When Balch Came Back

In early October 1775, Nathaniel Balch the hatter left London and sailed back home to America.

On 23 December, the Providence Gazette reported on news from the preceding days:

Captain Gorham is arrived at Nantucket from London, after a Passage of eleven Weeks. With him came passenger Mr. NATHANIEL BALCH, late of Boston.  

Balch was soon on the mainland. On 20 December, the Boston court official and insurance broker Ezekiel Price, taking refuge from the siege in Stoughton, wrote in his diary:

Mr. Bailies, from Taunton, says that Mr. Nathaniel Balch was there last night. He is lately from London, and reports that the great men in England are against us, but that the common people are in our favor.

However, four days later Price wrote that young Benjamin Hichborn had told him:

Mr. Balch says our Boston gentry that lately went to England were, most of them, very desirous of getting back; that the people there in general were against us, and continually threatening to scourge us till they had obliged us to submit.

I don’t trust Hitchborn about anything. But the discrepancy between Price’s entries may simply be due to him using the word “people” to refer to two different groups: ordinary people as opposed to “great men” in his first entry, British gentry as opposed to Loyalist gentry in the second.

Finally, there’s a mention from Isaac Smith, Sr., father of one of the men Balch had sailed and seen some sights in London with. Smith wrote to his niece’s husband, John Adams, on 2 Jan 1776:

Itts likely you may have heard Mr. Balch is returnd from England but came Out the begining Octbr. so cant bring any thing New of a publick Nature tho possibly he may of his One invention.

Balch’s own invention might have meant private information he’d picked up, though, knowing him, it might just as well have been some new funny stories. I haven’t come across any other references to Massachusetts men debriefing the hatter about his trip.

Which means I still have the mystery of why Balch went to Britain at all.

TOMORROW: Post-war legends.

Another Mystery of Nero Faneuil

The likelihood that George Washington’s cook Hercules took his first owner’s surname and went by Hercules Posey in New York brought back thoughts about how another black man might have negotiated slavery and freedom in the early republic.

Last month I highlighted the name of “Nero Funels” on a 1777 Massachusetts anti-slavery petition. I posited that this was a phonetic spelling of Faneuil, and that the same man as Nero Faneuil was involved in two Boston burglaries in 1784.

One of the witnesses in those trials was Nero Faneuil’s wife Flora. Two other witnesses were surnamed Hitchborn (or a variation on that name):

• Prince Hitchborn, almost certainly given that first name as an enslaved child, was at Nero and Flora Faneuil’s house in November 1784.
• Elite young lawyer Benjamin Hichborn testified to Nero’s character.

That suggests some link between the Nero Faneuil and the Hitchborn household in the North End.

Boston town records state that on 20 Apr 1780 Nero Williams of Roxbury and Flora Hitchburne, “free negroes,” were married. I haven’t found any record of the marriage of Nero and Flora Faneuil. Nor have I found any other mention of Nero Williams. To be sure, there were other black men named Nero and other black women named Flora, but I haven’t found any other married couples with those names.

So here’s one possible reconstruction of Nero Faneuil’s life. He was either born into slavery or enslaved by a member of the Faneuil family, and used that family’s surname when signing the anti-slavery petition in 1777.

The Revolution sent different members of the white mercantile Faneuil family in different directions:

• Benjamin Faneuil, Sr., had become blind and lived in retirement with his daughter and son-in-law, Mary and George Bethune, in the part of Cambridge that became Brighton.
• That man’s sons Benjamin, Jr., and Peter were Loyalists, moving to Canada and elsewhere during the war and thus at risk of losing their Massachusetts property.
• Pierre Benjamin Faneuil, a francophone cousin, came to Boston from Saint-Domingue with the hope of raising a regiment of French Canadians to support the Continental cause, but died of illness in 1777 before accomplishing anything.

Nero Faneuil might have belonged to any of those households in 1777 and then been sold to someone named Williams in Roxbury by 1780. Joseph Williams was a big farmer in that town, for example. If so, town authorities might have listed Nero with the surname Williams in 1780 in the record of his marriage to Flora Hitchburne.

