Fire in the Schoolhouse

On 24 Feb 1780, Boston’s Continental Journal reported:

Early on Tuesday morning last [i.e., 22 February], a fire broke out in the South Writing-School, (near the Laboratory) in this town, which entirely consumed the same; but by the usual activity of the inhabitants, it was happily prevented from doing further mischief.—

’Tis not yet discovered how the fire happened.

Four days later the Boston Gazette added:

Wednesday last a Person was prosecuted for disobeying the Orders of the Firewards in this Town, at the Fire of the South School the Morning preceeding, and fined £.47 for the same.—

[This Information being given, and the second Instance of the Kind, ’tis doubted whether there will be any Need of cautioning Persons in future, against disobeying the Firewards, at the Time of Fire ]

No information on who disobeyed and how.

The selectmen had other business to handle after a fire. They rewarded Richard Hunnewell’s engine company for being the first to arrive on the scene. On 1 March they announced that “those Persons who have taken Stuff from the late Fire [and] refuse to deliver up what they have taken” had one more week to return those goods before being summoned to Faneuil Hall.

In addition, on 23 February the selectmen asked Master Samuel Holbrook how this fire had broken out in his schoolhouse. He couldn’t explain, saying:

that there had been but little Fire [in the stove] that afternoon, and that he left the School the last of any one, and his Son had looked thro. the Windows about 9. OClock, having smelt fire.

I sense that the selectmen found that inadequate. It had been Master Holbrook’s responsibility to check that the schoolhouse stove was left in safe condition at the end of Monday’s lessons.

On 1 March the selectmen recorded: “Mr. Holbrook Master of the South Writing School has sent a Letter of resignation as Master on account of his health.” He was then fifty-one years old.

So now in the middle of the school year the selectmen had to find a new schoolhouse and a new schoolmaster.

TOMORROW: The search.

(John Fenno, Jr.’s 1787 advertisement for leather fire buckets above comes courtesy of Skinner. The leather-dresser’s nephew, also named John Fenno, knew the South Writing School well: he had trained there under Abiah Holbrook and then worked as Samuel Holbrook’s usher in 1773–74.)

The Laboratory beside Boston Common

As described in The Road to Concord, Boston’s South Writing School shared a fenced-in yard with the militia train’s newer gunhouse.

In September 1774, the two small brass cannon stored in that gunhouse disappeared, even as British regulars stood guard at its door.

Frustrated Royal Artillery men hauled away the rest of the train’s equipment. Then came the outbreak of war, the siege, the evacuation. And Boston had it gunhouse back.

Except it didn’t have the train’s guns anymore. The town meeting sent a committee of Thomas Crafts, Paul Revere, and Thomas Marshall to ask Gen. George Washington for those brass cannon, but they were already on their way to the New York theater.

The state military establishment scrounged up more cannon, mostly old iron guns abandoned by the British military. But those weapons were in demand, needed to arm ships and guard the harbors. Leaving them in a building beside the Common didn’t make sense.

What do you do with a gunhouse that has no guns to house? We can see the answer in a report in the 15 Aug 1776 New England Chronicle about how the town celebrated the eleventh anniversary of the first Stamp Act protest: “a Detachment of the Train of Artillery, with two Field Pieces, marched from the Laboratory into King-Street.” 

The gunhouse was turned into a “Laboratory” or workshop for making weapons, especially artillery equipment. On 3 December the Massachusetts House formally discussed how “to have a laboratory established,” but even before its committee finished its work the 27 Jan 1777 Boston Gazette was telling readers to find Col. Thomas Crafts “at the Laboratory” if they wanted to store their gunpowder.

Crafts had been second-in-command of the train before the war. He’d tried for the rank of artillery colonel in the Continental Army in late 1775 but was rebuffed. Massachusetts then made him colonel of its own artillery regiment, and that job included overseeing the Castle and “the Laboratory on the Common.”

The man running that workshop was William Burbeck (1715–1785, represented above by his gravestone on Copp’s Hill). He had been storekeeper of ordnance at Castle William until the war broke out, then slipped away to become lieutenant-colonel and second-in-command of the Continental artillery regiment under Col. Richard Gridley.

At the end of the siege of Boston, Burbeck informed Gen. Washington that his commission came from Massachusetts, not the Continental Congress. He would therefore stay in Massachusetts, not heading down to New York (or serving further under Col. Henry Knox, thirty-five years his junior).

