Identifying Benjamin Franklin’s “Cousin Williams”

A couple of weeks back I dissected the records of Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s 1774–75 visit to Britain, and in those postings I now believe I misidentified a man.

I think I erred because of an error in the notes to Quincy’s London journal as edited by Daniel R. Coquillette and Neil Longley York for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. And I think Coquillette and York erred because of an error by Josiah Quincy, Jr., himself.

So let’s go back to the start of the eighteenth century. When Benjamin Franklin was a boy, he was already an uncle. That was because little Ben was the youngest son of the second marriage of Josiah Franklin (1657–1745). That man had had seven children by his first wife, starting in 1678 before the family moved to Massachusetts.

Baby Ben was thus almost thirty years younger than his oldest half-sibling, and the earliest half-siblings married and had children as he was growing up. When Ben was six years old, his half-sister Anne (1687–1729) married William Harris, and when Ben was twelve that couple had a baby named Grace (1718–1790). Grace was thus a niece of young Benjamin Franklin.

In 1746 Grace Harris married a man named Jonathan Williams. At this point the situation becomes confusing because there were two prominent men named Jonathan Williams in mid-1700s Boston, and authors have amalgamated the records of their lives. As a result, at Founders Online the editors of the Franklin Papers and the Adams Papers disagreed on when the Jonathan Williams who married Grace Harris was born and died.

The Adams Papers at one point said that man “(d[ied]. 1788),” probably based on a report in the Massachusetts Centinel of 29 Mar 1788 that “Deacon Jonathan Williams” had just died at age 88. The records of the First Meetinghouse say “Jonathan Williams (Son of the late Deacon Williams)” was himself chosen a deacon in 1737, and he appeared in those papers through 1776. However, that deacon’s widow was named Sarah, according to her own death notice in the 16 Sept 1789 Centinel.

On 14 Apr 1790 the Centinel reported the death of “Mrs. GRACE WILLIAMS, aged 71, the consort of Jonathan Williams, Esq. of this town, merchant.” That woman’s given name indicates she was Franklin’s niece. Her husband survived her for a few years, moving to his son’s home at Mount Pleasant near Philadelphia. Then the 1 Oct 1796 Columbian Centinel reported the death there of “Jonathan Williams, Sr., formerly a reputable merchant in this town [Boston].”

Therefore, after going back and forth on the question many times, I’ve decided that the Franklin Papers were correct in saying that the Jonathan Williams connected to the Franklin family lived “1719–1796.” (The Adams Family Correspondence volumes adopted these dates, too.) I can’t find confirmation for the birth year but can say that, contrary to many profiles of him, this man wasn’t the son of the Deacon Jonathan Williams who appeared in Samuel Sewall’s diary.

The Jonathan Williams who married Grace Harris was a successful merchant and Boston town official, thus earning the suffix “Esq.” As a Whig, he served on some town committees and in November 1773 moderated of one of the extra-legal tea meetings in Old South.

Franklin used this merchant Jonathan Williams as his business agent in Boston, referring to him as “Cousin Williams” and “Loving Cousin” since our language doesn’t have a specific term for a niece’s husband. However, when he was feeling conspiracy-minded, Thomas Hutchinson described that Williams as “a Nephew of Doctor F———ds,” making the relationship closer than it really was.

Now here’s where it gets more confusing. Jonathan Williams, Esq., had a brother named John (d. 1791). In 1767 Franklin told his son William that this man was “brother to our cousin Williams of Boston.” John Williams went to work for the Customs service in the late 1760s, though he ended up feuding with his superiors and spent most of the 1770s trying to go over their heads in London.

And here’s where it gets even more confusing. Both brothers, Jonathan Williams and John Williams, had sons in the 1750s whom they named Jonathan. So did their sister Mary, who married Samuel Austin. Two of those three first cousins named Jonathan studied law under John Adams. A different two spent years in France during the Revolutionary War. And two died during the war.

So who met with Josiah Quincy in London in 1774?

TOMORROW: Sorting through the Jonathan Williamses (and John).

“Your Countrymen must fail in a contest with this great and powerfull people”

Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s mission to London in 1774 was a failure after its first week, and he didn’t know it.

Quincy met with the prime minister on 19 November. Four days later the secretary of state, Lord Dartmouth, told Thomas Hutchinson that Lord North had concluded Josiah Quincy, Jr., was “a bad, insidious man, designing to be artful without abilities to conceal his design.”

Hutchinson wrote back to Robert Auchmuty in Massachusetts, “If the remarks which Ld. North made upon the first visit are truly reported, there will probably be no second visit to cause a dispute.” You think?

Dartmouth went into his own meeting with Quincy the next day. It didn’t go any better. The earl had also heard “Quincy intended to go to Holland,” seeking military supplies or other support from one of Britain’s rivals, which provided another reason to mistrust the young attorney from Massachusetts.

In that same week John Williams set up one other meeting for Quincy with a royal official: Corbyn Morris, a long-time Commissioner of His Majesty’s Customs. On 22 November, Quincy recorded in his journal:

Dined with Corbin Morris Esqr., one of the Commissioners of the Customs, (supposed framer of the annual ministerial budget, being a choice friend of the Ministry) in company with one of the officers of the Treasury and Jonathan [sic] Williams Esqr. Mr. Morris was sensible, intelligent and very conversible. The who[le] conversation was on American affairs. He enter[ed] largely into the claims, the rights and the duty of Parliament. He spoke as might be expected. I observed a remarkable conformity of sentiments between him and Lord North, and an equally observable similarity of language. Mr. Morris expatiated largely upon the infinite resources of Commerce[,] wealth and power of the English nation. I heard him.

The following address to me was a little singular, not to say laughable—but I never smiled. “Mr. Quincy you are a man &c. (flummery). You have seen some of the ministry and have heard more of the disposition of [the] administration. You find that they have no inclination to injure, much less to oppress the Colonies. They have no wish, but that of seeing the Americans free and happy. You must be sensible of the right of Parliament to legislate for the Colonies, and of the power of the nation to enforce their laws. No power in Europe ever provoke[d] the resentment or bid defiance to the Powers of this Island, but they were made to repent of it. You must know your Countrymen must fail in a contest with this great and powerfull people. Now as you find how inclined Administration are to lenity and mildness, you should, you ought to write to your friends this intelligence, and endeavour to influence them to their duty. I don’t doubt your influence would be very great with them, and you would by this means be doing a lasting service to the Country.” ! ! !

Morris was apparently trying to give Quincy straight talk: the Crown government was constitutionally sound, beneficent, powerful, determined, and—for a limited time—willing to be lenient. But Quincy found the warning “laughable.” He even appears to have been suspicious that Lord North had said much the same thing.