In 1783, Massachusetts’s high court ruled slavery unenforceable. By the following year Nero Faneuil was a free man in Boston married to a woman named Flora. Was he also Nero Williams, having reverted to using the Faneuil surname?

More of Mary Clapham’s Massacre Memorials

In the early 1770s, Mary Clapham managed the Royal Exchange tavern on King Street, near the center of Boston.

In this 1801 view of State Street, as it was renamed, the tall white building was the one that housed the tavern. The Boston Massacre had taken place in front of the red building across a small street. That made Clapham’s tavern an appropriate place for Massacre memorial displays, the Boston Whigs decided.

Yesterday I quoted the Boston Gazette description of the first such exhibit in 1772. The large “lanthorn” the Whig activists built, with strikingly painted scenes illuminated from inside, was similar to what the South End and North End gangs carted around on Pope Night, and to the paper obelisk made in 1766 to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act.

The Massacre exhibit was back at the Royal Exchange tavern in 1773, as described by the 11 March Massachusetts Spy:

At night a select number of the friends of constitutional liberty, met at Mrs. Clapham’s in King-street, and exhibitted on the balcony a lanthorn of transparent paintings, having in front a lively representation of the bloody massacre which was perpetrated near that spot on the 5th of March 1770, over their heads was inscribed, the fatal effects of a standing army being posted in a free city.

On the right, America sitting in a mourning posture, looking down on the spectators, with this label, Behold my Sons.

On the left, a monument, sacred to the memory of
Messrs. SAMUEL GRAY,
SAMUEL MAVERICK,
JAMES CALDWELL,
PATRICK CARR, and
CRISPUS ATTUCKS,
Who were barbarously murdered by a party of the 29th regiment, on the 5th of March, 1770.

At a quarter after nine, the time of the evening when the bloody deed was acted, the paintings were taken in, and most of the bells in town tolled till ten.

That was the same display, described in the same words, as the previous year. The Boston Gazette reported one new feature: in a “Window East of the Balcony” was a translucent sheet decorated with a 24-line poem on the Massacre. I’ve decided to spare you that until another year.

In 1774 the exhibit was a little delayed, as the 7 March 1774 Boston Gazette explained at the end of its report on that year’s oration:

As this Anniversary happened on Saturday, the Evening of which is considered by many Persons as the Commencement of the Sabbath, the Exhibition Portraits of the Murderers, and the slaughtered Citizens, was put off till this Evening, when they will be exposed to publick View at Mrs. Clapham’s in King-Street.

When the exhibit finally appeared, it included a new visual element, reflecting the new political controversy over the salaries and letters of royal appointees Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and Chief Justice Peter Oliver. The Gazette stated:

On Monday evening the horrid tragedy of the 5th of March was observed with the usual solemnity, by exhibiting to pubic view a portrait of that inhuman and cruel Massacre perpetrated by [Capt. Thomas] Preston, and his infamous butchers;

on the right, a figure of America pointing to her slaughtered sons, on the left, a monument to the memory of Gray, Attucks, Maverick, Caldwell, and Carr.

In one of the windows was a representation of H[utchinso]n and J[udg]e O[live]r, in the horrors, occasioned by the appeared of the two ghosts of Empson and Dudley, advising them to think of their fate. They appeared to be worshipping their ill-gotting gold the modern deity of the North.

Ye TRAITORS; “Is there not some chosen curse,
Some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven,
Red with uncommon wrath, to blast the men
Who owed their greatness to their country’s ruin?

The poetry is from Joseph Addison’s Cato.

John Adams mentioned the display in his diary for 7 March:

This Evening there has been an Exhibition in Kingstreet of the Portraits of the soldiers and the Massacre—and of H[utchinso]n and C[hief]. J[ustice]. Oliver, in the Horrors—reminded of the Fate of Empson and Dudley, whose Trunks were exposed with their Heads off, and the Blood fresh streaming after the Ax.

Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley were administrators for Henry VII executed for treason in 1510 under Henry VIII. They weren’t evoked often in American Revolutionary rhetoric, but one of the writers who did so was Adams himself.

