“Permission to pass to & repass from Noddle’s Island”

As discussed yesterday, Henry Howell Williams’s oversaw what was probably the biggest farming operation in Boston harbor in 1775. He was renting Noddle’s Island to raise sheep, cattle, and horses and to grow forage and vegetables.

According to Mellen Chamberlain’s Documentary History of Chelsea, Williams’s “most profitable business had been supplying the King’s troops rendezvoused at Boston, in time of war, and merchant vessels, in time of peace, with fresh provisions from his fields and stock yards.”

That tie to the royal establishment and imperial trade was probably why Williams had signed a complimentary address to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson on his departure for London in June 1774, which quickly became a litmus test for Loyalism.

On the other hand, Williams also had strong ties to the other side of the political divide. He was the son of Roxbury farmer Joseph Williams, and I found hints that that family helped to smuggle cannon out of army-occupied Boston in 1774–75. Williams’s sisters married into Patriot families like the Mays, Heaths, and Daweses. His brother Samuel had moved out to Warwick but then came back east as a Provincial Congress delegate and militia captain.

On 21 April, Williams was in Boston and ran into William Burbeck, who held the Massachusetts government post of storekeeper at Castle William. A year later Burbeck described their interaction:

after some Conoversation with him setting forth my Concern how I should git out of town, Expecting every minute that I should be sent for; to go Down to that Castle—

he told me that he would Carry me over to Noddles Island if I would Resque it that he would Do the same for ye good of his Country; And am Sure that if we had been taken Crossing of water must have been confind. to this Day, or otherway more severly punished. . . . And that the Very next morning after; A party of men & Boat was sent after me And Serchd. my house & Shop to find me—

that after we got to ye Island Mr. Williams ordered one of his men to Carry me over to Chelsea by which means I am now in Cambridge—And that a few Days after I got into Cambridge sent to Mr. Williams Desiring him to Send my millitary Books & plans as also all my instruments which ye Army stood in great Need of. And Could not Do without.

Days after arriving behind provincial lines, Burbeck became the second-in-command of the Massachusetts artillery regiment.

However much Williams wanted to support the Patriot cause, the British military still controlled Boston harbor. So he also made a deal with the royal authorities. On 1 May, Capt. Robert Donkin, one of Gen. Thomas Gage’s aides, issued Williams a pass, shown above courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Head Qrs. Boston 1st. May 1775

The Bearer, Mr. Williams, has the Commander in Chief’s permission to pass to & repass from Noddle’s Island to this place as often as he has occasion; he having given security to carry no people from hence, or bring any thing off the Island without leave from His Excelly or the Admiral—

Rt. Donkin
Aide Camp

NB. his own Servants row him.

Adm. Samuel Graves approved this pass as well. After all, the Royal Navy had at least one storehouse on Noddle’s Island, including a cooper’s shop.

“Townspeople took four brass cannon”

Here are all the entries from Thomas Newell’s 1774–74 diary that pertain to artillery and thus show the coming of war.

• 4 June 1773: “King’s birthday; general training; the grandest appearance ever known in these parts.”

John Rowe wrote about this same militia exhibition in honor of the king:

Colo. [John] Hancock & Company of Cadets, Major [Adino] Paddock & Artillery, Colo. [John] Erving & the Regiment, Colo. [David] Phipps & Company all made their appearance in the Common — Such a Quantity or Rather Multitude of People as Spectators I never saw before, they behaved very well.

Phips commanded the horse guards.

• 1 July: “Major Paddock’s son drowned at Cambridge River.”

Adino Paddock was a coachmaker as well as commander of Boston’s militia artillery company. His son John was a student in Harvard College’s class of 1776, carrying the family’s hopes to secure their rise into gentility, when he died at age seventeen.

• 15 September: “General training.”
• 22 September: “General training for the last time this year.”
• 12 November: “Workmen began to set another row of elms in the common.”

Paddock instigated the planting of trees along Tremont Street, opposite his coachyard. Years after he had left Boston as a Loyalist, those would still be called the “Paddock elms.”

Gen. Thomas Gage arrived as the new royal governor in May 1774, and the following summer was punctuated by the arrival of more army units, including companies of Royal Artillery:

• 2 July: “A.M. Artillery from Castle William landed, with eight brass cannon, and encamped in the common. 258 sheep given for the relief of this town by the town of Windham, in Connecticut. (I cut my hair off.)”
• 6 August: ”The Scarboro. man-of-war arrived, nine weeks from England; P.M. three transports from Halifax, with the 59th Regiment on board, and company of artillery, and brass cannon, eight days out.”
• 7 August: “A.M. three transports from New York with the Royal Regiment of Welsh Fusileers and detachment of Royal Artillery, and a quantity of ordnance stores, &c.”
• 8 August: “Company of artillery landed; encamped in common.”

Soon after Gage put the Massachusetts Government Act into effect, he had his soldiers remove militia gunpowder from the storehouse in Charlestown. That set off a big reaction in the countryside:

• 1 September: “This morning, half after four, about 260 troops embarked on board thirteen boats at the Long Wharf, and proceeded up Mystic River to Temple Farm, where they landed; went to the powder-house on Quarry Hill, in Charlestown bounds, from whence they have taken 250 half-barrels of gunpowder, the whole store there, and carried it to the castle. A detachment from this corps went to Cambridge and brought off two field-pieces.”
• 2 September: “From these several hostile appearances, the county of Middlesex took the alarm, and on last evening began to collect in large bodies, with their arms, provisions, and ammunitions, &c. This morning some thousands of them advanced to Cambridge, armed only with sticks. The committee of Cambridge sent express to Charlestown, who communicated the intelligence to Boston, and their respective committee proceeded to Cambridge without delay. Thomas Oliver, S[amuel]. Danforth, J[oseph]. Lee, made declaration and resignation of a seat in the new constituted council, which satisfied the body. At sunset, they began to return home. At dark, rain and thundered very hard.”

That “Powder Alarm” uprising prompted Gen. Gage and Adm. Samuel Graves to strengthen Boston’s military defenses against attacks from land.

• 3 September: “Four large field-pieces were dragged from the common by the soldiery and placed at the only entrance into this town by land. The Lively frigate, of twenty guns, came to her mooring in the ferry-way between Boston and Charlestown.”
• 5 September: “Artillery training.”
• 15 September: “Last night all the cannon in the North Battery were spiked up: it is said to be done by about one hundred men (who came in boats) from the man-of war in this harbor.”
• 17 September: “Last night, townspeople took four brass cannon from the gun-house near very near the common.”

