“Mr. Craft producd the Ball in Court”

Yesterday I showed a list of the men appointed as coroners in Suffolk County from 1747 to 1774. And that list made me nervous.

For nearly two decades now I’ve been writing that Thomas Crafts, Jr., member of the Loyall Nine and reader of the Declaration of Independence on 18 July 1776, was a coroner at the time of the Boston Massacre.

In my mind, that position showed how he was rising in society from the middling mechanical class into gentility, and how he was involved in all the political events of his time.

I think I saw that statement first in The Legal Papers of John Adams. Volume III quotes thus from John Adams’s notes on the soldiers’ trial for the Massacre: “Mr. Craft producd the Ball in Court.” A footnote adds: “The reference is probably to Thomas Crafts, the Suffolk County Coroner, and is presumably JA’s note, not the witness’ testimony.”

Hiller B. Zobel, one of the editors of those Adams papers, shortly afterward wrote in The Boston Massacre about the morning of 6 Mar 1770: “County Coroners Robert Pierpoint and Thomas Crafts were arranging for inquests on Johnson and the other victims.”

Note, however, that the only primary source I had on hand referred to “Mr. Craft” with no given name.

Now look back at the list of coroners yesterday, from The Massachusetts Civil List for the Colonial and Provincial Periods, 1630-1774. The name “Thomas Crafts” doesn’t appear anywhere.

There was a “Thomas Crofts” appointed or reappointed on 5 Nov 1761, and that could be an easy error for “Thomas Crafts.” But it could just as easily be an easy error for “Thomas Cross,” first named on 18 Apr 1749.

Furthermore, William Crafts was made a coroner on 11 Apr 1768. Based just on that list, the coroner called “Mr. Craft” in Adams’s notes would be William, not Thomas. Indeed, that list offers no confirmation Thomas Crafts, Jr., was ever appointed a coroner at all.

Newspapers also reported the governors’ appointments of new coroners in formulaic lines, as in the 18 June 1772 Boston News-Letter:

At a General Council held on Thursday the 4th of June Instant [i.e., of this month], at Boston, His Excellency the Governor was pleased to nominate,…

Thomas Allen, Esq; to be a Justice of the Peace for the County of Suffolk.

Mr. Isaac Greenwood, to be a Coroner for said County…

To which Nominations His Majesty’s Council did advise and consent.

(All the new justices of the peace were labeled “Esq.” while the coroners were ordinarily “Mr.,” showing the gap in prestige between the two offices.)

I couldn’t find such a newspaper item for Thomas Crafts, Jr., however. (Nor for the other Crafts/Crofts/Cross coroners discussed above.)

Thus, at the beginning of this month I was contemplating the possibility that Thomas Crafts, Jr., wasn’t a coroner in 1770 after all. I needed to see some original documents.

TOMORROW: To the archives!