“Here I took my leave of that once happy country”

Even after the destruction of Castle William, described yesterday, Judge Peter Oliver’s ship Pacific remained in Boston’s outer harbor, waiting for the right weather.

On 24 March, Oliver recorded, the night was so cold “that the vessell’s bows and cables were loaded with ice.”

The next day the winds were more favorable. A packet ship sailed for London, carrying Oliver’s son Peter, Jr., and his wife Sally; Sally’s brother Thomas Hutchinson, Jr., and his wife Sarah (who was also the judge’s niece); and their children among the passengers. At the same time, the “first Division” of the Loyalist fleet headed toward Halifax.

Still, Oliver’s ship remained. On 26 March he was rowed over to H.M.S. Renown and dined with “Commodore [Francis] Banks,” that ship’s captain.

On 27 March, 250 years ago today, Adm. Molyneux Shuldam (c. 1717–1798, shown above) was ready to sail, his flagship H.M.S. Chatham leading a fleet of Royal Navy warships, army troop transports, and merchant vessels to Nova Scotia. But first he wrote out orders for Capt. Banks:

You are hereby required and directed to employ His Majesty’s Ship under your Command, in such manner as you shall judge best, either by Cruizing or Anchoring occasionally in preventing all communication or Commerce with the Town and Harbour of Boston; And whereas many Vessels are daily expected here with Stores and Provisions for the use of His Majesty’s Fleet and Army, which are in extreme want of them; You are to take under your Command the Ships and Vessels mentioned in the Margin and employ them in Cruizing between the Latitudes of Cape Cod, and Cape Anne at such distance from the Shore, where they are most likely to fall in with the above Expected Vessels, which you are to direct them to see in safety to Halifax, and then return to you.

You are also hereby required and directed on the Arrival of any of His Majesty’s Ships and Vessels at Nantasket (except those you have Orders to take under your Command) to give their Commanders Orders to proceed immediately to join me at Halifax, or where ever else you shall from good Authority hear I may be.

You are to take, sink, burn, or destroy, all Rebel Armed Vessels you may meet with, and to continue upon this Service till further Order, Governing yourself in the Executing of it, by the General Code of Orders and Instructions, you have already received from me, sending all Vessels you may seize or detain to Halifax, to be proceeded against according to Law, and giving me an Account of your Proceedings by all opportunities that offer.

The naval ships that the admiral listed in the margin were the frigates Lively, Niger, and Fowey; the sloop Swan; the brigs Hope and Bolton; and the schooner Dispatch. That flotilla would remain to limit New England shipping.

Judge Oliver wrote in his diary for that day:

I sailed from Nantasket, abt. 3 o’clock, afternoon, in the 2nd and last Division of the fleet, about 70 sail, for Hallifax, under convoy of the Chatham, Admiral Shuldham, and of the Centurion, Capn. [Richard] Braithwaite.

Here I took my leave of that once happy country, where peace and plenty reigned uncontrouled, till that infernal Hydra Rebellion, with its hundred Heads, had devoured its happiness, spread desolation over its fertile fields, and ravaged the peacefull mansions of its inhabitants, to whom late very late if ever, will return that security and repose which once surrounded them; and if in part restored, will be attended with the disagreeable recollection of the savage barbarities, and diabolical cruelties which had been perpetrated to support rebellion, and which were instigated by Leaders who were desperate in their fortunes, unbounded in their ambition and malice, and infernal in their dictates.

Here I drop the filial tear into the Urn of my Country.

O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint—Nov-Anglicanos!

And here I bid A Dieu to that shore, which I never wish to tread again till that greatest of social blessings, a firm established British Government, precedes or accompanies me thither.

Oliver’s Latin riffed off of one of Virgil’s lines in Georgics, saying that the farmers (or New Englanders) would count themselves lucky if only they knew how good they had it.

Peter Oliver was one of the wealthier Loyalists, as well as having a royal appointment (and salary). He soon moved on from Halifax to London, where he lived the rest of his life until 1795.

Oliver’s diary of departing Massachusetts was published in a volume of his friend and in-law Thomas Hutchinson’s diary and letters. Oliver also left of bitter, detailed, and gossipy account of the coming of the Revolution, written in the early 1780s and finally published in 1961. (Highly recommended.)

“The Judge supposes he is possessed of the secret”

Before returning to Dr. John Newman, I’ll share some other sources on the treatment of cancers in New England on the eve of the Revolutionary War.

In January 1773, the Massachusetts judge Peter Oliver went to Rhode Island to serve on the royal commission investigating the attack on H.M.S. Gaspée.

Politically the Rev. Ezra Stiles was opposed to Oliver and the inquiry, but he was still polite enough to host the man.

