Thomas Newell and “that Detestable Tea”

Thomas Newell’s diary makes clear that he opposed Parliament’s tea tax in 1773, as most Bostonians did. On 2 December, for instance, he wrote about James Bruce bringing in the Eleanor with “116 Chest of that Detestable Tea.”

But what did Newell do to support that stance?

On 17 November the young man made clear he didn’t participate in the attack on the Clarke family’s warehouse, discussed back here: “This evening a number of persons assembled before Richard Clarke’s, Esq., one of the consignees of tea; they broke the windows, and did other damage. (I was at fire meeting this evening.)”

On 2 December, the same day Capt. Bruce arrived, Newell’s diary contains one of the longer bits of cipher in the diary. The word “Junr” is legible among the little symbols, and a squiggle that doesn’t fit the cipher turns out to be “St.” What was Newell hiding?

Not a whole lot, it turns out. Once deciphered, the line reads: “This Eving. was at St. Andrew’s Lodge, I was chosen Junr Deacon of said Lodge.” Well, good for Thomas Newell.

Some people credit that lodge of Freemasons with being at the heart of the anti-tea operation. (None give it more credit than the lodge itself.) And indeed Newell got more involved the next night.

On 3 December, Newell recorded: “This evening I was one of the watch on board of Captain Bruce (with twenty-four more), that has tea for the Clarkes & Co.” That patrol was to keep the tea from being landed so the tax could be collected.

Finally, here’s Thomas Newell’s account of 16 December:

Town and country sons mustered according to adjournment. The people ordered Mr. [Francis] Rotch, owner of Captain [James] Hall’s ship, to make a demand for a clearance of Mr. [Joseph] Harrison, the collector of the custom house (and he was refused a clearance for his ship). The body desired Mr. Rotch to protest against the custom-house, and apply to the governor for his pass for the castle. He applied accordingly, and the governor refused to give him one. The people, finding all their efforts to preserve the East India Company’s tea, at night dissolved the meeting. But behold what followed the same evening: a number of brave men (some say Indians), in less than three hours emptied every chest of tea on board the three ships, commanded by Captains Hall, Bruce, and [Hezekiah] Coffin (amounting to 342 chests), into the sea.

Was Newell among those “brave men”? I’d guess not. But he surely knew some of them.

A couple of details struck me Newell’s writing about the Boston tea protesters. First, he consistently referred to the people meeting in Old South Meeting-House as ”sons of liberty.” He didn’t worry about calling them the “body of the people.”

Second, in Newell’s telling the crowd that afternoon was trying “to preserve the East India Company’s tea.” By having it shipped back to Britain, that is. Would be a shame if anything else happened to it.

TOMORROW: A mystery name.

“The seller is nothing less than a collector of the tax”

Here are some paragraphs from the seventh Letter from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, John Dickinson’s 1767–68 essays arguing against the Townshend duties:

There are two ways of laying taxes. One is, by imposing a certain sum on particular kinds of property, to be paid by the user or consumer, or by rating the person at a certain sum. The other is, by imposing a certain sum on particular kinds of property, to be paid by the seller.

When a man pays the first sort of tax, he knows with certainty that he pays so much money for a tax. The consideration for which he pays it, is remote, and, it may be, does not occur to him. He is sensible too, that he is commanded and obliged to pay it as a tax; and therefore people are apt to be displeased with this sort of tax.

The other sort of tax is submitted to in a very different manner. The purchaser of any article, very seldom reflects that the seller raises his price, so as to indemnify himself for the tax he has paid. He knows that the prices of things are continually fluctuating, and if he thinks about the tax, he thinks at the same time, in all probability, that he might have paid as much, if the article he buys had not been taxed. . . .

The merchant or importer, who pays the duty at first, will not consent to be so much money out of pocket. He therefore proportionably raises the price of his goods. It may then be said to be a contest between him and the person offering to buy, who shall lose the duty.

This must be decided by the nature of the commodities, and the purchaser’s demand for them. If they are mere luxuries, he is at liberty to do as he pleases, and if he buys, he does it voluntarily: But if they are absolute necessaries or conveniences, which use and custom have made requisite for the comfort of life, and which he is not permitted, by the power imposing the duty, to get elsewhere, there the seller has a plain advantage, and the buyer must pay the duty.

In fact, the seller is nothing less than a collector of the tax for the power that imposed it. If these duties then are extended to the necessaries and conveniences of life in general, and enormously encreased, the people must at length become indeed “most exquisitely sensible of their slavish situation.”

That quoted phrase came from Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws.

This letter concluded:

These duties, which will inevitably be levied upon us---which are now levying upon us---are expresly laid FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF TAKING MONEY. This is the true definition of “taxes.” They are therefore taxes. This money is to be taken from us. We are therefore taxed.

Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves of our representatives. We are therefore---SLAVES.

Dickinson thus put himself among the American Whigs who equated a lack of full political rights for white men of property with a state of slavery while keeping actual chattel slaves. Unlike most of his countrymen, however, Dickinson did something about that. In 1786 he finished manumitting everyone he had claimed as property.

“To regulate the collection of duties”

As the U.S. House of Representatives discussed its first significant law, establishing import tariffs, the members took up two closely related challenges:

• how to actually collect those duties.
• a “tonnage” tax on ships entering American harbors.

On 21 April the House took up the latter question as a committee of the whole with James Madison proposing “a duty of six cents per ton on all vessels built in the United States” or owned by U.S. citizens as “necessary for the support of light-houses, hospitals for disabled seamen, and other establishments incident to commerce.”

That was a pretty low tax, but the legislators went on to consider vessels owned or partly owned by foreigners, whether those foreigners were from countries allied to the U.S. of A., and so on. These ships were to be charged five to eight times more. A bill was proposed on 7 May and approved on 29 May.

