Seeing the Death of Christopher Seider

If I ever get the chance to curate an exhibit about Ebenezer Richardson’s killing of Christopher Seider in 1770 (with, of course, no limit on space or money), the portrait of Madam Grizzell Apthorp that I showed yesterday is one item I’d want to include.

Another would be the big broadside titled “Major-General James Wolfe, who reach’d the summit of human glory, September 13th, 1759,” that I described back here. According to the Boston Evening-Post, Christopher had a copy in his pocket when he died, showing early signs of “a martial genius.” So far as I know, the Massachusetts Historical Society owns the only copy.

A third item is the only contemporaneous visual depiction of that event that’s survived. It’s a woodcut picture that illustrates a broadside titled “The Life, and Humble Confessions, of Richardson, the Informer.” The Historical Society of Pennsylvania appears to be the only archive with a copy, and the image below comes courtesy of its website.

The paper hasn’t survived in great shape, and the the image and printing weren’t very crisp to begin with. But it’s enough to depict the whole event. At the left we can see the shop of Theophilus Lillie, helpfully labeled “Importer.” The giant head of an effigy stands on a stick to the right of the shop. Above it, a smoking firelock has fired out a window at the crowd on the right. One of the little figures representing boys is lying on the street in the right foreground—Christopher Seider, mortally wounded.

Some elements of this image echo the famous engraving of the Boston Massacre by Henry Pelham (copied by Paul Revere). There’s the general composition of the urban scene, with buildings slanting in on either side. In the background is a church steeple—perhaps the New Brick Meeting-House in the North End, known as the “Cockerel Church” for its weathervane.

In the foreground just below the gun barrel, a woman rushes into the scene. That’s probably a representation of Christopher’s mother, Sarah Seider, just as the Massacre print is said to include the widow Mary Maverick, come to look for her son. Mrs. Seider is carrying something which at first glance might look like a pitchfork, but I think it was meant to be a distaff, symbolizing her hard work at a respectable domestic craft.

This broadside was probably printed in 1772 as Richardson languished, neither hanged nor pardoned, in Boston’s jail. Al Young guessed that Isaiah Thomas carved it; Thomas did say he learned to carve such plates as an apprentice, not very well but adequately. In any event, it reflects the Whig interpretation of the event, which had foreshadowed and been overshadowed by the Massacre.

The First News of Christopher Seider’s Death

On Thursday, 22 Feb 1770, the Boston News-Letter contained this item in italics at the bottom of its local news:

This Instant we hear that one Richardson having attempted to destroy some Effigies in the North End, the Lads beat him off into his House, and broke his Windows, upon which he fired among them, mortally wounded one Boy, & slightly wounded two or three others. Richardson is now under Examination.

The issue of the Boston Chronicle dated 19-22 Feb 1770 closed its local news this way:

This forenoon, a boy of about 14 years of age, was mortally wounded, and two others slightly wounded by a shot from a musket, fired out of a house at the north end.—Two persons, who were in the house from whence the gun was fired, are now under examination at Faneuil Hall.

*** The Western Post not arrived at 2 o’Clock

The wounded lad, who would die later that afternoon, was Christopher Seider. He wasn’t fourteen, as the Loyalist Chronicle guessed, but only about eleven. His wound was indeed mortal, as both newspapers said. There was only one other person wounded, Samuel Gore, though a sailor named Robert Patterson complained that pieces of shot went through his pants.

Because Ebenezer Richardson shot at the boys mobbing his house on Thursday, one of the two days when newspapers were printed in Boston, this is a rare example of being able to read a local news story written as it broke.

Furthermore, this story tells us a couple of things about the newspapers themselves. The Chronicle dated 19-22 February was published at the end of that stretch; in chronological indexes that issue’s often pegged to the start date. Furthermore, the Chronicle’s note that the printer was still waiting for mail at 2:00 show that newspapers were printed in the early afternoon of the date on their front pages. They weren’t ready first thing in the morning, at least these editions.

At the time, the Chronicle was being supported by the Customs service with stationery orders, advertising, and leaks. And it appears the newspaper’s printer, then John Fleeming, reciprocated by not mentioning Richardson even by last name: he was a Customs employee, and a notorious one.

The Marriage of Ebenezer and Kezia Richardson

When Kezia Fowle and Thomas Hincher (or Henshaw) first got married in February 1742 (according to our modern calendar), they didn’t go to any of the meeting-houses in their native Woburn. Instead, they went to King’s Chapel in Boston.

That was an upscale Anglican church while their families back home were Congregationalist, but perhaps it was more welcoming to a couple in their circumstances. Three months later Kezia gave birth to the couple’s first child, also called Kezia.

In 1754, when Kezia wished to get married a second time, to her late sister’s husband Ebenezer Richardson, she went back to King’s Chapel (recently rebuilt in stone, as shown above). Their intention was announced in January, though they didn’t actually get married until 14 May. At that time, they both listed themselves as “of Boston,” having left Woburn behind. As I’ve been recounting, Ebenezer and Kezia had made themselves unpopular in two ways:

• by having a child while Rebecca, his wife and her sister, was still alive.
• by letting people believe the Rev. Edward Jackson was the father.

Ironically, if Ebenezer and Kezia had just managed to put off their affair, or not gotten pregnant during it, then they could have married after Rebecca Richardson’s death without raising many eyebrows. I’ve found several examples of widowers marrying sisters of their late wives in eighteenth-century New England.

Boston welcomed Ebenezer and Kezia Richardson in its traditional way: on 30 Sept 1754, a town employee “warned out” the couple, a legal ritual establishing that Boston took no responsibility if they came to need public assistance. But they stayed, and put down roots. In April 1758 the Richardsons buried a child out of Christ Church (now called Old North).

In Woburn, Ebenezer Richardson was a yeoman farmer, but in Boston he had to find a new way to support his family. At some point he began to offer confidential information to the province’s Attorney General, Edmund Trowbridge. (Folks who’ve followed this saga closely will recall that Trowbridge had also been Jackson’s lawyer.) Trowbridge later passed Richardson and his tips on to a Customs official named Charles Paxton.