Newell conflated two events in that last entry. Maj. Paddock’s militia artillery had two gunhouses, each containing one pair of small cannon. As other sources show, persons unknown spirited away the two cannon in the old gunhouse on the night of 14–15 September. When Royal Artillery officers opened the new gunhouse on 17 September, they discovered its two cannon were gone, too.

Newell’s diary entry shows that many Bostonians knew about those events even though they were never reported in the newspapers or in Gen. Gage’s letters to the government in London.

• 20 September: “Some cannon removed (by the man-of war’s men) from the mill-pond.”

People had tried to smuggle these guns up the Charles River, but their boat got hung up on the dam that formed the Mill Pond and they had to abandon it.

• 3 October: “Artillery training for the last time this year.”

Since the train’s weapons had vanished, and most of the company’s men were refusing to serve under Maj. Paddock, there probably wasn’t a lot of artillery training accomplished that day.

• 22 October: “This morning, about 7 o’clock, after three days’ illness, Mr. William Molineaux died, in the fifty-eighth year of his age. (A true son of liberty and of America.) It may with truth be said of this friend, that he died a martyr to the interest of America. His watchfulness, labors, distresses, and exertions to promote the general interest, produced an inflammation in his bowels, of which he died. ‘Oh, save my country, Heaven,’ he said, and died.”

Molineux was involved in many acts of resistance, and among the last was buying four cannon from Duncan Ingraham, Jr., in September or October 1774. Those guns were sent out to four rural towns to be equipped for use by spring. 

• 23 October: “This day four transports arrived here from New York, with a company royal artillery, a large quantity of ordnance stores for Castle William, three companies of the Royal Regiment of Ireland, or the 18th Regiment, and the 47th Regiment on board.”

This one document thus shows us both sides of the political conflict preparing for military action—with cannon.

Ultimately those efforts led to the British army’s march to Concord and to war. I’ll tell that story at the Scituate Historical Society this week.

Thursday, 15 May, 7–8:30 P.M.
Secrets on the Road to Concord
G.A.R. Hall, 353 Country Way, Scituate

Admission is $15, or $10 for society members. Reservations are recommended, but payment will be accepted at the door. I look forward to meeting folks there.

TOMORROW: Thomas Newell and the tea.

“What says the psalm-singer and Johnny Dupe”?

I’ve been working through my thoughts on a page from the 8 May 1770 Nova Scotia Chronicle, lampooning the Boston Whigs in much the same way that John Mein’s Boston Chronicle had done the preceding October.

Mein got assailed on the street and then chased out of Boston for that, so he couldn’t have written similar items in the Boston Chronicle in early 1770 or this article published in Halifax.

The obvious candidate for carrying on Mein’s work in 1770 is his printing partner, John Fleeming.

Of course, Fleeming might have helped to compose the original character profiles in October 1769. But I sense a little more sloppiness in May 1770: references to characters never introduced, aliases too similar to each other.

One possible pointer to Fleeming is how in October 1769 the Boston Chronicle dubbed Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., the “Lean Apothecary,” and Mein described him privately as:

One of the greatest miscreants that walks on the face of the Earth who has cheated & back bitten every Person with whom he ever had the least Connection—Father Mother & friend & more than once foxed his Wife &c &c &c.

In contrast, I can’t identify any of the characters in the May 1770 article as Church.

Three months after the Nova Scotia Chronicle publication, John Fleeming married Dr. Church’s sister Alice. Might the printer have held off on lambasting Dr. Church for the sake of his future wife?

Fleeming and Church joined the same new Freemason’s lodge in 1772. They were on friendly terms in 1775, corresponding across the siege lines (which was too friendly for the Patriot authorities). And in the letter that Church introduced as evidence at his inquiry before the Massachusetts General Court, Fleeming wrote:

What says the psalm-singer and Johnny Dupe to fighting British Troops now?

Those terms referred to Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and “John(ny) Dupe” appeared in both the October 1769 and May 1770 character profiles. While not proof that Fleeming created the Nova Scotia Chronicle item, that certainly points in his direction.

Back in the spring of 1770, Fleeming was under threat from the crowd and from Mein’s creditors, represented in Boston by Hancock. In June, the printer shut down the Boston Chronicle and took refuge in Castle William.

“Admiral Renegado, came to anchor in Port Despair”

At the start of February 1770, the big news in Boston was the non-importation movement, and particularly the weekly demonstrations by schoolboys in support of it.

That is to say, every Thursday when the schools let out early, gangs of boys would converge on the shop of someone who hadn’t signed the non-importation agreement, set up a picket line, and shout insults at that shopkeeper and his or her customers. If the kids were feeling feisty, they’d throw snowballs and mud as well.

The Boston Chronicle, which opposed the movement, responded on 1 February with a fictional advertisement:

Intended speedily to be acted,
By a Company of young Tragedians,
A TRAGEDY
(Not acted here these seventy-eight years,)
called the
W I T C H E S,
With many Alterations and Improvements.

(The full item is quoted back here.)

That slammed the Whigs’ boycott, tweaked the town’s ban on theater, and poked at the sore spot of the Salem witchcraft trials all in one. It was masterful trolling before that term was invented.

Four days later, the Boston Chronicle fictionalized another common newspaper item with this start:

S H I P   N E W S.
January 25, 1770.
Last Tuesday Evening the “Well disposed” [i.e., Whiggish] fleet, under the command of ADMIRAL RENEGADO, came to anchor in Port Despair, having left their stations that morning in great confusion on the appearance of an English VICE ADMIRAL, with the British STANDARD flying at the mast head.

This was commentary on how William Molineux led a crowd to confront Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s two importer sons at his house—an action that even Josiah Quincy, Jr., had warned could be treated as treason—and how that action had fizzled out.

Exactly one month after the second article, the Boston Massacre occurred. To defuse tensions in the streets, Hutchinson decided to have the 29th and then the 14th Regiments moved to Castle William.

As a result, in the following months there was no governmental force in the streets of Boston strong enough to deter the Whigs and their supporters. Crowds tarred and feathered Customs officer Owen Richards in May and threatened Scottish merchant Patrick McMaster with the same punishment in June.

In that atmosphere, I suspect, the printing staff of the Boston Chronicle didn’t feel safe publishing another item lampooning and lambasting the local Whigs. Somebody in that shop—or perhaps more than one somebody—composed a long article that built on three items the paper had already run:

• Caricatures of prominent Whigs like “Tommy Trifle” and “Johnny Dupe” from October 1769’s “Outlines of the characters of…the Well-Disposed.”
• The fake theatrical announcement.
• The name “Admiral Renegado.”