In March 1775, with thousands of British soldiers stationed in Boston, the Whigs put their display away. Those troops stayed through the next Massacre anniversary. In 1777 the town of Boston once again commissioned an oration to commemorate the killings, this time from Benjamin Hichborn, but the Boston Gazette made no mention of an illuminated display.

The Trial of Nero Faneuil

Nero Faneuil was a black man who petitioned for an end to slavery in Massachusetts in 1777, as quoted here. It’s unclear whether he was enslaved at the time or advocating for the many other people who were.

Seven years later, Nero Faneuil (his surname pronounced and often spelled as “Funnel”) was locked up on suspicion of two robberies in Boston: of a chest containing important papers and cash from the house of Continental official James Lovell, and of dry goods from the shop of John Fullerton.

Of the two crimes, the first was far more serious. As the 2 Dec 1784 Massachusetts Spy said:

It is reported that two persons are taken up in Boston, and committed to gaol, on suspicion of breaking open the house of the Hon. James Lovell, Esq; Continental Treasurer, in this State, and robbing him of 25,000 dollars in Loan-Office certificates, &c. 

Faneuil was charged with that crime alongside two white men, Thomas Archibald and William Scott. For the other crime, of stealing from Fullerton’s shop, Faneuil was charged alone.

The attorney general of Massachusetts was Robert Treat Paine (shown above). His papers, as published by the Massachusetts Historical Society, are our fullest source on what happened next. At the grand jury proceedings in February 1785, all three men pled not guilty, and their trial was scheduled for 3 March.

Prospects looked bleak for Nero Faneuil. He was charged with two thefts instead of just one. Testimony established that “no part of the Property [from Lovell was] found on any but Nero.” And he was the only black man arrested.

But I think Faneuil also had an important asset: he was local. People in town knew him. According to Paine’s notes, Benjamin Hichborn testified, “Nero’s Character for Truth good.” [I think Hichborn was a slippery character himself, but he was a genteel, well-connected lawyer.] In contrast, Archibald and Scott had recently drifted into town from the south.

In addition, Faneuil seized an opening. Lovell was anxious to locate his stolen papers. He asked Scott on “the day after they were cmtted” where those were, and recalled that Scott answered “that the negro was the only person who could give me informn.” Lovell then went to Faneuil, who testified, “Mr. Lovel told me if I wd. Confess I should be a Witness.” Faneuil therefore turned state’s evidence against Archibald and Scott.

But first, Faneuil pled guilty to the Fullerton theft. The court sentenced him to be branded on the forehead with the letter “B” for “burglar.” It also ordered him to restore Fullerton’s goods and pay £84 as treble damages, which everyone must have known was beyond his means. Faneuil declared that he couldn’t pay, and the court sentenced him to serve Fullerton for seven years. He was thus thrown back into servitude.

TOMORROW: At the trial.

Orations at Old South, 21 Mar.

On Wednesday, 21 March, the Old South Meeting House will host “Speak Out!”, its fourth annual remembrance of the Boston Massacre orations.

From 1771 to 1783, Boston had a yearly town meeting to commemorate the fatal violence on King Street. The tradition was started by Dr. Thomas Young speaking at the Manufactory on 5 Mar 1770, and the town’s politicians decided the event was successful enough to make it an official occasion, not just a speech by a radical who wasn’t even from around here.

That year the town had assistant schoolmaster James Lovell speak in April. From then on, the orations were always on 5 March or, if that date fell on a Sunday, 6 March. The invited orator was usually a rising young politician. In order:

• Dr. Joseph Warren
• Dr. Benjamin Church (after John Adams declined)
• John Hancock
• Dr. Warren again 
• Rev. Peter Thacher (speaking in Watertown since Boston was besieged)
• Benjamin Hichborn
• Jonathan Williams Austin
• William Tudor 
• Jonathan Mason, Jr.
• Thomas Dawes, Jr. 
• George Richards Minot
• Dr. Thomas Welsh 

In 1783 Boston decided that remembering the Massacre was less vital now that Massachusetts was independent, and the town shifted its annual patriotic oration to the Fourth of July.