On 11 January, Stiles wrote in his diary:

This Afternoon the hon. Judge Oliver came to drink Tea with me and spent the Evening at my house in Company with Mr. [Robert?] Stevens, Major [Jonathan] Otis and Dr. Jabez Bowen of Providence.

The Judge told us that his Wife had been last year cured of a Cancer in her Neck of 30 years standg. by a young man Mr. [John] Pope of Boston. . . .

His remedy is a secret, but he explained the operation of it to Mr. Oliver in a philosophical Manner, though Mr. Pope is not a man of Letters nor does he make pretension to any other part of Medicine or Surgery.

Peter and Mary (Clarke) Oliver’s son Peter (1741–c. 1831) was a respectable sort of doctor: upper-class, male, practicing standard medicine for his time. Nonetheless, Mary sought treatment from John Pope.

How good that treatment was over the long term is another question. Mary Oliver died on 24 Mar 1775 at the age of sixty-one. Among the pictures of Judge Oliver is one, reproduced above, showing the man mourning at his wife’s grave. It’s one of the rare portraits from the time of a person displaying strong emotion.

Stiles wrote down some of Oliver’s other medical remarks in 1773:

The Judge said that the late Mr. Little of Plymouth found an absolute Remedy for the Quincy, called white Drops, and offered me the Receipt. I suppose it the same as Dr. Bartlets which is only volatile Sp[iri]ts. as Hartshorn or Salarmoniac mixed with Oyl Olive. . . .

The Judge knew an illiterate physician to cure his (the Judge’s) Negro of a bilious Colic or perhaps the Illiac passion in a few Minutes—but would not disclose his Remedy. But the Judge supposes he is possessed of the secret, though that physician died without communicating it even to his own son. For being on the Circuit of the Superior Court in the Co. of York he found a Countryman to the Eastward [i.e., in Maine] who had a Cure for the bilious Colic, which Dr. Lyman had proved infallible in 100 instances.

The Judge bought it of the Man for 30. and it was only the Root of Meadow Flags, or Flower de Luce. Not every flag—but such only whose Root was flat with prongs—that flag root which was surrounded with bushy Fibres will not answer.

The most common name for those flowers today is wild iris.

The Death of Thomas Hutchinson

Thomas Hutchinson was born on 9 Sept 1711 to a wealthy Boston merchant. His father valued education so much that he funded the building of a new Latin School in the family’s North End neighborhood. Naturally, of course, that school benefited the Hutchinson boys.

Thomas went on to Harvard College and then a mercantile career of his own. But his real interests lay in two other professions:

• researching and writing history, culminating in the two volumes of his History of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay and a manuscript for a third, published in the 1800s.
• politics.

Hutchinson served significant terms as a Boston selectman, representative and then speaker in the Massachusetts General Court, probate court judge, advocate for the province in London and in intercolonial discussions, Council member, lieutenant governor, chief justice of the Superior Court, and finally governor.

One of his major accomplishments was stabilizing Massachusetts currency by using the Crown’s specie payment after the Louisburg expedition to pay off old notes and then limiting the amount of new debt the province took on each year. He also took credit for keeping Boston as the provincial capital after the Town House burned in 1747.

Hutchinson became unpopular among Boston politicians for holding so many offices at once along with his relatives the Oliver brothers, and for siding with the royal establishment on so many issues. Sometimes he actually opposed London policies, as with the Stamp Act, but he usually did so privately and, if he lost that internal argument, insisted publicly that people had a duty to follow the law.

In late 1769 Hutchinson became the acting governor after the departure of Sir Francis Bernard. Once the Crown officially made him governor, he lasted about three years before being replaced by Gen. Thomas Gage. By then hugely unpopular at home, Hutchinson sailed to London.

At first the former governor was viewed as a valuable advisor on the American situation. But as war broke out and went on, the government sought him out less and less. He remained the leader of the Massachusetts Loyalists in exile.

In 1780 Hutchinson was in his sixty-eighth year, not in good health. His sons Thomas, Jr., and Elisha and his daughter Sarah with her husband, Dr. Peter Oliver, had joined him in London. His beloved younger daughter Peggy had died there in 1777.

On 2 June, the Gordon Riots began in London. I wrote about them back here. Elisha Hutchinson described events of the next day in an account published with his father’s diary and letters in 1886:

Governor slept tolerably well, as he had done for several nights past; arose as usual at 8 o’clock, shaved himself, and eat his breakfast, and we all told him that his countenance had a more healthy appearance, and if he was not better, we had no reason to conclude that he had lost ground.

He conversed well and freely upon the riot in London the day before, and upon different subjects, ’till the time for going out in the coach; at intervals however, expressing his expectations of dying very soon, repeating texts of Scripture, with short ejaculations to Heaven. He called for a shirt, telling Ryley his servant, that he must die clean.