Burbeck immediately went to work improving Massachusetts’s military supplies. By 18 Apr 1776, the Massachusetts General Court discussed how to supply him “with Powder, wherewith, to prove the Cannon lately Cast for the Use of the Colony.” A year later, he was chosen as the Continental agent to inspect gunpowder.

In the spring of 1778 the state legislature approved regulations for the laboratory in Boston, and that October it unanimously chose Burbeck to be “Comptroller of the Laboratory.” 

A year later, the legislature appointed Burbeck captain-lieutenant of the Castle (under John Hancock as captain of the castle, who was soon more busy as governor). Burbeck remained comptroller of the laboratory, but in early 1782 the General Court determined that work had “greatly decreased,” so it adjusted his pay accordingly while still making him responsible for the facility.

These days we might raise questions about having a weapons workshop, possibly used for testing gunpowder, right next to a school. But the people of newly independent Boston didn’t see a problem. What could go wrong?

TOMORROW: Fire!

Back to the Scene of the Crime

A significant portion of The Road to Concord focuses on one spot in Boston: the corner of West Street and Tremont Street. There, across from the Common, stood the South Writing School and the newer gunhouse of the militia train of artillery.

(Now that space is occupied by a Suffolk University dormitory, a Sal’s Pizza, and a Blue Bikes rack.)

In September 1774, as I wrote in the book, the artillery company dissolved amid political recriminations. Soon their four small brass cannon disappeared, two from that corner.

In April 1775, war broke out, in some immediate sense because of those cannon, and all of Boston’s public schools shut down.

The following March, the British military left Boston. Patriot authorities gained control. After tending to the most dire problems, the selectmen looked ahead to a new school year, which would ordinarily begin in July.

In June the selectmen ordered the South Writing School to reopen. However, Master Samuel Holbrook was still out of town. So were a lot of families—Boston’s population was only a fraction of what it had been.

The selectmen therefore said that James Carter, the master of the Queen Street Writing School, would fill in for Master Holbrook. In effect, I think, that was consolidating the two schools for at least a few months until enough pupils returned to justify reopening both schoolhouses.

In October 1777 the town looked into repairing the South Writing School, possibly from damage during the siege. Two months later, Master Holbrook asked for an assistant, to be paid £34 plus £16 “on Accot. of the rise of Provisions”—i.e., the price of food had inflated. 

Ordinarily a schoolmaster had an adult assistant called an “usher,” paid about half of the master’s salary. Holbrook asking for an “assistant” with a smaller salary suggests that he was seeking to hire a teenager, as he had employed Andrew Cunningham in 1774–75. Perhaps he had in mind his own son Abiah, then fourteen years old.

We can see the effects of inflation in how the town meeting voted to pay Holbrook over the next few years:

• March 1778: £100 salary plus £100 “on Account of the present high Price of Provisions &c.” in the next six months.
• November 1778: £140 more to cover the remaining six months of the year.
• March 1779: a town committee recommended £600 for Holbrook himself plus £100 for his usher and £30 house rent. The meeting approved even more: £640 for the master, £300 for the usher.
• November 1779: and another supplemental grant, £1,500 for September through March.

Master Holbrook’s usher arriving in October 1778 was named Abiah Holbrook. The master’s son would still have been too young to command that title and salary. But Holbrook also had a nephew named Abiah Holbrook. A man of that name advertised a school in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from 1775 to 1777. So perhaps that man moved to Boston to work for his uncle, taking the place of his young cousin. Running writing schools was a family business; Master Holbrook had started out working as usher under his own brother—named, of course, Abiah.

Thus, as the 1770s ended, the South Writing School was back in operation under Master Samuel Holbrook, just as it had been at the start of the decade. But it was costing a lot more to operate, at least in inflated wartime currency.

TOMORROW: Changes at the gunhouse.

Finding White Thunder

Back in 2013 I quoted Charles Lee’s 18 June 1756 letter to his sister on being “adopted by the Mohocks into the Tribe of the bear under the name of Ounewaterika, which signifies boiling water.”

Through Facebook a commenter just asked me: ”Do you know what Mohawks?”

I thought there might be clues in something else Lee wrote: “My Wife is daughter to the famous White Thunder who is Belt of Wampum to the Senakas which is in fact their Lord Treasurer.”

That eventually led me to this entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography:

KAGHSWAGHTANIUNT (Coswentannea, Gaghswaghtaniunt, Kachshwuchdanionty, Tohaswuchdoniunty, Belt of Wampum, Old Belt, Le Collier Pendu, White Thunder), a Seneca Indian living on the upper Ohio River by 1750; d. c. 1762.

