Ebenezer Mackintosh, Captain of the South Enders

Pope Night is turning out very long this year. Some Boston 1775 readers thought yesterday’s description of the Fifth of November celebration in 1765 put too much emphasis on upper-class gentlemen manipulating the crowds. But I can read the same events the other way as well: the crowds manipulating the elite. Or perhaps both groups got what they wanted together.

There are many more sources from the genteel class than from the working class, of course. Rich men of all political persuasions wrote about the “mob” with distaste. Friends of the royal government blamed riots on secret Whig instigators. Whigs blamed the same events on oppressive laws spurring entirely foreseeable anger from the lower sort. No one recorded much about what workingmen themselves thought, how they organized, and what they hoped to accomplish.

Alfred F. Young’s “Ebenezer Mackintosh: Boston’s Captain General of the Liberty Tree,” an essay published earlier this year in Revolutionary Founders, collects what we know about the most prominent working-class political figure in pre-Revolutionary Boston.

Mackintosh, a twenty-seven-year-old shoemaker, was the captain of the South End gang in 1764. It looks like the youth of that part of Boston chose him for that post, along with some unnamed lieutenants, but we have no idea how. The South Enders won that year’s Pope Night brawl, but a young boy was killed, town officials tried to seize the wagons, and North End captain Henry Swift lay in a coma for days.

In March 1765 Mackintosh, Swift, and others were indicted for rioting, with a stern lecture from Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson. Yet the same month, Bostonians elected Mackintosh as a Sealer of Leather, one of the town’s many inspectors. So clearly he was still popular, and commanded some respect from the men who could vote in town meeting.

The next month brought news of the Stamp Act, scheduled to take effect at the start of November. Boston was the site of America’s first public protest against that law, carried out by a large crowd in the South End on 14 Aug 1765. With Ebenezer Mackintosh as a very visible leader, that protest used the same sort of effigies as on Pope Night. The elm hanging over the proceedings was later dubbed “Liberty Tree,” and Mackintosh became its “Captain General,” a term borrowed from the militia.

Behind the scenes, it looks like the Loyall Nine, a group of young merchants and luxury craftsmen, did much of the preparation for that protest. Records also show that two days before it Samuel Adams had sworn out a warrant for unpaid taxes against Mackintosh and his partner; later, Adams apparently dropped that matter. Was that because Mackintosh had kept the violence under control and directed against the property of Stamp Act agent Andrew Oliver?

On 26 August, a more spontaneous crowd sacked Hutchinson’s house in the North End. That’s a very murky affair, made murkier by Hutchinson’s conspiracy theories. Mackintosh was arrested for the riot, then let go on the grounds that there would be worse trouble if he were locked up. No one preserved evidence that Mackintosh was actually involved, but by then many officials perceived him as controlling the Boston crowd.

That fall, protests against the Stamp Act spread up and down the Atlantic coast. In Massachusetts it became clear that Oliver wouldn’t be able to collect the new tax, and that judges and other officials would proceed without requiring stamped paper. With that struggle going his way, and legal threats still hanging over him, Mackintosh had an incentive to help keep Boston peaceful. At the same time, his South End gang constituency was probably looking forward to their Pope Night celebrations.

Yesterday’s posting said that town leaders convinced the South End and North End gangs to forgo their traditional brawl on 5 Nov 1765 by supplying a festive banquet instead. In fact, gentlemen paid for large quantities of food and drink three times that fall:

• In late October, the two “richest men in town”—perhaps John Hancock and John Rowe—hosted two hundred workingmen at a tavern, with Mackintosh and Swift at the head table.
• On Pope Night, there were refreshments for all under Liberty Tree as the gangs rolled their wagons around peacefully.
• There was another formal dinner a week after the holiday, filling five rooms.

Furthermore, merchants gave the Pope Night officers new blue and red uniforms, hats, and canes. The young men first wore those in a public march on 1 November, the day the Stamp Act was to take effect. Mackintosh walked alongside William Brattle, general of the Massachusetts militia and Council member. A gentleman and a shoemaker, South Enders and North Enders, Pope Night officers and militia units—Bostonians thus showed their unified opposition to the Stamps. If Pope Night was all about having fun while showing off one’s patriotism, those parades and banquets accomplished the same thing without anyone getting bashed on the head.

Mackintosh wasn’t just getting a few meals and a fancy coat, furthermore. He was also getting a seat at the political table, a show of respect from gentlemen. There’s some evidence Mackintosh did have a wider political consciousness; he named his first son after a famous Corsican rebel. But we don’t have any sense of his platform, or how he might have differed on issues with the town’s rich merchants and employers. Was he a puppet, or a puppeteer, or just another actor in a complex process?

Supporters of the royal government and officials in London continued to worry about Mackintosh until the start of the war. Back in Boston, he was never prominent after 1766. Debt, the death of his wife, and possibly drink caught up with him. Mackintosh took his children to Haverhill, New Hampshire, in 1774.

More genteel men such as Dr. Thomas Young and merchant William Molineux became the Whigs’ street leaders. Members of the Loyall Nine, such as Thomas Crafts, rose to more high political offices. As for the crowds, they continued to act on their own, sometimes supporting Whig positions and sometimes defying pleas from Whig leaders. Even Mackintosh couldn’t really control everyone.

What Kind of Name for a Magazine was The Censor?

A while back I discussed whether Penelope Russell took over The Censor from her husband Ezekiel, or was simply his indispensable partner in the business. But I didn’t address the obvious question: What kind of name for a magazine was The Censor?

We associate the word “censor” with not allowing stuff to be published. So issuing a magazine with that name looks like calling a street “Roadblock Road,” or an airline “Grounded Air.”

