Flagging the “Object of History” Podcast

The latest episode of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s podcast, The Object of History, is titled “Who Were the Bucks of America?”

The description says:

In this episode, we closely examine one of the most noteworthy items in the MHS collection: the Bucks of America flag. The flag is one of the only remaining artifacts of the Bucks of America, an African American militia based in Boston during the Revolutionary era. There is very little known about the unit with no official military record of their service. We discuss the few pieces of evidence that we have including the flag presented by Governor John Hancock after the end of the Revolutionary War.

The guests are Ben Remillard from the University of New Hampshire and myself.

I haven’t listened yet. Last month I talked with Cassandra Cloutier for an hour, dumping all my thoughts and theories about the Bucks of America and George Middleton on her—the Dr. James Lloyd connection, the false link to the Battle of Groton Heights, the evidence that he and Lewis Glapion both had wives and children when they owned a house together. Only the best and most relevant pronouncements made this thirty-five-minute episode, I presume.

The first person with whom I shared ideas about the Bucks of America flag, several years ago, was curator Anne Bentley. So I’m taking this opportunity to note that the New England Museum Association just gave Bentley one of its 2022 Awards for Excellence. The citation says:

Her almost 50 years of service to the organization highlights her dedication and passion for Art and artifacts. She has had the privilege to work on such notable collections as the Adams and Winthrop families, her final lab project was Thomas Jefferson’s manuscript “Notes on the State of Virginia.” As curator of the art and artifact collection and acting registrar from 1998 through 2021, she enjoyed collaborating with curators and registrars in New England and beyond. . . .

“Retiring” at the end of 2021, Anne now works a three-day week, recataloging artifacts and numismatics and assisting the reading room staff in making these materials available to researchers.

Dr. Jeffries and Dr. Warren

When I started looking at Dr. John Jeffries’s records of caring for young smallpox inoculatees in June 1775, I hoped to find clues to his whereabouts during that month.

For almost two hundred years at least, a story has circulated about Jeffries and Dr. Joseph Warren meeting that June, and it’s always struck me as dubious.

To review, Dr. Jeffries (1745-1819) was son of Boston’s treasurer, David Jeffries, and protégé of Dr. James Lloyd. He thus had strong links to both the town’s Whig establishment and to friends of the royal government. Dr. Jeffries dined with the Sons of Liberty in August 1769, but in November 1770 Lloyd and Jeffries testified for the defense in the Boston Massacre trial. The two doctors described the victim Patrick Carr’s dying words, which helped to absolve the soldiers.

That testimony appears to have put Jeffries in the Loyalist camp. The next year, he accepted a sinecure appointment as a Royal Navy surgeon. He evacuated Boston with the British military in 1776, became a military surgeon, and spent the war either with the Crown forces or in London seeking higher positions.

In peacetime, Dr. Jeffries used his money to become a pioneering balloonist, or at least balloon passenger. But eventually the cost of living in the imperial capital and the lure of an inheritance in Massachusetts sent him back home. He reestablished his family and elite practice in Boston.

In 1825, six years after Dr. Jeffries died, Samuel Swett published his pioneering study of the Battle of Bunker Hill. He wrote this about the identification of Dr. Warren’s body on the morning after the battle, 18 June 1775:

Dr. Jeffries was on the field dressing the British wounded, and the wounded American prisoners, with his usual humanity and skill. [Gen. William] Howe inquired of him if he could identify Warren; he recollected that he had lost a finger nail and wore a false tooth, and informed the general that Warren had five days before ventured over to Boston in a canoe to get information, invited Jeffries to join the Americans as surgeon, and informed him that he was himself to receive a commission in the army.

Swett probably heard that story from Jeffries’s family. It’s certainly complimentary to the late physician, with its superfluous mention of “his usual humanity and skill.” And of course the idea that the heroic Warren had thought enough of Jeffries’s skills to try to recruit him was a ringing endorsement.

TOMORROW: A longer version of the story.

James Otis’s Medical Recovery

According to James Otis’s first biographer, William Tudor, Jr., after his brawl in the British Coffee-House in September 1769 he received care from “Doctors Perkins and Lloyd.”

Dr. James Lloyd (1728-1810, shown here) was one of Boston’s leading medical practitioners. Although he was a Loyalist in his politics, he remained in town after the siege and reestablished his popularity and practice.

There were three prominent doctors named Perkins in Boston at this time: John Perkins (1698-1781), his son William Lee Perkins (1737-1797), and Nathaniel Perkins (1715-1799). Nathaniel seems to have had the most active practice, so he’s most likely to have examined Otis. The court records (more about that tomorrow) could say for certain.