In 1760 Paxton had a rival in the Boston Customs office: collector Benjamin Barons, who was more popular with local merchants, probably because he let them get away with more. On 4 December, Barons tried to talk Richardson over to his side. The informer heard him out, then hurried to Trowbridge and blabbed. The following February, Richardson signed a deposition about his conversation with Barons that went to London in the record of that office dispute.

Someone in London leaked that document, or news of its contents, back to Boston. From then on, Richardson was known as “the Informer.” He was particularly unpopular with the prominent merchants he’d named as being “concerned in the Illicit trade”: John Rowe, the elder Benjamin Hallowell, Solomon Davis, and Arnold Wells. Around that time the Customs service hired Richardson openly since he could no longer work undercover.

In August 1765, four days after a mob sacked Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion in the North End, Boston’s Overseers of the Poor paid a man to carry Ebenezer Richardson, wife, and family to Woburn, possibly for their own protection.

In September 1767, after a dispute over a Customs search in the North End, a crowd of boys jeered Richardson’s home.

And in February 1770, when he tried to break up a picket line of boys outside an importer’s shop, those boys followed Richardson and threw garbage and rocks at his house. That confrontation ended with Richardson shooting Christopher Seider and Sammy Gore, and being arrested for murder.

At that time, Ebenezer and Kezia Richardson were still together. Their family also included two daughters—Sarah and Kezia—old enough to testify at Ebenezer’s murder trial. I haven’t found any other record of those girls.

There’s no evidence that the Richardsons’ marriage lasted through Ebenezer’s conviction, extended stay in jail awaiting sentencing, royal pardon, and flight from Boston. When he and his co-defendant petitioned the Crown for aid in early 1775, the other man referred many times to his “famely”; Richardson didn’t mention having a wife or child.

And that 1775 document is also the last trace I’ve found of Ebenezer Richardson.

The Father of Kezia Hincher’s Child Revealed

On 16 Aug 1753, the Rev. Edward Jackson filed an appeal of the decision against him in his libel case, telling the Massachusetts Superior Court that he had new evidence to prove that the rumors he’d fathered Kezia Hincher’s illegitimate child were baseless.

On the very same day—which I don’t think is a coincidence—there was a rift in the household where Hincher was living. Her brother-in-law, farmer Ebenezer Richardson, made out a bill to William, Dorothy, and Phinehas, three children of his late wife, Rebecca. It covered support and clothing from 11 Apr 1736 until each had turned seven, to be paid from their father’s estate.

The Woburn town clerk, James Fowle, attached a note for the probate judge, Samuel Danforth, saying that the children’s father, Phinehas Richardson, had actually died in 1738. (Let’s give Ebenezer Richardson the benefit of the doubt and assume his error—which increased the amount due him—was inadvertent.)

Those children had been between five years and three months old when their father had died, so in 1753 they were all well past seven. They were still below the age of majority, however. I take this bill as a sign that those minor children were severing ties with their stepfather—possibly moving in with biological relatives—and that he replied by demanding money due to him from their inheritances.

What had prompted that split? People in Woburn had just realized that the father of Kezia Hincher’s child was not her employer, the Rev. Mr. Jackson, but her brother-in-law, Ebenezer. The couple had apparently kept quiet about their affair while Rebecca Richardson was alive, and then longer, as the minister’s reputation sank. But in August 1753, the secret was out.

In fact, this whole case remained so notorious that twenty years later that Boston broadside titled “Life, and Humble Confession, of Richardson, the Informer” had Ebenezer saying:

WOOBURN, my native place can tell,
My crimes are blacker far than Hell,
What great disturbance there I made,
Against the people and their Head.

A wretch of wretches prov’d with child,
By me I know, at which I smil’d,
To think the PARSON he must bare
The guilt of me, and I go clear.

And thus this worthy man of GOD
Unjustly felt the scourging rod,
Which broke his heart, it proved his end,
And for whole blood I guilty stand.

In January 1754, seventeen days before the hearing that formally ended Jackson’s libel suit, Ebenezer Richardson and Kezia Hincher announced their intention to marry. And it looks like they were no longer welcome in Woburn.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

New Evidence in Edward Jackson’s Libel Case?

On 16 Aug 1753, the Rev. Edward Jackson of Woburn petitioned the Superior Court to reconsider the verdict against him in his libel suit against the Rev. Josiah Cotton, a verdict which implied he really was the father of Kezia Hincher’s illegitimate child. New evidence had come to light, he said.

A local tradition held that one of Jackson’s local enemies gave an enslaved servant a letter for Hincher. That slave asked one of Jackson’s own slaves for directions to where the widow lived, and Jackson’s slave took the letter to the minister. The local historian Samuel Sewall wrote:

The letter may reasonably be supposed to have been unsealed; for what the need of seals to letters, carried by the hand of a poor ignorant African, that had never learnt the alphabet, and to whom English and Latin, Greek and Hebrew were all alike?

Seeing it to be in this condition. Mr. Jackson ventured to open it; and finding that its contents furnished a complete exposure of the falsity of the charge against him, or a direct clew to such a discovery, he quickly copied it, and’ keeping the original for his own use, he returned the copy...

This tale flatters the racist wish to see black people as foolish, and it excuses Jackson from looking at someone else’s mail. But it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny on several counts:

• There was no need for Jackson’s slave to take the letter and return it to the other man’s slave if he simply went to ask the minister for directions.
• Some enslaved people did know how to read, and some letters did get lost, so anyone sending a potentially embarrassing document would seal it—if he was foolhardy enough to put such remarks in writing at all.
• Folks in Woburn had been living in the middle of ministerial feuds for twenty years. And people aren’t stupid just because they’re held in bondage (though thinking they are makes that bondage thing easier to do). The idea that a slave of one of Jackson’s enemies would blithely walk up to the minister’s servant and had over a private letter is ridiculous.
• Locating Kezia Hincher in a town of only 1,575 people (per the 1765 census) shouldn’t have been hard. She was still living with her brother-in-law, Ebenezer Richardson. (By this time her sister Rebecca had died, leaving Ebenezer a widower.)

