“The most profitable Business he could at present Employ himself about”

Here’s another transcribed letter from the Papers of John Hancock.

Thomas Cushing, having been replaced as a Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress in favor of Elbridge Gerry, was back home in Massachusetts as a member of the Council.

On 4 Apr 1776, less than a month after the British military evacuated Boston, Cushing wrote to Hancock:

Some time before you wrote to me concerning Your Brother [Ebenezer Hancock], I had not been unmindful of him, I saw him at Watertown & he told me he should like to be Employed if possible in that town in writing for the Council or House, as he should in that Care be near his family & could often Visit them, I accordingly made Enquiry after some Employ of this Sort for him & sspoke to divers Members of the Council & it appeared to me that there would soon be an opening for him –

a few days ago I saw him at Boston and told him what you hard wrote me concerning him & what prospect I thought there was of his being Employed, he told me he was oblidged to me, but it would not suit him & tarry at Watertown now as the Town of Boston was again retured to its Inhabitants, that he had found all his goods & merchandize were safe and in good Condition, that he determined to return to Boston & that he apprehended that the most profitable Business he could at present Employ himself about was in attending to the Sale of his Goods, in which I think he judged wisely. I give you joy that his Goods are Safe

John eventually got Ebenezer the job of a deputy paymaster of the Continental Army. As a result, Ebenezer sometimes had huge sums of silver money from France under guard in his Boston home.

Ebenezer Hancock’s house in downtown Boston is now on the market. It’s being promoted as John Hancock’s house because the older brother owned it, but he’d inherited a lot of property in Boston. Ebenezer, who had received a smaller bequest from their uncle, ran into business reverses and went bankrupt in 1769. According to W. T. Baxter’s article on Ebenezer’s bankruptcy, John helped him out with “rent-free premises.”

Eventually, Baxter noted, the property flowed the other way. Gov. Hancock died intestate, so Ebenezer inherited a third of his fortune, including the stone mansion on Beacon Hill.

“They all to a Man refus’d taking the Oath”

William Molineux refused to pay the £6 fine the Massachusetts Superior Court imposed on him for refusing jury duty in the fall of 1773.

Publicly, that was because Molineux was protesting how Chief Justice Peter Oliver accepted (or at that point not denying that he would accept) a salary from the Crown rather than the people of Massachusetts.

Privately, Molineux might have had another reason: he was in debt to Boston for £300 for money advanced for a public-works venture.

In February 1774, as the Massachusetts General Court moved to impeach Oliver, the merchant petitioned that legislature to block this fine on his behalf. The assembly declined to take action for Molineux alone.

On 28 July, Gov. Thomas Gage wrote to Chief Justice Oliver from Salem about how Molineux had still not paid his fine for refusing jury duty. He promised to support the judges if they demanded that £6 and threatened to jail the merchant.

But in August 1774 Parliament’s new Massachusetts Government Act made even more people refuse to cooperate with the court system under Oliver.

In the western counties, popular protest took the form of hundreds of men massing around the courthouses and keeping the justices out.

Bostonians didn’t dare to do that since their streets were once again patrolled by redcoat soldiers. So on 30 August they emulated Molineux’s refusal.

William Tudor (shown above later in life) wrote to his mentor in the law, John Adams, on 3 September:

Tuesday the Superior Court opened and Mr. Oliver took his Seat as chief Justice. When the grand Jury were called upon to be sworn they all to a Man refus’d taking the Oath, for Reasons committed to Paper, which they permitted the Court, after some Altercation, to read.

The Petit Jury unanimously followed the Example of the Grand Jury; their Reasons together with the others You will read in the Masstts. Spy.

The jurors’ protests were also published as handbills by Edes and Gill. Among the grand jurors were longtime activists Thomas Crafts and Paul Revere, John Hancock’s younger brother Ebenezer, and William Thompson, whose granddaughter supplied the texts to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1875.

In different ways the grand and petit jurors pointed to these reasons:

• The General Court had impeached Chief Justice Oliver.
• The Massachusetts Government Act had taken control of the courts from the people and put them under the Crown.
• Justices Oliver, Foster Hutchinson, and William Browne had accepted seats on the Council, now appointed under the new law instead of elected by the legislature as the charter specified.

The judges, attorneys, and young men waiting to be admitted to the Boston bar (like Tudor) tried to figure out what to do.

TOMORROW: The last court session.