The Old South event focuses on the orations leading up to the war. The description says:

Join us to hear selected excerpts of these speeches, performed by an inter-generational group in the grand hall where the orations took place 240 years ago! Learn about the orations and their significance with special guests Bostonian Society Executive Director Nathaniel Sheidley, historian Robert Allison, and Dr. Joseph Warren biographer Dr. Samuel Forman. Audience members will also have the option to read from a selection of excerpts; prizes will be awarded to the most rousing orators in youth and adult categories!

This free event is co-sponsored by the History Department at Suffolk University, the Bostonian Society, and the Boston Public Schools’ Department of History and Social Studies.

All are welcome, but Old South asks people to please register in advance. The speeches start at 6:00 P.M. If the weather is bad, the event might be postponed for a week until 28 March.

ADDENDUM: This event has now been rescheduled for 28 March.

“Treason! Rebellion! Massacre!”

To be fair to Benjamin Hichborn, there’s no evidence that he’d read the letters he was delivering to Massachusetts for John Adams and Benjamin Harrison (and delivered right into the hands of the Royal Navy on 31 July 1775).

Hichborn no doubt hoped those documents were important, because that would make himself more important. But he probably thought their rhetoric was typical for American Patriots in mid-1775.

Hichborn was therefore shocked by Capt. James Ayscough’s reaction to what he’d been carrying. Here’s how he described it months later [with paragraph breaks thrown in]:

My first interview with Ayscough, after his discovery of the Letters, I think worth relating—(if I had been subject to fits, I am sure he wou’d have thrown me into the most violent Convulsions)— “Oh the damn’d, black, hellish, bloody Plots contained in these Letters!

Pray Capt. Ayscough what do they contain?

Oh too shocking to relate! Treason! Rebellion! Massacre! (then beating his breast, with the most unnatural distortions of his face and body) O my God! It makes my blood run cold to think on it.

For God’s sake, Capt: Ayscough, if you have any compassion for my feelings, tell me what you mean.

Oh! (beating his breast again) it chilled the very blood in my veins when I read them. There is a plan laid to seize and massacre all the Officers and Friends of Goverment and all the Churchmen [i.e., Anglicans] upon the Continent in one Night. Pray Gentlemen is it a fair question, to ask if you are Churchmen?

(Mr. [Anthony Walton?] White said he was, I told him I was not.)

Such cruel, black designs, never before entered the heart of Man!

But Capt. Ayscough, are you not mistaken?

Oh I read them over and over again.

I am not disposed to question your veracity, but if I had read it myself I woud not believe it. Pray Sir, whose signature do they bear?

They are all signed John Adams.

In fact Adams had not written about a plan “seize and massacre all the Officers and Friends of Goverment and all the Churchmen upon the Continent in one Night.” He had merely written that the Patriots should “have arrested every Friend to Government on the Continent and held them as Hostages for the poor Victims in Boston.” So the captain did have a reason to feel alarmed.

Ayscough brought Hichborn around Cape Cod and into Boston harbor (shown above in 1764). On 5 August 1775, Gen. George Washington wrote to the Continental Congress:

I have this Morning been alarmed with an Information that two Gentlemen from Philada [(]Mr Hitchbourn & Capt. White) with Letters for General [Charles] Lee & mylf have been taken by Capt. Ayscough at Rhode Island, the Letters intercepted & sent forward to Boston with the Bearers as Prisoners. That the Captain exulted much in the Discoveries he had made & my Informer who was also in the Boat but released understood them to be the Letters of Consequence. . . . I shall be anxious till I am relieved from the Suspence I am in as to the Contents of those Letters.

Alas, I don’t know who Washington’s informant “also in the Boat but released” was.

In fact, the letters Ayscough turned over to his superiors weren’t that important, in the sense of containing vital orders or intelligence that Washington needed. But they did have consequences.

TOMORROW: Mrs. Draper’s press.

