Riot at the Richardson House

By 22 Feb 1770, 250 years ago today, the anonymous informant reporting events in Boston to Customs Collector Joseph Harrison judged that the Sons of Liberty had “seemed greatly to gain ground” over the previous week.

One piece of evidence was that “a subscription was sett on foot amongst the females in town to discontinue to Drinking of Tea.” The newspapers also featured a spinning meeting in the North End. (I’ll get back to that.) On the night of 21 February, another anonymous letter said, someone “besmeared…the Importers windows with feathers & tar & feathers.”

In another sign of Whig strength, on 22 February the boys doubled their picket lines enforcing non-importation. According to the letter to Harrison: “The Exhibition at [William] Jacksons [was] the same as Last week—there was likewise an Exhibition at Theopiluis Lillie.” Jackson’s Brazen Head hardware store was in the center of town, but Lillie’s dry-goods shop was up in the North End on Middle Street (now Hanover Street).

Another person living in that neighborhood, “about fifty or sixty paces away,” was Ebenezer Richardson, a Customs service land-waiter. Richardson was a notorious outcast. While living in Woburn in the 1750s, he’d gotten his wife’s sister pregnant, then kept quiet for over a year as people blamed one of the town’s ministers. Once the truth came out, Richardson, now widowed, and his sister-in-law had to move to Boston, where they married at King’s Chapel.

In Boston, Richardson began to supply confidential information to the province’s attorney general, Edmund Trowbridge, and then to Customs official Charles Paxton. That work stopped being confidential after some documents leaked from London in the early 1760s. The Customs office then hired Richardson officially, but Bostonians continued to refer to him as “the Informer.”

During the anti-Stamp Act riots of 24 Aug 1765, a crowd attacked the Richardsons’ house, and a few days later the Overseers of the Poor paid to have the family removed back to Woburn, perhaps for their own safety. By 1766 Richardson was back in Boston. After Capt. Daniel Malcom defied Customs officials, boys went over to Richardson’s house to taunt him for not gaining a reward—and it’s not even clear he was involved in that case.

Not that Richardson was quietly minding his own business in the political disputes of the period. According to William Gray, “Some mention of Effigies” had come up on 21 February, and Richardson said “he hoped if these was before Importers Doors there be a Dust beat up, wish’d the 14. Regiment there. They would Cut up the d——d Yankees.” (Richardson came from an old Puritan family himself, so here “Yankees” was a political epithet.)

According to the next week’s Boston Evening-Post:

Soon after it [the non-importation pageantry] was set up, Ebenezer Richardson, the famous Informer, came by and endeavored to persuade a countryman to overturn it with his wagon; which he refusing, he applied to a charcoal man to drive his cart against it; but he said he had no business with it, and would not concern himself about it.

Richardson (as the boys say) pressed him to it, saying he was a magistrate in the town and would bear him out in it. The man still denying to meddle therewith, Richardson laid hold on the horses and endeavored to shove them upon the pole which supported the pageantry; the cart, however, passed without disturbing it.

Frustrated, Richardson started to stomp off. But by this point some Whig men had arrived “to see Pagentry before Lilly’s Door,” as one of them, Edward Procter, later testified. Richardson saw them, perhaps laughing at him, and shouted, “Perjury! Perjury!”

Nobody’s sure what Richardson meant by that. Was he saying that calling Lillie an enemy of the country was perjury? Was he accusing those men of having perjured themselves in the past? Was he denying what they might have shouted at him (and, as shown above, Bostonians had a lot of stories to tell)? The men challenged Richardson to explain, and he replied that he was directing his comment not at Procter but at another man, Thomas Knox—which doesn’t help.

A neighbor named Deborah Warner said Richardson “Went into his house, and then…he came out in a great Rage, doubling his Fists and challenged the Gentlemen to the Door. Said it should be hot enough before night.” Sarah Richardson, one of the land-waiter’s daughters, testified that Knox and Capt. John Matchet responded, “come out you damn Son of Bitch, I’ll have your Heart out your Liver out.”

The yelling outside of Richardson’s door caught the attention of the boys. They left the signs and shoppers in front of Lillie’s shop and ran over to Richardson’s to “call him Informer,” in the Evening-Post’s words. Richardson and his wife Kezia—the woman who had once been his sister-in-law—tried to shoo the boys away, “flourishing their arms and advancing out into the street, with high threatenings.” That didn’t work. As the newspaper reported, “the children would retreat and on their return, advance, with the squealing and noise they usually make on such occasions.”

Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson later wrote that he “gave express directions to the Sheriff [Stephen Greenleaf] to go and suppress this unlawful assembly…but he did not think it safe to attempt it nor is there a J[ustice]. of P[eace]. in the town who will appear upon such an occasion.”

Outside the Richardsons’ house, the young mob started throwing “light rubbish.” Ebenezer came out “with a stick” and ordered the boys to go away. Invoking traditional British liberty, the children “said they would not, Kings high Way”—i.e., they had the right to be in the street. They threw more garbage. Kezia Richardson threw some back and was in return struck by an egg.

At some point a sailor who worked for the Customs service named George Wilmot came to the Richardsons’ house and offered to help his colleague. According to Sarah Richardson, “Wilmot said he would stand by him as Long as he had breath. Wilmot asked if he had any Gun. R[ichardson]. said he must get his Gun.”

Becoming desperate, “Richardson opened the door and snapped a gun” at the crowd—showing that he had a working musket but not firing anything. He reportedly threatened, “if you dont go away I’ll blow a hole thro you enough to Drive a Cart and Oxen” or “as sure as there was a G— in heaven, he’d blow a Lane thro ’em.” After a moment of fright, the young mob just started flinging things more ferociously.

Multiple witnesses said that someone threw a stick or brickbat out of the house and hit a passing soldier. He threw it back, smashing a window. That got the boys even more excited. Witness Andrew Tewksbury stated, “They threw Limon Peels then Stones. Some Men looked on Boys and they threw faster. Men shew’d no signs of Approbation but laughing.” Ebenezer, Kezia, and Sarah Richardson were all hit by stones.

Soon most of the windows in the house were broken. Sarah Richardson testified, “I staid till no Lead, no Frame, and then went away.” Ebenezer Richardson and George Wilmot retreated to an upper story. The active Whig tailor David Bradlee testified, “I saw one or two Men in the Room with Guns in their hands. R[ichardson] put a Gun on edge of Window.”

Finally, Richardson fired his musket. This time it was loaded.

TOMORROW: Rough justice.

Capt. David Bradlee, Wine-Merchant

If there’s not enough evidence to say David Bradlee participated in the Boston Tea Party of 1773, I don’t know what he did between the collapse of George Gailer’s lawsuit in late 1771 and the start of the war.

When Bradlee resurfaces in my notes, however, he was still deep inside Boston’s Revolutionary resistance. In early 1776, he was quartermaster of the Continental artillery regiment. (He may have had this job earlier as well.)

Once the war moved south to New York, Bradlee declined to move with the regiment, recently assigned to young Col. Henry Knox. So did the second-in-command, Lt. Col. William Burbeck, and a significant number of the men.

Bradlee instead became an officer in Massachusetts’s artillery regiment under Col. Thomas Crafts, who had helped to organize Boston’s resistance since the first anti-Stamp Act protest in 1765; Crafts was bitterly disappointed not to receive a colonelcy from the Continental Congress. The second-ranking officer in that regiment was Lt. Col. Paul Revere. The regiment’s major was Thomas Melvill, a veteran of the Tea Party. The regimental surgeon was Dr. Joseph Gardner, who had helped Bradlee carry Crispus Attucks away from the Boston Massacre.

Again, Bradlee was right in the middle of the socially rising mechanics who drove the Revolution in Boston’s streets and public meetings. He now had a military rank, and people referred to him as “Captain Bradlee” for the rest of his life. He joined the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons in 1777.

Bradlee’s connections helped him start building his fortune. On 10 Apr 1778 he joined Melvill and John Hinkley as majority investors in the privateer Speedwell. The ship left Boston harbor in July. After only three days, it captured a British sloop “laden with Sugar, Coffee, Cocoa, Limes, etc.” David Bradlee’s ship had come in.

In Boston’s 1780 tax roll, Bradlee was listed as a tavern-keeper, no longer a tailor. That same year, his younger sister Elizabeth Bradlee (1757-1832) married Gershom Spear (1755-1816), a nephew of Pool Spear, thus uniting the families of two of the people that Gailer had sued ten years earlier.

By the mid-1780s, David Bradlee was recognized as a “wine-merchant,” importing a commodity of upper-class life. He started to rent the basement of the State House to store his inventory, a sign of his continuing connections with the local government. The rent was £17, and the selectmen didn’t collect for two years until he’d finished renovating the space.

In 1794, after nine years, the State House rent was raised to £45, and Bradlee moved out. He bought a large wood and brick shop on the “w[est] side of the…Corn Market,” erected a set of scales outside the front door, and continued selling wine.