As Cadsedan-hiunt he was identified in 1750 as one of the “Chiefs of the Seneca Nations settled at Ohio”; as Kachshwuchdanionty, he appeared in 1753 as one of “the Chiefs now entrusted with the Conduct of Publick affairs among the Six Nations” on the Ohio; and in 1755 he was described as “Belt of Wampum or White Thunder [who] keeps the wampum.” His English and French designations apparently attempt to translate his Seneca name; compare Zeisberger’s form, gaschwechtonni, of the Onondaga word meaning to make a belt of wampum.

That certainly seems to be “the famous White Thunder who is Belt of Wampum to the Senekas.” So was Lee marrying (or forming a temporary relationship with) a Seneca woman while being adopted into the Mohawk nation? Or did he not care about such distinctions among the Six Nations?

Kaghswaghtaniunt was part of Lt. Col. George Washington’s 1754 expedition west, and then Gen. Edward Braddock’s bigger, more famous, and even less successful march. Lee could have first met him during the planning of the Braddock expedition.

According to the D.C.B., in 1756 Kaghswaghtaniunt and his Mingo community “moved from Pennsylvania to New York under the protection of Sir William Johnson.” In the same month that Lee wrote to his sister, “Johnson sent Kaghswaghtaniunt with a message to the Senecas, and advised him and his family to settle among them.”

If, therefore, Lee was with his new “Wife,” and she was with her father and other members of the family, they were in the vicinity of Fort Johnson, New York. And that would suggest that Lee met Mohawks in that area, possibly other people who had come to work with Sir William Johnson.

If, on the other hand, we can’t rely on Charles Lee’s statements about his wife, her father, or what nations he was interacting with, then it’s an even bigger mystery.

The End of the Jacob Osgood House

In 2012 and again in 2023 I reported on the deterioration of the Jacob Osgood House in Andover.

Parts of that building may have dated to 1699, but its historic significance arose from being where James Otis, Jr., died in 1783.

This month the Andover News website reported that the town had demolished the Osgood house as a safety hazard.

The owner of the building died last year. She had never lived there but used the property to store more than 100 tons of stuff she’d accumulated at other places and couldn’t bear to part with. By 2023 the house was flagged with a sign warning emergency personnel that it was too dangerous to enter.

Andover was able to preserve one artifact from the house: the granite back step where Otis was standing when lightning hit the building, traveled down a beam, and went through his body. It appears here in a photo by Brian C. Mooney.

According to the Andover News, “Before demolition, the stone was removed to a temporary location near the arch at West Parish Garden Cemetery, awaiting relocation to a permanent home in the cemetery.” (Otis’s body was interred in the Old Granary Burying Ground in Boston.)

For more on why James Otis went to Andover while dealing with mental illness, read Lucy Pollock’s article for Revolutionary Spaces. Otis first moved to the town in 1778 to be under the care of Dr. Daniel How, and How’s house still stands in the same neighborhood as the late Osgood house.

The Samuel Maverick Inquest

Three of the people shot in the Boston Massacre died almost immediately: Crispus Attucks, James Caldwell, and Samuel Gray.

The soldiers’ guns also wounded several men and boys, and by the next morning one of those had died: seventeen-year-old Samuel Maverick.

On 6 Mar 1770, Thomas Crafts convened his second coroner’s inquest in two days to consider Maverick’s case. While the jury that had looked into Caldwell’s death included some prominent Bostonians and the victim’s employer, this men on this second jury appear more typical: ordinary citizens from the neighborhood.

The foreman was Benjamin Harrod. The town had two men by that name, father and son. The father owned the building where Henry Knox rented space for his bookstore in 1775. After the war they moved to Haverhill and Newburyport, respectively.

Harrod and his thirteen fellow jurors determined that Maverick had died after a “Musket Bullet entered into his Belly and lodged between his Ribs.” Later Crafts produced that musket ball in court, according to the notes of John Adams.

Samuel Maverick had worked for and lived with Isaac Greenwood, an ivory turner in the North End. The teen-aged apprentice shared a bed with Greenwood’s nine-year-old son John, a notable voice in this week’s American Revolution documentary on P.B.S.

Two years after the Massacre, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson appointed Isaac Greenwood to be another coroner in Suffolk County.

The Jury for the James Caldwell Inquest

As I wrote yesterday, I now lean toward housewright Thomas Crafts, Sr., being one of the Suffolk County coroners who responded to the Boston Massacre rather than his namesake son.