“By such a mere accident as this”

Yesterday we left Benjamin Hichborn on the Royal Navy ship Swan, commanded by Capt. James Ayscough, on the way to Rhode Island. Hichborn had taken it upon himself to carry letters to Massachusetts for two Continental Congress delegates, and he didn’t want the British authorities to find them.

Of course, Hichborn had already passed by opportunities to keep quiet about those letters, to travel more safely by land, and to toss the letters overboard at the first sign of trouble. But he didn’t want to let go of those letters, which would be proof of how reliable he was.

At first, Hichborn later wrote, things seemed to be all right. Capt. Ayscough treated him and his traveling companion, Anthony Walton (?) White, with polite deference. But the next day, the captain had become suspicious and hostile. Hichborn guessed that another traveler, clerk to a Loyalist merchant, had reported that he and White were traveling to aid the rebel cause—which they were, and had probably boasted about. By the second evening, the captain put a guard over those two young men.

Hichborn could still have kept the letters secret. Nobody had yet searched him or his belongings. He came up with what he thought was a clever ruse:

my plan I thought was compleat and ensured me success; I had provided a couple of blank letters directed to General [George] Washington and Coll. [James] Warren, which in Case [the clerk] Stone shoud acknowledge himself the Informer and confront me with his declaration, I intended to deliver them up with seeming reluctance and pretend I had concealed them through fear.

But he never put that plan into action.

Instead, Capt. Ayscough rendezvoused with H.M.S. Rose under Capt. James Wallace, which was patrolling Narragansett Bay. As Ayscough prepared to transfer his two prisoners and their baggage onto Wallace’s ship, Hichborn had another brainstorm:

Just as the boat was preparing to carry our baggage on board Capt. Wallace for examination a Gentleman who came passenger with us from New York sent on board for a trunk which we thro’ mistake had taken for our own, this circumstance looked so favourable that I coud not avoid seizing [it] to get the letters on shore. I opened the trunk with my own key, put the letters in the folds of the Gentlemans Linen and with some difficulty locked it again, when the trunk came upon deck the Lieutenant mistook it for mine put it into the boat with the rest of our things and rowed off immediately on board the other Ship. By such a mere accident as this did the letters fall into their Hands.

Simply because Hichborn had claimed that trunk as his own, had control of it belowdecks, and even had a key that opened it, the naval officers wouldn’t just send it off to the man from New York as Hichborn asked them to. Really the whole situation was unforeseeable.

Soon naval officers searched that trunk and found letters from two Continental Congress delegates, one from Benjamin Harrison speaking in detail about troops, gunpowder, and fighting in Virginia and one from John Adams saying:

We ought to have had in our Hands a Month ago, the whole Legislative, Executive and Judicial of the whole Continent, and have compleatly moddelled a Constitution, to have raised a Naval Power and opened all our Ports wide, to have arrested every Friend to Government on the Continent and held them as Hostages for the poor Victims in Boston.

Not surprisingly, the British authorities thought that was treasonous. They put Hichborn under arrest and confined him to a warship in Boston harbor.

TOMORROW: And royal officials decided to make use of those letters.

Benjamin Hichborn’s Delivery Service

In late July 1775, twenty-nine-year-old lawyer Benjamin Hichborn set off from Philadelphia for his home province of Massachusetts, proudly carrying three letters from Continental Congress delegates. Those letters would, he’d insisted, show that he had the confidence of Patriot leaders.

I suspect that Hichborn met up with Anthony Walton White (1750-1803, shown here), son of a New Jersey merchant who was seeking an appointment in the Continental Army. On 27 July, White obtained a recommendation letter from George Clinton of New York addressed to the new commander-in-chief, George Washington, so the timing fits. Hichborn later referred to his traveling companion only as “Mr. White.”

In the summer of 1775 it was very easy for a gentleman of means to travel in the American colonies. The royal army was almost entirely concentrated in Boston. The land war hadn’t spread beyond that region to make the roads treacherous. The Royal Navy had unchallenged control of the sea, but Hichborn could simply have stuck to a land route.

Which he didn’t.