Back in 1764 Dr. Nathaniel Perkins inoculated John Adams against smallpox, and Adams described him this way:

Dr. Perkins is a short, thick sett, dark Complexioned, Yet pale Faced, Man, (Pale faced I say, which I was glad to see, because I have a great Regard for a Pale Face, in any Gentleman of Physick, Divinity or Law. It indicates search and study). Gives himself the alert, chearful Air and Behaviour of a Physician, not forgeting the solemn, important and wise.

Lloyd and Perkins found James Otis had suffered a deep head wound. They reportedly testified that it must have come from “a sharp instrument,” which Whigs insisted meant a sword. Nonetheless, all the eyewitness evidence says Customs Commissioner John Robinson walloped Otis with a walking stick.

Years later Adams wrote that Otis bore “a scar, in which a man might bury his finger,” and joked, “what is worse, my friends think I have a monstrous crack in my skull.”

At first, people thought Otis would recover. Within a few weeks he was behaving more rationally than before the fight. Toward the start of this series of postings I quoted a couple of entries from John Adams’s diary just before the brawl. In early September Adams had been struck, then annoyed, by how much Otis was talking at social events.

The next time Adams mentioned Otis in his diary (which he kept sporadically enough that year that this might not have been the next time they met) was on 19 October. Adams wrote:

Last night I spent the Evening, at the House of John Williams Esqr. the Revenue officer, in Company with Mr. Otis, Jona. Williams Esqr. and Mr. McDaniel a Scotch Gentleman, who has some Connection with the Commissioners, as Clerk, or something.

Williams is as sly, secret and cunning a fellow, as need be. The Turn of his Eye, and Cast of his Countenance, is like [Ebenezer] Thayer of Braintree. In the Course of the Evening He said, that He knew that Lord Townsend borrowed Money of [Charles] Paxton, when in America, to the amount of £500 st. at least that is not paid yet. He also said, in the Course of the Evening, that if he had drank a Glass of Wine, that came out of a seizure, he would take a Puke to throw it up. He had such a Contempt for the 3ds. of Seisures. He affects to speak slightly of the Commissioners and of their Conduct, tho guardedly, and to insinuate that his Connections, and Interest and Influence at Home with the Boards &c. are greater than theirs.

McDaniel is a composed, grave, steady Man to appearance, but his Eye has it’s fire, still, if you view it attentively.—

Otis bore his Part very well, conversible eno, but not extravagant, not rough, nor soure.

Adams was acerbic about Inspector Williams’s boasting but thought Otis very well behaved. He no longer monopolized conversation or indulged in “bullying, bantering, reproaching and ridiculing” as he had weeks before. If Otis had indeed been suffering a manic mood back in early September, it had passed.

Unfortunately, in the following spring it became clear that James Otis had become prone to serious mental instability. The injury to his head might not have brought on such problems, but it certainly didn’t help.

John Adams on the “Hancock” and “Adams”

James Lloyd was born in Boston in December 1769 and named after his grandfather, a respected physician. During the early 1770s, Dr. Lloyd sided with the royal government, but he remained in Boston when the British military evacuated. Eventually he regained his popularity and standing in society.

Meanwhile, the younger James Lloyd proceeded through the Boston Latin School, Harvard College, and a mercantile career in close connection to the Lowells. He entered politics in 1800, winning a seat in various legislatures. He served twice as a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, succeeding John Quincy Adams and Harrison Gray Otis when they resigned and later resigning himself. Lloyd got to be one of the last Federalists in Congress.

In the 1810s Lloyd began a lengthy correspondence with John Adams, picking the older man’s brain for information about the Revolution. Those letters, published later in the century, are one of the main sources of Adams recollections that subsequent historians mined for details. Not that Adams’s memory was always complete or accurate.

On 24 Apr 1815, for example, Adams wrote to Lloyd about how the American military started the war:

The Army at Cambridge, had poor Arms, no cannon, but the Hancock and Adams, no Tents, no Barracks, no provisions but from day to day, no cloathing for change, no Magazines, very little powder and but few balls.

That was the standard line for Americans in the nineteenth century, emphasizing the shortages that the nation’s first army faced, especially in military equipment. The “Hancock and Adams” that the former President referred to were two small brass cannon that came back to Massachusetts after the war engraved with the names of John Hancock and Samuel Adams.