Quincy might also have felt that Morris’s suggestion he use his “influence” to win over other Massachusetts Whigs might be followed by a financial reward for his “lasting service.” Quincy was already “upon my guard against the temptations and bribery of Administration.” One man in Massachusetts even told his sister that he ”loved money too much, to be trusted at a Court where every thing is bought and sold.” So he was determined not to bend his position.

Quincy remained in London, talking to local supporters of the American cause. But he had no more access to people who were actually in power. In early December Lord Chief Justice Mansfield told another official “Quincy had desired to see him, but he would not admit him.”

In early March 1775, Josiah Quincy, Jr., sailed home. By the time his ship arrived off the coast of Massachusetts, the province was at war and he was dying.

TOMORROW: More failure of communication.

“Nathaniel Barber, Esq; Captain of the North-Battery”

Nathaniel Barber (1728–1787) was an insurance broker with an office in the North End of Boston.

He became one of the more gung-ho Whigs in Boston, though he didn’t hold significant political offices or (to our knowledge) publish political essays.

Barber married Elizabeth Maxwell in 1750, and the couple started having children the next year with Nathaniel, Jr. Barber probably worked as an ordinary merchant before opening his insurance office by 1762.

On 24 Sept 1766, Barber was in the crowd watching the Customs officials try unsuccessfully to search the warehouse of Daniel Malcom for smuggled goods. Not coincidentally, Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson reported that “Malcolm is a principal underwriter” of Barber’s insurance firm.

In two depositions after that event, Barber insisted that he had no idea who told him “that Upon Mr Malcoms House being attacked the Old North Bell was to Ring” to assemble defenders, and denied having passed on that rumor to magistrate John Tudor.

Barber also claimed that “from the appearance and behavior of the People assembled who were worthy Gentlemen and good sort of People, there was not the least appearance of disorder, much less Opposition to any legal Authority.” (The Customs officials didn’t see things the same way.)

Here are three notable mentions of Barber in the newspapers, starting with the Boston Gazette for 8 Aug 1768:

We hear that the Week before last was finished, by Order and for the Use of the Gentlemen belonging to the Insurance Office kept by Mr. Nathaniel Barber, at the North-End, an elegant Silver BOWL, weighing forty-five Ounces, and holding forty-five Gills.

On one Side is engraved within a handsome Border—To the Memory of the glorious NINETY-TWO Members of the Honorable House of REPRESENTATIVES of the MASSACHUSETTS-BAY, who undaunted by the Insolent Menaces of Villains in Power, and out of strict Regard to Conscience, and the LIBERTIES of their Constituents, on the 30th of June 1768, VOTED NOT TO RESCIND.—Over which is the Cap of Liberty in an Oaken Crown.

On the other Side, in a Circle adorned with Flowers, &c. is No. 45, WILKES AND LIBERTY, under which is General Warrants torn to Pieces. On the Top of the Cap of Liberty, and out of each Side, is a Standard, on one is MAGNA CHARTA, the other BILL OF RIGHTS.—

On Monday Evening last, the Gentlemen belonging to the Office made a genteel Entertainment, and invited a Number of Gentlemen of Distinction in the Town, when 45 Loyal Toasts were drank, and the whole concluded with a new Song, the Chorus of which is, In Freedom we’re born, and in Freedom we’ll live, &c.

The silversmith who made that bowl was Paul Revere, and today it’s a treasure of the Museum of Fine Arts. The song was “The Liberty Song,” printed the month before.

In the 30 Apr 1770 Boston Gazette:

Yesterday se’nnight a Daughter of Mr. Nathaniel Barber, at the North End, was Baptized at the Reverend Dr. [Andrew] Eliot’s Meeting-House, by the Name of Catharine Macaulay. The same Gentleman about 18 Months ago had a Child christened by the Name of Oliver Cromwell, and about 18 Months before that, another by the Name of Wilkes.

Edes and Gill’s newspaper had reported the christening of each boy, with a note that little Wilkes “had No. 45, in Bows, pinn’d on its Breast” at the ceremony.

On 1 Oct 1772, the Boston News-Letter reported:

His Excellency the Governor has been pleased to Commission Nathaniel Barber, Esq; Captain of the North-Battery in this Town, with the Rank of Major.

You might ask why Gov. Hutchinson granted a prestigious rank to someone so obviously in the political opposition. In that period he was trying to use his patronage powers as commander-in-chief of the militia to peel men away from the Whigs.

COMING UP: Did that work?

Learning More about Hammond Green and Mary Rogers

This afternoon at the Dedham Historical Society is the third of the panel discussions I’m participating in with Christian Di Spigna and Katie Turner Getty (shown speaking here) in commemoration of the Boston Massacre.

This will be Katie’s fourth event, and Christian is going on to do a fifth. Jonathan Lane of Revolution 250 has moderated all sessions, and Bob Allison spoke in Charlestown last night.

Katie Turner Getty’s presentation was about the two women who gave detailed, preserved testimony about the Massacre, Jane (Crothers) Whitehouse and Elizabeth Avery.

From Avery’s testimony we know two more women watched the confrontation from an upper floor of the Customs house with her: Ann Green and Mary Rogers.

Ann, also called Nancy, was the sister of Hammond Green, one of the men tried for allegedly shooting a gun out of that room into the crowd below. Hammond was baptized in Christ (Old North) Church in January 1749, Ann in September 1756—and thus was still only thirteen on the night of the Massacre.

Not until I heard Katie’s talk did I learn that Mary Rogers, also called Molly, went on to marry Hammond Green. In fact, they married in Christ Church on 29 Nov 1770, just a couple of weeks before Hammond went on trial for murder. As Katie pointed out, this might have made the jury skeptical about anything Mary might say to clear her husband. The defense attorneys called Elizabeth Avery to testify instead, and Ann Green to corroborate the exoneration of her brother.

The record from 1770 makes clear that Hammond Green’s father worked for the Customs Commissioners, but it isn’t clear to me that the young man himself did. Legal records identified Hammond as a “boat-builder.” As of the evacuation of March 1776, however, Hammond Green was a Customs house “Tidesman.”

Notably, Mary Green didn’t leave with her husband that month. He evacuated as a party of one. In July 1777 the Massachusetts General Court passed a special law:

Upon the Petition of Mary Green, Wife of Hammond Green, late of Boston, praying Leave to go to her Husband now resident at Halifax—

Resolved that the Prayer of the Petition be granted & that the sd. Mary Green with her Child have Leave to go by such Opportunity & under such restrictions as the honorable Council judge proper—& that she have Leave to take with her, her Bed & other necessaries

I presume Mary (Rogers) Green and her child arrived in Halifax soon afterward.