Instead of publishing that piece in their own newspaper, however, they sent it to Anthony Henry in Halifax. Obviously, disguised gossip about Bostonians had less meaning for readers in Nova Scotia. But after he ran the piece on 8 May, it could filter back to its targets without sparking a riot. Not that any Boston printer dared to reprint it.

The October 1769 “Outlines of the characters of…the Well-Disposed” is always attributed to John Mein, publisher of the Boston Chronicle. He left a written key confirming the targets, so he was obviously involved in the production. But someone at the Boston Chronicle must have carried on in the same mode after Mein was driven away the next month. That person most likely wrote the piece published in Halifax.

TOMORROW: The most likely author.

“The infamous murderer Richardson, resided last week at Stoneham”

As of the summer of 1774, Ebenezer Richardson was back in Massachusetts.

We know that from two January 1775 petitions to Lord Dartmouth, one from Richardson and the other from George Wilmot.

Wilmot was Richardson’s co-defendant for murder back in April 1770. A sailor on the Customs ship Liberty, he went into Richardson’s house on 22 February to help defend it from a young mob. However, the gun he held was defective and therefore couldn’t have fired the shot that killed Christopher Seider. The jury acquitted him.

But Wilmot was still an outcast. Or, as his petition said:

And after your Lordships petitioner Stood a fare tryal for his Life and was discharged by there own Laws, they would not Lett him live Quaiett in boston but drove him from his house and famely.

And he was forced to Go to the Castell under the protection of the forteenth Rigment Quarterd thear—Where he remaind Nine Months before he dared Venter abroad—and since that tyme he Could Get No Imployment from them to suporte himself and famely.

Wilmot’s name didn’t appear in the press like Richardson’s, but he may still have been chased around.

Late in the summer of 1774, Wilmot wrote, he and Richardson went “to Salam to Petition Gineral [Thomas] Gagge—for a passeg to Great britton.” According to Richardson, the governor advised them “to Go to England, and procured a passage for them in the Scooner St: Larance.”

That was the Royal Navy warship St. Lawrence, discussed back here. It wouldn’t sail for London until November, so Richardson and Wilmot had to lay low for several more weeks.

On 3 Sept 1774, Wilmot stated, he and Richardson were both “at the house of Mr. Daniel Brayant at Stonham.” Daniel Bryant (1731–1779) had married Ebenezer’s younger sister Kezia (1732–1784). (Yes, Ebenezer also had a wife and a daughter named Kezia.)

Back on 26 Mar 1772, a couple of weeks after Richardson had received his royal pardon, the Massachusetts Spy reported:

We are well informed, that the infamous murderer Richardson, resided last week at Stoneham, at his sister-in-law’s. It is said he intends to come and tarry in Boston very shortly.

I don’t know if that’s a garbled reference to Richardson’s sister Kezia Bryant, or if one of Richardson’s brothers had also married and settled in Stoneham. Either way, people knew the man had relatives north of Boston, and the emphasized word “tarry” looks like a threat of tar and feathers.

Daniel Bryant was a respected member of his community. During the Battle of Lexington and Concord, he was sergeant of one of Stoneham’s militia companies. Soon he would rise to the rank of lieutenant. But was that local standing enough to protect his infamous brother-in-law?

TOMORROW: Yet unhanged.

“Another Mob to search for Ebenezer Richardson”

Ebenezer Richardson reportedly went into hiding in Philadephia in mid-October 1773, just as the tea crisis heated up.

For the next several weeks the biggest American ports were focused on the East India Company tea.

Richardson’s employers and protectors, the Customs Commissioners, took shelter at Castle William in Boston harbor, and probably others in the department were also lying low.

On 25 Jan 1774, a Boston mob attacked another Customs officer, John Malcom. He had threatened a boy and then clubbed the small shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes.

When local authorities tried to convince the crowd to release Malcom, men answered “that in case they let him go they might expect a like satisfaction as they had received in the cases of Richardson and the soldiers, and the other friends of government.” People resented Richardson’s royal pardon and didn’t want a repeat, just as they didn’t like the acquittals after the Boston Massacre.

The attack on John Malcom continued and became one of the most vicious and infamous of the pre-war years.

Two days later, someone reported seeing Richardson himself in Boston. Richard Draper’s 28 January Boston News-Letter said:

It having been reported that the noted Ebenezer Richardson, was seen in Town, a Number of People were in Pursuit of him last Evening, but could not find him.

That same day, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote to the Secretary of State, Lord Dartmouth, about the attack on Malcom and added:

there was an Attempt made to raise another Mob to search for Ebenezer Richardson, lately found guilty for Murder, but Judgment being suspended, His Majesty’s Pardon was applied for & obtained. He is now in some very inferior Employment in the Service of the Customs in Pensilvania, and it is thought a Report of his being in Town was spread for the sake of raising a Mob. Some of the more considerate People appeared & opposed the Leaders in the beginning of the Affair and put a Stop to it.

Hutchinson obviously believed Richardson was still in Philadelphia.

Richardson’s own statement to Dartmouth in January 1775 was skimpy on dates and other specifics about his movements:

after your petitioner was dischargd the Commissioners of the Customs Perocured for your Petitioner a place in Pennaslavania but the peopel of boston sent after and [???] the mob in Pennaslavania so that your petitioner could not shew his head there.

At some point in late 1773 or early 1774, Ebenezer Richardson did make his way back to Massachusetts.

TOMORROW: Meeting with the governor.

“Town Meeting. Nothing done but Harangue.”

As recounted yesterday, in May 1774 the Boston town meeting named merchant John Rowe to its committee to formulate responses to the Boston Port Bill.

Rowe attended committee meetings on 14 and 16 May. In his diary he noted who else came but nothing more.

In contrast, Rowe had a lot to say about what happened on 17 May:

This morning Genl. [Thomas] Gage Our New Governour landed from the Castle after having breakfasted with Admiral [John] Montague on board the Captain Man of Warr—he was saluted by the Castle & the Captain Man of Warr & Rec’d at the Long Wharf by Colo. [John] Hancock’s Company of Cadets.

The [militia] Regiment was under arms in King street. The Company of Grenadiers made a good appearance. Capt. [Adino] Paddock’s Company of Artillery & Colo. [David] Phipps Company of [horse] Guards were also under arms in King street.

He came to the Town House, had his Commission Read by the Secretary [Thomas Flucker] & took the Usual Oaths—from thence he was escorted to Faneuil Hall where a good Dinner by his Majesty’s Council. There were but very few Gentlemen of the Town asked to dine there.

That last remark was Rowe consoling himself that he wasn’t invited. But the next day Rowe got to write: “I waited on Genl. Gage this morning who Received me very Cordially.”

Rowe had already expressed hope that the new governor would soften the blow of the new law: “God Grant his Instructions be not severe as I think him to be a Very Good Man.”

