were, as Albemarle noted, ‘held not in the closet, but at the races’. (i. 199) . . . Pamphleteers and satirists delighted in the horse racing connexion: ‘From Jockeys to Ministers’, they jibed…

The new ministry took office on 13 July 1765. The Duke of Cumberland hosted its meetings at his London home and country estate. But at the end of October he died, only forty-four years old. Rockingham, Grafton, Newcastle, and their colleagues rode on, but their coalition held together for only slightly more than one year.

During that time, Rockingham repealed the Stamp Act for North America. For the protesting colonists, that restored their loyalty to the British constitution. It did not, however, solve what London saw as the government’s revenue problem.

(The equestrian portrait of the Duke of Cumberland above was made in China, probably in the 1750s, for the British market. It is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.)

The First American Bill of Rights

On 27 Oct 1774 the Philadelphia printers William and Thomas Bradford issued a book on behalf of the Continental Congress, which had broken up the previous day.

It was titled:

Extracts from the Votes and Proceedings of the American Continental Congress, held at Philadelphia, on the Fifth of September, 1774. Containing, the Bill of Rights, a List of Grievances, Occasional Resolves, the Association, an Address to the People of Great-Britain, and a Memorial to the Inhabitants of the British American colonies.

The September date was when that congress convened.

The “Bill of Rights” in that booklet has become known as just one part of the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress. Americans of 1774 used the “Bill of Rights” term, however. On 2 December the Massachusetts Provincial Congress voted that “the American bill of rights therein contained, appears to be formed with the greatest ability and judgment.”

Here then is the first Bill of Rights adopted by representatives of almost all the colonies that would become independent:

That the inhabitants of the English Colonies in North America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English Constitution, and the several Charters or Compacts, have the following Rights:

Resolved, N. C. D. [Nemine Contradicente, or with no dissenting votes] 1. That they are entitled to life, liberty, and property, and they have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever a right to dispose of either without their consent.

Resolved, N. C. D. 2. That our ancestors, who first settled these Colonies, were at the time of their emigration from the mother country, entitled to all the rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural born subjects, within the Realm of England.

Resolved, N. C. D. 3. That by such emigration they by no means forfeited, surrendered, or lost any of those rights, but that they were, and their descendants now are, entitled to the exercise and enjoyment of all such of them, as their local and other circumstances enable them to exercise and enjoy.

Resolved, 4. That the foundation of English Liberty, and of all free Government, is a right in the people to participate in their Legislative Council: and as the English Colonists are not represented, and from their local and other circumstances cannot be properly represented in the British Parliament, they are entitled to a free and exclusive power of legislation in their several Provincial Legislatures, where their right of Representation can alone be preserved, in all cases of taxation and internal polity, subject only to the negative of their Sovereign, in such manner as has been heretofore used and accustomed: But from the necessity of the case, and a regard to the mutual interest of both Countries, we cheerfully consent to the operation of such Acts of the British Parliament, as are, bona fide, restrained to the regulation of our external commerce, for the purpose of securing the commercial advantages of the whole Empire to the mother country, and the commercial benefits of its respective members, excluding every idea of Taxation, internal or external, for raising a revenue on the subjects in America, without their consent.

Resolved, N. C. D. 5. That the respective Colonies are entitled to the common law of England, and more especially to the great and inestimable privilege of being tried by their peers of the vicinage, according to the course of that law.

Resolved, 6. That they are entitled to the benefit of such of the English statutes as existed at the time of their Colonization; and which they have, by experience, respectively found to be applicable to their several local and other circumstances.

Resolved, N. C. D. 7. That these, his Majesty’s Colonies, are likewise entitled to all the immunities and privileges granted and confirmed to them by Royal Charters, or secured by their several codes of Provincial Laws.

Resolved, N. C. D. 8. That they have a right peaceably to assemble, consider of their grievances, and Petition the King; and that all prosecutions, prohibitory Proclamations, and commitments for the same, are illegal.

Resolved, N. C. D. 9. That the keeping a Standing Army in these Colonies, in times of peace, without the consent of the Legislature of that Colony, in which such Army is kept, is against law.