Mary Green probably died in the following years because Hammond remarried to Elizabeth Mott in 1785. This second wife was still in her teens, having been born to a retired British artillerist and his wife in Halifax in 1768. Hammond and Elizabeth Green had a few children together before she died in 1802. He continued working as a tidesman until at least 1807, according to a local almanac.

On 26 July 1808, the New-England Palladium reported that Hammond Green had died in Halifax, aged sixty. (He was in fact fifty-nine.)

One other personal detail about Hammond Green: In accusing him of murder, Charles Bourgate referred to him as “a young man one Green, he with one eye,” pointing him out in court. So Green didn’t simply become a Customs inspector; he became a one-eyed Customs inspector.

“A respectable and well-known Officer”

For Thomas Seward, his military service in the Continental artillery, rising from lieutenant to brevet major over eight years, remained an important part of his identity after the war.

Seward was an original member of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati and served on its standing committee in the 1790s.

Like a lot of networked Continental Army officers, he eventually accepted a job in the federal government, becoming an officer of the United States Customs in Boston in 1796.

When Alexander Hamilton was vetting officers for the “Quasi-War” with France in 1798, Henry Knox apparently told him that Seward was “advanced in years & corpulent,” and would be best as a “Garrison Capt” rather than in the field, but there were “few better Officers.”

Thomas Seward’s namesake son, a merchant captain, married in 1799. The following year, the major’s wife, Sarah, died in March.

On 28 Nov 1800 the Massachusetts Mercury reported in its Deaths section:

Yesterday, Major Thomas Steward, aged 60. A respectable and well-known Officer in the revolutionary army of the United States. His funeral will be from his late dwelling at the bottom of Middle-street, near Winnisimet-Ferry, this afternoon, which his relations and friends are requested to attended, without further invitation.

[pointing hand] The Members of the Cincinnati are respectfully requested to attend the funeral.

The next day’s Jeffersonian Constitutional Telegraph repeated the sentence describing Seward as a “respectable and well-known Officer” and added a new line: “A firm and determined Republican.” The major had taken sides in the nation’s political divide.

Seward died without a will, so probate judge George R. Minot appointed his late wife’s sister Abigail Brett to work out the estate. The inventory she filed shows that Seward owned many artifacts of gentility: a silver watch, a Bible and seventeen other books, an angling rod, two canaries in a cage, a $35 desk, $100 worth of wearing apparel. The house contained twenty pictures of various sizes, including two of “Bounaparte & Lady”—reflecting early Republican admiration for France.

That inventory also confirms that Seward owned a pew in the Rev. John Murray’s Universalist meetinghouse. At some point he had moved from an orthodox Congregationalist meeting to this liberal new sect. Among other converts to Universalism was Col. Richard Gridley, the artillery officer Seward had served under back in 1775.

TOMORROW: Why we remember Thomas Seward.

Call for Papers on the Long End of H.M.S. Gaspee

The Rhode Island Historical Society and Newport Historical Society have issued a call for submissions for a combined issue of their journals on the theme of “The Bridge: The Gaspee Affair in Context.”

The call says:

Prior to the end of the Seven Year’s War in 1763, the British colonies had enjoyed what historians often called “salutary neglect,” which had enabled economic and political development with little interference from the crown for nearly a century. After 1763, the British government took advantage of a period of European peace to overhaul the empire, seeking tighter control and more revenue, especially from North America. The late 1760s saw a series of acts which sent shock waves through the colonies and sparked various forms of colonial opposition. One such instance in Rhode Island was the Gaspee Affair.

On June 9, 1772, the British customs schooner HMS Gaspee ran aground on a sandbar at what is today known as Gaspee Point, Warwick, Rhode Island. The Gaspee had been chasing the Hannah, a packet vessel that had evaded the empire’s customs duties at Newport. At Providence, the Hannah’s captain Thomas Lindsey notified merchant John Brown of the Gaspee’s compromised position.

Mobilizing other merchants including Simeon Potter, Joseph Tillinghast, Ephraim Bowen, and Abraham Whipple in protest of the empire’s customs duties, Brown instigated a mob, including artisans, merchants, and several enslaved people, to attack the beached Gaspee. At dawn on June 10, the rioters boarded the Gaspee, shot the vessel’s captain, forced its crew to abandon ship, seized the vessel’s documents, and set the vessel ablaze.

Since the Revolution, Rhode Islanders have commemorated the Gaspee Affair as one of the earliest watersheds of the movement toward American independence.

We seek article submissions which re-contextualize the Gaspee Affair within the broader imperial crisis of its era, with a focus on such topics as other acts of colonial resistance to the crown prior to the Boston Tea Party; a better understanding the Gaspee Affair within the development of global capitalism; situating the role of enslaved and indigenous people in forms of colonial resistance in Revolutionary War period; examining the ways in which the Gaspee has been remembered, reconstructed and recast in various moments of American history; and a better understanding of how communication about pre-war acts of resistance helped to form regional identities that carried into the New Republic period.

Articles should be 5,000 to 7,000 words long with citations in the Chicago style. Deadline for submission is 15 Jan 2022. Articles will go through peer review and revision before being published in the spring. For other details on how to submit, see the call webpage.

“Strict Examination into the Affair of taring, feathering & carting Owen Richards”

Yesterday’s posting quoted two accounts of the assault on Customs employee Owen Richards on 18 May 1770.

Richards and a colleague had caught a ship’s captain from Connecticut trying to sneak in undeclared barrels of sugar. They refused a bribe and used their legal powers to confiscate the cargo and the ship.

That evening, a waterfront mob grabbed Richards, tarred and feathered him, paraded him through town, and threatened to do the same to the other Customs men.

This was a couple of months after the royal government had pulled soldiers from the center of town following the Boston Massacre. The first tar-and-feathers attack in Boston had occurred in October 1769, when the troops were still there, so there’s no guarantee a larger military presence would have protected Richards. But Customs officials certainly argued that withdrawing the regiments had turned the town over to the mob.

On 21 May, two of those officials—William Sheaffe, Deputy Collector, and Robert Hallowell, Deputy Comptroller—prepared a report on the incident for their superiors, the Commissioners of Customs. They gathered three accounts from lower-level officers called tidesmen:

• John Woart, also attacked but more mildly.
• Josiah King and Joshua Dutton, who had hidden from the mob in the captain’s cabin of the ship they were supposed to be patrolling.

