“Leave for his brother Benjamin, his son and servant, to depart this State”

As the year 1777 began, the Loyalist Benjamin Davis remained in the Boston jail along with his son and an enslaved servant.

Davis refused to petition the Massachusetts General Court for his release since he didn’t want to recognize the independent state government. But his religious scruples didn’t stop his brother Edward.

On 4 February, Massachusetts Council member Benjamin Austin came into the assembly chamber with

a petition of Edward Davis, of Boston, in behalf of his brother, Benjamin Davis, and son, prisoners in Boston Goal, praying that they may be permitted to go with a cartel to Newport

A “cartel” was the mechanism for a prisoner exchange.

The legislature named a joint committee of Austin and two House members to consider the request. The next day, that committee recommended “That the petitioner have leave to withdraw the same.” The General Court approved. That was a polite way of saying no.

On 18 February, jailer Joseph Otis listed his prisoners. Among the men noted as “being Enemical to the States” was Benjamin Davis but not his son. Benjamin, Jr., might have been paroled into the town, or at twenty years old he might still have been too young to merit his own listing.

On 6 March, the House noted

A petition of Edward Davis, praying leave for his brother Benjamin, his son and servant, to depart this State, in a cartel vessel bound for Halifax.

This time the response was “Read and dismissed.” That was a blunt way of saying no.

A newly elected legislature took their seats in May. Even as the House was getting itself in order

Nathan Cushing, Esq; brought down a Petition of James Richards, of Norwalk, praying that Mr. Benjamin Davis, a Prisoner in Boston, may be exchanged for his Brother Capt. Samuel Richards, a close Prisoner in New York Goal.

Again, the lawmakers referred this to a committee.

On 2 June, the Massachusetts House and Council reached this agreement:

Resolved that the prayer of the within petition be granted, & that Benjamin Davis now a Prisoner in the Goal in the town of Boston, be exchanged for Capt. Samuel Richards a prisoner in New York, provided that proper care be taken that sd Davis does not carry any papers with him & is cautiously sarched when deliver’d up. And it is also

Resolved that Benjamin Davis junr. Son of the aforesaid Davis, now a Prisoner in Boston Goal be exchanged for Mr John Callender a Prisoner in New York, provided due caution be taken that he does not carry any papers with him & is properly sarched when deliver’d up. But if said Callender or some person of equal rank should not be procured in Exchange for said Davis that said Davis be returned to this State.

Two days later, according to what Davis later told the British government, he was let out of the Boston jail. By the end of the year, it appears, the Davises were established in New York.

TOMORROW: The other side of those exchanges.

The Losses of Benjamin Davis

In the newspaper reports on the May 1775 fire on Boston’s Town Dock, Benjamin Davis’s name appears only as the man who used to use (“improve”) the building where the fire started.

Davis had “Let General Robenson [James Robertson] have his store for the Brit Troops in the year 1775,” as he told the Loyalists Commission years later.

In his testimony to that commission Davis said he’d lost a great deal of property in the fire: “his story & wharf & Goods in the cellar were destroyed to amount of £900.”

In addition, Davis said that he was out:

• £56 in whaling supplies on a ship “the Rebels” seized in Salem
• £375 more in goods left behind in Boston in March 1776
• £200 in household furniture in Boston
• about £3,666 in uncollected debt due to him through his old partnership with his brother Edward
• £700 in “Money & Wine” confiscated when he was captured in July 1776

Davis also said he “Was robbed of £400 on his way to Halifax,” but I can’t tell whether that was in 1776 or at the end of the war.

Most of Davis’s commission hearing involved discussing financial details like a mortgage or the value of certain land. He asked to be compensated for a total of £4,865 in losses, according to E. Alfred Jones’s The Loyalists of Massachusetts.

The commissioners awarded Davis only £300, suggesting they thought his claims were too high or too poorly documented, and/or that he had already been compensated enough through his wartime business with the government.

TOMORROW: Junior.

“Fell in with two Arm’d Schooners”

Yesterday I wrote about Benjamin and Edward Davis, two brothers who were mercantile partners in Boston until religion and Revolutionary politics split them apart.

Benjamin became a Sandemanian, devoutly guided not to oppose British Crown policies by, for instance, signing on to the non-importation boycotts.

Edward remained an Anglican, attending Trinity Church. By late 1774 the Whigs coopted him into helping to enforce their strongest boycott, the Continental Association.

Both brothers remained in Boston during the siege. But when the British military evacuated, Edward stayed while Benjamin sailed away to Halifax, Nova Scotia. In April 1776 the Patriot authorities ordered magistrates to question Edward about his loyalty, but evidently he passed muster.

Around the start of July, Benjamin Davis boarded the ship Peggy, headed for New York. Along with him came his son Benjamin, Jr., who turned twenty that year; an enslaved man; half a dozen other Loyalist men; and a few Loyalist women.

Evidently those refugees saw business opportunities supplying the huge British and Hessian army assembling at New York. The Peggy was loaded with provisions, including 2,648 “mutton hams,” 311 “tierces salted beef,” fish, flour, snuff, cloth, stockings, and a large quantity of alcohol in various forms.