As to collecting the new taxes, the House as a committee started discussing that on 18 May. Members noted that the federal government’s approach had to be equal in all states. The next day, Elias Boudinot proposed establishing executive branch departments including a “Secretary of Finance,” soon changed to a Treasury. By British precedent, the collection of duties would fall under that department.

On 27 May, Rep. Thomas Fitzsimons of Pennsylvania presented his committee’s proposal “to regulate the collection of duties.” The House got down to details on 2 June, listing U.S. ports of entry (skipping Narragansett Bay since Rhode Island wasn’t yet participating in the federal government). A week later, the House agreed that the government should appoint a collector, naval officer, and surveyor for the nine biggest ports.

On 29 June Rep. Benjamin Goodhue (1748–1814, shown here) of Massachusetts reported that the committee had “prepared an entire new bill” to incorporate all the proposed changes.

On the first day of July, the House voted 31–19 in favor of the tonnage bill. The Senate concurred on 7 July. The House approved the bill on collecting duties on 14 July, the Senate two weeks later. Those bills went to President George Washington, who signed them on 20 and 31 July, respectively.

Disregarding the initial law that established oaths of office, those were the second and fourth laws of the new U.S. government. (The third established a Department of Foreign Affairs.)

Thus, the collection of revenue from goods imported into the U.S. of A. was the first substantive action of the first Congress, the first meaningful law signed by the first President. The U.S. government has been collecting tariffs on imported goods for over two centuries. There’s a system in place.

The current President appears ignorant of that history, ordering that three Cabinet officers “investigate the feasibility of establishing and recommend the best methods for designing, building, and implementing an External Revenue Service (ERS) to collect tariffs, duties, and other foreign trade-related revenues.”

Of course, that current President has long shown ignorance of how tariffs work. As the New York Times reported, “Trade experts said that, despite the name ‘external,’ the bulk of tariff revenue would continue to be collected from U.S. businesses that import products.” The members of the first U.S. Congress, having gone through a war with its roots in a conflict over tariffs, understood how those taxes worked.

“The bill for laying a duty on goods, wares, and merchandises”

As I wrote yesterday, on 5 May 1789 the new U.S. House faced the text of its first major bill: a schedule of tariffs on various imported goods.

Tariffs within the British Empire had been a huge issue in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. Colonial merchants had to pay those taxes when their goods were landed.

Though that money went into the central government’s coffers, and therefore theoretically benefited all British subjects, American importers and politicians had complained vociferously.

Of course, since tariffs were an established way for governments to raise money, a number of the states instituted their own import taxes during and after the war. The U.S. Constitution assigned that power to the national government alone, with the requirement that they be equal in every port. But how much tax should the U.S. of A. collect?

Over the next several days, the House kept making itself into a committee of the whole to consider the proposal. More petitions arrived from domestic manufacturers, pushing for higher tariffs. On 16 May the House finally voted, 41–8, to approve the “bill for laying a duty on goods, wares, and merchandises, imported into the United States.”

Nearly a month later, on 12 June, Samuel Allyne Otis, secretary of the U.S. Senate, came to tell the House that that chamber had also passed the bill on duties, but “with sundry amendments.” Over the next two weeks there was a lot of back and forth. The Senate reported which amendments it would “recede” from and which it would insist on. The House approved a conference committee. At last, on 29 June Otis reported that the Senate acceded to the House’s last two proposed amendments.

Congress had reached agreement on a major bill—it had never done that before! Just to be sure, on 1 July the House created a small committee “to examine the enrolled bill” to be sure the text was accurate and ready for signature by the leaders of the two chambers.

The next day, Speaker Frederick Muhlenberg (shown above) signed the document. On 3 July, a joint committee presented it to the President. And on the already symbolic date of the Fourth of July, George Washington signed the first substantial legislation of the first U.S. Congress. It’s now called the Tariff Act of 1789.

But Congress still hadn’t established how to collect those duties.

TOMORROW: Following up.

Tracking the Lovells from Nova Scotia to Natchez

Continuing my exploration of the Creating a Federal Government website, I looked up another man active among Boston Whigs before the war who I knew received a federal appointment afterward: James Lovell.

I found him, but found that his name was amalgamated with his son’s. Poking around more, I saw a good genealogy website mixing that son up with another son.

At the same time, the Creating a Federal Government site has filled in some information about the Lovells that I didn’t have when I wrote about them back in 2008. So I’m going to try to sort things out.

James Lovell (1737–1814) was the respected usher, or assistant master, at Boston’s South Latin School in the 1760s and early 1770s. He delivered the first official oration in memory of the Boston Massacre. In the summer of 1775, the royal authorities arrested him for corresponding with Dr. Joseph Warren and at the end of the siege took him to Nova Scotia as a prisoner.

Released in an exchange, Lovell was chosen by the Massachusetts General Court to be a delegate to the Continental Congress. He was very active there, basically managing the diplomatic corps for a few busy years.

When Lovell went home to Massachusetts, the national government rewarded his service with an appointment which may not have required a lot of work: naval officer for the port of Boston. He kept that post until his death, through both Federalist and Jeffersonian administrations. In January 1809, for example, he placed an advertisement in the newspapers warning that he would follow his duty in enforcing the Embargo Act, unpopular or not. (It was about to be replaced, anyway.)

Lowell signed that advertisement with his full name: “James Lovell.” However, he’s been entered into the Creating a Federal Government website under the name of his son James S. (for Smith) Lovell (1762–1825).

James S. Lovell was a merchant in Boston, selling tobacco, sugars, alcohol, and other commodities from his shop on State Street and then beside the Town Dock. By the 1790s he was investing in ships. In February 1793 he was moderator for Boston’s Civic Festival supporting the French republic, and three years later on the committee of the chamber of commerce.

James S. Lovell’s most visible governmental appointment was a local one: Inspector of Police in 1798. In that capacity he made regular reports to the public about the yellow fever epidemic. The following year, the selectmen authorized him to deal with people who wanted to buy “the Manure, to be taken from the streets of Boston.”