Resolved, N. C. D. 10. It is indispensably necessary to good Government, and rendered essential by the English Constitution, that the constituent branches of the Legislature be independent of each other; that, therefore, the exercise of Legislative power in several Colonies, by a Council appointed, during pleasure, by the Crown, is unconstitutional, dangerous, and destructive to the freedom of American Legislation.

All and each of which the aforesaid Deputies, in behalf of themselves and their constituents, do claim, demand, and insist on, as their indubitable rights and liberties; which cannot be legally taken from them, altered or abridged by any power whatever, without their own consent, by their Representatives in their several Provincial Legislatures.

Joseph Galloway later told Parliament that because voting was done by colony, those unanimous “N.C.D.” votes didn’t mean every delegate at the Congress agreed—only that the majority of every delegation agreed.

The Extracts book was widely reprinted in North America and Britain. But when the Second Continental Congress voted for independence, these resolves based on a colonial relationship to Great Britain were no longer operative and the states started from scratch.

Nonetheless, they are an interesting snapshot of what American Patriots of late 1774 saw as fundamental rights: elected legislatures controlling taxation, rule of law, trial by jury, right of assembly, and no standing armies sent into their communities without their consent.

New Research on the Vassall Mansion in Cambridge

The Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site is unveiling a special history study researched over many years and in multiple countries. It adds tremendous detail to a dimension of that Cambridge mansion that people have long known about more generally.

That mansion in Cambridge was built in 1759 for John Vassall, heir to wealthy slave-labor plantations on Jamaica. It was not only erected with the profits of slavery, but it was staffed by enslaved workers for two decades.

While John Vassall took his family to England in the first year of the Revolutionary War, at least one family he had enslaved, led by Tony and Cuba Vassall, stayed behind to gain their freedom and found an African-American community nearby.

Black History at the Vassall Estate by Caitlin DeAngelis, Carla D. Martin, Rayshauna C. Gray, Aabid Allibhai, and Eshe Sherley digs into that story from every possible angle, using archives in the U.S. of A., Jamaica, Antigua, and Britain. The story it tells extends from the origins of the (white) Vassall family fortune through the political activity of the (black) Vassall family in the ante-bellum republic.

Two events in the next month will illuminate those findings for the public.

Thursday, 25 September, 6 to 7 P.M.
Black History at the Vassall Estate
Caitlin DeAngelis, Carla Martin, Rayshauna Gray, Aabid Allibhai, and Eshe Sherley
Online, free with registration

A new landmark study documents and analyzes the Black experience at 105 Brattle Street and in the wider Cambridge community from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. The authors will introduce the project, share key findings, and take you behind the scenes of their research and writing process.

This study is remarkable not only for the history it documents—much of it appearing in print for the first time—but also for the breadth of research behind it. In partnership with lineal descendants of the Black Vassalls, the authors consulted sources spanning New England, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean over the course of more than three years. Research of this scale is rare, and even more rarely presented in a format accessible to all readers.

Everyone who registers for that event will receive a digital copy of the study, which is also available for downloading here.

Sunday, 12 October, 1 to 3 P.M.
In Search of Darby Vassall: Tour of Cambridge & Beyond
Denise Washington and Joel Mackall
Free with registration

Starting at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters, travel by trolley in greater Cambridge between seven stops with a Vassall descendant and an educator. Each stop reflects a key location in the life of Darby Vassall (1769-1861), a lifelong community activist who endured slavery and seized freedom with his family in Revolutionary Cambridge. Early dinner provided after the tour.

The Friendly Face of the Massachusetts Historical Society

Sometime in the late 1990s, more than a quarter century ago, I paid my first visit to the Massachusetts Historical Society.

I was getting interested in the story of Christopher Seider, using resources from my local library network. But I’d heard about this much richer repository of papers, books, newspapers, and other sources in the Back Bay.

I was in Boston for an A.I.D.S. fundraising walk with colleagues from a job I’d just left, if I remember right. That action deposited us at the bottom of Newbury, so on a whim I walked over to check out this M.H.S. thing.

