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.