But then in 1801 James S. Lovell was judged bankrupt. He kept a lower profile for several years. In 1820, according to the Creating a Federal Government website, Lovell was appointed gauger, weigher, and inspector in the Boston Customs office. Two years later someone signing himself (or herself) “Radical” in the Boston Courier reported the Customs department salaries, including “James S. Lovell, weigher and guager, [$]3466.99.” At that time Lovell was helping to sell a cotton factory in Connecticut, advertising that he could meet with people “at the Custom-House, Boston, or his residence, Newton Plain.”

James S. Lovell died in Newton in December 1825, described in Boston newspapers as “the eldest and only surviving son of the Hon. James Lovell, deceased.”

But that wasn’t true. James S. Lovell had an older half-brother still living, and to add to the confusion that man was also named James.

While he was a student at Harvard College back in the 1750s, the future schoolteacher James Lovell had fathered a child with the daughter of the college steward, Susanna Hastings. That boy was born in 1758 and grew up for several years in Cambridge as James Hastings. About 1770, he came into Boston, joined his father’s household, and assumed the Lovell surname.

The younger James Lovell graduated from Harvard College himself in 1776 and then joined the Continental Army. He served under Col. Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, gained the rank of major, and married Ann Reid, a rich South Carolina widow.

In 2008 I wrote that this James Lovell “lit out for New Orleans” when he couldn’t get his hands on his wife’s inheritance. His years in the new Louisiana Territory, from 1806 to 1811, exactly correspond to the tenure of a James Lovell in the Customs office at New Orleans. Newspapers confirm he was appointed Surveyor in May 1806, Inspector of the Revenue in 1807. So now we know how he supported himself.

The younger James Lovell went back to South Carolina in 1811, prompting his wife to take legal steps to preserve her property. Eventually they quarreled again, and he left. But he lived in Orangeburg until 1850, far outdistancing his younger half-brother.

Finally, in researching these men, I came across information to fill another hole in my old post. The senior James Lovell had another son named John Middleton Lovell, born in 1763 and thought to have died around 1799 (shown above). I didn’t have much to say about him. Now I can report that he was also in business in Boston in the early 1790s, with a shop on Long Wharf; his brother James S. handled business for him while he invested in Dedham real estate.

In March 1795, John M. Lovell joined the U.S. Army as lieutenant and adjutant of the Corps of Artillerists and Engineers. That appointment is also noted at the Creating a Federal Government website. In that capacity he advertised for deserters in the Columbian Centinel and other New England newspapers. He administered a movement of troops from Pittsburgh to Fort Adams in the Mississippi Territory in 1798.

In March 1799 Lt. Lovell was still in the Mississippi Territory, negotiating an agreement with Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, Spanish governor of neighboring Louisiana, to discourage desertion. His commander, Gen. James Wilkinson, wrote to Alexander Hamilton to boast of the results.

On 7 Jan 1800 the Massachusetts Mercury ran this death notice:

At the Natchez, JOHN LOVELL, Esq. Aid-de-Camp to Gen. Wilkinson, and son of the hon. James Lovell, of this place.

According to a 21 Apr 1800 letter from Caleb Swan, paymaster general of the army, “Mr Lovell died on the 24 of October 1799.”

Going to Work for the Feds

In exploring the Creating a Federal Government website, I saw a fair number of familiar names.

Then as now, government officials appointed military veterans to civilian posts. Thus, I see significant appointments in the U.S. Customs department going to:

• Thomas Melvill (1751–1832, shown here) of the Boston Tea Party and the Massachusetts artillery regiment, holding various positions in Boston from 1789 until 1830, just two years before his death. (Melvill actually started working in Customs in 1786, before the Constitution put the office on a new footing.)
• John Popkin (1743–1827), lieutenant colonel in the Continental artillery, who worked for the Customs for at least a decade after his farm in Bolton failed and he needed to support his family.
• John Foster Williams (1743–1814) of the Massachusetts navy ship Protector, commanding a revenue cutter.

Likewise, a lot of men who were active in Boston’s Whig movement before the war got posts in the state government during and after it.

I also saw some familiar names which turned out to be men with appointments a generation or more after the Revolution. I wonder if they’re descendants of the Patriots, named after a Revolutionary ancestor and perhaps leveraging the family name and connections.

On interesting example is Francis C. Whiston (1798–1878), a Customs employee from 1824 to 1828. He later related how the Marquis de Lafayette handed him a masonic apron after laying the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument in 1825.

Francis C. Whiston’s grandfather Obadiah Whiston was a blacksmith in pre-war Boston, ready to tussle with British soldiers during the 1768–1770 occupation. In late 1774 he helped to hide two of the militia cannon I wrote about in The Road to Concord. But in January 1775 the Patriot leaders heard rumors he was talking about switching sides and divulging where those guns had been taken, so they cut him out of the network. The blacksmith had to leave town with the British military in March 1776.

I don’t know if Obadiah Whiston’s wife and sons stayed behind or sailed away with him and returned, but his grandson was working for the federal government fifty years later.

TOMORROW: Sorting out Lovells.

“With Geat diffickalty We Exaped With our Lives”

Ebenezer Richardson and George Wilmot evidently met with Gen. Thomas Gage in Salem in the middle of September 1774.

The royal governor moved back to Boston in the last week of that month after an unsuccessful confrontation with the local committee of safety.

Richardson and Wilmot went to the Stoneham home of Kezia and Daniel Bryant, Richardson’s sister and brother-in-law, as I recounted yesterday. They were there on 3 September.

When I first wrote about Wilmot’s story for what was then New England Ancestors magazine, I didn’t realize the significance of that date. That was the day after the “Powder Alarm.”