Bradlee had carried his family into genteel society. His daughter Sarah married a U.S. Navy captain, Patrick Fletcher. His son Samuel married Catherine Crafts, a daughter of Col. Crafts. His son David W. Bradlee became a member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company and of the Boston Board of Health.

Capt. David Bradlee died on March 6, 1811—“very sudden,” according to one citizen’s diary. He was mourned as a respected member of Boston’s business community and laid to rest in the family’s own tomb, purchased in 1800.

The American Revolution allowed this tailor to become an officer and a merchant. Still, Capt. Bradlee may never have escaped hearing words like those the Rev. Jeremy Belknap attributed to a blacksmith chafing at the demands of a newly-rich tailor: “Come, come, citizen pricklouse, do not give yourself such airs as this! It was but t’other day that you was glad to measure my arse for a pair of breeches.”

Inspecting the Tea Party House

In the 1890s the old Bradlee house at the corner of Hollis and Tremont Streets became known as the “Tea Party House.” Until it was leveled in 1898, it was on lists of what tourists should see in Boston. Even after that, people sold souvenir photos and postcards. The Bradlee home was a setting in the 1899 teen novel When Boston Braved the King.

All that celebrity was based entirely on stories that Sarah Bradlee Fulton’s family shared with the world starting in 1873 but really taking off after 1884. As I’ve noted, there’s no documentation to support the stories.

So what do I make of the family lore about Fulton, particularly that she, her husband, and her brothers participated in the Boston Tea Party?

On the one hand, there’s definite contemporaneous evidence that Sarah’s brother David was involved in the Revolutionary movement. He was sued for tarring and feathering a Customs sailor. He saw another Customs man aim a gun at him. He lifted Crispus Attucks’s body off King Street. You can’t get more involved in the street-level resistance than that.

Furthermore, as I’ll discuss tomorrow, David Bradlee remained part of that crowd of pushy mechanics-class Patriots as the war began. So if I wanted someone to toss the East India Company’s tea into the harbor in 1773, Bradlee would be one of the first guys I’d go to.

On the other hand, no one publicly connected the Bradlee family to the Tea Party in the first century after the event. David Bradlee lived until 1811. He and his sons remained prominent in Boston’s business community and civic government well into the nineteenth century. If they talked about him helping to destroy the tea, Benjamin Russell or whoever else published the first list of Tea Partiers in 1835 would probably have heard about it.

Likewise, there’s no question that Sarah Bradlee Fulton lived through the American Revolution. She had brothers in Boston during the most tumultuous years. Her house in Medford was close to the siege lines. As a wife, mother, and farmer, she undoubtedly went through a lot of anxiety, and it would be great to know what she experienced. That doesn’t mean she disguised her brothers to look like Indians, scared off British soldiers, or carried secret messages across the Charles River for George Washington.

In the end, I’m not convinced by the legends of Sarah Bradlee Fulton. I can’t disprove them, but that’s not my job. It’s the responsibility of authors retelling those stories to assess and support them with evidence, and the mere fact that some of her descendants grew up hearing those narratives isn’t enough to convince me.

For me the stories about Sarah Bradlee Fulton, her husband, her brothers, and her punchbowl fit into a genre I call “grandmother’s tales.” Fulton was indeed a grandmother, widowed in 1790 and probably helping to raise descendants for her remaining forty-six years. I suspect she told her grandchildren and great-grandchildren stories of the Revolution, inspired by history but exaggerated, massaged, or wholly invented for better effect. Fulton wasn’t necessarily aiming to put herself and her family into the history books. She simply wanted to entertain, education, and inspire those children at home.

But then those children grew up with Grandma’s stories as part of their understanding of their family and their country. As adults, with the centenary of the Revolution coming around, they retold those stories for the public. Because they believed those stories and believed they were important.

With enough insistent retelling, those tales found a wider audience in post-Centennial Massachusetts and America. They hit a chord with the public, especially women looking for a model female Patriot of a certain type.

Meanwhile, evidence for David Bradlee’s street actions, which frankly weren’t so savory, was confined to archives. In 1965 The Legal Papers of John Adams included the documents linking Bradlee to the George Gailer and Ebenezer Richardson mobbings. It took another thirty-five years before someone [well, me] wrote an article stringing all his appearances together. But his sister Sarah was already famous.

TOMORROW: David Bradlee in and after the war.