The Customs service didn’t have the power to arrest anyone for assault; it could only seize property. So Sheaffe and Hallowell set about doing that. King and Dutton testified about hearing “a great noise of People on the Deck, Knocking with Sticks, or Clubs.” Sheaffe and Hallowell interpreted that as

such hideous noises & thumping of Clubs and handspikes that they durst not venture out for a great part of the night during which time it is violently suspected, that part of the sugars, with other goods were taken out, which is very much confirmed, by our going Early the next morning into the Hold, and finding a great Vacancy on the starboard side of the Vessell the Ceiling of the Hold maked with the drainings of the Sugar Casks and but one or two of those Casks marked with —> the day before by Mr. Richards. . . .

We found in the Vessell seventeen hogsheads four teirces & two barrells Sugar, which are in the Store at the Custom house, which with the Vessell will be Immediately prosecuted [i.e., seized].

I saw those documents in the Treasury Papers at the National Archives in London. In the long run they might have helped to influence royal policy in Boston, but they didn’t do much for Owen Richards. The only officials who could indict the rioters who assaulted him were the town’s justices of the peace.

The Massachusetts Council was scheduled to meet on 23 May, but acting governor Thomas Hutchinson called those gentlemen together on the same day Sheaffe and Hallowell made their report. They agreed that “it does not appear that the Justices of the Peace within the Town of Boston have made any enquiry, or taken any notice of such disorder.”

The Council therefore advised Hutchinson to send for the justices. The Boston Post-Boy reported how the governor

enjoined them to meet, and make strict Examination into the Affair of taring, feathering & carting Owen Richards, as mentioned in our last, and to bind over such Persons, as shall appear to have been active in it, to answer the same in due Course of Law; and that in all Respects they pursue the Steps of the Law, in order to bring the Offenders to Justice.

But the result?

The Same Day and the Day following His Majesty’s Justices met at the County Court-House, and sent for several Persons as Evidences, but could obtain no Intelligence of any one that was concerned.

Even though parts of the attack on Owen Richards had taken place on King Street in the center of town, no one would identify any of the men involved.

TOMORROW: Owen Richards goes to court.

Looking Back on the Owen Richards Attack

Last December, starting here, I wrote about the tar-and-feathers attack on a Customs employee named Owen Richards in May 1770.

The fallout from that event lasted for years, so I’m going to resume the story.

But first, for review, here’s the merchant John Rowe’s summary of the attack in his diary for 18 May:

Just as I was going to bed there was a very great Hallooing in the street & a mob of upwards a thousand people—it seems they had got an informer & put him in a Cart, covered with Tar & Feathers & so exhibited him thro’ the Streets.

For a more detailed description, we can turn to Esther Forbes’s Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, quoting the merchant Samuel Salisbury (shown above, decades later):

I perceived candles in a number of windows,

what, thinks I, is there an illumination tonight?

Getting home I was informed that an Informer had been carted through the streets, Tarred and feathered.

After I had been to the Barber’s my Curiosity led me to the point at New Boston [the western tip of the peninsula] where I found the Informer in a Cart before Capt [John] Homer’s door surrounded with a great number of People

he had his shirt taken off & his bare skin tarred & Feathered. Sometimes they would make him say one thing sometimes another. Sometimes he must hold the Lanthorn this way, sometimes that, then he must hold up a glass Bottle & Swear he would never do so agin & let the bottle fall down & break & then Huzzah—

from thence they carried him into King Street Let him get out of the Cart made a lane down the street where 3 or 4 carried him off from the multitude in safety, being about nine o’clock.

The mob that attacked George Gailer, another man accused of helping the Customs service, in October 1769 also made him “carry the lantren in his hand & calling to all the inhabitince to put Candles in their Windoes.”

I can’t find a precedent for making Richards swear an oath and drop a bottle, though. It looks like a folk ritual of some sort, with the extra appeal of breaking stuff.

As Salisbury reported, the crowd eventually let Richards’s friends pull him away and get him home safely.

TOMORROW: Going to court.

“Emptied and threw the Tea into the Water”

On Sunday, 6 Mar 1774, as described yesterday, the brig Fortune carried 28 1/2 chests of tea into Boston harbor, along with “Gun-Powder, Duck and Hemp.”

“The next day,” Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote, “the vessel was haled to the wharffe, where the vessels lay which had the East India Company’s tea.” And we know what had happened to that tea the preceding December.

That same Monday, the Boston Gazette ran this calm and measured item:

Messi’rs Edes & Gill, PUBLISH THIS!

It is said that Capt. [Benjamin] Gorham who is just arrived from London, has brought Forty Chests of that baneful, detested, dutied Article TEA, shipped by the East-India Company, their Brokers or Employers, and consigned to HENRY LLOYD, Esq; of this Town, Merchant.

Justice to ourselves and to AMERICA—Justice even to the other Consignees—A Regard to our own Reputation and Honor—Every Obligation binds us most SOLEMNLY, at once to DETERMINE ABSOLUTELY to oppose its Landing—Experience has fully convinced us that the Governor and the Custom-House Officers concern’d will lay INSUPERABLE Bars in the Way of sending it back to London. The Consent of the Consignee to have it return’d would be to no Purpose, if he be waited upon to request it.

The SACHEMS must have a Talk upon this Matter—Upon THEM we depend to extricate us out of this fresh Difficulty; and to THEIR Decisions all the GOOD People will say, AMEN!

That dispatch got some factual details wrong—namely, the number of tea chests, who had sent them, and who was to receive them.

But the Whig newspaper was accurate in predicting the royal authorities would make no compromises to allow the tea to be returned to Britain.

The owners of the Fortune—Thomas Walley, Peter Boyer, and William Thompson—laid out what they were doing that Monday in the next Boston News-Letter. With Lloyd, who had been sent sixteen tea chests; Henry Bromfield, who owned much of the ship’s cargo; and Gorham they “applied to the Collector and Comptroller of the Customs, and unitedly requested a Qualification for the Vessel to return with the Tea.” Because otherwise, they declared, there was “Danger of this Tea’s being destroyed.”

The Customs officers replied:

it was absolutely contrary to their Duty, and therefore could not give any Papers to qualify the Vessel to go back; and that although no Report [legal notice of the arrival] had been then made, yet she could not go away without being liable to be seized, and that even if they should give a Clearance, she would inevitably be stopped by the Officers of the King’s Ships, who were also Custom-House Officers . . . moreover that she could not be reported that Day after two o’Clock, and if not reported within 24 Hours the Capt. as liable to a Penalty of £100 Sterling.

Seeing where his interest lay, Capt. Gorham quickly reported the ship’s arrival and “took out a Permit to unlade the Gun-Powder.” Everyone agreed that was a good idea.

As for further steps, Boston town clerk William Cooper wrote to the Brookline committee of correspondence, seeking to rebuild the united front that had formed the preceding December:

We think it our duty to acquaint you that a Brigantine Benjamin Gorham Master is just arrived from London with a quantity of Tea on board liable to a duty: We ask the favor of your Company at the Selectmens Chamber in Boston toMorrow afternoon 3. OClock in order for a joint consultation, relative to this matter——

As it turned out, that meeting became moot.

