The Mysterious Mr. Carnes

I’ve been digging for information about John Carnes’s ideological or economic situation in 1775, and coming up empty. While the problems in his ministerial career are well documented, his life for the next decade is misty. He wasn’t rich enough to be prominent, or poor enough to come to the attention of the authorities.

Aside from the episodes I described here and here, all I’ve found is that Carnes bought shoes from the newly arrived merchant John Short, and sold goods to the Box and Austin ropewalk or its proprietors. And in November 1770, he joined the Old South Meeting.

Which leaves a lot of room for speculation. For example, his brother Edward (1730-1782) owned a house that got the name “Carnes College,” but no one knows why. Was “Carnes College” where John Carnes tutored young men for Harvard right after leaving the pulpit? If so, the property kept that name even after John set up his shop on Orange Street. (In the 1790s Harrison Gray Otis bought the “Carnes College” property and built a new house there, now owned by Historic New England.)

Who was the Carnes who announced the opening of a new shop with Nathaniel Seaver in the Boston Evening-Post on 17 May 1773? The next March, Seaver advertised in the Boston Post-Boy that he was carrying on that business alone.

Did John Carnes test business in New York in October 1765, when a man of that name registered as a freeman of the city? In June 1774 a John Carnes was in New York advertising “a quantity of dry goods…exposed to sale at vendue,” or auction. In October the sheriff advertised a different auction of “the four years leases of two houses and lots of ground, situate in Murray’s street, back of the College, late the property of John Carnes.” So if that was the John Carnes of Boston, looking for better prospects, the move didn’t go so well.

But maybe John Carnes was in the South End of Boston the whole time, quietly carrying on his little business, not advertising and not getting into trouble.

A “Reminiscence of Gen. Warren” in the New England Historical & Genealogical Register for 1858 said:

Dr. David Townsend, June 17, 1775, in the morning, went to Brighton to see Mr. Carnes’s family of Boston. About one in the afternoon, Mr. Carnes came and reported that there was hot work. The British at Boston, with their shipping, were firing very heavy on our men at Bunker Hill. Dr. Townsend said he must go and work for Dr. Warren.

Was this John Carnes, having moved from the army-occupied town? Or was it a relative?

In any event, since John Carnes referred to himself in 1770 as being “in the grocery-way,” he’s almost certainly the “John Carnes a Grocer” who had agreed to send information on the British military out to Gen. George Washington in July 1775. Did he do that because he was committed to the cause of liberty? In need of money? In the grip of a grand idea? I have no clue.

TOMORROW: But I know that the Rev. John Carnes sent information.

The Difficulties of Medical Training in 1773

Popular demand indicates that it’s time for another series of CSI: Colonial Boston postings! Which is to say, Revolutionary people mucking about with dead bodies. (The last series started here.)

This image appeared on a broadside printed in 1773 with the title: “An Address to the Inhabitants of Boston (Particularly to the thoughtless Youth) Occasioned by the Execution of Levi Ames, Who so early in Life, as not 22 Years of Age, must quit the Stage of action in this awful Manner.” This was only one of the publications that Ames’s execution inspired. This online exhibit from the Library Company of Philadelphia says:

Levi Ames was perhaps the most written-about criminal in colonial America. His execution called forth two editions of [his] “Last Words,” four sermons in a total of seven editions, and no fewer than ten broadside poems.

So will this posting be about the horrible murders Ames committed, and how the authorities used forensic medicine to track him down? No, Ames was simply a burglar. He was executed for a series of property crimes.

Under the law of the time, the disposal of Ames’s body was up to the governor: Thomas Hutchinson could order the corpse to be buried, hung in chains, or given to a doctor for dissection. According to a letter from William Eustis to John Warren, written shortly after the execution:

You must know that [Dr. John] Jeffries (as we heard) had applied to the Governor for a warrant to have this body. The Governor told him if he had come a quarter of an hour sooner, he would have given it, but he had just given one to Ames’ friends, alias Stillman’s gang.

Stillman was the Rev. Dr. Samuel Stillman, minister at one of Boston’s two Baptist churches. Among the clergymen who preached about the execution, Stillman was the one Ames actually trusted. The condemned man asked the minister to arrange for his body to be buried so no aspiring surgeons could dissect it.

Which is exactly what Eustis and Warren wanted to do. They were recent Harvard graduates who trained in medicine under Warren’s older brother, Dr. Joseph Warren. At college they had been members of a group called the Anatomical Society or Spunkers Club. The other recent graduates Eustis mentioned in this letter to Warren were Jonathan Norwood; David Townsend; Samuel Adams, only son of the politician; and “One Allen,” perhaps Ebenezer Allen. All but one became physicians; Allen became a minister. Apparently these young men were hoping for a surgical demonstration or lecture by Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr.

Meanwhile, Jeffries had the same hopes for using Ames’s body, along with his medical mentor, Dr. James Lloyd, and Lloyd’s current trainee, John Clarke. All those men were friends of the royal government. The Spunkers knew in advance about Jeffries’s group, but not about Stillman’s.

Eustis described what happened to the body:

as soon as the body of Levi Ames was pronounced dead by Dr. Jeffries, it was delivered by the Sheriff [Stephen Greenleaf] to a person who carried it in a cart to the water side, where it was received into a boat filled with about twelve of Stillman’s crew, who rowed it over to Dorchester Point. . . .

We had heard it surmised that he was to be taken from the gallows in a boat, and when we saw him carried to the water, we concluded it was a deep laid scheme in Jeffries. . . .