“A family mansion with a history of the stirring times”

Yesterday I quoted a letter that appeared in the Boston Evening Traveler on the day after the centenary of the Boston Tea Party. It described how a young woman named Sarah Bradlee helped prepare her four brothers and future husband to disguise themselves as they destroyed the tea and to conceal themselves afterward.

That letter offered no evidence for its story beyond the belief of a descendant, and there were discrepancies between its details and the historical record. Nonetheless, a young Bostonian named Samuel Bradlee Doggett picked up on the tale. He spent decades repeating, and perhaps improving, the account.

In his 1894 book A History of the Doggett-Daggett Family, Doggett described himself this way:

Born [29 May 1858] and always living in a family mansion with a history of the stirring times of the Revolution, and associated in early life with those who could tell of those times, he developed an interest in ancestry, which resulted first in a short account of the Bradlee family, printed in 1878, and since that time in the accumulation of material for the present work.

The house Doggett referred to appears above in a photograph from the Digital Commonwealth collection. Nathaniel Bradlee built that home about 1770, and it stood on the corner of Hollis and what became Tremont Street until 1898.

The Traveler letter said Sarah Bradlee was active “at her father’s house,” which would have been difficult since he’d lived in Dorchester and died five years before. Doggett fixed that by stating that Bradlee had disguised the men in her brother’s house—the very house he lived in.

As a genealogist Doggett also corrected the timing of Sarah Bradlee’s marriage. She and her husband, John Fulton, married more than a decade before the Tea Party rather than afterward. In Doggett’s telling, the fact that she lived in Medford and had small children didn’t stop her from going to her brother-in-law’s house in Boston to help on the night of the Tea Party.

Doggett first printed his version of the lore as a single sentence in his History of the Bradley Family (1878), quoting from the Traveler letter (while leaving out the awkward incongruous bits). A few years later he communicated with Francis S. Drake, who retold the story in Tea Leaves (1884), incorporating detail that first appeared in the Traveler letter.

According to Drake, all four Bradlee brothers “lived in the house yet standing, on the southerly corner of Hollis and Tremont Streets.” (Nathaniel did, and Josiah, aged nineteen, might have. David and Thomas were married with families and homes of their own.) The Tea Leaves version:

Their sister, Sarah, assisted her husband, John Fulton, and her brothers, to disguise themselves, having made preparations for the emergency a day or two beforehand, and afterwards followed them to the wharf, and saw the tea thrown into the dock. Soon returning, she had hot water in readiness for them when they arrived, and assisted in removing the paint from their faces. As the story goes, before they could change their clothes, a British officer looked in to see if the young men were at home, having a suspicion that they were in the tea business. He found them in bed, and to all appearance asleep, they having slipped into bed without removing their “toggery,” and feigning sleep. The officer departed satisfied. Mrs. Fulton helped to dress the wounds of the soldiers who were in the battle of Bunker Hill. She died in Medford, Mass., in 1836, and is the authority for the above statement.

Since Doggett wasn’t born until 1858, there must have been some intervening transmission to him. There were direct descendants old enough to have heard from Sarah Bradlee Fulton herself, such as grandson John A. Fulton of Cambridge.

The most dramatic detail of this story—how “a British officer looked in” suspiciously—makes little sense since in 1773 the one British regiment in Massachusetts was stationed out on Castle Island. Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie provided a report on the tea destruction for the royal government from that perspective, but he wrote nothing about officers searching houses in Boston.

Other versions of the tale presented that detail in different ways. The 1873 Traveler version said, “a spy or officer…put his head within the door.” In an 1893 Boston Post article that referenced Doggett, “an indignant Britisher…insisted on doing a thorough search.” An 1897 article for the American Monthly magazine by Helen Tilden Wild, reprinted in the Medford Historical Society Papers, said, “a spy…peered in at the kitchen window.”

In 1896 a number of American newspapers, including the Omaha World-Herald, printed an article describing a conversation with Doggett, his father, and John A. Fulton at age 91. The writer presented Sarah Bradlee Fulton’s story in her voice, not saying whether her descendants supplied those words or the journalist came up with them. In this version, “some soldiers or spies” came into the kitchen of that old house on Hollis and Tremont. Again, there was no evidence offered to corroborate that detail beyond the belief of descendants and its dramatic power.

TOMORROW: The legends of Sarah Bradlee Fulton.

The Bradlee Family and the Tea Party

Last week I discussed David Bradlee, a tailor who showed up at three violent episodes in Boston within five months of late 1769 and early 1770.

