“I will take your Body and I will Tar it”

When I was posting about Henry Barnes’s conflict with his Marlborough neighbors in the summer of 1770, I looked for the text of the anonymous threatening letter he reported receiving in late June.

But I couldn’t find that text and had to settle for quoting the proclamation Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson issued about it.

Later I came across the text of that letter in E. Alfred Jones’s The Loyalists of Massachusetts, so I’ll quote it today.

Henry’s wife Christian had already told her friend Elizabeth Smith about the local protesters:

the first thing that fell a Sacrifice to their Mallace and reveng was the Coach which caused so much desention between us they took the cushings out of and put them in the Brook and the next night Cut the Carraig to Peices.

I first interpreted that “desention” to be between the Barneses, perhaps arguing over the expense of the coach. But in another letter Christian Barnes told Smith about “the Person that cut your Coach to Peices,” meaning that vehicle had first belonged to Smith or her late husband. So now I’m wondering if there had been some disagreement between the two ladies over that coach—perhaps Smith insisting that the Barneses take it as she left for Britain and Christian Barnes trying to resist.

The anonymous letter referred to the coach as a “booby hut,” a New England term for a carriage or coach body put on sleigh runners, as John Hancock’s coach has been preserved. Was that just a pejorative reference, or had the Smith carriage been left on runners since the winter?

In any event, Henry Barnes’s public complaints about the destruction of that vehicle spurred the anonymous writer:

I understand you are about carrying your Old dam’d Booby Hutt to the General Court and from thence Home to England to get recompence for all the damage you have sustained since you have been an infamous Importer or a common Enemy to the Country—

Therefore if you only want recompence for the damage you have done the Country in Importing goods contrary to the Agreement of Body of Merchants on this Continent I will recompence you without going there or any where else for I am determined to fetch you to terms even if I do it at the expence of my own Soul, or the Coat of a Sore Back or any other punishment in this World only for the good of my Country, for I stile myself a Son of LIBERTY,

therefore if you will Shut up your Store and Sell nothing out, nor Import any goods till the Importation takes place you shall sustain no more damage

But if not I will Fire your House and Store and destroy all your substance you have on the earth, And I will take your Body and I will Tar it, and if nothing else will do but Death you shall have it certainly, and so you will have no more Notice and if you do it by the 20th June 1770 Good and well, and if not you may depend upon my being as good as my word and so I will never write no more and so I stile myself Inspector General

I find it striking that this letter doesn’t speak in the voice of the community as Whig missives usually did. Instead, the writer emphasizes himself as an individual—willing to sacrifice for the country, to be sure, but speaking and acting on his own. That makes me inclined to think it didn’t come from Alpheus Woods or another member of the Marlborough town committee to enforce non-importation but from someone riled up by the conflict and perhaps not in his right mind.

Getting Out of Marlborough in 1775

When we left Capt. William Brown and Ens. Henry DeBerniere, they were in a back room of Henry Barnes’s house in Marlborough, listening as he tried to send away a member of the local committee of correspondence.

Dr. Samuel Curtis had shown up that evening of 1 Mar 1775, uninvited and asking to stay to supper. Barnes told him the doctor that he couldn’t stay because the family already had company.

Dr. Curtis then turned to a child—DeBerniere wrongly understood the girl to be Barnes’s daughter—and asked “who her father had got with him.”

According to the ensign, “the child innocently answered that she had asked her pappa, but he told her it was not her business.”

Still suspicious but unable to learn more, the doctor left. Brown and DeBerniere decided he was probably going to gather his political allies, so they should stay only a couple of hours to rest. They would leave at midnight, regardless of the snowy weather.

But even that was too leisurely, DeBerniere later wrote:

we got some supper on the table and were just beginning to eat, when Barnes (who had been making enquiry of his servants) found they [local Patriots] intended to attack us, and then he told us plainly he was very uneasy for us, that we could be no longer in safety in that town: upon which we resolved to set off immediately

The two officers had been inside for only twenty minutes, they estimated. Barnes took them “out of his house by the stables, and directed us a bye road which was to lead us a quarter of a mile from the town.”

Brown and DeBerniere hiked through the blowing snow until they reached “the hills that command the causeway at Sudbury, and went into a little wood where we eat a bit of bread that we took from Mr. Barnes’s, and eat a little snow to wash it down.”