Evening fell. Illuminated pictures of the Boston Massacre shone out from the windows of Mary Clapham’s Royal Exchange Tavern on King Street. (That display had been postponed from the 5th because that fell on the eve of the Sabbath.) As I recounted back here, in 1774 there was a new image attacking Gov. Hutchinson and Chief Justice Peter Oliver.

Bostonians had spent weeks talking about what to do with the first three shiploads of tea. They had no patience left for the Fortune. In the words of a petition from shippers in London:

about Eight o’Clock in the Evening…a great Number of Persons all of whom were unknown to the Captain and many of them disguised and dressed and talking like Indians armed with Axes and Hatchets with Force and violence entered on Board the said Vessel and broke open the Hatches and proceeded to rummage the Hold and hoisted out Twenty eight Chests of Tea…upon the Deck of the said Vessel and there with Hatchets axes and Clubs broke open the said Chests and emptied and threw the Tea into the Water whereby the same was wholly lost and destroyed.

That was the lesser-known second Boston Tea Party on the night of 7 Mar 1774.

COMING UP: John Adams surveys the scene.

Press Coverage of the Owen Richards Riot

On 21 May 1770, Green and Russell’s Boston Post-Boy reported:

Last Friday Night Owen Richards, one of the Tidesmen belonging to the Custom-House, was Tarred, Feathered and Carted thro’ the Town for several hours, for having as ’tis said, given Information against a Connecticut Sloop which was Seized.

In contrast, the same day’s Boston Gazette from Edes and Gill said:

Last Friday Night one Richards, a Tide-Waiter, having ’tis said informed against a Connecticut Sloop, was tarred, feathered and carted thro’ the Town for two or three Hours.

No full name for the victim, no acknowledgement that the ship had actually been judged to be smuggling, and an ordeal of “two or three Hours” instead of “several.” 

Here are three more items from the newspapers reporting on different legal fallout from the 18 May 1770 attack on Richards.

In the Boston Post-Boy, 28 May:

At a Council held at the Council-Chamber on Monday last, His Honor the Lieutenant-Governor [Thomas Hutchinson], with the Advice of His Majesty’s Council, sent for His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace of in the Town of Boston, and enjoined them to meet, and make strict Examination into the Affair of taring, feathering & carting Owen Richards, as mentioned in our last, and to bind over such Persons, as shall appear to have been active in it, to answer the same in due Course of Law; and that in all Respects they pursue the Steps of the Law, in order to bring the Offenders to Justice.

The Same Day and the Day following His Majesty’s Justices met at the County Court-House, and sent for several Persons as Evidences, but could obtain no Intellgence of any one that was concerned.

In the Boston Post-Boy, 11 June:

Court of Vice-Admiralty
at Boston, June 2, 1770.

ALL Persons claiming Property in the Schooner Martin, and 17 Hogsheads, 4 Tierces and 2 Barrels of Brown Sugar, seized for Breach of the Acts of Trade, are hereby notified to appear at a Court of Vice-Admiralty to be held at Boston, on the 13th Day of June instant, at Ten o’Clock beforenoon, to shew cause, (if any they have) why the said Schooner and Sugar should not be decreed to remain forfeit pursuant to an Information filed in said Court for that purpose.

By Order of Court, Ezekiel Price, D. Reg’r.

That was the ship Richards had seized for the Customs office.

Finally, the Boston Gazette on 24 December (250 years ago today):

One Owen Richards, a petty Officer in the Customs, who was tarred and feather’d some Months ago, we hear has commenced an Action of Damage for Three Hundred Pounds lawful Money, against a young Gentleman of this Town, whose family Connections are among the better sort of folks, the friends of Government.

This Lad was taken by a single Writ and held to Bail—Upon his application to several of his near relations who are persons of fortune, to become sureties for him, we are told, they absolutely refus’d. But others had compassion upon him; for two Gentlemen were bound for his Appearance at Court.

I haven’t yet figured out who this young man might be. It’s striking how Edes and Gill criticized his relations for not bailing him out for an assault they presumably disapproved of on both personal and political grounds.

COMING UP: The court cases.

“Found me in the Hold of the Vessel where I had hid”

As recounted yesterday, shortly after nine o’clock on the evening of 18 May 1770, a crowd seized Customs land waiter Owen Richards as he was returning to a schooner he had seized for smuggling that afternoon.

The attackers ripped off Richards’s hat, wig, and at least most of his clothing and covered him with tar and feathers. The Customs man’s report continued:

in this barborous, Cruel & Inhuman manner they carted me thro’ all the Streets in Boston. they also fix’d a paper on my breast, with Capital Letters thereon, but cannot Recollect what it contained—

so after, so much cruel usage. and being so Long naked, it being to the best of my Knowledge, from 10 OClock in the Evening, till Two in the Morning. I gott away at last by the Help of some friends, from my merciless, and bitter Enemies, which happned before Capt. John Homers door, at Bartons point; whilst that another party of the same mob were contending what they should with John Woart; whom they had, in a Riotous manner, brought there, in order to serve him as I had been served as I had been served—

in fine [i.e., finally] I gott to my house, by the Assistance of God, and some friends, where my Wife and Children with unspeakable Grief, and astonishment, beheld me in that Horrible Condition—

Again, Richards later described this attack with more dire details. A court filing in January 1771 stated he “lost his Cloaths, Money, and Papers to the Amount of near £20 st[erling]. And in order to satiate their abandoned Brutality, they set fire to the Feathers as they stuck in the Tar, upon his naked back.”

Richards’s petition to the Loyalists Commission in 1782 said the crowd “set the Feathers on Fire on his Back, and fixed a Rope round his Neck. In this Position they Exposed him around the Town for seven Hours untill he was just expiring.” Back in the month it happened, he estimated the ordeal as four hours long.

Meanwhile, Richards’s original statement said, parts of the crowd went after his partner in the Customs service the same way. John Woart stated:

Soon after Dark Seven or Eight People with Clubs came alongside the Schooner & enquired for Mr. Richards & me, they were told by the Master & mate that Mr. Richards was dismist from that Vessel, & put on board another & that I was not on board, they went away, & about half an hour after, about a Dozen came, & made the same Enquiry, they were told as before, that Mr. Richards was dismist from that Vessel soon after Dinner, & that I was not on board

about 12 or 1 oClock, there came a great number of People & demanded me from on board, the Captain still telling them I was not there, they swore I was on board & were determined to have me, Mr. Richards (they said) having told them that I was on board & durst not leave the Vessel; they immediately got a Candle & came on board to search for me, & found me in the Hold of the Vessel where I had hid myself.