Bradlee has also been linked to the Boston Tea Party, along with his brothers, brother-in-law, and sister Sarah. Indeed, Sarah Bradlee Fulton has been latterly dubbed the “Mother of the Boston Tea Party.”

That’s a relatively recent tradition. The earliest printed link between the Bradlee family and the destruction of the East India Company tea that I’ve found appeared in the 17 Dec 1873 Boston Evening Traveler—i.e., a century and a day after the actual event. It was a letter from someone in Medford who signed herself “E.M.G.”

A little digging tells me that letter came from Eliza M. Gill (1851-1924), a schoolteacher in Medford and later clerk at the town hall. She was the longtime secretary of the Medford Historical Society and a co-founder of the town’s chapter of the Daughters of American Revolution.

On the hundredth anniversary of the Tea Party, Gill wrote this letter to the Traveler editors:

I venture to send you the following facts of family history imparted to me by descendants, still living, of men who took part in the Boston tea party.

On the evening of the 16th December, 1773, Miss Sarah Bradlee, at her father’s house, assisted her four brothers, Nathaniel, Josiah, David and Thomas Bradlee, and John Fulton, whom she afterwards married, to disguise themselves as Indians, and saw them start to go to the wharf to take part in throwing the tea overboard.

She soon after followed and witnesses the emptying of the tea chests into Boston harbor. Before its conclusion, however, she returned home, and filling the copper vessels with water, had everything ready on the arrival of her friends, to remove all appearances of their disguise. In ten minutes nothing could be seen that would give any clue that any member of that household had participated in the bold affair. The light in the house, however, attracted the attention of a spy or officer, who put his head within the door, but seeing nothing to excite suspicion, left the party unmolested. The descendants of John Fulton are living in Medford, by one of whom the above was related.

That same evening Peter Harrington, a patriotic and enterprising citizen of Watertown, left his home also to go to Boston and take part in the same affair. His descendants are living in Watertown and Medford, one of whom I am, being the grand-daughter of his twelfth and youngest child, Eliza Harrington.

The letter didn’t offer evidence of the Bradlees’ or others’ participation in the Tea Party. Gill simply stated that at the outset as a fact. She asked readers to take her word as a descendant of Peter Harrington that he had helped to destroy the tea.

The Bradlee family story, also taken from a descendant, offered more vivid details. However, those details created holes. Gill said Sarah Bradlee was active “at her father’s house.” Her father had lived in Dorchester and died in 1768. Gill said Bradlee “afterwards married” John Fulton. That couple had married in 1762 and settled in Medford ten years later, having five children by the time of the Tea Party.

TOMORROW: But that didn’t stop the story from spreading.

“David Bradley, came down with me to the corpses”

On 5 Mar 1770, eleven days after David Bradlee saw Ebenezer Richardson shooting out of his house, there was a confrontation between soldiers and civilians in King Street. That became, of course, the Boston Massacre.

Among the people on the scene was Benjamin Burdick, Jr., constable of the town house watch. He testified about what he saw in multiple forums. Burdick’s most detailed account appears in the town’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, and in part it says:

I then looked round to see what number of inhabitants were in the street, and computed them to be about fifty, who were then going off as fast as possible; at the same time I observed a tall man standing on my left-hand, who seemed not apprehensive of the danger he was in, and before I had time to speak to him, I heard the word “Fire!” and immediately the report followed, the man on my left hand dropped, I asked him if he was hurt, but received no answer, I then stooped down and saw him gasping and struggling with death. I then saw another man laying dead on my right-hand, but further advanced up the street.

I then saw the soldiers loading again, and I ran up the street to get some assistance to carry off the dead and wounded. Doctor Jos. Gardner, and David Bradley, came down with me to the corpses, and as we were stooping to take them up, the soldiers presented at us again; I then saw an officer passing busily behind them. We carried off the dead without regarding the soldiers.

At the soldiers’ trial the shorthand expert John Hodgson, who was a relative newcomer to town and didn’t know everyone, quoted Burdick this way:

When the Molatto man was dead, I went up, and met Dr. Gardner and Mr. Brindley. I asked them to come and see the Molatto, and as we stooped to take up the man, the soldiers presented their arms again, as if they had been going to fire, Capt. [Thomas] Preston came, pushed up their guns, and said stop firing, do not fire.

“Mr. Brindley” is clearly the man Burdick knew as “David Bradley.”

The tailor David Bradlee was thus at three violent political events in Boston in the space of five months: the tarring and feathering of George Gailer on 28 Oct 1769, the fatal confrontation at Richardson’s house on 22 Feb 1770, and the Massacre.