But in the eighteenth century the word “censor” still had a more general meaning of an official in charge of upholding public morals. The Roman republic had censors, and if it was good enough for the Roman republic, then it was good enough for eighteenth-century British gentlemen.

When supporters of the royal government in Massachusetts sponsored The Censor, they chose the name because they saw themselves as responding to public immorality: riots, intimidation, law-breaking, and lack of respect for royal officials. Since many of the men funding and writing for the magazine were royal officials, they felt this keenly. Among the contributors were Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver (shown here, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery), his brother Judge Peter Oliver, and (anonymously, at least according to later rumors) Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr.

The magazine’s first issue was devoted to answering an attack on Gov. Thomas Hutchinson written by Joseph Greenleaf and printed in the Massachusetts Spy. Eventually the royal party chose a different strategy and tried to have Greenleaf, Spy printer Isaiah Thomas, and others indicted for libel, but the local grand jury refused to return an indictment against any of those Whigs.

One big challenge for the men writing The Censor was that the Whigs also presented themselves as fighting public immorality. They spoke of “liberty,” but they didn’t condone any excesses of personal liberty of the sort that censors guarded against. Samuel Adams was the last of the New England Puritans, and no one could outflank him in scolding the world about public immorality. The Whigs meant political and economic liberty. Their newspaper essays assured the people of Massachusetts that they already had fine morals, but had to guard their way of life from corrupt officials enforcing unconstitutional laws.

TOMORROW: Why The Censor was doomed from the start.

The End of “Gloria Mundi”

On 6 January, the same day that Samuel Waterhouse threatened in the Boston Evening-Post to publicly scrutinize James Lovell’s private life as part of their argument in Boston’s newspapers, the Boston Gazette published another letter on the brouhaha. This letter was signed “Thy Friend,” addressed “Friend Samuel,” and written in the voice of a Quaker.

It was not, however, particularly peaceable:

Thou was once esteem’d as a Man of some Learning, some Sociability, some Integrity, some Honor, some Honesty, and some Humanity; but verily of late thou seemest to have lost all Claim to those Virtues, and art grown a sowre, unsociable, jealous, malevolent pityful, pedantick scribler. . . .

Surely Friend Samuel, thou art not Ignorant that Sammy will sound full as well as Jemmy in a late whimsical but invenom’d Song...

That was an allusion to Waterhouse’s notorious “Jemmibullero” song about James Otis, Jr.

One week later, the Monday newspapers printed no fewer than four pieces on the controversy:

• Unsigned letter in the Gazette suggesting “Gloria Mundi” be sent to “the Ok-um Manufactory [workhouse], as in that Employ to render himself more serviceable to the Community and his Family, than he has ever been in any other Way.”
• Acrostic in the Gazette spelling out Waterhouse’s name in sixteen insulting lines.
• “Y. Z.” in the Evening Post, insisting, “notwithstanding what you affirm, 7 out of 8 think Samy is Gloria and Gloria Samy.”
• Another Evening Post letter, signed “X.,” saying of Waterhouse’s denials: “how unnatural is it, for him in such a public manner to disown his own offspring, & refuse the indulgence and kind offices of a father to the Brats he had sent into the world.”

But at the end of that second letter the Fleet brothers, printers of the Evening Post, wrote:

The Printers hope the above Pieces will finish the Controversy: as they are determined to insert no more upon either Side; and are heartily sorry, that in order to maintain their Impartiality, they have been obliged to publish so much already of what neither themselves or few others understand.

The next week, Edes and Gill at the Gazette followed suit:

The Friend’s Letter to Sammy, and one from his Opponent, are come to Hand; but we hope they will excuse our not publishing them; especially as the other Printers have dropt the Affair, and we can see no Benefit that will accrue to any-one from continuing their Publications.

The Boston Post-Boy of 3 Feb 1766 printed documents showing that Andrew Oliver, who had been Stamp Act agent for Massachusetts before the Sons of Liberty forced him to resign the previous August, swore before magistrate Belcher Noyes that he’d never recommended that Waterhouse as his replacement. Waterhouse likewise swore that he’d never asked for that job. And that was the last of this controversy—until June, when there was a smaller spurt of satirical letters alluding back to these.

As I watch how this dispute developed in the newspaper, I was struck by how much it looked like many arguments on internet discussion boards. Everyone was using pseudonyms (screen names) and occasionally assumed identities. A political disagreement quickly shifted so far into personal invective that it was impossible to tell what the original issue was. Rhetorically, there was a lot of quoting of each other’s words (which I’ve spared you) and sarcasm. People accused one debater of creating another identity and lying about it (sock puppetry). People brought up unrelated personal matters. And finally the moderators—in this case, the printers of the Evening Post—moved to shut the discussion down.

Sometimes experts say that the lack of face-to-face contact make internet arguments more vituperative than other sorts. We say things online that we’d never say in person, and many of us become unusually nasty when we’re anonymous. The speed of communication is also a factor; we send messages that we might well omit if we’d taken another day to consider.

This dispute casts some doubt on that thinking. In eighteenth-century Boston, gentlemen could argue with the same level of nastiness—perhaps more—even though:

• The postings were only semi-anonymous, as everyone seemed confident of the identities of “Gloria Mundi” and “H.”
  
• The men involved were apt to meet face to face any day on the small peninsula.
• A full week passed before each reply, giving the writers plenty of time to rethink.

The internet may have made nasty arguments more common, but nasty arguments have always been around.

TOMORROW: Hang on. If Boston 1775 promises “unabashed gossip,” what was all that Waterhouse wrote about James Lovell’s “very notable performance, on the feminine GENDER, and the CONJUGATION copulative”?