More Colonial Newspaper Advertising Rates

After my posting on colonial newspaper advertising rates, Caitlin G. DeAngelis alerted me to some additional data inside Charles E. Clark’s The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740.

Then I found more examples quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.’s New England Quarterly article on “The Colonial Newspapers and the Stamp Act.” And in confirming those I came across other items in newspapers.

So here are yet more prices for colonial newspaper ads:

• John Peter Zenger’s New-York Weekly Journal, 1733: “three Shillings the first Week, and one Shilling every Week after.”
• Jonas Green’s Maryland Gazette, 1752: “Advertisements of a moderate Length are taken in and inserted for Five Shillings the first Week, and a Shilling per Week after for Continuance.”
• Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, 1754: “In the Gazette, small and middling Advertisements at 3/ the first Week, and 1/ per Week after, or 5/ for 3 Weeks. Longer ones to be valued by Comparison with the foregoing; as if 20 Lines be a middling Advertisement, Price 5/ for 3 Weeks, one of 30 will be 7/6d, etc. judging as near as you can, by the Light of the Copy, how much it will make.” (It seems characteristic that Franklin’s prices would come in the form of a word problem about ratios.)
• Newport Mercury, probably around 1765: 3s.9d. for three appearances of an ad of 12 lines or fewer, plus 1s. for each additional appearance.

In addition, Clark’s Public Prints reports that in the late 1750s Thomas Fleet billed the Massachusetts government 4s. for each notice in the Boston Evening-Post.

And in the early 1770s, Benjamin Edes and John Gill charged shopkeeper Ebenezer Hancock (John’s little brother) 4s. for advertisements in the Boston Gazette.

And there’s a political dimension to this topic—which brings us back to the Stamp Act! Among the many provisions in that law was:

For every advertisement to be contained in any gazette, news paper, or any other paper, or any pamphlet which shall be so printed, a duty of two shillings.

That basically doubled the cost of a typical ad, it appears—cutting the number of ads people would buy. For printers, that loss of business came on top of the cost of the stamped paper that they had to print the newspaper on—a penny for each full sheet. And, as Carl Robert Keyes explains in this essay, “this put printers in the position of collecting duties” for the stamp agent.

UP AHEAD: What about subscription rates?

The Real Green Dragon Tavern

We’ll close “Mapping Revolutionary Boston” Week with a visit to the Green Dragon Tavern. That was an important site in pre-Revolutionary political organizing, and it gets its own pin in the website/app.

That building contained a “public house” or tavern by 1714. There are period references to a Green Dragon Tavern in Boston before that date, but it’s not clear they refer to an enterprise at this location.

In 1764 the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons bought this building to use as their lodge. That was the organization of Dr. Joseph Warren, Paul Revere, and other strivers, as opposed to the more establishment St. John’s Lodge. Naturally, the Freemasons kept the Green Dragon running as a bar, too. Benjamin Burdick, who was also captain of the watch for the middle part of town, managed the establishment in the early 1770s under a short-lived new name, the Mason’s Arms. Lots of unofficial political meetings took place there.

Unfortunately, the blue pin for the Green Dragon Tavern on the “Mapping Revolutionary Boston” map is not in the right place. It should be up higher, on the part of Union Street that leads from Hanover to the Mill Pond. The pin shows the location of the modern business that uses the Green Dragon Tavern name.

That’s a common confusion because the modern Green Dragon Tavern desperately wants people to think it’s the historic site. I took the liberty of correcting the opening paragraph on its website, historically and grammatically:

The Green Dragon Tavern [that stood in another spot until nearly 200 years ago] has a long and rich history, playing an important part in the freedom of Boston during the War of Independence. Established in 1654 [actually, that’s four decades before the earliest reference][add comma] The the Green Dragon was a favorite haunt of Paul Revere (Wwhom [but points for using the objective pronoun] we consider a close Nneighbor [even though he lived on the other side of the North End]) and John Hancock [he attended very few lodge meetings after accepting membership] (who’s whose brother lived next door! [if you have to treat Ebenezer Hancock as a celebrity, you’re stretching]). Indeed, as has been ratified [I do not think this word means what you think it means] by Daniel Webster – the famous historian [he was famous as an attorney, senator, and secretary of state], [choose either em-dashes or commas for apposite phrases, not one of each] that it was in the Green Dragon that the plans for the invasion [pretty strong word for the British government sending British soldiers to part of the British Empire] of Lexington and Concorde Concord were overheard [so British officials and military commanders were hanging out with the radical activists in this tavern? I don’t think so. And that’s not even what the myth says.] [add comma] thus starting the famous ride of Paul Revere.