They then took me & carried me up to New Boston where there was a Cart with Mr. Richards in it. they asked Mr. Richards if I was the Man, he told that I was his Partner, & a Partner concerned, they were then going to hoist me into the Cart, but by my strugling & the Assistance of some of the Standers by I got away from them, & went to my own house & received no further Molestation

Barton’s Point, as shown in the map detail above, was a sparsely populated part of the Boston peninsula in West (or New) Boston that stuck out into the Charles River. It didn’t have the political significance as Liberty Tree or the government buildings near the center of town. That seclusion, plus the interference of passersby, suggests that this mob wasn’t exercising as much popular will as some other mobs had.

Two other Customs men were back on the confiscated schooner Martin, Josiah King and Joshua Dutton. They reported the same story to their superiors. This is Dutton’s wording:

I was ordered by Mr. [William] Sheaffe on board the Schooner Martin Silvanus Higgins Master from New London & continued walking on Deck of said Vessel untill 11 oClock at Night when a great number of People came on board said Schooner.

Capt. Higgins on seeing the People collecting, advised Mr. King and myself to go down into the Cabbin, and as we apprehended it not safe for us to tarry there, We accordingly went down accompanied by him soon after we got down, the Companion Doors was shutt by the People above, & we heard a great noise of People on the Deck, Knocking with Sticks, or Clubs.

We tarried shutt up in the Cabbin untill about three oClock in the morning when the Noise in some measure ceased & several People came in the Cabbin & satt Drinking there for about half an hour when they went away & all was quiet.

Back in 1768, Customs employee Thomas Kirk testified that a captain and crew locked him below decks and then emptied out their ship. That doesn’t seem to have happened with the Martin, however. It’s possible the Customs office had already hauled its undeclared sugar away.

TOMORROW: The legal fallout.

“I also Seized the schooner, and her appertunances”

As recounted yesterday, on the afternoon of 18 May 1770, Customs service land waiters Owen Richards and John Woart spotted a schooner being unloaded on Greene’s Wharf. They went over to that ship, the Martin, and found Capt. Silvanus Higgins in charge.

Inviting the Customs men into his cabin, Higgins showed them his official papers. Richards, the more experienced of the Customs men, said he suspected the ship was carrying more cargo than that. Higgins offered punch and a friendly bribe. Refusing, Richards and Woart searched the forehold and discovered many containers of undeclared sugar.

“Mr. Richards then asked me for a piece of Chalk,” Woart stated. Richards started marking the barrels and kegs with an upward-pointing arrow—the sign of royal property. “I seized as many Casks as I could come att,” he wrote; “then we both went on Deck, and I also Seized the schooner, and her appertunances, for a breach of the Acts of Trade.”

Leaving Woart on board, Richards reported everything to William Sheaffe, Deputy Collector of the Port of Boston. Sheaffe went through the legal ritual of seizing the Martin again, then “ordered Mr. Woart to go to the tide Surveyor, and desire him to send Two more tidesmen onboard.” Josiah King and Joshua Dutton arrived. That evening, between 6:00 and 7:00, “the schooner was transported to Mr. [James] Pitts Wharf at the town dock.”

The Customs office now had the Martin both legally and physically. Capt. Higgins and his crew were about to lose all their goods and their vessel. Those men hailed from New London, Connecticut, but they turned out to have support on the Boston waterfront—particularly now that there were no soldiers patrolling the town.

Richards described what happened next:

between seven & Eight OClock I went to my house to bring my great Coat—a little after Nine as I was Returning onboard, near the draw Bridge I was Violently assaulted in the Street by a great Number of disorderly men & Boys & Negroes, also, with Clubs & Sticks, Crying out, and Informer, an Informer; Repeating the word Informer continually.

That was the same term Bostonians used for Ebenezer Richardson, convicted the month before of murdering a child. Richardson had actually started out as a secret informer, but Richards had been working openly for the royal government.

I must note that thirteen years later, when applying for compensation from the Loyalists Commission, Richards testified that “a Tumultuous Mob of near 2000…came to your Petitioners House, Broke his Windows, and distroyed his Furniture.” That wasn’t how he described the attack immediately afterwards—but the British government was compensating Loyalists for lost property, and it was easier to put a money figure on that than on suffering.

Richards’s 1770 account continued:

they set upon me furiously, and I defended myself, as long as I could, with my Stick, but being at last overpower’d, by numbers of murdering Villains, they beat me out of measure, and Halled and Dragged me thro’ the Streets, and being intirely overcome, and faint, thro’ loss of blood, and my Sense quite gone, I could make no more resistance.

they then gott a Cart and dragged me into it, in a barbarous manner, and Carried me into King’s Street, and there right against the Custom House, in a Most Cruel & Violent manner, they Robb’d me of my Hatt, Wigg & Coat, waistcoat & Shirt, and stripped me naked down to my breeches, they poured Tarr on my head, and tarr’d my body all over, and then putt feathers thereon, repeating an Informer:

This was the second tar-and-feathers attack in Boston, following the October 1769 assault on George Gailer, another man who worked for the Customs service. And it wasn’t over yet.

TOMORROW: Coming for the rest.

“I believe they are a smuggling”

With less than two weeks left in 2020, there are still some significant events in 1770 that I missed discussing on their Sestercentennials, so I’m trying to catch up.

The first of those events took place on 18 May and centered on Owen Richards, a Customs service tide waiter. I traced Richards’s arrival in Boston from Wales, work as a ship’s rigger and auctioneer, and entrance into the Customs service in this post.

That set the stage for his role in the tussle over John Hancock’s ships Lydia and Liberty in 1768. Bostonians didn’t forget Customs men whom they perceived as having overstepped their authority.

On 7 Apr 1770, Richards had to put up a £100 bond to be released from magistrates’ custody. That was the same day that Edward Manwaring, John Munro, and Hammond Green put up much larger bonds after being indicted for participating in the Boston Massacre. I don’t know if the cases were linked, but many locals saw all Customs men as conspiring against the town.

Here is Richards’s own description of what happened on 18 May, from a collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library. At about 1:00 P.M., Richards and another Customs man named John Woart were standing on the deck of the schooner Success, making sure nothing was secretly unloaded from it.

John Woart being on Deck,…he did say to me, Richards look over to Greens Wharf, there is a Schooner hoisting out goods: I believe they are a smuggling;

I desired that we would go over, and see what they are about: he answered I will go over, come along with me. I followed him, stepping over the two Vessels that lay in the dosk, which brought us on Greens Wharf—

The Customs men moved from one ship to another by walking across other ships moored between them. That was how close the wharves were in that central area near Long Wharf, and how many ships were in the harbor at the height of the year.