[Remember having to raise funds to find a treatment for A.I.D.S.? A diagnosis that was once a death sentence became a manageable chronic condition. As of early this year, medical scientists were even seeing the possibility of a vaccine against H.I.V. in the near future. In May, the Trump administration shut down federal funding for that research. But I digress.]

I was in a T-shirt and shorts, footsore and a bit sweaty—not ready for research and somewhat abashed as I was buzzed into this brownstone institution. But the man at the front desk gave me a friendly welcome and explained the M.H.S.’s resources and policies. Only later did I learn that man was Peter Drummey, the society’s Stephen T. Riley Librarian.

I came back a couple of weeks later to look at the plague diary of young Peter Thacher, among other things. Since then I’ve attended and given papers at M.H.S. seminars, used David Mason’s papers there to identify Boston’s missing cannon, used other library resources to write my book, been elected a member and then converted to a fellow, studied a powder horn etched with a name I later realized was one of my ancestors, served on the publications committee, spoken at teacher workshops, worked with Peter and colleagues on a history comic and on an exhibit about a cartoonist, and more.

This month brought the news that Peter Drummey will retire in November after forty-seven years working at the M.H.S.

The society’s press release says:

A native of Duxbury, Mass., Drummey attended college and graduate school at Columbia University in New York City. After graduating from the program to train rare book librarians and archivists in the School of Library Service at Columbia, he returned to Massachusetts, where he was the curator of manuscripts at the New England Historic Genealogical Society before joining the staff of the MHS in 1978. Prior to becoming the Chief Historian, Peter had served as the Society’s Stephen T. Riley Librarian since 1987. . . .

His tenure has been marked by his deep knowledge of the Society’s collections and a commitment to making history accessible to a wide audience. He has supported thousands of researchers, curated landmark exhibitions, and served as a trusted expert for journalists.

And been a most welcoming, encouraging, and cheerful presence for this researcher and others.

The new Peter Drummey Chief Historian at the M.H.S. will be Dr. Kanisorn “Kid” Wongsrichanalai, currently the director of research. He too is cheery and amiable, and will no doubt be helpful to more generations of scholars. But he will still have big shoes to fill. 

“Officials plan to substantially alter an exhibit that memorializes nine people enslaved”

Back in July, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on how pressure from the Trump White House was affecting signage at Independent National Historical Park.

Its article said:

More than a dozen displays at Independence National Historical Park that share historical information about slavery during the founding of United States have been flagged for a content review in connection with an executive order from President Donald Trump. . . .

The President’s House Site, where Presidents George Washington and John Adams once lived, came under particular scrutiny with six exhibits flagged for review. The exhibit focuses on the contradictory coexistence of liberty and slavery during the founding of America and memorializes the people Washington enslaved.

White House staff had written an executive order for Donald Trump to sign with his distinctive signature that singled out the Independence park for training interpretive rangers to be sensitive to racial issues.

This Wednesday was the administration’s initial deadline for removing content it might deem “inappropriate.” Early in the week more articles appeared. The New York Times reported: “At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, officials plan to substantially alter an exhibit that memorializes nine people enslaved by George Washington.”

A day before, the Washington Post said:

That park includes the President’s House Site, where George Washington served as president before the capital moved to Washington, D.C. The house was demolished in the 1800s, but an exhibit opened there in 2010 based on archaeological excavations.

Local advocates had pushed for the exhibit to provide in-depth information on the lives of nine people who were enslaved by George Washington while he lived in the house as president. The exhibit includes their names carved into a granite wall.

“This is not just a handful of signs that tell the story of slavery,” said Ed Stierli, senior Mid-Atlantic regional director at the advocacy group National Parks Conservation Association. “This is a place that tells the complete story not just of slavery in America, but what it was like for those who were enslaved by George Washington.”

Trying to extricate slavery from the President’s House exhibit would fundamentally change the nature of the site, said Cindy MacLeod, who was superintendent of Independence National Historical Park for 15 years until 2023.

“This is just one of many exhibits at Independence National Historical Park,” MacLeod said. “And to me, it’s a vital one.”