In fact, Thomas Crafts was apparently the first coroner to act. His date on the inquest into the death of James Caldwell is “the Fifth Day of March” in 1770. In other words, his jury convened, examined the evidence, and issued their determination in the immediate hours after the shooting.

Decades later, Benjamin Bussey Thacher interviewed the shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes about how the crowd on King Street had carried away Caldwell’s body:

Caldwell, who was shot in the back, was standing by the side of Hewes at that moment, and the latter caught him in his arms as he fell, and was one of those who bore him up to Mr. [Alexander] Young’s, the Jail-House in Prison Lane. He…was at this time second mate of a vessel commanded by Capt. Morton. This man lived in Cold Lane, and Hewes ran down directly to his house, from Young’s, and told him what had happened. The corpse soon followed him. . . . Morton…looked upon the dreadful object, and shouted like a madman for a gun, to run out “and kill a regular”…

The 12 March Boston Gazette reported that Caldwell was buried out of Faneuil Hall alongside Crispus Attucks as a “stranger,” a detail later histories repeat. But the 19 March issue said: “In the account of the funeral procession in our last, it should have been said, James Caldwell was borne from the House of Capt. Morton in Cold-Lane, instead of Faneuil Hall.”

Way back in 2006, the first year of this blog, I identified that sea captain as Thomas Morton. (Over a decade later came the Boston Massacre Sestercentennial commemoration in the Old South Meeting House. That was a weird event, on the lip of the pandemic shutdown when we were all wondering whether we should gather at all. But the weirdest moment for me was hearing a speaker identify Caldwell as Capt. Thomas Morton’s mate and flashing back to when I’d drilled down to find that name.)

I was therefore struck by seeing Thomas Morton’s signature among the members of the coroner’s jury examining James Caldwell’s body. Clearly he was emotionally involved in that death. Nonetheless, coroner Crafts made him part of the inquest. Maybe that was a way to calm Morton down, letting him respond to the young man’s killing in a productive way.

Other members of this jury were prominent Bostonians. The foreman was town treasurer David Jeffries. His son, Dr. John Jeffries, was a juror, months before he testified as a defense witness for the soldiers. William Dorrington, keeper of the smallpox hospital, was another.

Other members of this coroner’s jury included:

• Samuel Gridley. In his testimony for the Short Narrative report, the apothecary Richard Palmes said he “followed Mr. Gridley with several other persons with the body of Capt. Morton's apprentice, up to the prison house.” Did that “Mr. Gridley” stay around to serve on the inquest jury?
• Nathan Spear, whose younger brother Pool Spear was in the crowd on King Street and offered testimony against the soldiers.
• Samuel Franklin (1721–1775), cutler. On 8 June, his first cousin once removed Benjamin Franklin wrote from London: “I received your kind letter of the 23d of March. I was happy to find that neither you, nor any of your family, were in the way of those murderers.” 

The verdict those fourteen men delivered to coroner Crafts: Caldwell was “murdered by a Musquet Ball shot thro’ his Body, & another Ball lodged in his Shoulder.” At first the men said the culprit was unknown, but then they revised the form to read “the Murderer a Soldier to us unknown.”

Considering Thomas Crafts the Coroner

As recounted yesterday, two documents at the Boston Public Library establish that one of the coroners holding inquiries after the Boston Massacre was Thomas Crafts.

Does that evidence restore that milestone in my mental narrative of Thomas Crafts, Jr.’s rise from a member of the Loyall Nine to artillery colonel and judge in the new republic?

Unfortunately not. Because, as the name implies, Thomas Crafts, Jr., wasn’t the only Thomas Crafts in Boston in 1770.

Thomas Crafts, Sr. (1706–1789), was a housewright of standing. He had moved into Boston from Roxbury and joined the First Baptist Meeting. He and his wife Anne had seven children between 1729 and 1752. Starting in 1745 he held town offices like surveyor of boards, fence viewer, and warden. In 1766 he got the contract to frame the new town jail.

In contrast to his father, Thomas Crafts, Jr. (1740–1799), was a decorative painter. At the time of the Massacre, he was still only twenty-nine years old. He married Frances Pinkney Gore in 1763, and they had two children by 1770. Thomas, Jr., was a member of the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons and an officer in the militia artillery company. He was on his way up. But he wasn’t yet a respected elder.

Back here I noted that The Massachusetts Civil List for the Colonial and Provincial Periods, 1630-1774 didn’t list any Thomas Crafts among the Boston coroners in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. But that book did list Thomas Crofts, who could be our man. (The Crafts family genealogy notes Craft and Crofts as alternate spellings used in the 1600s.)