Furthermore, Bradlee was willing to walk under the guns of the British troops to help pick up Crispus Attucks’s body.

We write a lot about the Boston “crowd” and the “Sons of Liberty” as a collective actor, but of course that group was made up of individual people. David Bradlee was evidently one of those people. He did the work of resisting Crown authority at the street level. He was part of the crowd that genteel political leaders like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and William Molineux relied upon.

COMING UP: The Bradlees and the Tea Party.

David Bradlee: “Windows broke when I got there”

We’ve come to the last of the men George Gailer sued for tarring and feathering him in October 1769, the man his legal filing identified as a “Taylor” named “David Bradley.”

As it happens, David Bradlee was one of the first individuals in Boston I dug into, about twenty years ago. I wrote a short article about him for the Bostonian Society newsletter then.

Bradlee hasn’t made a lot of appearances on Boston 1775, but I may have been saving him for the Sestercentennial of when his political activity started to appear in the historical record.

David Bradlee was born in Dorchester on 24 Nov 1742, according to Samuel Bradlee Doggett’s History of the Bradlee Family (1878). David was the sixth child and third son in the family, and two more boys followed. Most moved into Boston.

Bradlee became a tailor. On 22 Mar 1764 he married Sarah Watts of Chelsea. Doggett said her father was a judge, but Mellen Chamberlin’s Documentary History of Chelsea shows she was a daughter of Richard Watts, Harvard 1739, innkeeper and militia captain. His father was the judge—Samuel Watts, justice of the peace, member of the Massachusetts General Court and the Council. In other words, David Bradlee married up in society.

David and Sarah Bradlee’s first son arrived on 20 October, or seven months after their marriage. That baby received the name David Watts Bradlee. The couple then had Sarah (1766), Samuel and Mary (twins in 1768, but Mary died at nine months), and eventually another Mary (1770).

As I’ve written, it’s not clear why George Gailer named David Bradlee as one of the people who attacked him on 28 Oct 1769. I’m assuming Bradlee really was involved in assaulting the sailor in some way. But Bradlee had the connections to secure John Adams as his attorney. He and his fellow defendants eventually won their case on default, and he paid Adams 19s.4d.

Well before that lawsuit was resolved, however, Bradlee was present at another riot and involved into another court case about it. He was on the scene on 22 Feb 1770 when Customs officer Ebenezer Richardson shot into a crowd of boys and young men mobbing his house, killing little Christopher Seider.

Robert Treat Paine’s notes on the Richardson trial summarize Bradlee’s eyewitness testimony this way:

Windows broke when I got there. I saw 3 or 4 Stones come out of the Window. I saw one or two Men in the Room with Guns in their hands. R put a Gun on edge of Window. I heard the Gun, and run to the back of the house. R clapt the Gun at me.

In this case, the word “clapt” seems to mean that Richardson had fired a load of powder but no shot at Bradlee—in other words, he fired a blank to scare the man off. Even though Bradlee’s testimony was all about the stones and gunshots coming from inside the house, one has to wonder what he was doing so close to that house to provoke Richardson’s action.

TOMORROW: Two weeks later.

“An assault, on the Body of the said George Gailer”

George Gailer, the first victim of tarring and feathering in Boston, was an ordinary sailor. He was therefore not the type of person who typically left letters, journals, newspaper essays, or other writings.

However, we do have Gailer’s perspective on that assault through a lawsuit he filed three months later in January 1770.

The sailor’s attorney was Robert Auchmuty (c.1722-1788, shown here as a young man, courtesy of Amherst College), who also had Crown appointments. Since Auchmuty was probably beyond Gailer’s price range, I suspect the Customs office helped pay his fees.

John Adams represented one of the defendants, the Boston tailor David Bradlee. Adams also copied Auchmuty’s initial filing into his “Pleadings Book,” just in case he needed to file a similar motion for another client. We’re lucky he did so because the original court file has been lost.

Gailer’s warrant said:

Attach &c. Eleazar Trevett Junior and Benjamin Trevett, Merchants, Daniel Vaun Mariner, all of Newport in the County of Newport and Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantation, and David Bradley, Pool Spear, Taylors, and David Provence Infant and Edward Mathews Mariner all of Boston in our County of Suffolk.