So if Jackson did come across a letter from one of his accusers, this wasn’t how it happened. His new evidence probably took another form. In any event, something happened in August 1753 that sent Jackson back to court to reverse the judgment against him.

TOMORROW: What happened in court—and what didn’t.

And the People’s Choice Is...Ebenezer Richardson!

Ebenezer Richardson was born in Woburn on 31 Mar 1718, eldest son of Timothy and Abigail Richardson. The family farm was along the town’s border with Stoneham.

Woburn was one of the older British towns in the colony of Massachusetts, and had already spun off the town of Wilmington. This old photograph shows the meeting-house built in 1732 for Woburn’s “second parish,” which in 1799 became Burlington. (Check out the Burlington Historical Commission’s heritage trail for other sites in that town.)

When Ebenezer was twenty-two years old, he married a widow named Rebecca Richardson, formerly Rebecca Fowle. A large portion of the Woburn population was named Richardson, descendants of two of the town’s earliest settlers. As far as I can tell, Rebecca’s first and second Richardson husbands weren’t closely related. (To complicate matters, there was another Ebenezer Richardson living in Woburn at the same time, an occasional town official.)

When Rebecca married the second time, she was thirty-four years old and had six children. She had the “widow’s third” of her husband’s estate, and her kids were due to inherit more when they came of age. Ebenezer became responsible for managing Rebecca’s property and for helping to raise her children (for which he was reimbursed from their father’s estate). In the 1740s the couple had three more children of their own. Then Ebenezer inherited his own father’s property, giving him quite a solid Middlesex County farm while he was still in his early thirties.

The household also included Rebecca’s younger sister Kezia, whose husband, Thomas Hincher, had died, leaving her with one child and little property. Thomas had served in the province militia, and Massachusetts owed him £42.10s. (in depressed local currency, probably). In 1746, Ebenezer went into Boston to collect that money for his sister-in-law.

Clearly the Richardsons had taken in Kezia Hincher (sometimes spelled Henshaw) as a poor relation. She earned some money for herself by working as a housekeeper for the Rev. Edward Jackson, the unmarried minister of Woburn’s first parish.

The first surviving sign of trouble in the Richardson household came in early 1751, when Ebenezer was “put into the Goal [i.e., jail] at Charlestown—from which he broke out” by March 1751. It’s unclear what that was all about. Was he in debt? Was he suspected of a minor crime? (A major crime would probably be better documented.)

But the real stink arose later that year when Kezia Hincher became pregnant, and people in Woburn whispered that the new child’s father was the Rev. Mr. Jackson.

TOMORROW: The midwife and the ministers.

Sing Along with Ebenezer Richardson?

In his essay in the Colonial Society of Massachusetts’s publication Music in Colonial Massachusetts, volume 1, Carleton Sprague Smith posited that a lot of the early American verses printed on broadsides were actually meant to be sung to well-known tunes.

This is one of his examples. The verse is “The Life, and Humble Confession, of Richardson, the Informer,” words supposedly from the mouth of Ebenezer Richardson—adulterer, Customs informer and official, and killer of Christopher Seider. Smith matched the verses up (though not exactly, he admitted) to the old tune “Confesse.”

That tune would be thematically appropriate, to be sure. But is the melody indeed a good match for the words?

Injured BOSTON now awake,
While I a true CONFESSION make,
Of my notorious sins and guilt,
As well the harmless blood I’ve spilt.

WOOBURN, my native place can tell,
My crimes are blacker far than Hell,
What great disturbance there I made,
Against the people and their Head.

A wretch of wretches prov’d with child,
By me I know, at which I smil’d,
To think the PARSON he must bare
The guilt of me, and I go clear.

[I wrote an article explaining these references to Richardson’s life for New England Ancestors a couple of years ago. It was online for a while, but no longer.]

And thus this worthy man of GOD
Unjustly felt the scourging rod,
Which broke his heart, it proved his end,
And for whole blood I guilty stand.

The halter now is justly due,
For now I’ve killed no less than two,
Their blood for vengeance loud doth cry,
It reach’d the ears of Heaven on high.

But yet still wicked, yet still vile,
I’ve lived on honest Merchant’s spoil,
For this I justly got the name,
The INFORMER, though with little gain.

Little indeed when I compare,
The stings of conscience which I bare,
And now I frankly own to thee,
I’m the INFORMER, I am he.

By my account poor BOSTON’S lost,
By me in only three years past,
Full sixty thousand pounds—yea more
May still be added to the score.

But what’s that to this last crime,
In sending SEIDER out of time!
This cuts my heart, this frights me most;
O help me, LORD, I see his ghost,

There,—there’s a life, you now behold,
So vile I’ve been,—alas so bold;
There’d scarce a Lawyer undertake
To plead my case, or for me speak.

On Tuesday next I must appear,
And there my dismal sentence hear;
But O!——my conscience, guilty cries,
For conscience never can tell lyes.

And now alas, my injur’d friends,
Since I can make you no amends,
Here is my body you may take,
And sell, a notimy to make.

That last line is a reference to how medical trainees sought out the bodies of hanged men to study anatomy, as Levi Ames worried about.

So this could be a natural lead-in to either a series about Ebenezer Richardson’s tangled past or another series of C.S.I.: Colonial Boston. Which do folks prefer?

“For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses”

Of late, one of the more discomfiting phrases in the U.S. Declaration of Independence has been this item from the list of what George III had done so tyrannically as to make it necessary for the thirteen colonies participating in the Continental Congress to break off from Britain:

For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses;...

Today the U.S. of A. has made itself notorious for transporting people across the ocean, to the Spanish-American war trophy of Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, and for creating a system of what look like criminal trials as long as you don’t look too closely for fairness.