Alerting the news media to this pressure from above is the first step to resisting it. Philadelphians quickly protested the prospect of erasing information about slavery in the park, the Inquirer reported on Tuesday.

Independence National Historical Park commemorates how Americans sought their liberties and political rights in the late 1700s. The lives and struggles of Americans born into literal slavery, some of whom managed to secure their freedom on that very site, fit right into that theme. The stories of Oney Judge, Hercules Posey, and others can be enlightening, even inspiring, for people who recognize them as fellow humans. But champions of trumpery would prefer to suppress that history.

250 Logos

Over at Emerging Revolutionary War, Bert Dunkerly looked at the national and state logos of the Sestercentennial commissions and campaigns.

I like the Bicentennial logo so much I own a T-shirt with that picture on it, cleverly made to look like it’s an antique silkscreen that’s gone through the laundry five hundred times. But of course that logo came out in my childhood, so it has extra nostalgia appeal.

Dunkerly also likes that 1970s logo much more than America 250’s national Semiquincentennial logo, but otherwise his taste is old-fashioned. His tastes leans toward round, seal-like images and serif fonts.

In the comments, Dunkerly admits that one thing makes the Semiquincentennial logo look better: reviewing the state logos.

Many states aren’t represented in this roundup, and I’ve seen a lot of municipal logos as well. Will any have the staying power of the Bicentennial star? We should probably consult with an eleven-year-old about that.

(Meanwhile, the America 250 Facebook feed is being politically partisan and literally divisive.)

Commemorating the 1775 Expedition to Québec in Newburyport

This weekend the town of Newburyport will commemorate the 250th anniversary of when Col. Benedict Arnold and his Continental volunteers passed through the town on their way to Québec.

There are multiple events on the schedule. It looks like the Custom House Maritime Museum at 25 Water Street is the main base, open 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. all three days, but the Museum of Old Newbury and several churches are involved.

Friday, 19 September, 12 noon
Newburyport’s Bells Ring Out!

Three of the town’s oldest churches will ring their bells to herald the coming of the Continental troops.

Friday, 19 September, 7 to 8:30 P.M.
Through a Howling Wilderness: 1775 March to Quebec
Tom Desjardin
St. Paul’s Church, Newburyport

In September 1775, Arnold commanded eleven hundred Colonial soldiers on a daring, top-secret mission: to march and paddle nearly 200 miles through the untamed wilderness of Maine and Quebec to seize British-held Quebec City. It was a journey marked by hypothermia, disease, starvation, hurricanes, and blizzards. Dozens perished; survivors endured eating everything from dogs to lip salve before reaching their target. Though the attack ultimately failed, Arnold’s expedition helped pave the way for America’s eventual victory. Through a Howling Wilderness tells this gripping story of endurance, sacrifice, and leadership before Arnold’s name became synonymous with treason.

Tom Desjardin holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History and is the author of multiple acclaimed books. A former archivist and historian at Gettysburg National Military Park, he has taught at Bowdoin College, advised film and television productions (including Gettysburg and Gods and Generals), and appeared on the History Channel, A&E, Discovery, PBS, and CSPAN. He is a former Commissioner of Education for Maine and director of the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands.

Saturday, 20 September, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.
Revolutionary Living History Experience: Bringing 1775 to Life
Downtown Newburyport

A special one-day living history event featuring reenactors, tactical demonstrations, and engaging historical interpretation, this immersive celebration brings 1775 to life and honors the city’s pivotal role in America’s fight for independence. The day’s schedule will begin with Col. Arnold reviewing his troops. He will address them about their orders at around 3:30 P.M.

Saturday, 20 September, 10:30 A.M.
A Moment of Resolve: Reenactment of the Dedication Service
First Parish Church, 20 High Road

Commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Quebec Expedition with a powerful reenactment of the 1775 dedication service for departing troops. Reverend Samuel Spring, portrayed by Edward Speck, delivers the historic sermon that inspired courage and faith, honoring the spiritual strength that sustained Newburyport’s patriots on their journey to liberty.