At the next house, a man came out and asked Brown, “What do you think will become of you now?” By this time the officers were totally on edge, unable to tell whether the people they met recognized who they were and were helping to plan an assault or just thought it strange for two strangers to be out walking in the night during a snowstorm.

In Sudbury the officers encountered “three or four horsemen.” Those riders moved to either side of the road, letting the strangers pass between them while they watched silently.

Brown and DeBerniere reached the safety of Isaac Jones’s Golden Ball Tavern in Weston about 10:30 P.M., having walked 32 miles that day. The next day, the officers got into Boston, where they were safe. They wrote out a detailed report for Gen. Thomas Gage, which is our source for all this information. They turned over sketches and maps of the route out of Worcester in case the general planned a march that way.

Meanwhile, back in Marlborough, soon after the British scouts left, there was yet another knock on Henry Barnes’s door. This time the whole Marlborough committee of correspondence showed up and “demanded” to see the visitors. Barnes insisted those two men were not army officers “but relations of his wife’s, from Penobscot, and were gone to Lancaster.” According to DeBerniere’s report:

they then searched his house from top to bottom, looked under the beds and in their cellars and when they found we were gone, they told him if they had caught us in his house they would have pulled it about his ears.

Among the Marlborough committee-men was Alpheus Woods. Five years earlier, Woods had also been on the town committee to make Barnes follow the non-importation agreement. Barnes’s supporters had accused Woods of sending the merchant a letter threatening to burn down his potash works and house. Now Woods had nearly caught Barnes harboring British army spies.

Henry Barnes departed Marlborough a few days after his busy evening. His wife Christian Barnes went to stay with her friend Elizabeth Inman until past the actual outbreak of fighting in April. Taking refuge in Boston, they left the Marlborough estate in the hands of Henry’s adult niece, Catharine Goldthwait.

Under Massachusetts committee of safety guidelines, local committees weren’t supposed to confiscate property from Loyalists as long as some family members were still living peacefully on it. But the Marlborough committee including Alpheus Woods did take property from the Barnes estate, including furniture they loaned to Col. Henry Knox. Catharine Goldthwait complained about that to the General Court, to no avail.

In February 1776, Henry Barnes learned that a bequest worth almost £2,000 was awaiting him in London. He and Christian sailed that month, ahead of the end of the siege. Catharine Goldthwait followed a few years later, and Massachusetts confiscated her uncle’s property. Henry and Christian Barnes received a small Loyalist pension until he died in 1808.

More Mild Mayhem in Marlborough

All right, now that I’ve calmed down from spotting William Benson staying out of the political dispute/gang brawl in Marlborough on 17 July 1770, I can move on to the people who were actually involved.

The “Honest Ploughjogger” letter published in the 6 August Boston Gazette continued its finger-pointing at Henry Barnes’s political enemies:

…the said mob alias sons of liberty knowing their cause to be bad, and their best man not coming, they dare not move forward in a body, but sent out a scout of about five in number well arm’d to reconnoitre the street, among which was Waldo Woods, the young fellow said to be wounded, as ill-bred a fellow as ever existed, who came foremost armed with a tomhawk [sic] and his mouth full of oaths, imprecations and curses, and assaulted John Gott Brigham, and swore he would split out his brains, and would bring 200 people in half an hour, upon which said Brigham told him he had better go home and be peaceable or he would flog him.

As we recall, in the previous month the Boston Evening-Post had published a letter characterizing the wounded person as a “young lad.” John Waldo Woods, son of Alpheus Woods, was actually eighteen years old. Eighteenth-century society still classified him as a boy, but that’s certainly older than the first newspaper account led me to believe.

Furthermore, by this account young Waldo wasn’t just practicing “to learn to drum” before being enticed away by four men from the gathering at Simon Howe’s house. Instead, he went out looking for trouble with a tomahawk and accosted John Gott Brigham.

As for Brigham, he was nineteen years old. So we have two older teen-aged boys, each feeling politically justified, with possible local feuds, drinking, and sharp weapons added to the mix. Oh, this will end well.