Instead, as he wrote later that year:

When we came to New York, contrary to our expectations, we found a packet-boat waiting for Passengers, and in the opinion of every one there was not the least danger in crossing the [Long Island] Sound, we accordingly took passage for New-Port…

Hichborn could probably still have made his way to Rhode Island by sea unmolested if he kept a low profile, not telling anyone about the documents he was carrying. As a gentleman, he wasn’t likely to be subjected to close scrutiny.

But he didn’t.

Instead, Hichborn let on to a man named “Stone, (a person who formerly was Clerk to Henry Lloyd, and came passenger with us from New York),” that he had letters to Gen. Washington and James Warren, leader of Massachusetts legislature. Stone’s employer, Lloyd, was widely known as a Boston Loyalist. (Interestingly, two months earlier Lloyd had been worried about the security of his own mail.)

Sure enough, the packet boat carrying Hichborn, White, and Stone was stopped by the British warship Swan under the command of Capt. James Ayscough. However, the captain assured the young gentlemen that he was simply impressing sailors. Hichborn could still have kept the letters away from the British authorities by tossing them overboard in the night, and indeed he wrote of how he later “loaded them with money of the least value I had about me intending to drop them over board in the Evening.”

But he never did.

After all, if Hichborn were to come back to Massachusetts with no letters, he’d have no evidence that the Congress delegates trusted him.

TOMORROW: Benjamin Hichborn’s clever schemes.

“It would give him the Appearance of having my Confidence”

When John Adams wrote those cranky letters from Philadelphia that I quoted yesterday, he had someone looking over his shoulder: a young lawyer named Benjamin Hichborn (1746-1817).

Hichborn was a cousin of Paul Revere, but he came from a branch of the family that was already upwardly mobile. He had attended Harvard, graduating in 1768, and then gone to work as a clerk for the Boston lawyer Samuel Fitch.

Fitch was a Loyalist. This should not have been a surprise to Hichborn since Fitch was already accepting royal appointments in the Vice Admiralty courts in 1768. Then he signed the complimentary farewell address to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson in 1774 and stayed in Boston during the siege.

Fitch’s actions made Hichborn’s political allegiance suspect. Or at least he said so. It might have helped if he’d been politically active before the war, like a couple of his older relatives, but I don’t see his name anywhere prominent. So Hichborn went to Philadelphia to prove his dedication to liberty.

As Adams remembered the situation decades later:

A young Gentleman from Boston, Mr. Hitchbourne, whom I had known as a Clerk in Mr. Fitch’s office, but with whom I had no Particular connection or Acquaintance, had been for some days soliciting me, to give him Letters to my Friends in the Massachusetts. I was so much engaged in the Business of Congress in the day time and in consultations with the Members on Evenings and Mornings that I could not find time to write a Line.

He came to me at last and said he was immediately to sett off, on his Journey home, and begged I would give him some Letters. I told him I had not been able to write any. He prayed I would write if it were only a Line to my Family, for he said, as he had served his Clerkship with Mr. Fitch he was suspected and represented as a Tory, and this Reputation would be his ruin, if it could not [be] corrected, for nobody would employ him at the Bar. If I would only give him, the slightest Letters to any of my Friends, it would give him the Appearance of having my Confidence, and would assist him in acquiring what he truly deserved the Character of a Whigg.

To get rid of his importunity, I took my Penn, and wrote a very few Lines to my Wife and about an equal Number to General James Warren.

Actually, Adams also included Hichborn on a short list of young Massachusetts men he hoped Warren could find appointments for.

One might think that Adams, facing a young man whom he barely knew and whose political loyalty was so debatable, would send him off with some innocuous correspondence. Adams had just written to his wife and his friend Warren, so he didn’t really have to say more to them. But maybe that was the trouble—trying to think of stuff he hadn’t already written.

In any event, in his “very few Lines” for Hichborn to carry, Adams managed to say impolitic things about John Dickinson, Charles Lee, and most of his colleagues in the Continental Congress, and also to advocate for radical measures that he and his Massachusetts colleagues were still publicly disavowing.

Adams wasn’t the only delegate to entrust Hichborn with letters. Benjamin Harrison (shown above in a miniature owned by the Virginia Historical Society) also gave him a letter to carry to Massachusetts, in his case to his fellow Virginian Gen. George Washington.