Official defenders of that system are now pointing to the end of the trial of Salim Hamdan, with a military jury deciding on a sentence of five and a half years, as proof that it can produce justice. Of course, most of those defenders thought only a much longer sentence would be justice. But if it’s just for Hamdan to be imprisoned for five and a half years for his crimes, then by logic it’s unjust that the U.S. of A. has held him in prisons for over six years so far, and makes no commitment about ever releasing him.

The recent prominence of the “transporting us beyond seas” phrase in the Declaration made me wonder what exactly it referred to. All the complaints in that part of the document were supposed to reflect colonists’ grievances with the government in London, embodied in the king.

Historians usually trace this particular complaint to the Administration of Justice Act, which Parliament passed in May 1774. Here’s the complete text from Yale Law School. Like a lot of other laws, it doesn’t make for comfortable reading, but this is the most important part:

That if any inquisition or indictment shall be found, or if any appeal shall be sued or preferred against any person, for murder, or other capital offence, in the province of the Massachuset’s Bay, and it shall appear, by information given upon oath to the governor, or, in his absence, to the lieutenant-governor of the said province, that the fact was committed by the person...either in the execution of his duty as a magistrate, for the suppression of riots, or in the support of the laws of revenue, or in acting in his duty as an officer of revenue, or in acting under the direction and order of any magistrate, for the suppression of riots, or for the carrying into effect the laws of revenue, or in aiding and assisting in any of the cases aforesaid:

and if it shall also appear, to the satisfaction of the said governor, or lieutenant-governor respectively, that an indifferent trial cannot be had within the said province,

in that case, it shall and may be lawful for the governor, or lieutenant-governor, to direct, with the advice and consent of the council, that the inquisition, indictment, or appeal, shall be tried in some other of his Majesty's colonies, or in Great Britain...

Americans of the time and many historians since have emphasized the phrase “or any other capital offense,” and in the eighteenth century British Empire there were a lot of capital offenses. That interpretation implies that the London government had decreed that it could bring almost anybody to Britain for trial, far away from their families, lawyers, and communities.

But that interpretation doesn’t seem to recognize the law’s most important qualifying phrases. It applied only to people acting as royal officials suppressing riots or collecting Customs duties, or folks helping those officials. It also applied only to Massachusetts. In other words, the Administration of Justice Act was aimed at rescuing officials who had used force to enforce Parliament’s laws from being prosecuted in local courts before hostile local juries.

When Parliament enacted this law, its leaders were probably thinking of Capt. Thomas Preston and the soldiers tried for the Boston Massacre, and Customs employee Ebenezer Richardson tried for killing young Christopher Seider during a small mob attack on his house. Crown officials had worried that those men would hang for what, in their eyes, was clearly self-defense. (In the end, Preston and the soldiers were acquitted or given “benefit of clergy,” branded, and released. Richardson was convicted of murder but pardoned by London and released.)

I’m not sure the Administration of Justice Act as written would have applied to those men. There doesn’t seem to have been a magistrate to assist at the Massacre, and Richardson wasn’t on the job when he got into his fight with the boys. Bostonians had threatened to use the law against other army officers and officials—for example, a grand jury tried to indict an army captain named John Willson for encouraging slaves to revolt. But those efforts fizzled out after people had made their point. I suspect that the threat of officials being put on trial for enforcing Parliament’s laws was still hypothetical, but this new Act still gave those men more security.

So was the Continental Congress justified in complaining about the royal government “transporting us beyond seas...”? Maybe the delegates had another situation in mind, and historians have erred in interpreting the Administration of Justice Act, just as many erred in interpreting the Quartering Act. Clearly political leaders in Massachusetts were worried in early 1775 about being arrested and sent to London for trial as traitors; that’s why Samuel Adams, John Hancock, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper, and others were outside Boston on 18 Apr 1775. But I’m not sure the Crown had ever done that by June 1776, however, and thus I’m not sure whether this Declarative phrase refers to an actual event or even an actual law.

Nonetheless, not transporting people out of their country to be tried in a pretend justice system seems like a good principle for the U.S. of A. to abide by.

Robert Patterson: riotous sailor

Robert Patterson was a sailor. Since Boston was the third largest port in North America, there were many sailors in town over the winter of 1769-1770. But Patterson stood out by standing on the front line of riotous crowds.

On 22 Feb 1770, a mob of boys attacked Customs official Ebenezer Richardson’s house after he tried to break up their anti-importer demonstration. Richardson fired a musket-full of birdshot down at the crowd. Some of those pellets cut Patterson’s pants. (As a sailor, he wore baggy shin-length trousers rather than closely fitted leather or cloth breeches.) Patterson must therefore have been standing close to Christopher Seider and Samuel Gore, the two boys wounded (one fatally) by Richardson’s shot.

Judicial authorities made Patterson agree to a £50 bond to ensure he’d be available to testify against Richardson. They may have thought that necessary because the sailor wasn’t a legal inhabitant of the town and might have gone to sea at any time. We don’t have complete records for that trial, but notes kept by special prosecutor Robert Treat Paine summarize Patterson’s testimony this way:

I went up to R[ichardson], and I saw R fire the Gun, from within the House. The Boy fell. The Shot went thro’ my Trowsers.

One might think that such a close call would have prompted Patterson to stay home quietly the next time there was trouble. But no. Here’s what he did on the night of 5 March, in his own words:

I, Robert Patterson, of lawful age, testify and say, that on Monday night, the 5th current, being at Capt. [Hector] McNeill’s at the North End, heard the bells ring and “Fire!” cried.

I immediately ran till I got into Royal Exchange lane, it being about a quarter after 9 o’clock. I saw a number of people in the lane. I asked what was the matter? They told me that the soldiers were going to kill all the inhabitants.