That event showed how powerless Gov. Gage was outside of Boston. Up to five thousand militiamen had marched into Cambridge, demanded that royal appointees resign, chased Customs Commissioner Benjamin Hallowell for miles, and surrounded Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver’s mansion until he signed a resignation. And there was no response from the royal government.

If Gage couldn’t protect high officials in Cambridge, right across the Charles River, he certainly couldn’t protect an infamous child-killer up in Stoneham. And on 3 September, a rural mob came for Richardson.

According to Wilmot’s petition to Secretary of State Dartmouth:

about Eleven a Clock at Night thee came forty men armed with Goons and Suronded the house of Mr. Brayant—and broke his Windows Strocke out on of his Wife Eyes, and swore they would distroy us for we Ware Toary and Enemys to there Countery—and With Geat diffickalty We Exaped With our Lives and Came to Boston under the protection of the fourth Rigment of foot Quartred there.

His Majesty’s 4th Regiment of Foot was camped on Boston Common.

Richardson and Wilmot must eventually have gotten on board H.M.S. St. Lawrence as planned. They were in London on 19 January when they signed their petitions to Lord Dartmouth. Judging by the handwriting (and spelling), Wilmot wrote both petitions, and Richardson added his signature.

On January, undersecretary John Pownall sent those papers to his counterpart at the Treasury Office, Grey Cooper. He wrote:

As the inclosed Petitions relate to Services performed and Hardships sustained by the Petitioners as Officers of the Revenue, I am directed by the Lord of Dartmouth to transmit them to you and to desire that you will communicate them to Lord North.

In other words, this is a Customs service problem, so it’s up to your department to deal with it.

Treasury officials read the papers on 26 January, and a note on the outside of the bundle states that the two men were paid £10 each.

And with that, “the rank, bloody, and as yet unhanged Ebenezer Richardson” departed from the historical record.

“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.

“Discovered skulking at the North-end of this city”

According to the Massachusetts Spy, when the Pennsylvania Journal printed its incendiary item about Ebenezer Richardson (quoted yesterday), people were already hunting for the man.

On 4 Nov 1773, Isaiah Thomas’s newspaper ran an “Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman in Philadelphia, to his correspondent in Boston, dated the 13th of October, 1773.” That was the same day that William and Thomas Bradford’s Pennsylvania paper published its alert.

The first paragraph of that letter was about the new Tea Act, Philadelphia merchants’ plans to respond, and concern about a report that “the duties on Tea have been regularly paid” in Boston.

The next extract said:

Your infamous Richardson, who has been concealed from public view until very lately, was yesterday haunted about, and very narrowly escaped. But a certain A. T———— who was supposed to have been his associate and patron here, was turned out of the Coffee-house in a very ignominious manner.—I pity him:—He always appeared to be decent and very civil; but to be subjected to a Murderer convict, is so injurious and unsafe, that his appointment here by the Commissioners could be only with a view to provoke to a riot: And if T——— made him his friend it could not be expected that the populace could well distinguish between them.

The Pennsylvania Journal had singled out this “A. T————” as “a Tide-Waiter” who’d said he’d work with Richardson if the Customs Commissioners ordered him to. I can’t identify him further, but folks who know the Philadelphia sources might. Clearly people in 1773 knew exactly whom the newspaper was referring to.

As for “the Coffee-house” that refused this man service, that was probably the London Coffee House (shown above, as drawn from William H. Ukers’s All About Coffee). The proprietor of that enterprise was none other than newspaper printer William Bradford.

A week later, the Bradfords’ 20 October Pennsylvania Journal proudly reported:

The description given in our last paper of the phiz of the Villain, EBENEZER RICHARDSON, being very accurate, he was last Monday [18 October] discovered skulking at the North-end of this city: and being closely pursued by many well-wishers to peace and good order, very narrowly escaped (by means of a wood) the TAR AND FEATHERS, which had several days before been prepared for HIM.—

As the city of Philadelphia is now, and forever must be too hot, to hold this Parracide, he will, in all probability, try his fortune in New-York; and if, contrary to expectation, he should not there meet his reward, but should experience another hair-breadth escape, he may probably, as a dernier Resorte, fly to the arms of his dear, dear P———, the surest and safest asylum for complicated Villainy, on this side the Atlantic.

“P———” was most likely Charles Paxton, Richardson’s longtime employer and one of the those Customs Commissioners in Boston.

TOMORROW: Back home in Massachusetts?

“Lurks about the wharves of this city”

Page 3 of William and Thomas Bradford’s Pennsylvania Journal for 13 Oct 1773 included a notice of a meeting of the American Philosophical Society and a proclamation from Gov. John Penn that the Crown had approved two bills the colonial assembly had passed back in March 1772 (a divorce and a naturalization).

In between those items was this announcement:

WHEREAS the infamous EBENEZER RICHARDSON, convicted of PERJURY and MURDER, has, at the instance of his special friend, Charles Paxton, been sent to this city as a pensioner to the —honorable Commissioners at Boston; and in consideration of his many special Services, has by them been rewarded with a quarterly payment, out of the money levied on the Americans, by an Act of Parliament, without their consent:

And whereas the said RICHARDSON, rioting in the spoils of his country, lurks about the wharves of this city, seeking an opportunity to distress the Trade of Philadelphia, and enslave America: And, in order more effectually to answer his vile purpose, has intimately connected himself with a certain T———, a Tide-Waiter here, who publicly declared “he would not only associate with the VILLAIN, EBENEZER, but with the DEVIL himself, if so ordered by the COMMISSIONERS,”

Now it is expected, that all Lovers of Liberty, in this Province, will make diligent search after the said RICHARDSON, and having found this Bird of Darkness, will produce him, tarred and feathered, at the Coffee-House, there to expiate his sins against his country, by a public recantation.

TAR AND FEATHERS.

N.B. The above RICHARDSON appears to be a man of 40 years of age, is about 5 feet 4 or 5 inches high, pretty thick and broad a-cross the shoulders, has a very ill countenance, and down look, [Cain’s Phyz,] mostly wears a flopped hat, a piss burnt cut wig, and a blue surtout coat, with metal buttons.