However, when we saw the Stillmanites, we were satisfied Jeffries had no hand in it. When we saw the boat land at Dorchester Point, we had a consultation, and Norwood, David, One Allen and myself, took chaise and rode round to the Point, Spunker’s like, but the many obstacles we had to encounter made it eleven o’clock before we reached the Point, where we searched and searched, and rid, hunted, and waded; but alas, in vain! There was no corpse to be found.

Discontented, we sat us down on the beach and groaned, etc., etc. Then rode to [Thomas] Brackett’s [King’s Arms tavern], on the Neck, and endeavored to ’nock ’em up, to give us a dish of coffee; but failing, we backed about to the Punch Bowl, where, after long labors, we raised the house and got our desires gratified, and got home about four o’clock in the morning. Hadn’t much sleep, of course, so we are very lame and cross today. . . .

We have a ——— from another place, so Church shan’t be disappointed.

In a postscript Eustis added: “By the way, we have since heard that Stillman’s gang rowed him back from the Point up to the town, and after laying him out in mode and figure, buried him—God knows where! Clark & Co. went to the Point to look for him, but were disappointed as well as we.”

There’s more about Levi Ames at Bill West’s West in New England.

ADDENDUM: A message from Charlie Bahne convinces me that the medical trainees visited the Punch Bowl tavern in what is now Brookline Village.

Boston Discovers Universal Salvation

I’ve been following the religious evolution of two men who left the Old South Meeting-House congregation in the late 1760s: retired artillerist Richard Gridley (1711-1796) and blockmaker Shippie Townsend (1722-1798).

As soon as the Revolutionary War began in April 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress sent for Col. Gridley. He had proven himself as an artillery commander and engineer in the attack on Fort Louisbourg in 1745. Even the British army had recognized his ability, giving him a rank and a pension. Would he take command of the Massachusetts artillery regiment?

Gridley agreed to that post, on the condition that the congress would take over the payments on his pension. He thus laid out the first siege lines around Boston, fought and suffered a wound in the Battle of Bunker Hill, and became the first artillery commander of the Continental Army. In late 1775, Gen. George Washington arranged for Gridley to be made Chief Engineer but relieved of battlefield command. Henry Knox replaced him.

Townsend, in contrast, had become a Sandemanian, and therefore felt religiously obligated to obey the government in power—i.e., the king and his ministers in London. Many of his fellow congregants sailed away with the British military in 1776 and resettled in Canada. But Townsend stayed behind. In August, the Boston Committee of Correspondence complained that he wasn’t fulfilling his militia requirement. Eventually he and the few remaining Sandemanians convinced the authorities that they weren’t threats, that they could be as loyal to the new government as the old. The fact that Townsend’s son David was serving as a Continental Army physician probably helped.

Meanwhile, Gridley had been given responsibility for strengthening the defenses of Massachusetts’s ports. According to his biographer, “when engaged on the fortifications on Cape Ann,” the colonel heard the Rev. John Murray (1741-1815) preach in Gloucester.

Murray (shown above, courtesy of Wikipedia) was an English minister who had moved from the Anglican church through Methodism to an early form of Universalism—he believed in universal salvation, though he also believed in the Trinity and many other Christian traditions. Murray had settled in Gloucester in 1774, prompting some locals to suspect him of being a British spy. Gen. Nathanael Greene and Col. James Varnum of Rhode Island insisted on employing him as a chaplain during the siege of Boston, but he then returned to Gloucester.

Gridley became one of Murray’s supporters and friends. In 1790, after the colonel’s wife died, Murray and his second wife, the feminist author Judith Sargent Murray, visited the Gridley house in Stoughton. According to Gridley’s biographer, Murray later preached at the colonel’s funeral.

As for Shippie Townsend, he also became a Universalist—in fact, a leader of the Boston society. An 1890 history of the Old South Meeting-House, where I found the quotation started this series of postings, reported:

In 1785 its members purchased and enlarged the meeting-house in Hanover street, in which the Rev. Samuel Mather had preached for forty years. Shippie Townsend’s name headed the list of contributors, and he was chosen deacon.

Townsend thus helped take over the church of the minister whom he had debated back in 1768. Even more ironically, the Rev. Dr. Charles Chauncy, who had encouraged Mather to attack the Sandemanian faith back then, had finally published his own Universalist writings in 1784; he had been sitting on them for years, worried that such unorthodoxy would rile his congregation.

In 1793 the Boston Universalists invited Murray to become their minister, getting Judith Sargent Murray in the bargain. Among their acolytes was Townsend’s former apprentice and journeyman Jonathan Balch, who in 1798 interrupted a visiting minister at Mrs. Murray’s behest. The blockmaker’s son Dr. David Townsend also became an ardent Universalist, writing Gospel News in 1794.

Meanwhile, Townsend continued to publish his own pamphlets on religious and other topics:

• Repentance and Remission of Sins Considered (1784)
• The Master and Scholar Attending Catechising: or, An attempt to imitate Timothy’s catechism (1787)
• Peace and Joy: being a Brief Attempt to Consider the Blessings of the Peace between Great-Britain and America, &c. (1788)
• A View of a Most Magnificent Singing-Choir (1793)
• The History of the Mother and Child: A new primer, attempting an easy, entertaining, and effectual method of teaching young children the alphabet (1794?)
• An Attention to the Scriptures: for an answer to the important inquiry, whether unbelievers are under the law and under the curse? (1795)
• Observations on the Religious Education of Children (1797)
  

Townsend’s name doesn’t appear in most of those publications, but his authorship seems to have been an open secret. The Universalist minister Nathaniel Stacy later credited “some of the writings of Shippy Townsend” for contributing to his own conversion. Not bad for a self-educated blockmaker.