Woart had turned thirty the year before while Richards was probably in his late forties and didn’t move so fast. According to Woart, he reached the schooner being unloaded and asked for the master. A man “sitting on a Sparr by a Store alongside the Vessel” stood up and said, “I suppose you are a Custom house Officer.” This was the captain, Silvanus Higgins.

Back to Richards:

John Woart was alongside the schooner before me, and Inquired where they came from, and if they had a permit to unload:

the master answered, that he came from New London, and that he had a permit.

Woart desired to see it, the master said Gentlemen, Walk down to the Cabbin, and I will shew it to you—

We went into his Cabbin, and read the permit, found her the schooner Martin, from New London, loaded with Corn Wheat Pork, Pottashes &c. and one barrell of Sugar—

I said to the master, [“]Sir, I believe you have more goods onboard your Vessel than are mentioned in your permit”

he answered Sir, only a triffle, that was put onboard without my Knowledge; he then called for some Water, to make Punch, and said “pray don’t ruin me, I will give you any thing your shall ask:[”]

I answered, I was under oath, and Could not over look it.

he then said Two or three half Joannes [£4-6] will make all things Easy—

I said, it was not in my power to take anything, from him; that I must do my Duty.

I then with Mr. Woart went down into the Hold and found the fore Hold full of Hogsheads, Tierces, & barrells, of brown Sugar

Busted.

TOMORROW: Crowd action.

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.

The Forgotten Trial for the Boston Massacre

On 12 Dec 1770, 250 years ago today, the third trial for the Boston Massacre began.

This is the trial that later generations of Bostonians preferred to forget. In 1771 the Loyalist printer John Fleeming published a seven-page report including witness testimony as an appendix to the much longer record of the soldiers’ trial. But Harbottle Dorr didn’t buy that expanded edition and keep it with his collection of Whig newspapers.

In 1870, when Frederic Kidder assembled his History of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770; consisting of the narrative of the town, the trial of the soldiers: and a historical introduction, containing unpublished documents of John Adams, and explanatory notes, he reprinted John Hodgson’s transcript of the soldiers’ trial but not the appendix. He replaced those seven pages with a single paragraph on the verdict.

Because John Adams wasn’t involved in the third trial, its record also makes no appearance in his Legal Papers, the most complete source of documents on those proceedings.

When I started my Revolutionary research, the only way I could read about the third trial was to visit a library that owned a first edition, second state of The Trial of William Wemms… from 1771. But now Google has digitized that book, so everyone can find its account of the third trial starting at page 210.

The defendants on 12 December were:

• Edward Manwaring, a Customs officer assigned to Douglastown on the Gaspé peninsula in Canada, who was in Boston on 5 Mar 1770.
• John Munro, a notary public and friend of Manwaring who had the bad luck to be socializing with him that evening.
• Hammond Green, a boat builder whose family worked for the Boston Customs office.
• Thomas Greenwood, a low-level local Customs officer.

Those men were indicted on the evidence of one person: Charles Bourgate, a fourteen-year-old francophone servant of Manwaring. Earlier this year I traced the French boy’s evolving story starting here. Despite the forensic slipperiness of that account, a Boston grand jury indicted those four defendants for murder.

On 11 December, acting governor Thomas Hutchinson, who was still on leave as Chief Justice, had two other Superior Court justices visit him at the Province House. He urged them to “continue,” or postpone, those men’s trials till the spring session. That would have been a full year since the shooting on King Street. Perhaps he hoped the accusation would just go away. Senior justice Benjamin Lynde declined.

Thus, the third Massacre trial started on 12 December. Massachusetts advocate general Samuel Quincy prosecuted, though he considered the attempt to convict these defendants “another Windmill adventure” with himself as “poor Don Quixot.” The record doesn’t say who served as defense counsel, and legal historian Hiller B. Zobel suggests the defendants didn’t need one.

The first prosecution witness was Samuel Drowne, who said he had seen “two flashes from the Custom-house” behind the soldiers as they fired. Stationer Timothy White testified that he had hosted and employed Drowne for two years and “never observed any thing to impeach his veracity and understanding”—though “Some people thought him foolish.”

Charles Bourgate then told his story of being pulled into the Customs house and forced to fire out at the crowd by a “tall man” with a sword-cane—some suspected Customs Commissioner John Robinson, notorious for cutting James Otis’s scalp with his walking-stick. Charles said he’d seen his master Manwaring shoot a gun, too. The prosecution rested.

Four upper-class defense witnesses then testified that they had watched the confrontation on King Street and seen no shots from the Customs House. One of those gentlemen was Edward Payne, who had actually been wounded in the shooting and had no reason to protect any shooters.

Two women who lived in the Customs House said they had viewed the shooting from the very room that Charles described, and there had been no men with guns there.

Manwaring’s landlady, Elizabeth Hudson, stated that he and Munro had been at her house during the shooting along with the traveling entertainer Michael Angelo Warwell and young Charles.

The court brought the French boy back to the stand. He insisted that he’d told the truth and Hudson (and everyone else) had lied. The judges summoned four men known for speaking French well, including schoolmaster John Lovell and merchant Philip Dumaresque, and asked them to question the boy to make sure there was no language barrier. He stuck to his story.

At that point the defense lowered the boom. James Penny, a debtor who had been in the jail while Charles was housed there as a witness, stated that the teenager had admitted to him:

That what he testified to the Grand Jury and before the Justices…was in every particular false, and that he did swear in that manner by the persuasion of William Molineux, who told him he would take him from his master and provide for him, and that Mr. Molineux frightened him by telling him if he refused to swear against his master and Mr. Munro the mob in Boston would kill him: and farther that Mrs. [Elizabeth] Waldron, the wife of Mr. [Joseph] Waldron a taylor in Back-street, who sells ginger bread and drams, gave him the said Charles gingerbread and cheese, and desired him to swear against his master.

Charles “positively denied that he had ever made any such declaration.” He asked that another debtor, cabinetmaker William Page, be called to the stand. But Page testified that he’d seen the French boy in deep conversation with James Penny, who was taking notes, so that ended up bolstering Penny’s claim.

The case of Rex v. Manwaring et al. went to the jury. The record ends:

The Jury acquitted all the Prisoners, without going from their seats.

The third Boston Massacre trial thus ended within a day, as was usual in that period. But it also set up a fourth Boston Massacre trial: of Charles Bourgate on the charge of perjury.

Whatever Happened to Jesse Saville?

On 7 Apr 1770, acting governor Thomas Hutchinson sent the Massachusetts General Court documents from Essex County justices of the peace describing the previous month’s mobbing of Jesse Saville.