Saturday, 20 September, 11 A.M. to 4 P.M.
Revolutionary Newburyport
Museum of Old Newbury, 98 High Street

Tours starting every hour highlight objects linked with the American Revolution not usually on display. Buy tickets and reserve spaces through this page.

Saturday, 20 September, 1:00 P.M.
DAR America 250 Patriots Marker Dedication
Old South Presbyterian Church, 29 Federal Street

The Brigadier General James Brickett–Old Newbury Chapter, N.S.D.A.R., will dedicate an America 250 Patriots Marker in Newburyport. This ceremony honors Revolutionary War patriots with reflections from civic leaders and descendants, preserving their legacy for generations to come.

Saturday, 20 September, 1:30 P.M.
Walk to the River: A Tribute to Newburyport’s Revolutionary Departure
Federal Street to Water Street

Following the dedication of the America 250 Patriots Marker, attendees are invited to join a commemorative walk through downtown Newburyport to the riverfront. The walk will conclude near the original embarkation site with brief remarks honoring the 1775 departure of local patriots on their daring expedition to Quebec.

Saturday, 20 September, 2 to 4 P.M.
Discover Your Family’s Story: Genealogy Drop-in Clinic
Museum of Old Newbury, 98 High Street

Discover your roots and deepen your community connection at this engaging genealogy workshop. Participants will learn how to trace family history, uncover ancestral ties to early settlers and patriots, and explore Newburyport’s revolutionary and colonial past. Trained genealogists will be available to assist with family history research.

Sunday, 21 September, 10:00 A.M.
Burying Ground Tour: Old Hill and Newburyport’s Road to Revolution
Old Hill Burying Ground, 25 Greenleaf Street

Join Newburyport historian Ghlee Woodworth on a captivating cemetery tour honoring Revolutionary War patriots. Explore gravestones, hear stories of bravery and sacrifice, and discover how these local heroes shaped America’s fight for independence. A fascinating journey connecting past to present through tales of courage, resilience, and Newburyport’s rich revolutionary heritage.

Sunday, 21 September, 11 A.M. to 4 P.M.
Revolutionary Newburyport
Museum of Old Newbury, 98 High Street

Tours starting every hour highlight objects linked with the American Revolution not usually on display. Buy tickets and reserve spaces through this page.

Sunday, 21 September, 1 P.M.
Faith and Freedom: Old South Presbyterian Church and the Revolution
Old South Presbyterian Church, 29 Federal Street

Explore Old South Presbyterian Church and uncover its rich Revolutionary War history on this guided tour. Learn about its role in 1775 as a gathering place for patriots, hear stories of prominent figures connected to the church, and discover how faith and freedom intertwined in Newburyport’s fight for independence.

Sunday, 21 September, 3 P.M.
The 1775 Quebec Expedition from Newburyport: Following Their Footsteps
Central Congregation Church, 14 Titcomb Street

On September 19, 1775, over 1,100 men departed Newburyport on a secret mission to capture Quebec—led by Benedict Arnold and planned with George Washington. Join Jack Santos as he recounts the stories of Newburyport’s patriots on this daring expedition through the wilderness as we celebrate its 250th anniversary.

Revolutionary Talks This Week in Dedham and Westford

Here are a couple more Revolutionary lectures coming up this week.

Wednesday, 17 September, 7:00 P.M.
Bullet Strikes from the First Day of the American Revolution
Joel Bohy
Dedham Museum, 612 High Street

In 2013, Joel Bohy began a collaboration with conflict archaeologist Dr. Douglas Scott to better understand the ammunition found during archaeological investigations on former battlegrounds. This morphed into live-fire research and the study of the extant battle-damaged structures and objects from April 19, 1775.

From the Elisha Jones house in Concord, through Lexington and the Jason Russell house in Arlington, Massachusetts—where Dedham soldiers fought—the two carefully studied all the surviving bullet strikes and bullet-struck objects. Using modern forensic techniques adapted to historical studies and live-fire validation, Bohy and Scott tell the story of the brutality of the fighting on the first day of the American Revolution as British forces retreated to Boston.