If Gov. Francis Bernard appointed Thomas Crofts/Crafts as a coroner in 1761, that definitely wasn’t Thomas, Jr., since he was barely legal at the time. But Thomas, Sr., was then fifty-five years old, the sort of weighty neighbor whom people would trust as a coroner.

Did Crafts the coroner fill out the verdict forms himself? If so, then we could compare his handwriting and the signature on the fifth line to other documents by the two Craftses.

Until such additional evidence arises, I’ll make my best guess based on the social evidence and say that Thomas Crafts the coroner of 1770 was the housewright father, in his mid-sixties with experience in several town offices. He was an example to his sons, but Thomas, Jr., hadn’t yet achieved the same political stature.

TOMORROW: Examining the coroners’ examinations.

The Coroners Who Oversaw Inquests after the Boston Massacre

The most famous piece of coroners’ paperwork from the Boston Massacre is a verdict from the inquest into the death of Michael Johnson—or Crispus Attucks, as he was soon to be identified.

That document is in the collection of Revolutionary Spaces and has been on display in the Old State House. It’s been reproduced and transcribed in several places. Here’s an article about its conservation.

The coroner for that proceeding was Robert Pierpont, a Whig who lived at the far southern end of town.

I knew that the Boston Public Library’s Special Collections Department holds several more inquest documents. Mellen Chamberlain collected those papers for the library in the late 1800s, for both their historical value and their autographs.

Last last month, therefore, I made an appointment to look at the Chamberlain Manuscripts. I’ve done research at the B.P.L. for years, but the Special Collections Department upgraded its facilities and tightened its procedures since my last visit, so this required making an appointment and learning some new procedures.

I’m pleased to report that I found the verdicts of two inquests overseen by coroner Thomas Crafts. One examined the body of James Caldwell on 5 Mar 1770, and the second examined Samuel Maverick the next day.

In addition, Chamberlain acquired verdicts from two inquests headed by Thomas Dawes (shown above). He handled the cases of Samuel Gray (6 March) and Patrick Carr (15 March).

The collection also includes testimony for the Gray inquest from Richard Palmes, Robert Goddard, Joseph Petty, and Richard Ward, plus a deposition about aggressive soldiers from John Leach, Jr., that Dawes took in on 6 March. All but one of those witnesses also testified for Boston’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre report or the trials or both. (Frankly, they couldn’t shut Palmes up.)

Thus, we should list Thomas Dawes among the coroners who did the first investigations of the Boston Massacre. In fact, he did more than Pierpont, and more evidence from his inquiries survive.

TOMORROW: So am I satisfied that Thomas Crafts, Jr., was a coroner in 1770?

“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!

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.

Call for Proposals for “Rebellion, Resistance & Refuge” Symposium

Slavery North has issued a call for proposals for a scholarly conference to be held at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on 8-12 July 2026 on the topic “Rebellion, Resistance, and Refuge: Slavery and Border-Crossing during the American Revolution.”

The call says:

Like all conflicts, the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) brought disruption, violence, and uncertainty. However, because it unfolded at a moment when Transatlantic Slavery was yet to be abolished in the regions that were to become Canada and the USA, for the enslaved, the war also brought large-scale upheaval of forced inland and maritime migration which opened opportunities for escape and emancipation. On the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Slavery North invites proposals for papers that rethink the cultures, events, and experiences of the war across the liminal borders (regional and proto-national) of British North America.

While scholars of early America have centered studies on the political motivations and military maneuvers that influenced the rebels, the grassroots impact of sedition, and the interpretation of constitutional debates, most scholarship on the Canadian side of the border has been regionally and thematically biased towards a celebratory focus on White Loyalists in the Maritimes.

Meanwhile, little scholarship – Canadian or American – has been devoted to recuperating and understanding the experiences of the enslaved across regions, origins, identities, climates, geographies, and circumstances. Nor has attention been paid to the turmoil that ensued when White Loyalist enslavers, those they enslaved, and newly freed Black Loyalists were all evacuated into northern (Canadian) territories which had already been shaped by Transatlantic Slavery.

Slavery North invites abstracts for 20-minute papers in Humanities and Fine Arts disciplines that engage new approaches and perspectives, interrogate un(der)studied archives, and tackle original topics and themes on the art, cultural, material, and traditional histories of the Revolutionary War on both sides of the 49th parallel. We especially encourage contributions that recuperate and center the aspirations, resistance, perspectives, and experiences of enslaved people and communities.