In fact, as I detail in The Road to Concord, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and individual towns had collected dozens of cannon by the start of the war in April 1775. Those were mostly old iron guns, many badly mounted, but they included some large siege weapons. Not having been a member of the Massachusetts committee of safety and supplies, Adams might not have known all the details of that ordnance, but he surely knew his side had more than two cannon. (Even the engravings on the “Hancock” and “Adams” said there were two more.) But John Adams, and Americans at large, preferred to remember their side as even more of an underdog than it really was.

I’ll speak about the secret work of collecting those cannon and what the British commander, Gen. Thomas Gage, did about them to the Billerica Historical Society on 12 October. That event will start at 7:00 P.M. in the Billerica Public Library, 15 Concord Road in the center of town. It’s free and open to all.

Henry Lloyd Worries about the Mail

The National Postal Museum has a webpage devoted to a 3 May 1775 letter from Henry Lloyd (1709-1795) to the New York merchants Oliver DeLancey and John Watts.

Lloyd was the eldest son in a mercantile family with roots in both Boston and Long Island, New York. He was a decided Loyalist. In March 1774 he tried to import tea into Boston, and a crowd destroyed it—part of the lesser-known second Boston Tea Party. By 1775 Lloyd was supplying the British military, which was the main topic of this letter.

At the time he wrote, Lloyd was besieged inside Boston with the British troops. He warned his New York colleagues that rebels might be opening their mail:

Your fav.r of 24th Ult.o [i.e., last month] came safe to hand Yesterday. Per Post & the Seal not broke, tho’ most of the Letters both publick & private were open’d before they got here & some of them stop’d, this Letter goes by a private Conveyance to Providence to be put into the Post Office there & hope it will reach you safe. . . .

Fresh provisions of all kinds are stop’d coming in here, & I don’t know how I shall be able to procure the Pork & Rice, Flour, & Pease I suppose may be had from Canada, some Butter I have procur’d here.

In 1776 Lloyd evacuated to Halifax with the royal authorities, and eventually the American governments confiscated his property in Massachusetts and New York. DeLancey and Watts remained in New York through the end of the war and then evacuated as well.

Henry’s younger brother James stayed in Boston after the siege. His neighbors knew he too was a Loyalist, but he was generally tolerated as a popular physician. James’s namesake son actually became a U.S. Senator.

(Photograph of the Lloyd brothers’ childhood home on Long Island courtesy of the Caumsett Foundation. The buildings are maintained by the Lloyd Harbor Historical Society.)

Dr. Isaac Rand and the “Important Branch of Obstetrics”

After reading that Prof. John Winthrop took two recent Harvard graduates with him to Newfoundland in 1761 to observe the transit of Venus, as described yesterday, I wondered what had become of those young men. What do you do with your life after having seen “the Savage coast of Labrador”?

Isaac Rand (1743-1822) went into medicine. He trained with Dr. James Lloyd, and like his mentor he sided with the Crown when war broke out and stayed in Boston through the siege. However, both men opted not to leave with the British military.

Within a few months of the evacuation, Rand was managing a smallpox hospital for the local authorities. He overcame suspicions about his political leanings by staying out of the fight and working hard for his patients.

After the war, Rand became a founding member of the Humane Society of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the Massachusetts Bible Society.

Dr. James Thacher wrote of Rand:

Previous to this period strong efforts had been made by the physicians of Boston, and more particularly by the late Dr. James Lloyd, to rescue from the hands of unqualified females, the important branch of obstetrics, and to raise it to an honorable rank in the profession. So great was considered the necessity of changing the practice in this respect, that Dr. L., even while engaged in the most extensive and lucrative business in the town, made a visit to Europe partly for the purpose of qualifying himself for the exigences which the practice of this highly responsible and important branch of obstetrics continually furnishes. His efforts succeeded; that business gradually fell into the hands of the physicians, and Dr. Rand and his contemporaries completed what had been begun by Dr. Lloyd. In this branch Dr. R. acquired a high and deserved reputation.

That of course reflects a physician’s professional bias about who’s best at birthing babies.

The engraving of obstetrical forceps above originally appeared in André Levret’s Observations sur les causes et les accidens de plusieurs accouchemens laborieux, published in 1750. The image comes from this National Institutes of Health history of cesarean sections.

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.

Pulling Teeth in Colonial Boston

Before John Baker arrived from London and promoted the notion of specialized “surgeon dentists,” it looks like most Bostonians went to their regular doctors for dental care—which usually meant having teeth pulled rather than repaired. Indeed, losing one’s teeth seem to have been an experience that connected people.

