“We went to see Mr. Davis in Jail”

As I wrote back here, the lore in Benjamin Davis’s family was that his third wife, Alice, left him soon after their marriage in 1768 because she couldn’t stand how he worshipped with the Sandemanians.

Reportedly the men of the sect agreed that Davis could remarry if he chose. In a profile of Davis written for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Henry H. Edes said:

If Mr. Davis married a fourth wife, it is probable that she was Katharine Overlick, whose Intention of Marriage with Benjamin Davis was entered 24 April, 1773, but as we find no record of a marriage, and do find that Catharine Overlick,—presumably the same woman—entered her Intention of Marriage with John Clows 10 November, 1774, it is doubtful if Mr. Davis made another matrimonial alliance.

Alice (Whipple) Davis died in Cranston, Rhode Island, in 1795.

When captured on the Peggy sailing from Halifax to New York in July 1776, Benjamin Davis was accompanied only by his son and an enslaved man. In contrast, a couple of other merchants on the same ship were traveling with their wives, most notably Robert and Mary Semple, formerly Mary Wheat of Lincoln.

In her journal, published by the Essex Institute in 1868, Mary Holyoke (1737–1802, shown above) of Salem wrote:

July 28. Mr. Ben. Davis taken and put into Jail at Boston, and on the 31st Mrs. Davis spent the day with us at Mrs. Minott’s; we went to see Mr. Davis in Jail.

It appears that this “Mrs. Davis” wasn’t Benjamin Davis’s wife but a friend and/or relative of Mary Holyoke whom she mentioned many other times. But this Mrs. Davis could also have been related to Benjamin, giving him a courtesy call.

Life in the Boston jail wasn’t easy. The mates on the British transport ship Anne, James Young and John M’Kurdy, escaped from custody in Massachusetts and provided this intelligence on 24 August:

That Mr. Benjamin Davis, and several others were passengers, and that they treated Mr. Davis very ill. That they do not give the prisoners sufficient provisions, but offer them good wages to enter on board their privateers, and that many do enter.

The captain of the Peggy, James Kennedy, even petitioned the Massachusetts Council on 13 August for release on the grounds that he didn’t deserve to be associated with his passenger:

As your Petitioner had a Man on Board by the Name of Davis whose Character he did not know till he was brought into this Place, he beleives is the Occasion of his receiving different punishment from other Masters of Vessells.

Kennedy was indeed let out of the jail. According to the Naval Documents of the American Revolution editors, four other men gained release through “similar petitions.”

TOMORROW: Junior.

“The extraordinary self-denials and usages of the Sandemanians”

Hopestill Capen wasn’t the only Sandemanian clapped into the Boston jail in the summer of 1776, as discussed yesterday.

Another merchant who had joined that sect, Benjamin Davis (1729–1805), had been locked up since 26 July.

Like Capen, Davis was from an old New England family. For years he and his brother, Edward Davis (1730–1811), ran a mercantile firm located on the “South Side of the Town Dock.”

Among the European goods Benjamin and Edward Davis advertised for sale were coal, ale, cheese, snuff, salt, and stoneware. In return, they offered farmers money for flaxseed and potash.

Family sources say the Davis brothers’ partnership came apart during the non-importation campaign of 1768–70. Indeed, as of May 1771 the shop on “the South Side the Dock” was “Benj. Davis’s Store.” Having advertised their firm for many years, the brothers’ names appeared in only one more newspaper notice together: in August 1772 they offered “Two new Copper Stills & Worms,” perhaps their last joint property.

The Davis brothers definitely started to split politically in those years. On 28 Oct 1769, Edward was one of three angry merchants who confronted printer John Mein about how he was printing Customs house records. Mein stated, “Davis first made a push at me with his Cane which struck me on the left side of the belly.”

On 5 Mar 1770, Benjamin Davis was out in the evening about nine o’clock as locals faced off against soldiers at the Customs office. According to Robert Treat Paine’s notes from Capt. Thomas Preston’s trial, Davis testified: “Some body clap’d me on sholder and asked me if I would go and help fight the Soldiers. I said no.” He was a defense witness in the Boston Massacre trials.

Meanwhile, Edward Davis was watching the dispute with other merchants from the stoop of Edward Payne’s house, opposite the Customs office. At a bail hearing for Edward Manwaring in April and then at Manwaring’s trial, Davis and members of his family testified that they had seen no guns fired from the Customs building. In fact, Davis said that “soon after the firing he saw two women standing in the chamber of the Custom-house…with their hands under their aprons, in the posture of spectators.”

After the death of his wife, the former Ruth Vassall, in January 1774, Edward became a more active Whig. By the end of the year he was serving on Boston’s committee to enforce the Continental Association boycott.

In contrast, once Benjamin joined the Sandemanians in the 1760s, he appears to have sworn off actions to resist the royal government. In October 1774, John Andrews reported, “Ben Davis has let his Store on the Dock for the use of the troops.” He signed the usual Loyalist addresses and protests.

The mercantile house wasn’t the only partnership Benjamin Davis gave up for his faith. He married his third wife, Alice Whipple, daughter of a former lieutenant governor of Rhode Island, in 1768. According to family lore published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts:

The lady’s amour propre was offended and her philosophy over-taxed by the extraordinary self-denials and usages of the Sandemanians. Following the example of the early Christian Church, it was their custom to hold a love-feast on Sunday at one another’s houses, at which only Sandemanians were present. The wives who were not members of the Sect, naturally did not take kindly to their exclusion from their own tables, and, at last, the third Madam Davis felt constrained to return to her family, thus, practically, deserting her husband.

A legal divorce being then unobtainable, the Sandemanians took the matter under consideration and concluded to sanction another matrimonial alliance on the part of Mr. Davis, declaring his to be one of those cases where voluntary abandonment by the wife justifies the dissolution of the marriage tie in the sight of Heaven.

Benjamin Davis didn’t actually remarry, though.

Unlike Capen, Davis chose to sail away to Nova Scotia with the British military in March 1776. But then he got on a ship headed to New York, presumably to help supply or administer Britain’s reinvasion.

TOMORROW: Captured at sea.

(The John S. Copley portrait above shows Anstice [Greenleaf] Davis, Benjamin’s second wife, courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum. She died in 1764, only two years after their marriage.)