Then said Woods drew out a sharp pointed knife, and swore he would stab him to the heart, and made a pass at his belly, upon which Brigham seized him by the arm, and took the knife out of his hand and thereby saved his own life; but it seems in the scuffle of taking away the knife, Woods bro’t the point of it against his own shoulder, and made a scratch equal to the scratch of a pin, not one drop of blood lost, and then he cry’d murder and run home with wet breeches, and no other person than Brigham offered to meddle with him: and neither Brigham nor any other person who was at said Simon How’s that night, had any sort of weapon, either wood or iron with them, nor did any of them attempt to meddle with or molest any Person that pass’d the street that evening.

The previous letter claimed that Brigham and a companion had dragged young Woods back to Howe’s party, where the host said “he tho’t they had carried matters a little too far.” Then there was a discussion of legal liability with more threats and promises. The “Ploughjogger” letter didn’t mention any of that, even to deny it. Which makes me think something like that happened.

Looking at court records from the next term might reveal whether either side did proceed to filing suit for assault. In addition, the “Honest Ploughjogger” closed his letter suggesting that Alpheus Woods would be hauled up for threatening Henry Barnes:

It has been surmiz’d that A——s W—ds was the author of that villainous letter threatning of Mr. Barnes that he would murder him and destroy all his substance by fire. There is now such sufficient proof, that it is thot’ the villain will soon be bro’t to the bar to receive sentence; and if justice does but take place, there is no doubt but it will prevent his further proceeding in his wickedness.

In fact, tensions eased with the collapse of the strict non-importation movement that summer. But eventually this local rivalry came to a head, and one family had to leave town.

TOMORROW: Visitors to Marlborough in 1775.

“Pitched upon for their leader and herald”

We’re looking at two accounts of what happened in Marlborough on the night of 17 July 1770.

One, published in the Boston Evening-Post and quoted here, said that embattled importer Henry Barnes had promised free alcohol to his supporters, including young men who worked for him. They all gathered at Simon Howe’s house, and then a few went out looking for trouble.

The other was written on 25 July, 250 years ago today, and I started quoting it yesterday. Its writer, “An Honest Ploughjogger,” said the trouble started because the local Sons of Liberty gathered at Alpheus Woods’s house in order to destroy Barnes’s property and possibly him.

Both sides of the political divide therefore felt, or at least told the world that they felt, that the other side was preparing for violence, so they were justified in taking steps to defend themselves. Which is a lot like the larger political conflict in Massachusetts.

The “Ploughjogger” letter stated:

The drum beating very briskly, and the mob alias sons of liberty, collecting together, induced those persons to tarry at Mr. How’s to see the event; and about 40 of the said mob being met at said Woods with their weapons of death, waiting for orders; [but?] it seems one William Benson a negro who was pitched upon for their leader and herald being a fellow of more sense than the rest of them, did not come among them,…

Hold on—there’s a familiar name! Someone I’ve been tracking for years, in fact.

A man of African heritage named William Benson (1732-1790) was the son of Nero Benson (d. 1757) and the father of Abel Benson (1766-1843). Nero was enslaved to the Rev. John Swift of Framingham until that minister died in 1745 and then to his son-in-law in Sudbury, Dr. Ebenezer Roby. Abel grew up free in the Framingham vicinity and served in the Continental Army starting in 1781. Both grandfather and grandson played the trumpet as part of their military duties.

Locals in Framingham and Needham recalled that a black trumpeter helped to rouse local militia early in the morning of 19 Apr 1775. In 1908 a genealogist identified that trumpeter as Nero Benson, but he’d been dead for almost two decades by then. The identification then switched to Abel Benson. But no one had reported that trumpeter was only nine years old, and Abel didn’t mention military service in 1775 when he applied for a Revolutionary War pension.

I’ve posited that William, the biological link between Nero and Abel, was that trumpeter. He could have learned the instrument from his father and passed it on to his son, I suggested. He was in his early forties, of militia age, in 1775.

Now in this letter from Marlborough we have a reference to “one William Benson a negro” whom at least forty young men of the town supposedly saw as a “leader and herald”—and traditionally a herald blows a trumpet.

William Benson was born in the Swift household in Framingham. After the minister died, he probably went west with his mother to the household of another son-in-law, Joseph Collins of Southborough. By 1762 William Benson’s name appeared on the records of multiple towns in that area. He and his wife Sarah Perry, a teenager from Sudbury, were warned out of Shrewsbury. Collins tried to force Benson back into slavery, with their dispute settled in Benson’s favor by a court case in 1764.