Notably, on the same day Gage received Rowe, the merchant skipped the next session of the town meeting. “I was so Busy I could not attend.”

He never mentioned sitting down with the town committee again. We can see Rowe’s allegiance solidify by the end of the month.

• 24 May: “The Merchants met at the Town House on Business of Importance.”
• 30 May: “I paid the General a visit this morning. Town Meeting. Nothing done but Harangue.”
• 2 June: “I met the Gentlemen Merchts at the West Side of the Court House in Boston.”

TOMORROW: More merchants’ voices.

“The pistols were not heard by a single person”

Yesterday I left Edward Rand dead on Dorchester Point. The man who had just killed him in a duel, Charles Miller, Jr., could have been arrested for murder, and their seconds were also open to criminal charges.

After a bare-bones report on the duel, the 16 June Columbian Minerva of Dedham reported:

Miller passed thro this town to the southward, on the morning of the same day, in a coach, attended only by his second.

That second was Lewis Warrington (shown here), a nineteen-year-old midshipman in the U.S. Navy. Warrington was the natural son of Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, vicomte de Rochambeau, son and aide of the commander of French troops during the war.

Back in Dorchester, other people began to arrive on the scene. According to duel chronicler Lorenzo Sabine:

A gentleman who was at Fort Independence at the moment of the duel, and who, with three or four others, immediately after it jumped into a boat and rowed to the Point, informs me, that when he arrived Rand lay dead upon the beach, alone, with an empty pistol near him; that he was gayly dressed; and that he saw Mr. [Ebenezer] Withington of Dorchester (who, as coroner, came with a jury) take Miller’s acceptance of his challenge from his pocket.

This gentleman remarks, that a fishing-vessel was at anchor off the Point, and that some three or four hundred workmen, officers, and soldiers were at the Fort, but that, as far as he was ever able to ascertain, the reports of the pistols were not heard by a single person among them all.

Which should lead us to wonder why a handful of men had jumped into a rowboat immediately after Rand fell dead. I suspect no one wanted to testify to the authorities.

Massachusetts law allowed for those authorities to confiscate Rand’s body and turn it over to a surgeon for dissection. Instead, this profile of Charles P. Phelps, Rand’s business partner, cites his 1857 manuscript autobiography to state that he “was called upon to retrieve his partner’s body and helped to bury him in the Granary burying Ground late that night.”

Sabine (who’s best known for writing the first biographical guide to American Loyalists) went on:

Miller departed Massachusetts on the very day his antagonist fell. He was indicted for murder in the county of Norfolk, but was never tried or arrested. The indictment against him was missing from the files of the court as early as the year 1808 or 1809.

His home, ever after the deed, was in New York, where his life was secluded, though in the possession of an ample fortune. He lived a bachelor. He died in 1829, leaving an only brother.

The New York newspapers said this Charles Miller, formerly of Boston, died “suddenly” at age sixty.

The mercantile firm Charles Miller & Son continued to advertise in Boston newspapers for a couple of years after the younger man’s move. Eventually Charles Miller, Sr., retired to Quincy, where he had been born. In 1815 former President John Adams noted that foxglove (digitalis) had “lately wrought an almost miraculous cure upon our Neighbour Mr Charles Miller.” But the man died two years later, age seventy-five.

The Resources of the Royal Governor

Andrew Roberts’s Spectator essay about the Boston Tea Party, discussed yesterday, ends with the line:

One wonders what would have happened if only Governor [Thomas] Hutchinson had put an adequate armed guard on the ships.

This facile suggestion reflects popular depictions of Boston in 1773 showing redcoats pushing around civilians (e.g., Assassin’s Creed III, Deryn Lake’s Death at the Boston Tea Party, &c.). So it’s worth explaining the reality Hutchinson faced.

The only British soldiers in greater Boston in late 1773 were the 64th Regiment out on Castle Island. They were too far away to quell a disturbance and too few to patrol the whole port.

Hutchinson did order that regiment’s commander, Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie, to be ready to fire Castle William’s guns on any ship that tried to leave the harbor without unloading and being authorized to sail.

Hutchinson could also call on, though not command, the resources of the Royal Navy. Adm. John Montagu stationed warships in secondary channels of Boston harbor, also preventing the tea ships from leaving with their cargo. Thus, the governor did act rather strongly with military power.

What civilian authorities did Gov. Hutchinson have at his disposal? Not many. Inside Boston, the royal government had one arm of law enforcement: the Customs service. That department’s administrators took the same hard line Hutchinson did, refusing to bend the rule that required ships to be unloaded within three weeks.

But then top Customs officials lay low, staying at Castle William or their country homes. Lower-level officers carried out their job of watching the ships at the wharf but put up no resistance when scores of men showed up on 16 December and started destroying the tea. There were too few of them to stand up to the united populace.

Boston had no police force yet. It had about a dozen watchmen who walked around town at night, looking for trouble and fires. Those men were employed by the town, not the colonial government, and therefore answered to the selectmen rather than the governor.

Hutchinson could give orders to Stephen Greenleaf, the appointed royal sheriff of Suffolk County. However, in Massachusetts the sheriff wasn’t an active law enforcer with armed deputies, like in western movies. His job consisted mainly of delivering writs and warrants.

On 30 November the governor actually sent Sheriff Greenleaf to the Old South Meeting-House with a declaration that the gathering there was illegal and the people must disperse. Instead, the people there voted unanimously to go on with their meeting. And then they had that vote published. Clearly the populace wasn’t cowed by that expression of royal authority.

Then there were the magistrates—justices of the peace and of the quorum. Royal governors appointed these men, too, and theoretically commanded their loyalty. But many had commissions for life from past governors, and they tended to act, or not act, independent of Hutchinson.

One magistrate, Nathaniel Hatch, was in the Clarke family warehouse when a crowd attacked it on 3 November. Hatch tried to invoke the Riot Act. Hutchinson’s described what happened:

Mr. Hatch a gentleman of Dorchester & a Justice of peace commanded the peace & required them to disperse but they hooted at him & after a blow from one of them he was glad to retreat. It had no effect.

How did British law expect magistrates to enforce such orders? By calling on a larger group of people to help enforce the law against the lawbreakers, either in a “hue and cry” emergency or in the form of a mobilized militia. Obviously, this system didn’t work when most people supported the behavior in question.

In fact, there was a “guard on the ships” in the weeks leading up to the Tea Party. It was set up at the 28 November meeting of the people in Old South. Those patrols were composed of fervent volunteers; eventually Boston’s militia companies took turns supplying the men. That guard carried out the orders of the people, not the royal government. Its job was to ensure the tea wasn’t officially landed, and it succeeded.