Slavery North therefore “invites proposals for 20-minute papers from graduate students, scholars, professors, and cultural and heritage workers.” Those proposals must include:

• Name, title, affiliation/institution, and location (city, province/state, country)
• Paper title
• Abstract (200-300 words)
• Two-page c.v. (featuring research highlights)

The submission deadline is Friday, 19 December. Proposals should be sent via email as P.D.F. files to Emily Davidson.

Scholars whose proposals are accepted in January will be expected to participate fully in the in-person symposium program in Amherst. The organizers will cover the costs of travel, accommodation, and some meals.

The Vanishing of Mary Wenwood?

As recounted earlier, Gen. George Washington had Mary Wenwood brought his headquarters to answer questions about a ciphered letter she had given to her former husband to pass on.

The woman held out against the general’s questioning for hours. But still under guard the morning after she arrived, she gave up the name of the cipherer: her lover, Dr. Benjamin Church.

After that, Mary Wenwood fades from the historical record. She had every reason to adopt a low profile. Gen. Washington kept her name out of his official report and paperwork. No surviving informal comment on the episode mentions her name. 

But men had a lot to say about her character. Indeed, just as she vanished as a person, she started to appear as a character in a moral fable—the downfall of a doctor.

James Warren, speaker of the Massachusetts house, called her “a suttle, shrewd Jade” and “an Infamous Hussey.” The Rev. Ezra Stiles of Newport said she was “a Girl of Pleasure,” and had carried the ciphered letter “in her stocking on her Leg.” How did he know?

Lt. Ebenezer Huntington of Norwich, Connecticut, told his brother: “the Plot was discoverd by his [Church’s] Miss who is now with Child by him and he owns himself the father (for he has Dismissed his Wife).” Huntington was stationed in Roxbury, far from Washington’s headquarters, and had no link to people in the case. No one closer to the investigation said the woman was pregnant. Some other details in Huntington’s account are wrong. Therefore, unless other evidence turns up, I think this was probably baseless gossip.

Here are further facts possibly about Mary Wenwood.

The 14 December 1775 New-England Chronicle reported that the Cambridge post office was holding mail for a woman named Mary Butler—which was Mary Wenwood’s maiden name.

Mary was the most common given name for women, and Butler a fairly common surname. Wainwood/Wenwood/Wanewood was much less common. Indeed, all mentions of “Wenwood” and its variants in late-1700s New England newspapers lead back to Godfrey Wenwood, Mary’s former husband.

That said, Newport vital records show that another Mary Wenwood, wife of Frederick Wenwood, gave birth to a baby girl named Mary in December 1785, and that couple baptized a baby girl named Mary (perhaps a new one) in June 1787. Even an uncommon name isn’t necessarily unique.

The most tantalizing clues are that a Mary Wainwood/Wanewood was in and out of the Boston almshouse after the war:

• Admitted 6 May 1785, left 30 May 1786.
• Admitted 29 Feb 1792.
• Admitted 12 Jan 1793.
• Admitted 25 Apr 1797, died 23 May 1797.

And that last entry stated that the woman was from Rhode Island.

“Tradition gives us a graphic scene connected with her arrest”

In his biography of George Washington, published in the late 1850s, Washington Irving included a vivid description of how Mary (Butler) Wenwood was brought to the commander-in-chief’s headquarters.

Irving wrote:

Tradition gives us a graphic scene connected with her arrest. Washington was in his chamber at head-quarters, when he beheld from his window, General [Israel] Putnam approaching on horseback, with a stout woman en croupe behind him. He had pounced upon the culprit.

The group presented by the old general and his prize, overpowered even Washington’s gravity. It was the only occasion throughout the whole campaign on which he was known to laugh heartily.

He had recovered his gravity by the time the delinquent was brought to the foot of the broad staircase in head-quarters, and assured her in a severe tone from the head of it, that, unless she confessed everything before the next morning, a halter would be in readiness for her.

So far the tradition;…

This anecdote is consistent with other stories about Putnam.

However, there’s no contemporaneous support for this tale, nor did Irving explain how he came by all those details, especially the picture of the general laughing in his own bedroom.

In fact, even Irving seemed dubious, twice labeling this story “tradition.” But he couldn’t resist including it.

And some other authors, including George Washington Greene, repeated it in their books.

It can serve to signal how Mary Wenwood was about to be transmuted from a real woman into the embodiment of all female dangers.