John Cary, the biographer of Dr. Joseph Warren, wrote: “During the first years of practice, Warren charged one shilling, four pence for the extraction of teeth, one of his most common medical services.” On 27 Jan 1765, for example, Warren recorded extracting a tooth from Hannah Flucker, who was then fourteen years old. Her father was Thomas Flucker, later the last Secretary of the royal province, and her younger sister Lucy married Henry Knox.

Dr. Elisha Story extracted teeth from town watchman Benjamin Burdick’s wife and children. Indeed, Story’s office records for 12 Oct 1768 seem to be the only documentation for one of those children. Burdick and Knox were both at the Boston Massacre, trying to calm the conflict.

Ame [pronounced, I think, as “Amy”] and Elizabeth Cumings were two sisters who came to Boston from Scotland in the 1760s to set up a shop. Among the many things they sold, according to their ad in the 11 Nov 1765 Boston Gazette, were “Teeth Tincture and Powder.” In 1771 Knox rented space from the Cumingses for his first bookshop.

Merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary on 14 June 1769:

Sent for Dr. [James] Lloyd to have my Tooth drawn & had not Resolution to go thro’ the Operation.

One person who didn’t remove teeth was the painter John Singleton Copley (whose painting of Warren appears above, and who also painted Flucker). But the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, Sr., who rarely passed by a chance for a pun, reportedly told a man to go to Copley’s house to have a tooth drawn. Drawn—get it? (With jokes like that, it’s no surprise that Dr. Byles’s congregation swiftly voted to remove him from their pulpit after the war began.)

Dr. John Jeffries: physician, Loyalist, aeronaut, part 1

I'm traveling this weekend, so it seemed like a good time to discuss a notable journey by a Revolutionary Bostonian: Dr. John Jeffries's balloon trip across the English Channel in 1785. For this feat, and an earlier balloon flight in Nov 1784, Jeffries is sometimes called the first American to fly.

Jeffries was an American by birth, having been born in Boston in 1745. And he was an American when he died, back in Boston in 1819. But in 1784 he was a British subject, a Loyalist who had served in British military posts during the war. In his published account of his aerial voyages, he made his allegiance clear:

I had provided an handsome British Flag, (invidiously misrepresented the next day, in one of the public papers [i.e., newspapers], to have been the Flag of the American States)...

Jeffries was an unusual Loyalist since his father, David Jeffries, was a Boston official, town treasurer for many years before and after the Revolution. John himself went to Harvard College, earned an M.A. in 1766, and then traveled to Scotland for a quick medical degree. Back in Boston in 1769, he started to practice under the wing of Dr. James Lloyd, an Anglican who was an old friend of the British general and politician Sir William Howe.

During the Boston Massacre trial, Drs. Lloyd and Jeffries both testified for the defense. They said they had heard one of the shooting victims, Irish sailor Patrick Carr, say that the soldiers had held off shooting longer than they would have in Ireland under the same provocation. This sort of hearsay testimony would probably not be allowed in trials today (except under the Bush-Cheney administration rules for special military tribunals). But the words of a dying man carried great weight in the culture of colonial America.

Jeffries's testimony may have convinced his fellow Bostonians that he was a friend of the royal government. But his loyalties may have been clear already. He didn't participate in the political protests of the early 1770s, and in 1771 became an assistant surgeon for a Royal Navy warship while it was docked in Boston harbor. He had a family to support, having married in 1770 and fathered three children, one dying young. In 1774 he reportedly tried to offer the first lecture on anatomy in America, but was interrupted by a mob that “entered his anatomical room and carried off in triumph his subject, which was the body of a convict given him by the governor after execution.” (I haven't been able to find any contemporaneous record of such a controversy, however.)

In the mid-1800s a story circulated in Boston that just after the Revolutionary War broke out Dr. Joseph Warren paddled a canoe over to the besieged town to meet Dr. Jeffries and try to convince him to join the provincial cause. The implication is that Jeffries was such a good doctor Warren was ready to risk being captured. I don't believe it. The only source on this secret two-man meeting must have been Jeffries himself since Warren had died in 1775. There's no contemporaneous evidence for it; indeed, Paul Revere remembered Warren as trying to discourage Dr. Benjamin Church from going into Boston, as I discussed in this article. When Jeffries returned to Boston after the war, he had to win over patients, and claiming the endorsement of the great, martyred Warren would have been a sharp way to do that.

What the record shows about Dr. John Jeffries at the start of the Revolution is that he sent his wife and children to England, left with the British military for Halifax in 1776, and then won a commission as Surgeon-General of the British forces in North America. A couple of years later, wanting a higher and more lucrative position, he set off for England.

Tomorrow: in Part 2, Dr. Jeffries goes to London.