To answer unto George Gailer of Boston aforesaid Mariner, in a Plea of Trespass, for that the said Eleazar Trevett Jnr., Benjamin Trevet, Daniel Vaun, David Bradley, Pool Spear, David Provence, and Edward Mathews, at said Boston in the Evening of the twenty Eighth Day of October last, together with diverse other Persons to the said George Gailer unknown, with Force and Arms, an assault, on the Body of the said George Gailer did make, and then and there with Force as aforesaid did strip the said George Gailer naked, tar and feather his Skin, and carry the said George Gailer naked, tarred and feathered, as aforesaid in a Cart about said Boston for the space of Three Hours, and with Clubbs, Staves, and a hand saw did then and there strike him the said George Gailer, sundry heavy and grievous Blows, upon the said George Gailers naked Body, and greatly bruise, and wound him and hit him the said George Gailer diverse grievous Blows, with Stones:

By Reason of all which the said George Gailers Life was put into great Hazard and Danger, and greatly despaired of, and many other Enormities, and Cruelties, the said Eleazer Trevett Jnr., Benja. Trevett, Daniel Vaun, David Bradley, Pool Spear, David Provence, and Edward Mathews, with others unknown to the said George Gailer did then and there commit, on the said George Galer, against the Peace of our Lord the King and to the Damage &c. £2000.

This description of the assault differed in some details from what was in the newspapers. The warrant said the crowd “did strip the said George Gailer naked.” However, the Boston Post-Boy said “his Cloaths except his Breeches [were] pulled or torn off,” and other papers agreed. So this is an example of the period usage of “naked” not being stark naked.

On the other hand, the warrant described more violence than the newspapers, saying the crowd hit Gailer “with Clubbs, Staves, and a hand saw” and “Stones.” The press, particularly the Whig press, might have suppressed those blows, or decided they were few and exceptional and didn’t deserve mention. It’s also possible Gailer and Auchmuty pumped up those details because they were fighting a perception that a tar-and-feathering wasn’t a real assault. Yet that “hand saw” doesn’t seem like the sort of detail one could make up.

According to The Adams Legal Papers, Gailer’s case was initially “decided in the defendants’ favor on demurrer,” meaning the defendants didn’t address the truth of the allegation but argued that those actions weren’t enough to justify a legal judgment. Adams received 19s.4d. from Bradlee. Auchmuty filed an appeal in March 1770. None of the parties appeared when the case came up in the August 1771 term, and the case was dropped. I’ve never come across any other mention of George Gailer.

TOMORROW: An eyewitness account from a soldier.

Paging through the Town of Boston’s Tax Records

Yesterday the Boston Public Library announced that it had digitized Boston’s surviving tax records from 1780 to 1821, when the town officially became a city.

The first volume of “takings” or assessments, from 1780, was published a century ago by the Bostonian Society. The digital collection not only offers a look at the handwritten pages of that volume, but also adds the many more volumes created over the following decades.

Here as a sample are snapshots from one page of the 1780 volume. This section covers Ward 1 in the North End.

At the top is the name of Bartholomew Broaders, barber. As an apprentice, he was one of the teenagers involved in the argument with Pvt. Hugh White outside the Customs House that led to the Boston Massacre. The tax list shows that ten years later Broaders running his own shop.

The next name, probably next to Broaders’s shop, was fellow barber Theodore Dehon. He was in his early forties at this time. Back in 1770 Dehon was established on State Street, and he was listed there again in the 1789 town directory. Dehon had another man living on his property in 1780, as well as journeyman Nicholas McMahon—who was “gone” a while later.

I’m convinced that the end of powdered-wig fashion caused a great constriction in the barbering business. Broaders ended up opening a “slop shop” selling clothes to sailors before going mad. Another former barber’s apprentice, Ebenezer Fox, likewise left the profession and opened a shop in Roxbury.

Here’s another person with a Massacre link: David Bradlee, who helped carry away Crispus Attucks’s body. Trained as a tailor, he became a Massachusetts artillery officer during the war and invested in a successful privateering voyage. In 1780 he was running a substantial tavern. That led him into the business of importing wine, thus rising from mechanic to merchant.

The last name above is Col. Isaac Sears, a Massachusetts native who had made his name and fortune in New York City. He was a leader of the Whigs there before the war and basically controlled the city in late 1775. When the British military returned, Sears moved to Boston and engaged in privateering and trading.

The next scrap shows Benjamin Cudworth, one of the town’s tax collectors. It’s notable that he owned considerably less real estate that Gawen Brown, the maker of the Old South Meeting-House clock.

The library’s research guide to the collection explains some of the quirks of these documents.