Hutchinson said Saville “had been most inhumanly treated for seeking redress in the course of the law for former injuries received.” He complained that Gloucester was becoming a violent town.

In his history of Massachusetts, Hutchinson complained, “The house suffered the message to lie more than a fortnight; but, two or three days before the assembly must, by the charter, be dissolved, they sent a very long answer.”

This was delivered by a committee that included strong Whigs John Hancock, Joseph Hawley, and James Warren. In part, they complained:

…we cannot think it consistent with the justice of this house, to come into measures which may imply a censure upon individuals, much less upon a community hitherto unimpeached in point of good order: or even to form any judgment upon the matter, until more light shall appear than the papers accompanying your message afford. The house cannot easily conceive what should determine your honour so particularly to recommend this instance to the consideration of the assembly, while others of a much more heinous nature and dangerous tendency have passed altogether unnoticed in your message…

The committee then took the opportunity to renew all the complaints about the king’s soldiers sent to Boston in 1768. It was, after all, the year of the Boston Massacre. The exchange was reprinted in British periodicals, making the third mobbing of Jesse Saville an element in the larger imperial conflict.

But Gov. Hutchinson never mentioned Saville’s name. He was, after all, just a tanner. The General Court committee likewise didn’t name this Customs employee. And that conflict was soon lost in the wash of other disputes, surviving only in the Essex County courts.

When I started the research for this series of postings about Jesse Saville, I found a secondary-source reference to yet another mob attack on him in 1771. But studying that reference further showed me it used language from the 1769 attack, so I think that was just an error.

Therefore, I have no sources on Saville’s experiences as Massachusetts’s conflict with the Crown heated up in the early 1770s, and as the war started. In fact, I’m not even sure he continued to work for the Customs service. He certainly didn’t move into Boston and evacuate with other revenue officers.

And that’s the biggest surprise of this story: Jesse Saville, mobbed three times in three years for helping His Majesty’s Customs Office, didn’t become a Loyalist. In fact, his son John, born in 1768, is reported as having gone to sea at 1782, being taken by a British frigate, and never returning.

Jesse Saville stayed in Gloucester. When his first wife, Martha, died in 1785, he remarried the next year to a woman named Hannah Dane and had a couple more children. When he died in 1823, Saville’s property included half of a house, half of a barn, a couple of pastures, and “1/4 part of a Pew in Squam Meeting House.”

Furthermore, he merited a fairly long obituary in the 26 March Columbian Centinel:

Mr. Saville was possessed of an uncommonly strong mind, and a very retentive memory. There was not a man perhaps in Gloucester who possessed such a perfect recollection of ancient transactions, grants, and land marks, as did Mr. Saville; for he seemed to have contained in his head, a successive record of all events; and more especially those of a local nature, for more than 70 years.—

In his political character, he was an undeviating FEDERALIST, adhering strictly to the sentiments of the immortal WASHINGTON, whom he always considered the polar star in the American political hemisphere.

In his religious theory, he was a Universalist, having the most unwavering belief in the great doctrine of reconciliation by JESUS CHRIST, as taught by the late Rev. JOHN MURRAY.

Murray’s meetinghouse, built in 1806, appears above.

Not everyone was as admiring as New England’s Federalist newspaper. In his 1860 local history, John J. Babson noted Saville’s work as a Customs officer and stated:

The strict performance of what he considered his duty made him odious to his townsmen, and for it he suffered severely in his person and property. It also subjected him to annoyance in later days, as the hostile feelings engendered by his official acts long survived the events which called them forth.

Nonetheless, Babson deemed Jesse Saville as having “lived a useful but retired life.” 

The Third Mobbing of Jesse Saville

After the attack on Jesse Saville’s house on 7 Sept 1768, the Essex County authorities brought charges against eight men for assault, as Joseph E. Garland described in Guns Off Gloucester.

The criminal case came to trial in the summer of 1769. The jury acquitted one defendant, Paul Dudley Sargent, and convicted the seven others. The wealthiest, including merchant Joseph Foster and Dr. Samuel Rogers, were fined £10 to £15 and ordered to post £50 bonds for good behavior. Four working men were fined £5 and ordered to post £20 bonds.

The organizer of the mob, David Plumer, was never criminally charged with assault, but he lost his cargo and ship to the Customs Office for smuggling.

That didn’t completely satisfy Saville, however. He pursued another avenue of redress—personal damages. He sued all seven convicted men plus a neighbor named Thomas Griffin.

That case came to court in Newburyport in September. This jury decided that Saville—now a Customs officer himself—had gotten all the satisfaction he deserved. They found the defendants not liable and ordered him to pay court costs.

Saville appealed that verdict, and the case was scheduled for a higher court at the end of March 1770.

Meanwhile, the Boston Massacre occurred in Boston. It’s not clear whether that had any effect on the mood in Essex County, but it might have made people more angry about the royal authorities or (after the army regiments were withdrawn to Castle William) more bold about confronting those authorities.

The result was the third and most violent attack on Jesse Saville, as described with minimal sympathy in the 26 March Boston Gazette:

We hear from Cape-Ann, that on Friday night last [March 23], a number of People there, who knew that Town had sustained great Damage by the Misdoings of one Jesse Savil an informer, and that he deserved Chastisement therefor, went in a Body to his House for that purpose, about 10 o’Clock, and finding him in Bed, took him from thence, and walk’d him barefoot about 4 Miles to the Harbour, then placed him in a Cart they had provided for that Purpose, and putting a Lanthorn with a lighted Candle in his Hand, that every one might see him, they carted him thro’ all their Streets, and stopping at every House they roused the inhabitants, and obliged him to declare and publish unto them that he was Jesse Savil the Informer; and having gone round in this manner, they then bestowed a handsome Coat of Tar upon him, and placed him upon the Town-Pump, caused him to swear that he would never more inform against any Person in that or any other Town, and then dismissed him, after having received his thanks for the gentle Discipline they had administered to him.

A report in the 13 Nov 1770 Essex Gazette recounted the same event with slightly different details:

…seizing the Person of one Jesse Saville, in the Month of March last, taking him out of his Chamber, in the Night, without Shoes, and almost naked, dragging him over Hills, Dales and Fences, some Times by the Hair of his Head, for about 4 Miles, and then carting him through the Streets of Gloucester. It is said further, that after elevating Saville upon a Pump, and insisting on his swearing not to steal any more Leather, nor to prosecute any Person for thus abusing him, he was tarr’d and dismissed.

Another detail, possibly in the court record but first published in James R. Pringle’s 1892 History of the Town and City of Gloucester, said the mob came for Saville “disguised as Indians and negroes.”

TOMORROW: The legal fallout.