That’s quite a display of rhetoric. It makes something sinister from Richardson’s job in the Customs service: he “lurks about the wharves,” aims to “distress the Trade,” receives “a quarterly payment” (i.e., his salary). The item links him to “the DEVIL,” “Cain,” and a “Bird of Darkness.” It also contains the only physical description of the man that I’ve seen, not at all flattering. 

This article appears to have been written in Philadelphia by someone not fully familiar with Richardson’s long history in Massachusetts, picking up cues from Boston newspapers. The man was never “convicted of PERJURY,” to my knowledge. Bostonians called him a perjurer, including at the start of the riot at his house, because he’d deceived the public about his child with Kezia Hincher for several crucial months, and because painting him as a habitual liar let them cast doubt on his reports about smuggling and other activity.

The invocation of “TAR AND FEATHERS” is also striking because that public punishment hadn’t shown up in Philadelphia yet. Indeed, many Americans, even Whigs, viewed those incidents as New Englanders going too far. But the next month a broadside warning river pilots against bringing tea into Philadelphia would be issued by “THE COMMITTEE FOR TARRING AND FEATHERING.” (Or “Committee of Taring and Feathering,” as the next paragraph put it, showing the locals behind this threat were still working out details.)

Lastly, this newspaper notice overtly confronts the royal Customs service. It names one of the agency heads in Boston, verges on calling those men “[dis]honorable,” and refers to a local tide waiter by an initial everyone on the Philadelphia waterfront would recognize. That last seems like a clear threat.

TOMORROW: Results.

”No other than the notorious Richardson”

As I quoted back here, on 24 May 1773 Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette closed an item about Ebenezer Richardson with the line: “Balf, McQuirk & Kennedys are not the only Instances of the unexampled Goodness of George the Third.”

By invoking those London legal controversies from a couple of years before, this newspaper linked Richardson’s pardon after killing Christopher Seider in a riot to two cases that London radicals had held up as examples of government corruption.

In the same way, they treated the Boston Massacre of 1770 as the local equivalent of the Massacre of St. George’s Fields in 1768. American Whigs viewed and presented their efforts as part of reforming the whole British Empire.

John Wilkes, Catharine Macaulay, and a few other radicals wrote back to the Bostonians, but they didn’t win over many other people in Britain.

The Boston Whigs had more success building solidarity in other mainland British colonies. Case in point: They were able to convince Philadelphians to dislike Ebenezer Richardson.

That invocation of the Kennedy brothers, McQuirk, and Balfe came a paragraph below a report that the Customs service was seeking a new berth for Richardson in Philadelphia.

About six weeks later, on 5 July, the Boston Gazette shared this anecdote:

A correspondent has sent the following, viz.

“Notwithstanding the art made use of to conceal the appointment of that pardoned murderer, the infamous and ever to be detested Ebenezer Richardson, this may certify, that said Richardson lately employed a friend to bespeak a passage for him in a vessel bound from Salem to Philadelphia.

The master enquiring who the intended passenger was, and being told it was one belonging to the customs and no other than the notorious Richardson, he refused carrying him on any consideration.[”]

That item was reprinted in the Pennsylvania Journal on 14 July.

Richardson did eventually make it to Philadelphia, but the city was ready for him.

TOMORROW: In the city of brotherly love.

“A proper Person to be employed in the REVENUE”

On 10 Mar 1772, as described yesterday, Massachusetts’s high court delivered a royal pardon to Ebenezer Richardson, convicted twenty-three months earlier of murder.

According to one of the judges on that court, Peter Oliver, “The Prisoner fled the Town immediately on his Discharge; the Rabble heard of it, & pursued him to execute their own Law upon him, but he happily escaped.”

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson reported to his predecessor, Sir Francis Bernard, that the “poor fellow who has been in close prison more than two years…hapned to be discharged when the Inhabitants of the Town were engaged in an Affair at their annual meeting & by this means we saved a tumult at least if nothing more.”

Richardson still had family north of Boston in the Woburn/Stoneham/Reading area, so he probably lay low there. I haven’t found clues about his second wife Kezia and their children.

For a decade before his conviction Richardson had worked for the Customs service. The Commissioners of Customs appear to have eventually found another place for him—a distant place.

Or, as Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette put it on 24 May 1773:

As an additional Affront to the Feelings of his Countrymen; as an aggravated Outrage on the Sensibility, Humanity, Virtue and Justice of this People; as a Master Stroke of rancorous Enormity, to put to the Rack the most obstinate Quietist: BE IT KNOWN;

that the cringing, smiling, fawning, bowing CHARLES FROTH, Esq; a Wretch, who from his earliest Puppy-hood, thro’ the lingering Progress of a too-long protracted Life, to a Period when he withers on the Crutch of Decrepitude, might challenge his recording Angel to produce one single Action, that sifted to it’s Motive, would not effectually consign him to eternal Infamy; has, O! unparalelled Effrontery! O! the detestable Parricide! has appointed that execrable Villain, the condemned Vagabond; the rank, bloody, and as yet unhanged EBENEZER RICHARDSON, an Officer in the Customs in the Port of Philadelphia.

And what is infinitely aggravating, and renders the Transaction much more atrocious; the Murderer is distinguished by a particular Recommendation to the Collector and Comptroller of that Port; declaring the Miscreant to be a distinguished Friend to Government, a proper Person to be employed in the REVENUE, and ordering them to reward him with a Guinea per Week.——

As the said Ebenezer Richardson is now placed on the Ladder of Promotion, we may expect him one of the Honorable Board of Commissioners, in a few Years; where he may probably make as distinguished a Figure as the Rest of his BRETHREN.