I immediately went through the lane, and stood in the middle of King street about ten or eleven minutes (the sentinel [Pvt. Hugh White] then standing leaning against his box), when I saw an officer [Capt. Thomas Preston] with seven or eight soldiers coming from the main-guard, clearing the way with their guns and bayonets, go below the sentinel box, and turn up and place themselves around it, facing the people standing opposite Royal Exchange lane; when I saw a man with a light colored surtout at the Custom-house door, the door being wide open, there standing with his shoulder against the side; then I heard the officer order the soldiers to load, which they did. After that I heard the people say, “Damn you, why don’t you fire?”

In about a minute after I heard the word “Fire!” (but from whom I cannot say) which the soldiers did. Looking round I saw three men lay dead on the snow; the snow being at that time near a foot deep.

Immediately they loaded again. The people then gave three cheers, and cried out, “Let’s go in upon them, and prevent their firing again;” upon which they put on their hats and advanced towards them. My hand being raised to put on my hat, still advancing towards the soldiers, the sentinel up with his gun and fired, the balls going through my lower right arm, my hand immediately falling; and finding myself wounded, made the best of my way home with help.

Patterson signed this deposition with his mark; perhaps his right arm was disabled, or perhaps he never could sign his name. Dr. Elisha Story attested to that mark, so he might have been caring for the sailor. Then again, Story might have been on the scene to help his father-in-law, Justice of the Peace John Ruddock, take the deposition.

The historical consensus is that there were not two volleys of shots from the soldiers as Patterson described; instead, the Boston Massacre resulted from an irregular series of shots. Though the soldiers reloaded, they didn’t fire a second time. There’s also no corroboration for Patterson’s recollection of a civilian in the Customs house doorway at the time of the shooting—a detail that would have implicated royal revenue officials in the incident. Paine didn’t call Patterson to testify at the soldiers’ trial, and Pvt. White was ultimately acquitted.

TOMORROW: What the future held for Robert Patterson.

Another Cut at the Massacre

To show off and sell its useful but expensive Archive of Americana digital databases, the Readex company offers a few online samples, including this broadside about the Boston Massacre titled “Poem in memory of the (never to be forgotten) Fifth of March, 1770.” Click on the picture here to go to the appropriate page, and click on the picture there to download a PDF version.

I first saw this document reproduced on the wall of the Old State House Museum. The Readex version is a scan from a microfilm photograph of an imperfectly preserved printing, so it’s not pretty. In fact, I’m not sure it’s legible. Here’s my best guess at the second stanza:

Look into king-street: there with weeping eyes
Regard O Boston’s sons—there hear the cries!
There see the men lie in their wallow’d gore!
There see their bodies, which fierce bullets tore!

So as poetry it’s not readable, either.

Still, it’s possible to spot some interesting details.

• At the top is a line of five coffins for the five people killed on King Street, whose names are also listed after the title. Like the dark borders, this was an obvious sign of morning.
• Within the text another coffin appears, representing the death of Christopher Seider eleven days before the Massacre.
• Seider’s coffin, like the one above marked “S.M.” for Samuel Maverick, has a scythe on it as well as a skull and crossbones. I believe that was supposed to symbolize that these boys had been cut down too soon: Seider at nearly age eleven, Maverick at seventeen.
• The poem mentions another badly wounded boy, Christopher Monk, in the tenth stanza. He survived for several years, but people blamed his disability and early death on his wounds.
• Stanza 8 calls for punishment of Ebenezer Richardson, who shot Seider. However, the poem doesn’t complain that he’s been convicted and not punished, which probably dates it to mid-1770.
  

Finally, this specimen of propaganda and the printing art was “Sold next to the Writing-School, in Queen-Street,” so Boston’s schoolboys probably got a good chance to cogitate upon it.

The Autopsy of Christopher Seider

This week Boston 1775 will take the theme of CSI: Colonial Boston. I could probably come up with a few clever allusions to the CSI television shows if I’d watched more than a snippet of them, but you’ll have to provide those parallels yourselves. I’ll just quote documents about investigating dead bodies in Revolutionary Massachusetts.

First up, little Christopher Seider, died on 22 Feb 1770 in the North End, as reported in the newspapers:

soon after the child’s decease his body was opened by Dr. [Joseph] Warren and others and in it were found eleven shot or plugs, about the bigness of large peas; one of which pierced his breast about an inch and one-half above the midriff and passing clear through the lobe of the lungs, lodged in his back.

This, three of the surgeons deposed before the Jury of Inquest, was the cause of his death; on which they brought in their verdict, wilful murder by [Ebenezer] Richardson. The right hand of the boy was cruelly torn, whence it seems to have been across his breast and to have deadened the force of the shot, which might otherwise have pierced the stomach.

Dr. Warren likewise cut two slugs out of young Mr. [Samuel] Gore’s thighs, but pronounced him in no danger of death, though in all probability he will lose the use of the right forefinger, by the wound received there, much important to a youth of his dexterity in drawing and painting.

Good news: young Gore did not lose the use of his hand—at least not enough to prevent him from participating in the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and stealing two cannon from a gunhouse under redcoat guard in 1774. He had a long career as a decorative painter, paint importer, and glass factory owner in the early republic. Throughout his life Gore enjoyed showing off the scars on his fingers from where Richardson had shot him.

William Molineux Saves Ebenezer Richardson's Neck

When Ebenezer Richardson shot Christopher Seider from his window on 22 Feb 1770, the Bostonians watching were naturally upset. Richardson was already unpopular, and shooting an eleven-year-old in broad daylight didn’t improve his image, even though a mob of boys was attacking his house. A witness taking notes for the Crown said:

they Rang the Brick meeting bell as if for fire which soon Collected a vast Concourse of people, who broke down the side of his house & when they had made a breach wide enough several entered & took Richardson & one Wilmot who assisted him, seized him and his companion George Wilmot, and marched them outside.

Wilmot, a sailor for the Customs service, quickly gave up, protesting that his gun was defective and couldn’t have fired even if he’d tried. Richardson, in contrast, had briefly fended off the crowd with a cutlass, shouting about the wounded boys, “Damn their blood! I don’t care what I’ve done!” Some in the mob prepared to hang Richardson right there, even though those two boys were still alive.