Thus, the counterfactual that Roberts proposed is unrealistic. Under British and Massachusetts law the governor had no way to put armed guards on the tea ships strong enough to hold off an assault.

Another counterfactual that could actually have happened is:

One wonders what would have happened if only Governor Hutchinson had let the ships sail back to England with the tea.

Obviously the imperial government wouldn’t have been pleased with that outcome. Lord North might have responded with actions similar to what he and Parliament enacted in 1774: replacing Hutchinson with a stricter governor like Gen. Thomas Gage, rewriting the Massachusetts constitution, even sending in troops to patrol the port—but to protect free trade (i.e., the unloading of tea ships) rather than to stop all trade.

The next question would be how that situation would have played out differently in Boston and in the other North American colonies.

“Genl. Putnam & Some Troops came into Town”

In his diary, the merchant John Rowe noted that Sunday, 17 Mar 1776, was “St. Patricks Day” with “Pleasant Weather.”

He appears to have started his entry in the wee hours of the morning, perhaps before second sleep, then added to it later:

The Provincials are throwing up a Battery on Nook Hill on Dorchester Neck, which has occasioned much Firing this night.

This morning The Troops evacuated the Town & went on board the Transports at & about Long Wharff

they sailed & got most part of them into King Road

about Noon Genl. [Israel] Putnam & Some Troops came into Town to the Great Joy of the Inhabitants that Remained behind

I din’d at home with Mr. [Ralph] Inman Mrs. [Elizabeth Murray Campbell Smith] Inman, Mr. [Jonathan] Warner Mrs. Rowe & Jack Rowe—

I Spent the Evening at home with Major Chester Capt. Huntington Mr. [Samuel] Parker Mr. Warner Mrs. Rowe & Jack Rowe.

Once again, Rowe was distancing himself emotionally from “the Inhabitants that Remained behind,” though he undoubtedly was part of that group.

The Inmans had been separated by the siege lines, which strained their marriage. Back in July 1775 Ralph and the Rowes were talking about sailing to Britain together, and Elizabeth had responded with “pointed remarks.” This was the Inmans’ first dinner together in about a year, and it might have been tense.

Maj. John Chester (1749–1809, shown above) and Capt. Ebenezer Huntington (1754–1834) were Continental Army officers from Connecticut. They were also brothers-in-law, Chester having married Huntington’s sixteen-year-old sister Elizabeth in 1773.

Rowe’s diary gave no hint about how much pressure he felt to host officers from the conquering army, but he was making a quick transition to being friendly to the Revolutionary cause.

The first full day of independent Boston, 18 March:

Major Chester and Capt. Huntington Lodgd at Our house

The Town very quiet this night. Severall of my Friends came to see Mee from the Country

And the second:

Numbers of People belonging to Boston are dayly coming in—

Genl. [George] Washington & his Retinue were in Town yesterday I did not hear of it otherways Should have paid my Respects & waited on him—

This afternoon the King’s Troops burnt the Blockhouse at the Castle & the Continental Troops A throwing up a Battery on Forthill

Most all the Ships are gone from King Road into Nantasket Road—

TOMORROW: Royal Navy off the coast, Continental generals in the town.

“Another Vessel took the Tea on board”

Four ships carrying British East India Company tea set out for Boston in 1773, but only three made it.

The fourth was the William, captained by Joseph Loring, son of the man who built the Loring-Greenough House in Jamaica Plain.

As with the other three ships, tea was just part of the William’s cargo. It also carried hundreds of glass globes that Boston had ordered for its first street lamps.

On 2 December, Loring ran aground off the northern tip of Cape Cod near Provincetown. The next day, bad weather damaged the William, ensuring it wouldn’t complete its voyage. Most of the cargo, however, was still intact. Over the next couple of weeks, people took off as much as they could.

Jonathan Clarke salvaged most of the tea on behalf of his family firm, one of the original tea consignees. In his Journal of the American Revolution article, James R. Fichter calculated that Clarke managed to secure 54 of 59 chests of tea on the William.

Three or four containers wound up in other people’s hands. That situation set up a new tempest as Massachusetts Patriots tried to keep anyone from selling any surviving tea, even if it had bypassed the tea tax. Mary Beth Norton described those efforts in her book 1774. Peter Drummey covered a local angle in this talk for the Jamaica Plain Historical Society.

It took a while for Clarke to find a ship with a crew willing to carry his rescued tea chests into Boston harbor. We glimpse that situation in this 3 Jan 1774 report in the Boston Evening-Post:

Last Saturday [i.e., 1 January] a Vessel arrived here from Cape-Cod with Part of the Cargo of Capt. Loring’s Brig lately stranded there, among which are the Lamps for the Use of the Town.—Another Vessel took the Tea on board, which, we hear, is intended to be landed at the Castle.

Citing a document preserved in Britain’s India Records papers, Fichter explained what ultimately happened to those chests in his article “The Tea That Survived the Boston Tea Party.”

The 6 January Massachusetts Spy included a detail about the first ship’s arrival from the Cape that the Evening-Post left out:

Last Saturday arrived a vessel with the goods saved out of the Brig William, Capt. Loring, lately cast away at Cape-Cod; and the same evening was visited by a number of Indians, who made thorough search, but found no tea.

Again, this is evidence of Bostonians using “Indians” as a way to refer to locals enforcing the loyal tea boycott by force without acknowledging those men were locals enforcing the loyal tea boycott by force. I doubt these inspectors were disguised with paint and costumes. Instead, everyone knew they’d be better off keeping those men’s identities secret.

“Ebenezer Withington hath declared that he hath sold a Part of the Tea”

Yesterday I quoted the proceedings of the Dorchester town meeting as printed in the Massachusetts Spy on 13 Jan 1774.

They included:

• Ebenezer Withington’s public admission that he had picked up some tea left over from the Boston Tea Party and sold it, but was sorry.
• The town’s long declaration that selling tea like that was very wrong, for the most important political reasons, but Withington hadn’t meant any harm.

Now for some close reading of the details.

First, this one contemporaneous report is not evidence for locals finding Tea Party detritus along the Dorchester shore on the morning after.

Bostonians destroyed that tea on the evening of Thursday, 16 December. The next morning was Friday. Withington was clear he “found said Tea on Saturday, on going round upon the Marshes.” So it may have taken longer than a day for that half-chest to float across Boston harbor.

Not a big deal, but it does hint at how we like to compact details to make better stories. “The next morning” works better than “a day and a half later.”