“Charles Froth” was the Whigs’ usual insult for Customs Commissioner Charles Paxton (shown above), who had employed Richardson as a confidential informer soon after he moved to Boston. As you might guess, Paxton was about as unpopular as Richardson himself.

TOMORROW: Shifting to Philadelphia.

John Malcom, Customs Officer

I wish I could find more sources on Capt. John Malcom’s years in Québec.

Select Documents in Canadian Economic History, 1497–1783, compiled by Harold A. Innis in 1929, quotes at least one business advertisement by him, but it’s not an easy book to stumble across in the U.S. of A.

I’m guessing that Malcom ran into some business reverses because in 1769 he not only moved back to New England, but he took a job helping to collect His Majesty’s Customs.

For a merchant captain like Malcom, joining the Customs service meant switching sides in a long-running conflict. In Boston, younger brother Daniel Malcom was being lauded for resisting Customs officers trying to search his property in 1766 and for testifying against officers seizing the Liberty in 1768.

I suspect that Malcom became especially unpopular as a Customs officer precisely because he’d been a New England ship captain. He wasn’t like Henry Hulton or John Robinson, British bureaucrats without local ties. Instead, like Benjamin Hallowell, Jr., he’d worked among fellow New England mariners. He knew their tricks. His neighbors expected better of him.

Malcom would probably have preferred to remain a merchant if he could. In eighteenth-century British society, men aspired to be “independent,” earning a good living from their land or other investments. Working for a salary, however solid, was seen as dependence on someone else.

In Malcom’s case, his first job was as a tide surveyor, which seems to have been in the middle of the bureaucracy, supervising the tide waiters but not being in charge of the money. That looks like a big comedown for someone used to commanding his own ship.

Still, that rank might have been enough for Malcom to qualify as a gentleman, and social status was certainly a recurring theme in his conflicts with other men. After joining the Customs office, he began to use “Esquire” after his name.

There may be more information about this appointment in British government records. I don’t even know when in 1769 it took place, though one clue is that Malcom’s family apparently returned from Canada in August.

On 14 Oct 1769, Isaac Werden wrote from Québec to his employer Aaron Lopez (shown above), enclosing a financial note to “John Malcom Esqr., In his Majesties Customs at Newport, Rhode Island.” In that same letter Werden called Malcom “a drole mortal.” Obviously, Werden was acquainted with Malcom and knew that he would be found in the Newport Customs office by that date.

Twelve days after that letter was written, Daniel Malcom died.

TOMORROW: Boston mourns a Son of Liberty.

Capt. Daniel Malcom, Brandy, Wine, and Punch

In the mid-1760s, while John Malcom was trading out of Québec, his younger brother Daniel Malcom was becoming prominent in Boston.

On 24 Sept 1766, three high officials came to his home on Bennett Street in the North End:

• Benjamin Hallowell, Comptroller of the Customs for the Port of Boston
• William Sheaffe, Deputy Collector of the Port
• Stephen Greenleaf, Sheriff of Suffolk County

Those men had brought some lesser Customs officers as well, to do the heavy lifting.

Malcom didn’t really want the honor of their visit. Those authorities had come to search his cellar for brandy and wine allegedly smuggled onto shore without the legal duties being paid.

To be technical, the Customs officers wanted to search Malcom’s whole cellar, while he was happy to show them part of it but insisted he’d rented a locked portion to his friend William Mackay, so it wasn’t up to him to open that. Also, Malcom insisted the writs should name the officers’ source of information, which of course they didn’t want to do. And occasionally he brandished (empty) pistols to make his point.

This produced a stalemate that lasted hours. A crowd grew to watch and/or intimidate the legal authorities. Among the people involved in the incident were John Ruddock, Paul Revere, John Pigeon, John Tudor, Nathaniel Barber, and the boys of the North Latin School. Ebenezer Richardson, whom I’m speaking about tonight, hovered just off-stage.

Ultimately the Customs officials gave up on this particular search, but they used Malcom’s intractability and the threat of crowd violence to lobby for beefing up their powers. Gov. Francis Bernard ordered an inquiry. The many depositions thus created are printed in George G. Wolkins’s “Daniel Malcom and Writs of Assistance,” a study presented to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1924 and now available through JSTOR.

After that event, the Boston town meeting started to name Daniel Malcom to committees on merchants’ issues, particularly complaints about the Customs. Late in 1768 he was on hand for the Liberty riot, and his testimony about events was sent to London and even published in the St. James’s Chronicle.

Malcom, Mackay, Barber, and twelve more friends commissioned Revere to make and engrave a silver punch bowl, now in the Museum of Fine Arts. The text on that bowl celebrates the Massachusetts General Court’s refusal to rescind the Circular Letter of 1768. It’s called the “Sons of Liberty Bowl,” but those fifteen men weren’t the town’s political leaders. Daniel Malcom was the only one at the head of a crowd.

TOMORROW: 1769, a year of change.

Talking about Ebenezer Richardson in Stoneham, June 4

On the evening of Tuesday, 4 June, I’ll speak to the Stoneham Historical Society. The society is headlining my talk “The Most Hated Man in Revolutionary Boston.”

Was that Gov. Thomas Hutchinson? Customs Commissioner Benjamin Hallowell? Or even Boston 1775’s latest figure in the spotlight, Capt. John Malcom?

No, for producing long-lasting, multifaceted, bitter antipathy, I don’t think anyone could beat Ebenezer Richardson. In fact, I’ve argued that Richardson did as much as any other individual to turn people in rural Massachusetts against the royal government.

Richardson was born in 1718 on a Woburn farm touching the border with Stoneham. Until the age of thirty-four he was an ordinary middling New England farmer—married, raising children, and helping to house his wife’s poor widowed sister.

Over the next quarter-century Richardson became a secret adulterer, an outcast from his home town, a government informant, a Customs officer, a target of riots, a convicted child murderer, and a fugitive. Starting around 1760, each new scandalous episode linked him more closely to royal officials, whom people saw as protecting him.