By this time the merchant William Molineux had arrived on the scene. He was one of the most radical Whigs in Boston, shocking even fellow gentlemen with his extreme comments. (Gentlemen were never supposed to be extreme.) For example, after a meeting of merchants on nonimportation on 12 Jan 1770, the Crown informant reported:

Many were disgusted at Mollyneaux’s violent proposals particularly at a speech made at the meeting at which the vote against [Joseph] Green [Theophilus] Lillie &c was pass’d, wherein he declared that were it not for the Law he would with his own hands put to Death any person who should presume to open their goods [i.e., sell goods they had imported and then stored]

At another of the big nonimportation meetings that month, Molineux proposed that the whole crowd visit two importers at their father’s house. However, their father was Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor and acting governor. Young lawyer Josiah Quincy, Jr., warned dramatically that such an action was a trap, that confronting the representative of the king that way could be taken as treason. Molineux agreed to a small committee instead, but then several upper-class gentlemen declined to serve on it.

The informant described the dramatic result:

It would be impossible Sir to describe the looks of Mollineaux when he found so many had deserted him, he drew his hand across his Throat, and declar’d he was ready to Die that Minute, that for his part he scorn’d to have any thing more to do with them, and then immediately Jump’d down from his Seat among the People with a view to march off, upon this Dr. [Thomas] Young ascended a Form [i.e., a bench], and in the most earnest manner beg’d him for Gods sake to stay, otherwise their Plan would be entirely overthrown, with much perswasion and a great deal of pulling, he was at last fix’d in his former Seat

(Another source quotes Dr. Young this way: “Stop Mr. Molineux, stop Mr. Molineux...If Mr. Molineux leaves us we are forever undone, this day is the last dawn of liberty we shall ever see.” Young was much cheerier than Molineux, but equally hyperbolic.)

Earlier in February 1770, witnesses saw Molineux looking on with approval the first time that boys had picketed an importer’s store. And he may well have known Christopher Seider personally; the boy worked in the household of wealthy widow Grizzell Apthorp, and Molineux was the Boston agent for the business of her eldest son.

Yet when the mob threatened to kill Richardson, Molineux waded into the crowd, insisting that they let the law take its course. Gov. Hutchinson himself reported that Molineux managed to calm the people and lead the prisoners to Justice John Ruddock. That North End magistrate, also a fervent Whig, decided to take the prisoners to Faneuil Hall, where four other justices gathered. In front of the large crowd, they questioned the two men, charging Richardson with a dangerous assault and Wilmot as his accessory.

Then the justices sent the two prisoners to Boston’s jail in the custody of some town constables. Ordinarily those officials delivered writs and seized property; they really weren’t prepared to be police officers or marshals. The mob once again tried to string Richardson up on his way to jail:

it was with difficulty that they got Richardson there, the mob endeavouring to put a rope about his Neck & take him from the Constables to execute him themselves, but was prevented by some leading men of the popular side.

At last, thanks to Molineux and his Whig colleagues, Richardson was safely behind bars. After Christopher Seider died that evening, the charges against him were upgraded to murder. The superior court was due to open on Monday, 13 March.

Boston's First Revolutionary Death, 237 Years Ago

For a couple of days I’ve been discussing how in early 1770 Boston was aboil with conflict over a “nonimportation” of goods from Britain to protest the Townshend duties. Most of the town supported this boycott, and Whigs were pressuring the handful of merchants and shopkeepers who refused to sign on.

Part of that pressure in early February were crowds of boys marching outside importers’ stores; these protests appeared every Thursday morning when there was no school. On 22 Feb 1770, these young Whigs focused their attention on small merchant Theophilus Lillie. They set up their “Pageantry” on Union Street: a hand pointing to his shop with the word IMPORTER, and an effigy of Lillie’s head on a pole.

Along came Ebenezer Richardson, a Customs service employee. As I described in a New England Ancestors article available online, Richardson had become notorious in his home town of Woburn for having impregnated his wife’s sister and letting blame fall on the town’s minister for several months. He then moved to Boston and made his living as a confidential informer, first for the Attorney General and then for the Customs service. When that work was exposed in the early 1760s, Richardson became even more unpopular, and started to work openly for Customs since no one else would employ him.

The Customs establishment opposed the nonimportation movement, and Richardson apparently took it upon himself to break up the boys’ protest of Lillie’s shop. First he tried to persuade two farmers in Boston for market day to knock down the carved head with their wagons. The drivers refused. Whig gentlemen watching the action laughed at Richardson’s efforts. He stomped off to his nearby home, shouting, “Perjury! Perjury!”

It’s unclear what Richardson was referring to, but, as the Boston Evening-Post reported, “The Boys on hearing the words began to gather round, and call him an informer.” Richardson and his wife Kezia (the same woman he had impregnated and eventually married years before) shooed them away. The boys said, “they would not, Kings high Way”—meaning they had every right to be on the street.

Richardson flourished a stick. The boys ran around “with the squeeling and noise they usually make on such occasion,” said the newspaper. The young mob, now numbering at least “60 or 70 Boys,” left Lillie’s shop and started pelting Richardson’s house with “Limon Peels,” witnesses later testified. The boys hit Kezia Richardson with an egg. Someone inside the house tossed out a brickbat, striking a sailor. He threw it back through a window.

A low-level Customs employee named George Wilmot came to the house and offered help. According to one of the Richardsons’ daughters, “Wilmot asked [my father] if he had any Gun.” Both men armed themselves with muskets.

Richardson came out his front door and yelled at the boys, “as sure as there was a G[od] in heaven, he’d blow a Lane thro ’em.” He “snapped” his gun—firing it with powder but no ball, like a blank shot. The boys scattered and came back again, no longer tossing “light rubbish of one kind or another” but throwing stones through windows.

