The Coroners of Suffolk County, 1747–1774

Early this month I started to discuss the office of coroner in pre-Revolutionary Boston. Then came Pope Night, followed by postings about the espionage of Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr. Now I’m going back to pick up the coroners’ thread.

Coroners were royal appointees: chosen by the governor, who was chosen by the ministry in London, who was chosen with the approval and authority of the king.

As such, their commissions lapsed six months after the death of the king in whose name they were appointed. The new monarch could remove them before that date or authorize new appointments.

The same rule applied to many other legal documents issued in the king’s name, such as the writs of assistance that granted Customs officials the power to search buildings for smuggled goods.

The death of King George II on 25 October 1760 started that clock ticking. In January 1761 sixty-three Boston merchants with James Otis, Jr., as their attorney sued to challenge the validity of new writs of assistance under Massachusetts law. Customs official Charles Paxton responded with his own filing, and the case was argued before Massachusetts judges in February and November 1761.

The merchants lost. But John Adams’s memory of the case (and his wish to put Massachusetts ahead of Virginia in challenging Crown policies) made the Writs of Assistance Case a milestone on the way to independence and eventually the Fourth Amendment.

When it came to the coroners, there was much less trouble. With the advice and consent of the Council, Gov. Francis Bernard simply issued new appointments in the name of King George III for what appear to have been all the existing coroners, and perhaps some new ones, on 5 Nov 1761.

In 1870, William H. Whitmore went through government records, compiled a list of every man elected or appointed to Massachusetts offices before independence, and published The Massachusetts Civil List for the Colonial and Provincial Periods, 1630-1774. You can read it here, though it’s not that sort of book.

Here are scraps of The Massachusetts Civil List’s section on Suffolk County coroners. Recall that Suffolk County then included all of today’s Norfolk County, so this list includes men who examined unexpected deaths in rural towns well outside Boston.

That list doesn’t say when a coroner left office, usually by becoming a potential subject for a coroner’s inquiry. But it should include the names of the Boston coroners in 1770, the year of the Massacre, and 1774, the year of William Molineux’s death.

That’s why I started to worry I’d tripped into a Boston 1775 emergency.

TOMORROW: A chill of doubt.