I’ve chased traces of Ebenezer Richardson through archives on two continents. This talk brings his story back to, well, not quite to his home town, but to the neighboring town, and also the town where his widowed mother moved after she remarried.

This event is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. at the Stoneham Public Library, 431 Main Street. It is free and open to the public, sponsored by the Stoneham and Massachusetts Cultural Councils.

John Malcom: The Early Years

Back in January I wrote about the mobbing of Customs officer John Malcom on the Sestercentennial anniversary of that event.

The standard study of that attack is “Tar and Feathers: The Adventures of Captain John Malcom,” written by Frank W. C. Hersey in 1941 and available through the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Alfred F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party looks at the same day through the eyes of George R. T. Hewes.

I collected some additional information about Malcom that I didn’t have time to dig through and share in January, so now I’m doubling back to his story. We can call this series “The Further Adventures of Captain John Malcom.” Though really it’s more of a prequel.

First of all, a note about nomenclature: Capt. John Malcom spelled his name without a second L, as did his brother Daniel Malcom. However, many people writing about him spelled the surname in the traditional Scottish style as “Malcolm.” Indeed, Hersey transcribed a petition signed by Malcom which a clerk then labeled as coming from “Mr. Malcolm.”

Because so many historians rendered the name as “Malcolm,” I followed that style in making a Boston 1775 tag for the man years ago. However, in these postings I’m going to use the spellings that individuals preferred.

This story starts in 1721, when Michael and Sarah Malcom arrived in Boston from Ulster, Ireland, where their ancestors had moved from Scotland in the previous century. They brought young children named William and Elizabeth.

On 20 May 1723 Sarah gave birth to a second boy, whom they called John. The family then moved to Georgetown in the district of Maine. Another baby boy, Daniel, arrived on 29 Nov 1725, followed by Allen in 1733 and Martha in 1738.

Michael Malcom invested in the Massachusetts “Land Bank or Manufactory Scheme.” In 1745 he was assessed to pay £16, on the high side of those investors.

Also in 1745, wrote Hersey, young John Malcom “served as an ensign in the Second Massachusetts Regiment, commanded by Colonel Samuel Waldo, at the siege of Louisbourg; and this same year he was captain of a vessel which carried dispatches from Louisbourg to Boston,” presaging his maritime career. However, John Malcom’s name also appears as a private enlisting in Capt. Elisha Doane’s company in August 1746.

In 1750 John Malcom married Sarah Balch at Boston’s Presbyterian Meeting-House. The Rev. John Moorhead baptized five of their children between 1751 and 1758.

Younger brother Daniel Malcom also came to Boston and married Ann Fudge, and they also had children starting in 1751. He became a prominent member of the Anglican Christ Church’s congregation. While John named one of his sons Daniel, I’ve found no evidence Daniel named any of his boys John.

Both John and Daniel went to sea, made Boston their home port, and rose to be merchant captains. By the late 1740s a captain or two named Malcom was sailing out of Boston for Cape Fear, North Carolina; Antigua; Annapolis; Philadelphia; Honduras; Bristol, England; and Youghal, Ireland. By the 1750s the Malcoms were owners or part-owners of ships. They traded all over North America, the Caribbean, and Britain—and occasionally Cadiz and Lisbon.

It wasn’t illegal to trade with Portugal, Spain, or Caribbean islands claimed by other empires, but there were higher tariffs on most goods traded that way. Ship captains usually tried every trick they could to minimize those tariffs. Many of those methods made that trade into illegal smuggling, but in that period Boston merchants generally figured that as long as they didn’t get too blatant the Customs service wouldn’t come down hard on them.

The real hazards in ocean trade were natural disasters and war.

TOMORROW: Wrecked and captured.

Adm. Benjamin Hallowell Carew, R.N., a Son of Boston

Last month David Morgan’s Inside Croydon website profiled a notable British naval figure who grew up in pre-Revolutionary Boston.

Adm. Benjamin Hallowell Carew was one of the sons of Loyalists who joined the British military during the American War and remained in it through the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

Morgan writes:

He was an American, born in 1761 in Boston to a family who were supporters of the British in the difficult years before the American War of Independence. Hallowell’s father, also named Benjamin, had also seen service in the Royal Navy, and had become a Commissioner of the Board of Customs in the port of Boston. His mother, Mary Boylston, was a second cousin of John Adams, who would go on to become the second President of America. . . .

The Hallowells of Boston lived a comfortable life by the standards of the time, with enough income to be able to employ one of the great American portrait painters of the day, John Singleton Copley, to produce family portraits.

Distance from Boston led Morgan into some geographical errors in describing the Hallowells’ houses. On 26 Aug 1765, an anti-Stamp Act mob damaged the Customs official’s house in Boston. He also owned a mansion in the Jamaica Plain part of Roxbury which was more secluded and safe. (J.P. and Roxbury are separate neighborhoods now, but in colonial times Roxbury was the town, Jamaica Plain simply an area within it.)

As a Customs officer, Benjamin Hallowell was unpopular with the merchants and people of Boston. He may have attracted special resentment because he was from a local family, his father a prominent merchant captain himself. In other words, people might have perceived him as switching sides.

In 1768 Hallowell helped to seize John Hancock’s ship Liberty, and the waterfront crowd physically attacked him, driving him into hiding onto Castle Island. Within the Customs service, however, Hallowell parlayed that treatment into a promotion as the Crown’s replacement for John Temple, a commissioner the administration came to see as too close to the locals.

Commissioner Hallowell was also the target of part of the “Powder Alarm” multitude gathered on Cambridge common on 2 Sept 1774. Leaders of that crowd successfully urged most of the men to leave him alone, but some chased him on horseback all the way across the Charles River bridge, up through Brookline and Roxbury to the gates of Boston.