Joel Bohy is the owner of J.Bohy Historical Consulting. He is an arms & militaria specialist at Blackstone Valley Auctions and an appraiser on the PBS TV series Antiques Roadshow.

Admission is $10, free to museum members. This event will be recorded by C-SPAN for its America 250 series and by DedhamTV.

Thursday, 18 September, 7:00 P.M.
The Plight of the Loyalist in Massachusetts
Larry Kerpelman
Westford Museum, 2 Boston Road

It’s been said that history is written by the victors, so it’s not surprising that the story of Loyalists to the Crown who lived in the American colonies is not as widely known as that of the Revolutionary War’s victors, the Patriots. As the drumbeat to independence grew louder, Loyalists faced their Patriot neighbors’ scorn and the agonizing decision of whether or not to flee their towns and homes. Various historians have estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 people fled the colonies by the time “America’s first civil war” ended. Dr. Kerpelman will present a picture of how ordinary Massachusetts Loyalists and their Patriot neighbors interacted with one another during the fraught period between the 1750s and the 1790s.

Larry C. Kerpelman, Ph.D., is a freelance writer and communications professional from Acton, Massachusetts. Upon retiring as Vice president and Director of Corporate Communications after 30 years with the Cambridge public policy research and consulting firm Abt Global, he turned to researching, writing, and speaking on singular moments in American history. His work has appeared in American History, American Heritage, The Boston Globe, The Rochester Review, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. He holds a B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.

Suggested Donation for this lecture of $10 per person.

“Lost and Legendary Riders” in Boston on 16 Sept.

On Tuesday, 16 September, I’ll deliver a talk for the Paul Revere Memorial Association on “Lost and Legendary Riders” from the 19th of April in ’75.

The event description says:

Beyond Paul Revere and his companions, Americans have passed along stories of other notable riders on April 19, 1775. Historian J. L. Bell investigates the facts and fiction behind such figures as Hezekiah Wyman, the dreaded “White Horseman;” Abel Benson and Abigail Smith, children said to have helped raise the alarm in Middlesex County; and Israel Bissell, the post rider credited with carrying news of the fight all the way to Philadelphia.

I’ve spoken on this topic before, but I’ve collected new information on some of those figures—and on some of the real people around them.

This event is free and open to the public. It will start at 6:30 P.M. in Smith Commons on the 5th floor of Sargent Hall, Suffolk University, 120 Tremont Street in Boston.

That’s a short walk from the King’s Chapel Burying Ground, where every years thousands of visitors pay respects to the very real rider William Dawes, who was never actually buried there and thus might also qualify as “lost.” Dawes was first buried in what’s now called the Central Burying-Ground on the Common and then moved to Forest Hills in Jamaica Plain in 1882. The William Dawes grave near King’s Chapel was his father’s.

Here are the upcoming lectures in the same series at Suffolk University.

Tuesday, 30 September, 6:30 P.M.
William Dawes’s Midnight Ride
William Dawes Schulz, journalist

Tuesday, 21 October, 6:30 P.M.
Who Cares About the Midnight Ride?: Perspectives on an American Legend
Moderated by Dr. Noelle Trent, Museum of African American History, Boston
Ahsante Bean, Creator and Storytelling Strategist
Dr. Eileen Ka-May Cheng, History Faculty, Sarah Lawrence College
Kerry Dunne, History & Social Studies department head, Lexington High School

Tuesday, 28 October, 6:30 P.M.
Who Was Paul Revere, Really?
Dr. Robert Martello, Professor of the History of Science & Technology, Olin College of Engineering
Dr. Jayne Triber, Independent Scholar
Nina Zannieri, Executive Director, Paul Revere Memorial Association

Other organizations sponsoring this series are GBH, the Suffolk University History Department, Old North Illuminated, Lexington History Museums, Evanston History Center at the Charles Gates Dawes House (Evanston, IL), and Made by Us, with funding from the Lowell Institute.

Rev. Samuel Madden, the Lover of His Country

Samuel Madden was born in Dublin in 1686. His father was a physician, and his mother was part of the prominent Molyneux family.