I usually walked down the stairs before him, but he got up suddenly from his chair, and walked out of the room, leaving the Doctor and I behind. We went into the room next the road; saw him whilst he was walking from the steps of the door to the coach, (a few yds. distance), hold out his hands to Ryley, and caught hold of him, to whom he said “Help me!” and appeared to be fainting.

I went down with the Doctor. The other servants had come to support him from falling, and had got him to the door of the house. They lifted him into a chair in the Servants‘ Hall or entrance into the house, but his head had fell, and his hands and f[eet?], his eyes diste[nded?] rolled up.

The Doctor could feel no pulse: he applied volatiles to his nostrils, which seemed to have little or no effect: a be[d] in the mean time was bro’t, and put on the floor, on which he was laid, after which, with one or two gaspes, he resigned his Soul to God who gave it.

Hutchinson was buried in the churchyard of Croydon Parish in London, three thousand miles from home.

TOMORROW: John Adams, speaking ill.

“Doctor McHenry now a prisoner”

As I said yesterday, in mid-1777 the British military proposed exchanging suspected spy Dr. Benjamin Church for a “Doctor McHenry now a prisoner with the British Troops.” That offer came from the British Commissary of Prisoners, Jamaica Plain’s own Joshua Loring, Jr.

I haven’t seen any identification of McHenry in the articles about Church that I’ve read, but it seems reasonable to conclude that this was young Dr. James McHenry, a rather significant figure in American history. The only other Continental doctor named McHenry I’ve found served on a Pennsylvania privateer from April 1776 to Mar 1777, and there’s no mention of his being captured.

Dr. James McHenry (shown here in middle age) was born to a genteel family in Ireland in 1753. He came to America in 1771, apparently for his health, and liked it so much that he persuaded his family to emigrate and set up a mercantile business in Maryland. James himself lived mostly in Philadelphia, studying medicine under Dr. Benjamin Rush.

When the Revolutionary War began, McHenry volunteered in the lines outside Boston. He worked as an assistant surgeon under Dr. Church in the military hospitals, and collaborated in keeping them going after Church’s resignation and arrest. McHenry offered to set up a hospital in the “northern department,” the upstate New York war against Canada, but before he could go there was made surgeon for a Pennsylvania regiment.

McHenry was at Fort Washington on Manhattan Island in 1776, and was among the many men taken prisoner by the British army on 16 November. Five days later he wrote to Rush, then a Continental Congress delegate:

I have not as yet reflected so deeply on the fate of a prisoner as to make me unhappy. And perhaps I shall not. For I am no admirer of that philosophy which is constantly in tears or beating itself to pieces against the impassable bars of its prison. Methinks I feel something within me like that kindly resignation which when duly attended to never fails to befriend the unfortunate. But

Altho’ I am resigned with regard to my own fate, yet it were to be wished that an exchange of prisoners could be brought about as soon as possible. The officers thro’ the goodness of his Excellency General [William] Howe—have the liberty of the City—but the privates are crouded into Churches and the like. Prodire tenus, si non datur ultra. [Horace: “To reach a certain point, if not to go beyond.”]

Col. Magaw is ill of a fever, tho’ in my opinion not dangerous. I am at private lodgings with him, Col. Miles, Atley, Swoope &c. Their evening and morning devotions begin and end with Horace’s O rus, quando ego te aspiciam. [“Countryside, when shall I behold you.”]

However, McHenry never got to send that letter. He kept it, marked, “The commissary of prisoners Mr. Loring rejected this letter It would not pass”. Which meant Loring knew McHenry, whatever he said about “kindly resignation,” hoped to be exchanged.

Loring had McHenry set up a hospital for the captured Americans, though the two men debated over lines of authority. In a June 1777 report to Gen. George Washington, McHenry mentioned that the wounded prisoners were under the care of “Dr. Oliver, a refugee from Boston.” This was probably Dr. Peter Oliver of Middleborough, son of the Loyalist Chief Justice of the same name.

The British command paroled McHenry on 27 Jan 1777. This treatment, usually available only to gentlemen, meant that he was free to go home after promising not to engage in war again unless he was formally exchanged for someone the Americans freed. (If a man still on parole was recaptured in arms, he was liable to be hanged.) Thus, when Loring proposed the trade for Church, McHenry would not have been actually “now a prisoner with the British Troops,” just legally so.

It looks like the British thought that would be a fair exchange since both men were doctors. There’s no indication that McHenry was a spy, though British commanders might have seen him as more treasonous than the average American since he was born on the east side of the Atlantic. Then again, those authorities might simply have been trying for a bargain—a twenty-four-year-old who was already free for a locked-up spy who’d been in the top ranks of the Boston resistance.

TOMORROW: How that exchange went down.