Naturally, the family didn’t stick around to try their chances in March 1776. Commissioner Hallowell moved to Britain, taking his wife and children.

The next Benjamin's story continues:

Young Hallowell was aged 14 or 15 when he arrived in England, and wasted little time before joining the navy.

Hallowell enjoyed Navy life and was promoted to lieutenant in 1783 having already been involved in the Battle of Chesapeake Bay in 1781, St Kitts in 1782 and the Battle of Dominica later that same year.

Hallowell, by then a Commodore on frigate HMS Minerve, was on board the British flagship HMS Victory with Nelson at the Battle of Cape Saint Vincent in 1797. . . .

By the time of Battle of the Nile in 1798, Hallowell was in command of the 74-gun HMS Swiftsure. The British had hunted down the French fleet all the way from Toulon, via Malta, and tracked them to Egypt.

For how that fight worked out for Hallowell, why Adm. Horatio Nelson sent him a coffin, and finally how his surname became Carew, see the Inside Croydon post.

The Last Glimpses of Lt. Ragg

Yesterday’s posting took Lt. John Ragg of the British marines to Middletown, Connecticut, as a prisoner of war along with his servant, Pvt. Benjamin Jones, in September 1776.

I’ve looked for records of what happened next, without success. I assume there must be some paperwork at the Continental or local level, but not published.

It appears that the lieutenant was exchanged for an American officer taken prisoner that fall, and there were a lot of those.

The next sign of Lt. Ragg is in the 12 May 1777 issue of the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, printed by Hugh Gaine inside the Crown-held city. An advertisement for Maj. Robert Donkin’s Military Collections and Remarks, to be printed by Gaine later that year, listed “Marines, Lieut. Ragg” among the subscribers.

Then the man drops out of my sight again until toward the end of the war.

Lt. Ragg had a brother named Andrew, who became the Customs service controller of Customs on the Pocomoke River in southern Maryland in May 1766. When the war broke out the local authorities detained him, then let him out as long as he didn’t cause trouble and paid heavy taxes.

On 5 Feb 1779, Andrew Ragg asked the Maryland government to allow him and his young daughter Anne to return to Britain. On 31 March, Ragg filed a deposition promising not to give intelligence to the enemy, and that same day the state Council granted permission to travel to New York.

Evidently the Raggs didn’t go to New York until 1780. Anne was then nine years old. To the British authorities they characterized their journey as an “escape.”

The little family got on board a ship to Britain, but during the voyage Andrew Ragg fell overboard and was drowned. John Ragg, by then a captain in the marines, petitioned the government to support his niece on 24 Apr 1781.

The last sign I’ve found of John Ragg is that “Captain Ragg, of the marines,” was listed as wounded while serving on H.M.S. Magnificent in the Battle of the Saintes in April 1782.

After the war, Ragg might have gone home to Aberdeen, Scotland. He was living in that city in February 1767 when he was listed as a witness in a court case recorded in the city’s Enactment Book (notes in P.D.F. form here).

That book also lists “Andrew Ragg, late apprentice to William Brebner, merchant,” among the genteel young men accused of a breach of the peace in April 1763. Was this the future Customs officer? Those men “bound and enacted themselves that they shall behave themselves regularly, soberly and discreetly” and got off.

In any event, that’s all I’ve been able to uncover about Lt. John Ragg, remembered in the Shaw family lore as the lieutenant named Wragg who so angered young Samuel Shaw.

(The painting above shows H.M.S. Magnificent among the Royal Navy warships capturing two French vessels at the Battle of the Saintes.)

“Volumes of dense smoak” in Liverpool

EPOCH, published by Lancaster University in Britain, just shared an eye-opening article by Dabeoc Stanley on “Liverpool’s Eighteenth-Century Second-Hand Smoke Problem.”

Liverpool had grown in size and wealth in the eighteenth century as a port for Britain’s colonial and slaving ventures.

If you were to walk Liverpool’s streets in 1784, however, you would struggle to see this material wealth, indeed you would probably be struggling to breathe. The culprit was second-hand tobacco smoke. A petition to the Commissioners of Customs signed by more than 40 ‘respectable persons’ of Liverpool, and dated to June 1784, described:

… volumes of dense smoak … [that] cloud the streets to the annoyance of all passengers and fill the rooms of every house … to a degree perfectly offensive and intolerable … Within the reach of the smoak the furniture of our houses is spoiled, life is rendered comfortless to all, many are afflicted with sore eyes and only the young and healthy at some time can breathe.

In foggy or calm conditions, the wind was not sufficient to carry off the smoke, allowing it to accumulate in Liverpool’s streets and squares, creating a smog every bit as suffocating as that of London.

Those vapors had many sources: brick kilns, salt works, an oilhouse rendering whale blubber, and of course fires for cooking and heating. Tobacco smoke added to the hazy mix.

But tobacco fires were also the result of government policies, as Stanley traces. First, merchants could get a “drawback” on tobacco duties if they claimed they were reshipping that commodity outside the British Isles. That gave them an incentive to pump up the weight of their outgoing tobacco with “sand, dirt, and all manner of rubish.” They could then smuggle that untaxed tobacco into Britain through the Isle of Man.

In response to such smuggling, Parliament beefed up its laws. After 1750, Customs officers were to burn all the tobacco they confiscated as contraband or damaged.

In Liverpool, that condemned tobacco was first burned in a seaside furnace away from the center of town. But officials discovered that tobacco sent to that relatively isolated place too often went missing. So in 1783 a new “immense chimney” was built behind the Custom House in the middle of the city’s business district.

That’s why a year later locals complained about the effects of tobacco smoke on people’s health and property values. (And some of them might have preferred the opportunities of the previous system.)

Nonetheless, the situation didn’t change until 1802. That January, “a most tremendous gale” knocked the big chimney onto the Customs House, incidentally destroying lots of paperwork. (Again, some merchants and marines in Liverpool might have been pleased with this outcome.)