TOMORROW: And how did Hichborn carry out that task?

John Adams and “the Oddity of a great Man”

Abigail Adams wasn’t the only person reporting to her husband John about public reaction in Massachusetts to the arrival of Gen. George Washington and Gen. Charles Lee in early July 1775.

Legislative leader James Warren was another Adams confidant. On 7 July he wrote:

General Lee I have seen but a Minute. He appears to me a Genius in his way. He had the Marks about him of haveing been in the Trenches. I heartily rejoice at the Appointment of these two Generals, and I dare say it will give you pleasure to hear that every Body seems to be satisfied with it. I have not heard a single word Uttered against it. This is more than I Expected with regard to the second, since their Arrival everything goes well in the Army.

Lee’s appointment had been more controversial in Philadelphia than Washington’s. Though he had become well known as a pamphleteer for the American colonial cause and as a military expert, he was still widely considered an Englishman and therefore a curious choice to be third-in-command of the Continental Army. And Lee’s eccentric personal style didn’t help.

On 24 July, Adams sat down to write back to Warren. He had written just the previous day, but a young man was pressing him to write some more. So he wrote a bunch more, including this about Gen. Lee:

You observe in your Letter the Oddity of a great Man—He is a queer Creature—But you must love his Dogs if you love him, and forgive a Thousand Whims for the Sake of the Soldier and the Scholar.

Warren hadn’t actually said much about Lee’s “Oddity,” but it’s possible that by then Adams had received Abigail’s letter of the 16th and had her comments about his lack of outward “Elegance” on his mind. (According to the editors of the Adams Papers, William Tudor’s 19 July letter from Cambridge had reached Adams four days later, so it was possible for mail to move that quickly.)

In any event, Adams wrote about Lee with admiration but what some might consider an impolite frankness. But that’s no surprise since he’d started his message to Warren:

In Confidence,—I am determined to write freely to you this Time.—A certain great Fortune and piddling Genius whose Fame has been trumpeted so loudly, has given a silly Cast to our whole Doings…

That comment was about John Dickinson, a wealthy and well regarded Pennsylvania delegate resisting more radical measures.

That same day, Adams also sent a reply to Abigail, which managed to remain polite all the way until the postscript:

I wish I had given you a compleat History from the Beginning to the End of the Journey, of the Behaviour of my Compatriots.—No Mortal Tale could equal it.—I will tell you in Future, but you shall keep it secret.—The Fidgets, the Whims, the Caprice, the Vanity, the Superstition, the Irritability of some of us, is enough to—

He didn’t need to finish that sentence for her.

And then John Adams gave those two letters to Benjamin Hichborn, a young lawyer, to carry back home to Massachusetts.

TOMORROW: And how did that go?

“He was an awful sight as I ever saw.”

Here are some more reports of gun accidents from the Revolutionary War. I found these through the advanced research method of searching Google Books for the words “accidental,” “shot,” and “Revolutionary.” I’m sure there are more incidents to be found.

From the diary of Capt. Thomas Rodney, spending 4 Jan 1777 in Pluckemin, New Jersey:

Here Sergeant McKnatt was accidentally shot through the arm by one of our own people, who fired off his musket to light a fire and as there was not one surgeon in the whole army I was forced to dress it myself and the next day got one of the prisoners to do it.

Asa Fitch wrote home to his father from Ticonderoga on 23 June 1777:

There was one man shot himself accidentally as he stood talking with his brother, and had the gun before him leaning his chin on it, she accidentally went off, and the ball, together with the whole charge of powder went into his head and tore it all to bits. He was an awful sight as I ever saw.

Here’s the 23 Aug 1779 entry from the journals of Lt. Col. Henry Dearborn:

a Soldier very accidentally discharg’d a musket charged with a ball & several buckshot, 3 of which unfortunately struck Capt. Kimbal of Colo. Cilleys Regt. Who was standing at some distance in a tent with several other officers, in such a manner that he expired within 10 or 15 minutes. . . . one of the shot wounded a soldier in the leg who was setting at some distance from the tent Capt. Kimball was in.