Tar, Feathers, and Other Historical Details

Some historians had a chance to see parts of the upcoming H.B.O. miniseries on John Adams in their role as reviewers for the news media. And of course historians are particularly touchy about details of, well, history. Here are a couple of the responses I’ve seen.

In a review for The New Yorker, Harvard professor Jill Lepore suggests that, while this miniseries might reflect how John Adams would have liked to see history portrayed, maybe—just maybe—he wasn’t responsible for everything good that happened in the American Revolution. It was, after all, a mass movement that involved millions of people.

Lepore likes some of the dirty detail of eighteenth-century life:

Actually, the inoculation of Abigail and the Adams children against smallpox—more blood; also pus—is nearly the most terrifying scene in the four episodes made available to reviewers. It’s second only to the tarring and feathering of a British customs official in Boston, the brutality of which Adams watches with horror, in a masterly sequence that exposes the violence of insurrection and helps explain the future President’s enduring fear of democracy.

But the manners ring false for her: “Everyone is far too frank with everyone else (the eighteenth century was nothing if not coy).”

And what about that tar and feathers scene? Boston 1775 reader Ira Stoll, who’s working on a biography of Samuel Adams, sent me a link to his New York Sun critique:

In the first episode of HBO’s “epic seven-part miniseries event” John Adams, one of the most riveting scenes occurs at Boston Harbor, when a customs inspector or informant challenges John Hancock (Justin Theroux) for evading the taxes imposed by the British. “Teach him a lesson, tar the bastard,” Hancock commands a mob, which proceeds to do exactly that to the poor accessory of the crown. This being HBO, there’s a glimpse of full frontal nudity that is promptly drenched with hot tar. Hancock looks on, as do John Adams (Paul Giamatti) and his cousin Samuel (Danny Huston). “God, Sam, that’s barbarism,” John cries to his cousin, who stands silent. “Do you approve of this? Answer me, Sam, can you?”

It’s a telling scene, because there is no historical evidence that it ever happened. . . . There was a riot in June of 1768 over Hancock’s ship, the Liberty, in which customs officials were beaten, but there is no evidence that Hancock or either Adams was at the scene of that riot, nor is there any record that anyone was tarred in the event. . . .

The scene does convey, accurately, John Adams’s hostility to mob violence. . . . But it does so by inaccurately, well, tarring the reputations of Hancock and Samuel Adams, and by conjuring a situation that there is no evidence existed.

Such are the compromises attendant in turning history into a seven-part miniseries for television. . . . [David] McCullough is so deservedly celebrated as an author not only for his skill as a storyteller but for his care with research and facts. So it is disappointing to see the television version of his bestselling biography make such departures.

Indeed, both the Liberty riot on 10 June 1768 and the first tar-and-feathering in Boston on 28 Oct 1769 are documented in detail through the complaints of the victims and other Customs officials. If any of those men had seen or heard about Hancock, Adams, or any other well-known Whig leader directing, encouraging, or even silently watching the mobs, they would have publicized that detail.

As Stoll notes in his review, the top Whig leaders actually discouraged violent attacks on Crown officials and supporters, on the grounds that they discredited the cause. At different times in 1770 William Molineux kept a crowd from lynching Ebenezer Richardson after he shot young Christopher Seider, and Dr. Thomas Young helped to prevent Scottish merchant Patrick McMasters from being tarred and feathered.

There’s actually a link between the seizure of the Liberty and that first tar-and-feathers attack, which might have been why scriptwriter Kirk Ellis combined them. Though the smuggling case against Hancock was eventually dropped, the Customs service kept his ship and used it to chase down smugglers off Rhode Island. One of the sailors it employed, George Gailer, was spotted in Boston in October 1769. A mob seized him, stripped him, and covered him with tar and feathers.

Gailer sued seven people for this assault: Newport merchants Eleazar Trevett, Jr., and Benjamin Trevett; Newport mariner Daniel Vaughan; Boston mariner Edward Mathews; Boston tailors David Bradlee and Pool Spear; and a minor named David Provence. The defendants responded with a demurrer in Inferior Court, neither affirming nor denying the allegation but suggesting Gailer had no cause to sue. That court decided in their favor in January 1770. Gailer appealed but failed to appear in August 1771, and the case was dropped.

Based on an account-book entry, the attorney who represented David Bradlee in this matter was that opponent of mob violence, John Adams.

(The details of Gailer’s case appear in the first volume of The Legal Papers of John Adams. The picture above is a London portrayal of a Boston mob’s tar-and-feathers attack on John Malcolm in 1774.)