William and Sarah Benson had their first child, Kate, in Framingham in 1763. (Kate grew up to marry Peter Salem, then going by the name Salem Middlesex.) Their subsequent children, including Abel, aren’t on the Framingham records; that might have been an oversight, but the family was probably moving around for work.

The “Ploughjogger” letter suggests that in 1770 William Benson was in nearby Marlborough, and was seen as the sort of man who could rouse the youth into patriotic action, most likely with his trumpet. Except that Benson was wise enough to stay out of the fight between the white men at Simon Howe’s and the white men at Alpheus Woods’s.

TOMORROW: When someone pulled out a knife.

“A general aversion to truth, honesty, peace and good order”

Yesterday I quoted a letter published in the Boston Evening-Post and Boston Gazette in July 1770, alleging that supporters of the Marlborough importer Henry Barnes had roughed up a “young lad” with “edged weapons.”

On 25 July someone using the pseudonym “An Honest Ploughjogger” wrote to the printers of the Gazette angrily refuting those charges. Edes and Gill waited until 6 August before running the letter, which didn’t match their usual political line. Maybe it was just to fill their extra page that day, but eventually the printers acceded to the request at the top of that letter:

Please to give the following a Place in your next, and you will oblige several of your constant Readers, as well as Friends to Peace and good Order.

IN the Boston Evening Post of the 23rd of July current, a piece was published, dated at Marlboro’, being an infamous scandalous libel, without any connection, good sense, and scarcely one word of truth in the whole. No notice would have been taken of it, had the true characters of the authors been as well known abroad as they are at home.

Every man of honesty looks upon himself even degraded, when either of them speak well of him; one of them is an old man, very enthusiastical both in religion and politics, and sometimes delirious at times, ever since he lay with a g—l at Rutland; the other, the father of the young man (said to be wounded) is a low liv’d dirty worthless fellow as ever existed, meddling with every bodies business, and much neglecting his own; deals out often scraps of latin and law; pretends to have all sorts of sense, but never yet discovered the least degree of common sense, and seems to have a general aversion to truth, honesty, peace and good order.

Later the letter stated the name of the second man: Alpheus Woods (1727-1794), a farmer who had just been named to Marlborough’s five-man committee to enforce the non-importation boycott. He would continue to be politically active into the 1780s. His gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find a Grave.

The letter never named the first man. People in Marlborough and neighboring towns presumably recognized the references to and “old man,” “enthusiastical…in religion” and in a relationship with a young woman in Rutland. But there were lots of “New Light” worshippers in Massachusetts, and Marlborough had lots of links to Rutland, where many younger sons had moved for fresher farmland. I looked in the records of the Marlborough meeting and the Marlborough Association of nearby ministers digitized at New England’s Hidden Histories, and didn’t spot clues to this man’s identity.

So the most I can pull out of those references is another example of how small-town feuds could intersect with imperial politics. This dispute wasn’t just about non-importation and how to protest the Townshend duties. It was also about this letter writer’s dislike of Alpheus Woods’s “scraps of latin and law” and the other neighbor’s enthusiasms.

As this passage makes clear in addressing the effigies of Henry Barnes:

As to the first part of their piece, relating to the old horse and the hay bags, &c. we shall take no further notice of it than only as one of those hay bags or men of straw was hang’d up and then burnt, it seems to be an emblem of the last describ’d author; who for his immorality is now hang’d up by the church, and whether he will be made better, or finally burnt, is at present very uncertain.

That boils down to, “Yes, people burned Barnes in effigy, but you’re even more disgraced.”

Then the letter offered a completely different narrative of the evening when the “young lad” was accosted, starting:

As to what they published relating to the affair of the 17th current, there is not one word of truth in the whole account, but quite the reverse; the truth of the case is, that divers of the persons mentioned in the aforesaid piece, accidentally came into Marlboro’ street that evening, and they being credibly informed that a mob who call’d themselves sons of liberty, were to meet that night at Alpheus Woods, in order to destroy Esq; Barnes’s buildings and substance, and had given it out freely, that if Mr. Barnes should oppose them, that they would cut the throats of all his family that night.

In sum, both sides claimed the others were looking for trouble.

TOMORROW: How the night turned violent.