Away from the front, there’s the 9 Jan 1779 incident involving Benjamin Andrews, Benjamin Hichborn, and a pair of pistols, told back here.

Out on the early American frontier, more men used guns for their subsistence, but that didn’t mean they avoided firearms accidents. One of the earliest memories of Davy Crockett (1786-1836) was the aftermath of his uncle Joseph Hawkins shooting a neighbor while hunting. George Hunter wounded himself in the hand and face during an expedition for President Thomas Jefferson on 22 Nov 1804. Meriwether Lewis was shot while hunting during a similar expedition on 11 Aug 1806, as narrated here. Three years later, of course, Lewis apparently shot himself to death.

Benjamin Andrews’s “Death by Misfortune”

Last week I mentioned Benjamin Andrews, who helped investigate the Boston Massacre. I can’t resist that opening to share one of Revolutionary Boston’s juiciest bits of gossip, the circumstances of Andrews’s sudden death on 9 Jan 1779, at the age of thirty-eight.

This anecdote comes to us from his sister’s son, Samuel Breck:

Benjamin Andrews, Esq.,...was well educated, active, useful, beloved; in short, a very distinguished citizen. Mr. Benjamin Hichborn, his friend, and a lawyer subsequently of eminence, was with my uncle assisting him to prepare for a journey that was to commence the next day.

While Mr. Andrews was writing, Hichborn was trying a pair of pistols and putting them in order for the journey. He had snapped them against the chimney-back, he said, and, supposing them to be unloaded, was in the act of handing one of them to my uncle when it went off, hit him with the wad in the temple and killed him on the spot.

The Boston Gazette account of Andrews’s death was:

Sitting in his Parlour with Mrs. Andrews and aFriend—He had been comparing an elegant Pair of Pistols which he had bought the preceding Day with a Pair which he had had some Time before, and which were supposed to be unloaded—upon one of these Mr. Andrews observed some Rust in a Place left for the Engraver to mark the Owner’s Name upon—his friend undertook to rub it off—having accomplished it he was returning the Pistol to Mr. Andrews, who was sitting in a Chair at the Table by the Fireside—

Unhappily as he took it from his Friend he (Mr. Andrews) grasp’d it in such a Manner as brought his Thumb upon the Trigger, (which happened to have no Guard) and it instantly discharged its Contents into his Head near his Temple, and he expired in less than Half an Hour—

It is remarkable that, a few Minutes before, he had taken the Screw Pins from both these Pistols, and one of them almost to Pieces, and had handled them without any Caution, and in every Direction against his own Body, and those who were in the Room with him.

This report ended with the detail that a “Jury of Inquest” had already met and determined that Andrews “came to his Death by Misfortune.” Hichborn was already a prominent lawyer—he’d delivered the town’s Massacre oration in 1777—and the Gazette kept his name out of the news.

But locals must have started gossiping about Hichborn’s actions again in March 1780. Here’s Samuel Breck with the rest of the story:

My aunt was a fine-looking, well-bred woman, fond of dress and fashionable dissipation. She had five or six children and an indulgent husband. Suddenly she saw herself a widow overwhelmed with consternation and dismay.

This affair has always appeared mysterious, and made a great noise at the time; and, very strange as it may seem, Hichborn proposed as a remedy and atonement the only measure that could be adduced as a motive for the commission of murder. “I have been guilty,” said he, “of this unintentional manslaughter; Mr. Andrews was my friend; by my instrumentality his children are left fatherless. I will be a parent and protector to them; the best amends I can make is to marry the widow.”

He did marry her, and during a long life he was to her and her children a kind and generous friend, father and husband.

The marriage took place on 2 Mar 1780. Hichborn killed Andrews, married Andrews’s widow, and was admired for it. That would indeed make “a great noise.”

(The picture above shows the Pierce-Hichborn House, now part of the Paul Revere House operation. At the time of this story, it was the home of Benjamin Hichborn’s brother Nathaniel. They were both cousins of Revere on his mother’s side.)