Even before completing his studies at Trinity College Dublin in 1705, Madden inherited a considerable estate from his father. Therefore, while he became the Church of Ireland minister for the parishes of Galloon and Drummully, he never had to rely on those salaries.

(Some sources say Madden was chaplain or tutor to Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, but I don’t see when that would have been.)

Madden married Jane Magill (also written as Jean McGill) in 1709, and the couple had ten children over the next twenty-five years.

According to the Rev. Philip Skelton, who lived with the family as a curate and tutor early in his career, Mrs. Madden was “haughty” about her family background, indulgent to her children, and so strict in managing the family finances that she “took care to keep [her husband’s] pocket empty of money” so he couldn’t give it away.

The Rev. Mr. Madden was known for his charity. He made donations, collected money for causes, and helped to set up the Dublin Society. Through that organization and Trinity College he offered prizes or “premiums” for various discoveries and feats to benefit the nation, and was thus remembered as “Premium” Madden.

Madden’s other talent was for writing. In 1729 his play Themistocles, the Lover of His Country was performed in London to good reviews. Nine years later, his Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland, as to their Conduct for the Service of their Country, as Landlords, as Masters of Families, as Protestants, as Descended from British Ancestors, as Country Gentlemen and Farmers, as Justices of the Peace, as Merchants, as Members of Parliament described Irish society and the responsibilities of its ruling class. Madden corresponded with Dr. Samuel Johnson and other British literary lights.

In 1733, between those two major works, Madden anonymously wrote and published Memoirs of the Twentieth Century: Being Original Letters of State under George the Sixth, volume 1. In the vein of Gulliver’s Travels, published seven years before by the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift, this book critiqued contemporary society through a fictional narrative set at a distance. But instead of going to outlandish places, Madden invited readers into the far future—1997!

Madden’s first narrator, in the preface, is an opportunistic politician who’s lost his seat in Parliament and is sliding toward becoming a Jacobite. He describes how in 1728 his “good Genius” appeared to him during an illness. This spirit showed him “several large Volumes” of letters written to his descendant, the Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain at the end of the twentieth century.

By that time, these dispatches from British diplomats report, Jesuits ruled much of the world. Their pope held vast lands in Africa, Paraguay, and China; dominated the weak governments of Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire; and was making inroads among the Russians and Tatars. But Britain was standing firm and united under the House of Hanover. The narrator therefore returns to his patriotic support of the British system, and his Protestant determination to oppose Jesuits.

Memoirs of the Twentieth Century was a milestone in speculative fiction, the first fictional narrative built around time travel. In daring to imagine a future, it denied the possibility of imminent end times. The book may not qualify as science fiction, however, since Madden didn’t imagine technology any different from what he knew in 1733. And it had very little literary influence since hardly anybody got to read it.

According to a footnote in John Nichols’s Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer: Printer (1782):

A thousand copies were printed, with such very great dispatch, that three printers were employed on it (Bowyer, Woodfall, and Roberts); and the names of an uncommon number of reputable booksellers appeared in the title-page. In less than a fortnight, however, 890 of these copies were delivered to Dr. Madden, and probably destroyed. The current report is, that the edition was suppressed on the day of publication.

The promised five additional volumes never appeared.

Madden had apparently trodden on some sensitive toes, but it’s not clear whose. The picture of parliamentary politicking isn’t flattering, and some sources guess that Sir Robert Walpole suppressed the book. There’s a long dedication to the Prince of Wales, who would be estranged from his father, George II—but that young prince wasn’t yet the anchor of formal opposition. Modern scholars suggest that Madden had the bad luck to publish just when Britain had to deal with the War of the Polish Succession, and continental turmoil made any hint of sympathy for the Stuarts problematic.

Few copies of Memoirs of the Twentieth Century survived. This one is at Oxford University. Charles James Fox owned another. But word of the book must have gotten around because by the end of the 1700s it was famous for being rare.