Second, I wish I knew all the implications of the phrase “some Gentlemen belonging to the Castle,” the description in Withington’s statement of men who asked him about the tea he’d found. During the Tea Party, Castle William (shown above) was the home base of Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie’s 64th Regiment. It also served as a refuge for Boston’s top Customs officials and the tea consignees. And at least a few civilians worked on that island.

Whoever talked to Withington obviously knew that most of his “Neighbors” supported the strict tea boycott. What might they have said about a man salvaging tea for himself? Especially if they were friends of the royal government! No wonder Dorchester leaders expressed concern that people might insinuate “that the whole of the Tea said to have been destroyed was plundered.”

Finally, I was struck by the elevated language of these Dorchester documents. The statement Withington signed begins, “I found said Tea…” There’s nothing about tea before that in the printed proceedings, but the statement may have been written in response to a reference in the warrant for the town meeting, or in a letter from the selectmen. In any event, that “said” was the legal language of depositions.

Likewise, the four town resolutions that follow are in the most formal style. The first even uses “hath” instead of “has,” despite being about a poor man pulling a soggy chest of tea out of a swamp. Dorchester clerk Noah Clap clearly knew he was writing for public consumption and depicted his town at its most upright and proper.

TOMORROW: Inspectors.

Rewards Offered in 1798

As quoted yesterday, in July 1798 David Stoddard Greenough offered a “ONE DOLLAR REWARD” for the return of his teen-aged indentured servant Dick Welsh.

I wanted to know how that compared to rewards other newspaper advertisements announced for other people. So I looked up the word “reward” in Massachusetts newspapers from June and July 1798.

Here’s what advertisements offered for people of different sorts, sorted from smallest reward to largest:

• John Scofield, 19 years old, indented to John Neat, Boston: 1¢.
• Eber Potter, 15, indented to Eliel Gilbert, Greenfield: 1¢.
• Stephen Mulforde, 13, indented to Daniel Pepper, Boston: 1¢.
• Elisha Roberts, 16, indented to cordwainer Enoch Mower, Lynn: 1¢.
• Silas Nowell, boy, indented to printer Edmund M. Blunt, Newburyport: 5¢.
• Jacob Phelps, 16, indented to Jonathan Whitney: 6¢.
• Joseph Larrabee, 19, indented to John Newhall, Lynn: 20¢.
• John Sturgis, 16, from the sloop Nancy: $4.
• Walter Spooner Belcher, 18, indented to carpenter Marlborough Ripley: $5.
• John Holbrook, 22, and Ebenezer Hollis, 20, soldiers deserting from Castle Island: $8.
• Prince, 20, enslaved to Joseph Willcox, 2d, Killingworth, Connecticut: $10.
• Ebenezer Buckling, 19, indented to papermaker Hugh McLean, Milton: $20.
• John Barton, adult, sailor who had taken $20 advance pay from Capt. Stephen Curtis: $20.
• John Wilcot, adult, accused of stealing a horse from Caleb Easty: $50 for man and horse, $30 for horse and tackle alone.
• Frank, 25, sailor enslaved to Elijah Grinnelds of Virginia: $50.
• Joseph Haslett, adult, suspected forger: $100.

Greenough’s one-dollar reward for Dick Welsh was much more than some masters offered for their missing apprentices, but that probably reflected Greenough’s wish to be seen as a wealthy landed gentleman. He could afford to toss out a dollar where other men offered only a penny.

Nonetheless, Greenough’s message was probably the same as that from Neat, Gilbert, and the other masters at the top of the list above: this runaway is worthless, and I bought this newspaper notice only as a legality and to make life on the run more difficult for the lad.

For pocketbooks, horses, watches, and other property, people offered substantial rewards—sometimes for the goods alone, sometimes more for the goods and the thieves. Greenough himself advertised a $50 reward in May 1791 for thieves who had broken into his house and stolen a lot of gold and silver items. For people who could just walk away again, not so much.

It’s notable that masters were willing to pay far more for enslaved workers than apprentices. After all, those black men had taken many more years of free labor away with them. Not until the case of the slave-child Med in 1836 did Massachusetts law hold that people enslaved in other states became free if their owners brought them into the commonwealth.

One last observation: Ebenezer Buckling must have learned a lot of the valuable trade of papermaking to be worth $20.

“Those that are concerned in this Pageantry make a Party-Affair thereof”

The 8 Nov 1764 Boston News-Letter included this commentary on how the town had come to celebrate the 5th of November:

Monday last being the Anniversary of the Commemoration of the Preservation of the British Nation from the Popish Plot, the Guns at Castle William and at the Batteries in Town were fired at One o’Clock.

It was formerly a Custom on these Annniversaries for the lower Class of the People to celebrate the Evening in a Manner peculiar to themselves, by having carved Images erected on Stages, representing the Pope, his Attendant &c. and there were generally carried thro’ the Streets by Negroes and other Servants, that the Minds of the Vulgar might be impress’d with a sense of their Deliverance from Popery, and Money was generally given to regale themselves in the Evening when they burnt the Images.——

But of late those that are concerned in this Pageantry make a Party-Affair thereof, and instead of celebrating the Evening agreeably, the Champions at both Ends of the Town prepare to engage each other in Battle, under the Denomination of South End & North End.— . . .

It should be noted that these Parties do no subsist much as any other Time.

This article was probably written to put Boston in the best possible light for readers, both locally and in other towns. It may therefore not be correct in all its implications.

First, the custom of moving around effigies of the Pope, Devil, and others wasn’t peculiar to Boston. Most New England ports and many British towns observed Pope Night the same way (though they might have different names for the holidays). There were giant effigies, often on wagons; appeals for money; and a bonfire after dark.

The dismissal of the celebrants as “the lower Class of the People,” “Negroes and other Servants” (probably meaning apprentices), and “the Vulgar” disguised how broadly the population participated in Pope Night. Even if genteel men didn’t join the crowds, their treats funded the activity. Women and girls watched and might have helped the preparations.

Perhaps the biggest question is whether the North End–South End divide really did disappear on most other occasions, as the newspaper claimed. We know that there were separate North End and South End Caucuses in town politics in the early 1770s, though they tried to work together. According to Henry Adams, a version of that rivalry (turned into a fight between the Boston Latin School students and every other boy) persisted until the mid-1800s.

In one important respect, the New-Letter report seems accurate: only in Boston did the Pope Night celebrants divide into neighborhood gangs and end the night with a head-bashing rumble. Joshua Coffin’s detailed 1835 account of the event in Newburyport, for instance, mentioned nothing of the sort. That town’s young men and boys all worked together.

The News-Letter implied that this neighborhood brawling was a recent development, added on top of the genral rowdiness of procession and pageantry. But how recent? The intra-town fight was reported in a newspaper as early as 1745, or before at least some of the brawlers of 1764 were born.