Richardson reappeared with his musket at an upper window. The boys continued to throw rocks. Richardson fired his musket again. This time he had loaded it with buckshot pellets, “about the bigness of large peas.”

Some of those pellets sliced through the baggy pants of a sailor named Robert Patterson. A few pierced the right hand and thigh of a nineteen-year-old painter named Sammy Gore. Eleven pieces flew into the chest of Christopher Seider, a servant boy just about eleven years old, who was “stooping to take up a Stone.”

The wounded boys were taken into a nearby house. As the violence continued outside, Dr. Joseph Warren, Dr. Thomas Young, and other surgeons examined them. Christopher’s chest was gradually filling with blood. People brought his parents, poor German immigrants, from their little home at the far end of Boston Common. Clergymen came to pray with the family. Christopher Seider died around nine o’clock on the night of 22 February, the first death of Boston’s Revolutionary conflict.

Josiah Quincy, Jr., Takes the Case

In the current race for governor of Massachusetts, Republican candidate Kerry Healey is running ads that attack Democratic candidate Deval Patrick for serving as attorney for people who turned out to be guilty. Healey's ads ask, "While lawyers have a right to defend admitted cop killers, do we really want one as our governor?" and, "What kind of person defends a brutal rapist?"

Despite her claim of being an expert on criminal justice, Healey apparently doesn't understand the protections our Constitution provides us. It's not that "lawyers have a right" to defend the accused or even the convicted during their appeals; defendants have the right to that adequate counsel, and the legal system has an obligation to provide it.

In fact, for major crimes this legal tradition predates the U.S. Constitution, as many historians and attorneys in Massachusetts have pointed out in response to Healey's ads. Most editorials on this matter have cited John Adams's decision to represent Capt. Thomas Preston and the soldiers tried for the Boston Massacre on 5 March 1770. I suspect Adams gave himself a little too much credit there, as I'll discuss in a future post.

But we have solid evidence that Adams's younger colleague, Josiah Quincy, Jr., was criticized for agreeing to defend the soldiers, and his response. As discussed in the Colonial Society of Massachusetts's new volume, Portrait of a Patriot, Quincy was an energetic advocate for the Whig party in the pre-Revolutionary political debates. He died of tuberculosis on the eve of the Revolution but was remembered widely because he fathered the first Josiah Quincy to become mayor of Boston. Quincy's father, Col. Josiah Quincy of north Braintree (later called, like almost everything else in this paragraph, Quincy), wrote to Josiah, Jr., on 22 March 1770:

My dear Son,

I am under great affliction, at hearing the bitterest reproaches uttered against you, for having become an advocate for those criminals who are charged with the murder of the fellow citizens. Good God! Is it possible? I will not believe it.

Just before I returned home from Boston, I knew, indeed, that on the day those criminals were committed to prison, a sergeant had inquired for you at your brother’s house,—but I had no apprehension that it was possible an application would be made to you to undertake their defence. Since then I have been told that you have actually engaged for Captain Preston;—and I have heard the severest reflections made upon the occasion, by men who had just before manifested the highest esteem for you, as one destined to be a saviour of your country.

I must own to you, it has filled the bosom of your aged and infirm parent with anxiety and distress, lest it should not only prove true, but destructive of your reputation and interest; and I repeat, I will not believe it, unless it be confirmed by your own mouth, and under your own hand.

Your anxious and distressed parent,...

Even John Adams recalled that the military had approached Quincy first. Ironically, the brother in whose house the sergeant had found him, Samuel Quincy, became one of the prosecutors in the case.

Four days later the young lawyer replied to his father from Boston:

Honoured Sir,

I have little leisure, and less inclination either to know, or to take notice, of those ignorant slanderers, who have dared to utter their "bitter reproaches" in your hearing against me, for having become an advocate for criminals charged with murder. But the sting of reproach when envenomed only by envy and falsehood, will never prove mortal.

Before pouring their reproaches into the ear of the aged and infirm, if they had been friends, they would have surely spared a little reflection on the nature of an attorney’s oath, and duty;—some trifling scrutiny into the business and discharge of his office, and some portion of patience in viewing my past and future conduct.

Let such be told, Sir, that these criminals, charged with murder, are not yet legally guilty, and therefore, however criminal, are entitled, by the laws of God and man, to all legal counsel and aid; that my duty as a man obliged me to undertake; that my duty as a lawyer strengthened the obligation; that from abundant caution, I at first declined being engaged; that after the best advice, and most mature deliberation had determined my judgment, I waited on Captain Preston, and told him I would afford him my assistance; but, prior to this, in presence of two of his friends, I made the most explicit declaration to him, of my real opinion, on the contests (as I expressed it to him) of the times, and that my heart and hand were indissolubly attached to the cause of my country; and finally, that I refused all engagement, until advised and urged to undertake it, by an Adams, a Hancock, a Molineux, a Cushing, a Henshaw, a Pemberton, a Warren, a Cooper, and a Phillips.

Samuel Adams, John Hancock, William Molineux, Thomas Cushing, Joshua (probably) Henshaw, Samuel Pemberton, Dr. Joseph Warren, William (or the Rev. Dr. Samuel) Cooper, and William Phillips made up the bulk of genteel Whig office-holders and activists in Boston. They all agreed that Quincy should take the case and ensure the soldiers received a fair trail.

The young lawyer continued:

This and much more might be told with great truth, and I dare affirm, that you, and this whole people will one day REJOICE, that I became an advocate for the aforesaid "criminals," charged with the murder of our fellow-citizens.

I never harboured the expectation, nor any great desire, that all men should speak well of me. To inquire my duty, and to do it, is my aim. Being mortal, I am subject to error; and conscious of this, I wish to be diffident. Being a rational creature, I judge for myself, according to the light afforded me. When a plan of conduct is formed with an honest deliberation, neither murmuring, slander, nor reproaches move. For my single self, I consider, judge, and with reason hope to be immutable.

There are honest men in all sects—I wish their approbation;—there are wicked bigots in all parties,—I abhor them.