In the fall of 1757, the Rev. Mr. Madden sent a letter to the Royal Society praising Benjamin Franklin’s Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America. He wrote:

I am rejoiced at Mr. Franklin’s coming over with so good a Plan which to the shame of Governments has been overlooked such a number of years. If our Colonies be not properly modelled and protected nothing but Ruin and disgrace can follow.

That proved to be a better prophecy than Memoirs of the Twentieth Century.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Madden died in 1765. A few years after that, his grandson Thomas Hawkshaw joined the British army, only to be wounded on the first day of the American war.

The Short Life of Thomas Hawkshaw

When I was writing about Lt. Thomas Hawkshaw earlier this month, I kept wishing I had more individual information about him, and I kept being styimed.

There were multiple Thomas Hawkshaws in the British military in the late eighteenth century. Modern genealogical websites offer information, but it’s contradictory and conflated.

This week I lucked out in finding a reliable source: the monument Hawkshaw’s widow paid to install inside St. Fechins Church in Termonfeckin, County Louth, Ireland. It reads:

To the memory of Thomas Hawkshaw, late of the 5th regt of foot who died 22d Jan 1793 aged 42 years.

Also to the memory of his son John William, Lieut in the 90th regt. Born 11th Octr 1785, and died 14th Novr 1812. And of his son Thomas, who was born 9th Decr 1788 and died in 1802. And of his son Wallop Brabazon Hawkshaw, late Lieut of the Vigo man of war, who was born 30th June 1790, and died 30th Septr 1813.

Captain Thomas was son to the Revd. John Hawkshaw of the Co. of Monaghan. His widow Vincentia, daughter of Wallop Brabazon Esqr, has erected this monument to the memory of her husband and all her offspring.

Also to the memory of Vincentia, Widow of the above Captain Hawkshaw. She died 1st Feby 1825, aged 78.

That source in turn helped me to find more, so I can fill out the life of Thomas Hawkshaw.

After growing up in Dublin, John Hawkshaw graduated from Trinity College in 1734 and took an M.A. three years later. Taking holy orders in the Church of Ireland, he was vicar at Clontibret, then rector at Monaghan starting in 1740. Three years later, he married Elizabeth Madden, a daughter of the Rev. Samuel Madden, D.D.; she was seven years his senior. The couple started having children. Thomas was born in 1751 and named after a paternal uncle.

From 1759 to 1762, the Rev. John Hawkshaw was the rector at Dromore, County Tyrone. He then accepted a calling at Tydavnet, back in County Monaghan, and remained the rector there for the rest of his life.

Some of the Hawkshaw brothers followed their father into the clerical profession while others, including Thomas, joined the British military. He was still in his early twenties when he was so gravely wounded on 19 Apr 1775. During the war he rose to the rank of captain.

According to Evelyn Hawkshaw Rogers’s Descendants of John Hawkshaw of Louisburgh, County Mayo, Ireland, Capt. Hawkshaw retired from his company in Belfast in 1786. He married Vincentia Brabazon, and they started their own family, including sons John William, Thomas, and Wallop Brabazon (named after his maternal grandfather).

Thomas Hawkshaw’s mother died in 1787. The death of one of Thomas’s younger brothers is recorded by an inscription in Chester Cathedral:

Adjacent lie the remains of
George Hawkshaw Esqr
a native of Ireland and
Sixteen years a Lieutenant in
His Majesty’s Marine Forces

Returning after a long voyage
to an aged Father
and expecting friends
He was arrested here
by the hand of God
the ninth day of May
MDCCXCII [1792]
in the xxxivth year of his age.

Hugh Hawkshaw and Robert McCleverty two of his numerous friends sensible of his worth and many Virtues Pay this humble but most affectionate tribute.

The Rev. John Hawkshaw died later that same year.

Capt. Thomas Hawkshaw passed away in early 1793, only forty-two years old, having lived more than sixteen years after being shot in the throat. As the top inscription shows, one of his sons joined the army, another the navy, and both those men died in their twenties. Capt. Hawkshaw’s widow Vincentia lived on until 1825.

One more detail: Capt. Hawkshaw’s grandfather invented time-travel literature.

TOMORROW: Back to the future.