The 1764 celebration was actually fatal—but was that the fault of the gangs?

TOMORROW: The first death.

What Happened to the Boston Massacre Defendants?

After being acquitted of murder at the Boston Massacre on 5 Dec 1770, Cpl. William Wemys and five private soldiers “went their Way thro’ the Streets,” the Boston Gazette reported. They probably boarded a boat to Castle William, where the 14th Regiment of Foot was stationed.

Nine days later, fellow defendants Edward Montgomery and Mathew Kilroy joined them, each with one hand bandaged after branding.

Lt. Col. William Dalrymple of the 14th had already decided how he would send those men back to the 29th Regiment, which had been moved to New Jersey. The commander wrote:

A bad disposition appearing in the Soldiers who were confined I shall send them round by sea, we have but too much reason to suspect their ententions to desert they are not at all to be depended on.

“I do not chuse to trust them any other way,” he added on 17 December. It would be great to know why Dalrymple was suspicious, but we don’t.

Until recently, the story of those eight British enlisted men stopped there. But Don Hagist has been doing thorough research on British troops during the War for Independence, culminating in the new book Noble Volunteers. Don found more information on some of those soldiers in the muster rolls and Chelsea pensioner records, which he generously let me publish here. I’ve added information on others over the years. So here’s what happened to all the defendants.

By May 1771, William Wemys was promoted to sergeant. He was still a sergeant when the company was stationed at Chatham, England, on 29 July 1775. His company’s muster rolls end there, so we lose track of him.

In the grenadier company, John Carroll and William Macauley were both made corporals. William Warren, despite being the tallest of the defendants, transferred out of the grenadiers to another company in the 29th.

As I related in this posting from 2006, Pvt. James Hartigan died on 4 Nov 1771 at the 29th’s next assignment in St. Augustine, Florida.

The regiment was in England when the war began, and army commanders decided to send it back to North America. That could have exposed Pvts. Montgomery and Kilroy to being captured by the American rebels, their hands still bearing the brand of the Massacre. On 22 Feb 1776 those two men appeared before a board of examiners for military pensions administered by Chelsea Hospital. Montgomery, age forty-one, was deemed “Worn Out,” and Kilroy, only twenty-eight, was found to have “a Lame Knee.” The board discharged both men from the army with pensions.

The rest of the 29th Regiment sailed to Canada, where different fates awaited different companies. Pvt. Warren and Pvt. Hugh White, the sentry, spent the American war at separate stations in Canada. White was finally discharged from the army on 10 Nov 1789, then aged forty-nine.

John Carroll, promoted to sergeant by February 1777, and Cpl. Macauley were still with the 29th’s grenadier company, which was assigned to Gen. John Burgoyne’s invasion force. Those two men might therefore have become part of the “Convention Army” of prisoners of war marched from Saratoga to Cambridge at the end of that year. But there’s no record of anyone in Massachusetts recognizing those two soldiers from the Massacre trial.

I discussed the evidence about Capt. Thomas Preston’s retirement here. He started to receive an annual £200 royal pension in 1772, and it continued until at least 1790. In the 1780s Preston was living in Dublin.

Of the defendants in the third trial, I profiled Hammond Green in this posting. He evacuated Boston in 1776 as a Customs employee, and his wife and children followed the next year. The royal government gave Green a Customs job at his new home of Halifax, and he was still working there in 1807.

Thomas Greenwood was working for the Customs service in 1770 but wasn’t listed among the employees who evacuated in 1776. I don’t know anything more solid about him.

Edward Manwaring retained the post of chief Customs officer on the Gaspé peninsula until 1785 when he was succeeded by his neighbor Felix O’Hara.

John Munro carried on his business as a notary “at his Office South Side of the Town House.” The 12 Jan 1775 issue of the Massachusetts Spy reported that he had died the previous Tuesday at the age of thirty-nine after a “tedious illness.” He was buried out of Christ Church on 13 January.

Capt. Preston at the Castle

The Boston Whigs don’t appear to have been surprised or terribly upset when Capt. Thomas Preston was acquitted of murder for the Boston Massacre in October 1770.

The 5 November Boston Gazette reported the not guilty verdict without comment.

Writing to John Wilkes on behalf of the Whigs, young merchant William Palfrey complained at length about how the jury had been seated and called the trial a “farce,” but he also said:

It must however be confessed that the confusion of that unhappy night was so great that the Witnesses both for the Crown & the prisoner differed materially in some parts of their testimony, and even in my own mind there still remains a doubt whether Capt Preston gave the orders to fire, as the two Witnesses who swore to that point, declared also that Capt Preston had on a Surtout Coat, which he proved was not the case.

Preston and his friends nonetheless still feared a lynching, or at least more harassment. On 31 October, the captain wrote to Gen. Thomas Gage in New York:

They have endeavourd to lodge an Appeal against me, in behalf of one of the relations of the deceasd, but it won’t lie, as there are not any near enough of kin now surviving, but their busy malice has found out another way to distress me, by sueing me for damages on acct. of the wounded, & if taken wou’d involve me in endless lawsuits…

The next day, Lt. Col. William Dalrymple added, “I understand there are fresh warrants out against him.” No lawsuit went forward, however.

To be safe, Capt. Preston had headed for Castle William, where the 14th Regiment could protect him against both mobs and constables.

We even have a glimpse of the captain’s departure for that island fort in a document that Christie’s auctioned in 2005. That was a handwritten copy of Preston’s “Case,” including a section not published in the London newspapers.

Bound with that plea for a pardon was a letter from the Rev. Richard Mosley dated 7 November. He recounted the captain’s trial and stated, “After Capn Preston was discharged…I escorted him to a boat” headed to Castle Island. Mosley believed the locals still wanted “Blood for Blood.”

Mosley was then the chaplain of H.M.S. Salisbury, which had arrived in Boston harbor earlier in October carrying Commodore James Gambier, recently appointed naval commander of the North American station. Some Whigs had speculated that the Crown had sent the warship to Boston to ensure the town remained peaceful during the Massacre trials.

As for the Preston/Mosley document, I don’t know where it is now. The selling price was over a quarter-million dollars, so it’s not in the Boston 1775 collection.

TOMORROW: Preston’s own view of his trial.

Dr. Charles Hall, Regimental Surgeon, and Cleft Lips

On 6 Sept 1770, 250 years ago today, the Boston News-Letter carried this news item:

A few weeks since the Operation for the Hare-Lip was performed to great Perfection on a young Man in Milton near Brush-Hill; and a Child in Boston has received as much Benefit from the Operation as the Case would admit of, by Mr. HALL Surgeon to the 14th Regiment.——

The Impression these unhappy Sights are apt to make on married Women, should be an Inducement to have this Defect in Nature rectified early in Life, as there are numerous Instances of the Mother’s Affection having impressed her Offspring with the like Deformity.