I am, truly and affectionately,

your son,

Josiah Quincy Jun.

A few weeks later, Quincy also agreed to represent Ebenezer Richardson, an even less popular defendant charged with killing young Christopher Seider and already notorious for impregnating his wife's sister.

I think Quincy's letter provides a fine answer to the Republican question: What kind of person defends an unpopular defendant accused of a serious crime?

Christopher Seider: household servant, schoolboy?

Christopher Seider was the young boy killed by Customs employee Ebenezer Richardson after a political demonstration turned violent on 22 Feb 1770, eleven days before the Boston Massacre. Back in this posting, I described what recent research has found about Christopher’s family. This post assembles the evidence about the boy's life in Boston.

In its 26 Feb 1770 report on the shooting, the Boston Evening-Post described Christopher as “a boy about eleven years of age, who lived with Madam Apthorp.” Grizzell Apthorp was a very wealthy widow who owned a mansion on Tremont Street. She was a stalwart of King’s Chapel, the upper-class Anglican church, where we can still see a marble memorial panel honoring her husband. Ordinary widows were called “Widow [Surname]”; rich widows got the “Madam” honorific.

Christopher’s parents didn’t live with Madam Apthorp, however. They lived, according to the same newspaper article, “in Frog Lane, opposite to Liberty Tree.” That street is now called Boylston, and it borders the Common on the south, leading to the Public Garden.

What was Christopher doing in the Apthorp house? Probably working. Bostonians of the late 1700s wouldn’t have called him a “servant,” though. They reserved that term for enslaved workers, whom the tax rolls labeled “servants for life.” All sources agree that the Seider family was poor, so "living with Madam Apthorp" probably meant his parents had sent him there to earn his keep.

Even with his job, it seems likely that Christopher was also getting lessons of some sort. On 13 Apr 1772, Samuel Adams wrote to James Warren of Plymouth about how he would look after a young servant:

I am much obligd for your Care in procurng for me a Boy. I shall be ready to receive him about the middle of next month and shall take the best care of him that shall be in my Power till he is 14 years old, perfecting him in his reading and teaching him to write and cypher if capable of it under my own Tuition for I cannot spare him the time to attend School. Will strictly regard his Morals and at the End of time I will if his parents shall desire it, seek a good place for him to learn such a Trade as he and they shall chuse.

There’s some evidence that, unlike Adams's servant, Christopher Seider did “attend School.” In the 1840s a woman named “Mrs. Preston” told a writer working on a (never finished) biography of Henry Knox that she’d gone to school with the German boy who was killed. If this is reliable, the school must have been private; girls didn’t yet attend Boston’s public schools. Christopher and the future Mrs. Preston might have learned to read together before they were seven, or they might have attended private writing lessons later.

Furthermore, the Boston News-Letter reported on 1 March 1770 that Christopher “was going from School” when he came across the political demonstration. That newspaper had been criticized for having “partially related” the story of his shooting the week before, and therefore in this issue may have tried to present Christopher's actions in the best light. On the other hand, Boston schools did let out early on Thursday mornings, and schoolboys did spontaneously join in protests.

It’s quite clear that Christopher Seider was a reader. The Evening-Post reported after his death that

several heroic pieces found in his pocket, particularly Wolfe’s Summit of human glory, give reason to think he had a martial genius and would have made a clever man.

I haven’t found any broadside titled “Wolfe’s Summit of human glory,” but this passage implies it was a martial poem about Gen. James Wolfe and the Battle of Quebec. And that was only one of “several heroic pieces” Christopher was carrying around with him when he died.

Ebenezer Richardson: Customs informer and killer

In April 2005, Hiller B. Zobel, author of The Boston Massacre, gave a lecture at the Old South Meeting-House on the killing of Christopher Seider, eleven days before the Massacre, and the trial of Ebenezer Richardson for that act. Thanks to our local public television station, you can listen to that lecture. (I'm now hearing the part at the end when Judge Zobel answers inaudible questions from the audience; it probably wasn't so mysterious or funny at the time.)

Near the start of his lecture, Judge Zobel had kind words to say about my article on Richardson, published in the winter 2005 issue of New England Ancestors. That study was titled "'A Wretch of Wretches Prov’d with Child': From Local Scandal to Revolutionary Outrage," and you can read the complete text online. I missed the event at Old South because I found the wrong date on a webpage, which once again reminds us that you can't believe everything you read on the web (except maybe here on Boston 1775).

In a nutshell, Ebenezer Richardson of Woburn (born in 1718) married a local widow with children and a comfortable estate, then got her sister pregnant, kept quiet while a local minister was blamed for the illegitimate child, waited until his first wife died, billed her estate for the care of her kids, and went to Boston with the sister to get married. In the middle of those events he was put in jail and escaped; I don't know how or why. It's not surprising that Richardson became unpopular in Woburn.

Moving to Boston, Richardson worked as a confidential informer for the Attorney General and then for Customs officials, getting caught up in the intraoffice politics discussed at the start of Smugglers and Patriots, by John W. Tyler of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. With his cover blown in the mid-1760s, Richardson became an official Customs employee, enforcing the laws against smuggling and helping to collect the new Townshend duties. Because of this work, Richardson became very unpopular in Boston.

In 1770, Richardson tried to break up a picket line of boys outside a shop in his North End neighborhood. The boys turned their hostilities on his house, so he shot a musket out his window, wounding a teenager named Samuel Gore and killing a younger boy named Christopher Seider. Richardson became immensely unpopular in Massachusetts.

Richardson was tried and convicted of murder, but the royally appointed judges delayed sentencing him because they felt he should and would receive a pardon from London. Indeed, the pardon arrived years later and the judges let him go, as Judge Zobel's talk and the article describe. Richardson quickly traveled to Philadelphia, where the Customs service tried to employ him. But by now Richardson was extremely unpopular up and down the North American coast.

My article describes some documents I found in Britain's National Archives which reveal what Richardson did next, bringing his story up to January 1775.