In fact, Revere said he had his committee of observers stop meeting at the Green Dragon in late 1774 after hearing from someone—quite possibly Henry Knox—that their activities were known to the royal authorities. That doesn’t make the original Green Dragon Tavern any less historic, of course. And it doesn’t make the current one any more so.

Twitter Feed, 23-31 May 2010

• @jmadelman Yes, Texas history standards still include ancient Rome, but only the REPUBLICAN period. #stuffimakeup #
• Current reading – R. Arthur Bowler, LOGISTICS & THE FAILURE OF THE BRITISH ARMY IN AMERICA, 1775-1783. #
• "An army of up to 65,000 operating thousands of miles from its supply base…No European government had faced such a task since Roman times." #
• Profile of Elizabeth (Peck) Perkins, widowed businesswoman in Revolutionary Boston: bit.ly/d0a3un #
• NY TIMES columnist David Brooks pits Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke against each other: nyti.ms/cLZvbg #
• RT @PaulRevereHouse: Slight change for Sat, June 5 event – Henry Cooke, Tailor extraordinaire will be at the museum bit.ly/aRxUp9 #
• George & Martha Washington juggling their household staff in Philadelphia to ensure those slaves didn't become free: bit.ly/aAmB4U #
• From @lucyinglis, a profile of Peter the "Wild Boy" (c1710-1785), brought to England in 1725: bit.ly/9KBl8Q #
• Ladies' high hair fashions in Paris, 1777: bit.ly/bcwJE7 Of course, Paris was a long way from recently Puritan wartime Boston. #
• RT @2palaver: Concord lodge stumbles on Mason 'jewels' made by Paul Revere? bit.ly/9dIZGb // There were other silversmith Masons #
• RT @russeltarr: The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913: Great history resource: tinyurl.com/lrxk2w #
• RT @PaulRevereHouse: To honor the 150th anniversary of "Paul Revere's Ride" our summer Teacher Workshop features poetry bit.ly/a1TBUd #
• Someone actually made it thru the Revolutionary War with the name Polycarpus Snell: bit.ly/90Ts2q (Looks like a MAYFLOWER descendant) #
• Looking for iron cannon cast during Revolutionary War at Salisbury, Conn.: bit.ly/bnHyqc #
• Abigail Adams talks politics with Dr Benjamin Rush in an 1800 letter just bought by Massachusetts Historical Socy: bit.ly/amLhy6 #
• RT @JBD1: folks inventorying Hancock's library got bored. Entries toward end lump titles together (i.e. "Shakespeare and Spectator"), &c. #
• Via @JBD1, podcast lecture on the reconstruction of Thomas Jefferson's library: bit.ly/ag7vJE #
• BOSTON GLOBE urges Walpole, Mass., football fans to make mascots of Rebels of 1775, not those of 1861: bit.ly/9IVpUT #
• Honored US 6th Amendment and Massachusetts Declaration of Rights today: showed up for jury duty. #
• .@AlPike: "Walpole could've opted for Federalist Rebels of 1814." // True, but Walpole has a tradition of winning. #
• Call for papers for journal issue on Seven Years' War in a global perspective: bit.ly/czFrgO #
• From @LizB, review of two children's books about George Washington, George III, and spying: bit.ly/94BFSF #
• BOSTON GLOBE column with links on investigating Benjamin Franklin's kite-flying experiment: bit.ly/9JxYK7 #
• Pvt Augustus Barrett of the British 22d Regiment, the British 24th Regiment—and the 16th Massachusetts Regiment: bit.ly/aeNMYh #
• Visiting John Hancock's younger brother, who got a financial bailout and later a valuable Continental job: bit.ly/a8hFwl #
• Parallels between the politicization of debate over climate science with politicization of debate over relativity? bit.ly/c5DAIK #
• RT @wceberly: 256 yrs today, May 28, 1754, Lieutenant Colonel George Washington begins French & Indian War bit.ly/bz6Ys4 #
• RT @history_geek: Betsy Ross, Out of the Parlor bit.ly/bGPA3G #
• RT @jmadelman: Nifty take RT @KevinLevin Interesting post on historical movies at "Past in the Present" bit.ly/aPijSZ #
• RT @jmadelman: The post has John Adams about right on creating an environment, even if the inaccuracies and shortcomings bother me. #
• RT @universalhub: What if Boston had become an island city? bit.ly/9vex0x #
• RT @amhistorymuseum: Today in 1790: Rhode Island becomes 13th state to ratify Constitution. Spinning frame from 1790: ow.ly/1RmUO #
• May need to visit Museum of London during my next trip: bit.ly/bKctty #
• A regular podcast for living-history and SCA reenactors: bit.ly/b9HZWp #
• Rick Beyer & Lexington Historical Socy's FIRST SHOT film won award from American Association of State & Local History! bit.ly/d1C3cO #
• Learned that artist Jef Czekaj deserves credit for school-play concept in UNITE OR DIE picture book on Constitution: bit.ly/6nRaB #
• @historianess I ADORE Sir John Soane's Museum. I subject all my relatives to visiting it. That way they understand my decorating tastes. #
• RT @history_book: Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783-1820 (The Enlightenment World) - by Michael R. Lynn. amzn.to/bg4YYM #
• NY TIMES review of Jack Rakove's REVOLUTIONARIES: nyti.ms/duXmd5 #