This event shows up in histories of plastic surgery as the earliest recorded American examples of operations to repair cleft lips. It’s striking how that medical breakthrough was still accompanied by an antique warning that the condition was contagious—pregnant women might see people with cleft lips and pass the trait on to their babies!

The surgeon who did these operations was Dr. Charles Hall. He had cared for the men of the 14th Regiment at least since 1758, when he was in his late twenties. In 1768, while the regiment was in Halifax, Hall treated one soldier for a compound fracture of the arm, sawing off “between two and three inches of the whole substance of the Tibia” but reporting that after about five months that limb was “but very little shorter than the other.” Eighteenth-century medicine was not for the faint-hearted.

Dr. Hall presumably came to Boston with the regiment in October 1768. He shows up in the town’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, in the deposition of leather-dresser Ephraim Fenno:

on Friday the ninth instant [i.e., of March], as I was going home by the hospital in the Common, I saw Doctor Hall, surgeon of the 14th regiment, looking out of his window, who said to me, dirty travelling, neighbour!

Yes, Sir, returned I.

He asked me what news in town?

I told him I heard nothing but what he knew already, that the talk was about the people that were murdered.

He then asked me if the people of the town were not easier?

I replied, I believed not, nor would be till all the soldiers had left the town.

He then asked me, if I heard whether the 14th regiment was going?

I answered, yes—for the people would not Be quiet till they were all gone.

He said, the town’s people had always used the soldiers ill, which occasioned this affair; and said, I wish, that instead of killing five or six, they had killed five hundred, damn me if I don’t.

Weeks after the Boston Massacre, the 14th Regiment moved to Castle William, and Dr. Hall probably went with them.

The Boston News-Letter article about Hall’s surgeries on cleft lips provided a little positive press for the army. The reference to “Brush-Hill” is notable; that was acting governor Thomas Hutchinson’s country estate.

The 14th Regiment remained at Castle William until 1772, then went to St. Vincent. In 1775, at the start of the Revolutionary War, its men fought at the Battle of Great Bridge in Virginia. The next year, the 14th was part of Gen. William Howe’s force at New York, and in 1777 the regiment returned to Britain to recruit more men.

Toward the end of the war, in 1782, the Crown sent the 14th Regiment to Jamaica. Dr. Charles Hall was promoted from the regiment to the army hospital on that island on Christmas Day. One year later he retired, going on half-pay. In 1795 the doctor wrote a letter from Nantwich, a small town in central England. Hall died in 1805 at the age of seventy-six.

(The picture above comes from a 1748 French manual of surgery, shown in Blaire O. Rogers’s “Treatment of Cleft Lip and Palate during The Revolutionary War,” downloadable as a P.D.F. file.)

“Nothing Remaining but the bare walls & floors”

As evening fell on Monday, 26 Aug 1765, crowds started to gather on the streets of Boston.

It was twelve days after the town’s first big protest against the Stamp Act and the provincial stamp agent, Andrew Oliver. Back then, some men had threatened to attack Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s house in the North End as well but had been dissuaded.

This time, the crowd first went to the home of Customs official Charles Paxton. His landlord convinced them not to harm that property, as I wrote back on the sestercentennial of that event. But the men did more damage at the houses of William Story, Benjamin Hallowell, and Ebenezer Richardson. Then they headed up to the Hutchinson mansion.

The lieutenant governor left several descriptions of the night which, since he was a royal official and historian, have always been included in the story of the Revolution. Here, from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts’s ongoing project to publish Hutchinson’s letters, is one of his most detailed descriptions of the event, in a letter to Richard Jackson in London dated 30 August:

In the evening whilst I was at supper & my children round me somebody ran in & said the mob were coming.

I directed my children to fly to a secure place & shut up my house as I had done before intending not to quit it but my eldest daughter [Sally] repented her leaving me & hastened back & protested she would not quit the house unless I did. I could not stand against this and withdrew with her to a neighbouring house where I had been but a few minutes before the hellish crew fell upon my house with the Rage of devils & in a moment with axes split down the door & entred.

My son [which one?] being in the great entry heard them cry damn him he is upstairs we’ll have him. Some ran immediately as high as the top of the house others filled the rooms below and cellars & others Remained without the house to be employed there.

Messages soon came one after another to the house where I was to inform me the mob were coming in pursuit of me and I was obliged to retire thro yards & gardens to a house more remote where I remained until 4 o’clock by which time one of the best finished houses in the province had nothing Remaining but the bare walls & floors.

Not contented with tearing off all the wainscot & hangings & splitting the doors to pieces they beat down the partition walls & altho that alone cost them near two hours they cut down the cupola or lanthern and they began to take the slate & boards from the roof & were prevented only by the approaching day light from a total demolition of the building. The garden fence was laid flat & all my trees &c broke down to the ground. Such ruins were never seen in America.

Besides my plate & family pictures houshold furniture of every kind my own my children and servants apparel they carried off about £900— sterling in money & emptied the house of every thing whatsoever except a part of the kitchen furniture not leaving a single book or paper in it & have scattered or destroyed all the manuscripts & other papers I had been collecting for 30 years together besides a great number of publick papers in my custody.

The evening being warm I had undressed me & slipt on a thin camlet surtout over my wastcoat, the next morning the weather being changed I had not cloaths enough in my possession to defend me from the cold & was obliged to borrow from my friends.

Many articles of cloathing & good part of my plate have since been picked up in different quarters of the town but the furniture in general was cut to pieces before it was thrown out of the house & most of the beds cut open & the feathers thrown out of the windows.

The next evening I intended with my children to Milton but meeting two or three small parties of the Ruffians who I suppose had concealed themselves in the country and my coachman hearing one of them say, there he is, my daughters were terrified & said they should never be safe and I was forced to shelter them that night at the castle.

Hutchinson detailed his losses in a petition to the Massachusetts General Court, to be read here. That document indicates that the mansion was also home to:

• Hutchinson’s sister-in-law, Grizzell Sanford
• sons Thomas (aged 25), Elisha (22), and William Sanford (13)
• daughters Sally (21) and Peggy (11)
• housekeeper Rebeckah Whitmore
• maid Susannah Townsend
• coachman Moses Vose
• “negro” Mark 
• Mrs. Walker, “a widow woman to whom I had allowed a living in the house several years”

For more detail about the house and its furnishings, see John W. Tyler’s analysis, “Such Ruins Were Never Seen in America.”