John Lowell: the man with the trunk

On 19 Apr 1775, John Lowell was in Lexington with John Hancock. Near dawn he and Paul Revere hastily carried Hancock’s truck containing sensitive Massachusetts Provincial Congress papers out of Buckman’s tavern so the approaching British troops wouldn’t find it. (Those troops weren’t looking for it, but Lowell and Revere didn’t know that.)

Revere left little information about Lowell. In his 1775 deposition about the day he referred only to “another man” fetching the trunk with him. When Revere wrote a more detailed account for the Rev. Dr. Jeremy Belknap in 1798, he referred to “a Mr. Lowell, who was a clerk to Mr. Hancock.”

In Paul Revere’s Ride, David H. Fischer described Lowell as “a young Boston acquaintance” of the silversmith, and later referred to him as “young Lowell.” I imagined a young man, perhaps even legally still a minor in his first counting-house job, tasked with wrestling Col. Hancock’s trunk to safety. Unfortunately, once I looked into Lowell’s identity, I had to discard that theory.

John Lowell (1740-1793) was in his mid-thirties in 1775, only a few years younger than Revere and Hancock. He was apparently born in Charlestown, but moved across the river to enter business in Boston. Lowell married a daughter of selectman John Scollay in 1768, and his sister married John Hancock’s little brother Ebenezer. (Scollay’s daughter Mercy was engaged to Dr. Joseph Warren in 1775, showing how tightly connected this crowd could be.)

What’s more, this John Lowell was politically active and connected. He dined with the Sons of Liberty in 1769, and helped to promote a boycott of tea in 1770. Three years later, he was still working against the tea tax in the North End Caucus and probably as a volunteer patrolling Griffin’s wharf to make sure the tea ships weren’t unloaded. (Check out the handwritten list of names; I think “John Lowl” or “Lowel” means this Lowell.)

Lowell continued to be in the middle of events after the war began. On 5 June he wrote from Charlestown to Lydia Hancock, John’s aunt, about how it would be hard to get anything more out of their mansion on Beacon Hill. Twelve days later, Charlestown itself was in flames. In early 1776, documents show, Lowell was “Deputy Secretary, pro tem.,” for the Massachusetts Council.

Lowell and Revere must have known each other well. Not only were they part of the same political groups, but they were both active in the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons. In 1775 Revere presumably didn’t mention Lowell’s name to protect him, but I can’t figure out why he wrote so vaguely of the man in 1798.

Before he died, John Lowell became the first teller and later the cashier of the Massachusetts Bank. Those were prestigious posts in the nascent American financial sector.

In the meantime, Lowell’s first cousin from Newburyport, also named John Lowell (1743-1802), had become a very prominent and wealthy lawyer and then judge. That man’s descendants founded the cotton mills in the town eventually named after them. Judge John Lowell was a lukewarm Loyalist when the Revolution began, but managed his career so successfully that his memory has almost completely eclipsed that of his cousin.

Yet John Lowell of Charlestown was actually on Lexington common as the shooting began, working to protect the Provincial Congress’s secrets. At least that moment of his life is reenacted each year, as shown above in the thumbnail image above, from a photo by Ho Yin Au.