The Peggy also carried six 3-pounder and two 2-pounder cannon. It sailed in convoy with dozens of other merchant ships and troop transports, all escorted by two Royal Navy warships. The sea voyage probably seemed safe.

We have the ship captain’s account of what happened next:

I James Kennedy, Master of the Ship Peggy, in the Merchant Service, declare that I left Hallifax about the first Inst. [i.e., of this month] under Convoy of the Renown of Fifty Guns, with a Fleet of sixteen [torn] Transports containing the 42nd & 71 Scotch Regiments & Fraziers new rais’d Regiment, about 3000 in all, & three Large Ships with Hessian Troops on board, about 600 in all, & one Ship with 5 companys of English foot Guards, & four Victualling Ships, the whole Fleet bound for New York.

Off Nantucket Shoals we fell in with the Flora Frigate of Thirty Guns & four Transports with Highland Troops, these had been in Boston Bay, where they got information from a Fisherman that the Town was Evacuated, on which they Stood for Hallifax untill they met with us, they then joyn’d our Fleet for New York.

The Scotch Troops were all to be of Coll [Archibald] Campbells division (of the Grand Army in America, the whole of which Army I was informd, would by the last of July, amount, to 50,000.) the Hessian Troops left England about the 12th of May, some of the Officers informd me they came out with 304 Sail under the Command of Commodore Hawtham [William Hotham], on board of whom were 10,000 Foreign Troops & some English Troops (number unknown).

last Fryday sennight [19 July] in a gale of wind & thick weather I lost the Fleet & on monday [22 July] I fell in with two [American] Arm’d Schooners, Capts. [John] Skimmer & [Samuel] Tucker, to whom I surrendered after a short engagement, in which I had only one man Wounded.

The day after the Fleet left Hallifax, I saw from my Deck forty Sail of Ships standing in for that Harbour, & which I suppose to be part of the Fleet under Commodore Hawtham.

Skimmer commanded the Franklin and Tucker the Hancock, schooners originally launched under the authority of the Continental Army commander. They were now sailing for Massachusetts.

The Patriot authorities who took Capt. Kennedy’s deposition were evidently pumping him for intelliegence on what other British ships and troops were out there rather than details of his engagement with the schooners.

For Benjamin Davis, all that mattered now was that he was a prisoner of the state he’d left four months before.

TOMORROW: The gingerbread man.

“The extraordinary self-denials and usages of the Sandemanians”

Hopestill Capen wasn’t the only Sandemanian clapped into the Boston jail in the summer of 1776, as discussed yesterday.

Another merchant who had joined that sect, Benjamin Davis (1729–1805), had been locked up since 26 July.

Like Capen, Davis was from an old New England family. For years he and his brother, Edward Davis (1730–1811), ran a mercantile firm located on the “South Side of the Town Dock.”

Among the European goods Benjamin and Edward Davis advertised for sale were coal, ale, cheese, snuff, salt, and stoneware. In return, they offered farmers money for flaxseed and potash.

Family sources say the Davis brothers’ partnership came apart during the non-importation campaign of 1768–70. Indeed, as of May 1771 the shop on “the South Side the Dock” was “Benj. Davis’s Store.” Having advertised their firm for many years, the brothers’ names appeared in only one more newspaper notice together: in August 1772 they offered “Two new Copper Stills & Worms,” perhaps their last joint property.

The Davis brothers definitely started to split politically in those years. On 28 Oct 1769, Edward was one of three angry merchants who confronted printer John Mein about how he was printing Customs house records. Mein stated, “Davis first made a push at me with his Cane which struck me on the left side of the belly.”

On 5 Mar 1770, Benjamin Davis was out in the evening about nine o’clock as locals faced off against soldiers at the Customs office. According to Robert Treat Paine’s notes from Capt. Thomas Preston’s trial, Davis testified: “Some body clap’d me on sholder and asked me if I would go and help fight the Soldiers. I said no.” He was a defense witness in the Boston Massacre trials.

Meanwhile, Edward Davis was watching the dispute with other merchants from the stoop of Edward Payne’s house, opposite the Customs office. At a bail hearing for Edward Manwaring in April and then at Manwaring’s trial, Davis and members of his family testified that they had seen no guns fired from the Customs building. In fact, Davis said that “soon after the firing he saw two women standing in the chamber of the Custom-house…with their hands under their aprons, in the posture of spectators.”

After the death of his wife, the former Ruth Vassall, in January 1774, Edward became a more active Whig. By the end of the year he was serving on Boston’s committee to enforce the Continental Association boycott.

In contrast, once Benjamin joined the Sandemanians in the 1760s, he appears to have sworn off actions to resist the royal government. In October 1774, John Andrews reported, “Ben Davis has let his Store on the Dock for the use of the troops.” He signed the usual Loyalist addresses and protests.

The mercantile house wasn’t the only partnership Benjamin Davis gave up for his faith. He married his third wife, Alice Whipple, daughter of a former lieutenant governor of Rhode Island, in 1768. According to family lore published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts:

The lady’s amour propre was offended and her philosophy over-taxed by the extraordinary self-denials and usages of the Sandemanians. Following the example of the early Christian Church, it was their custom to hold a love-feast on Sunday at one another’s houses, at which only Sandemanians were present. The wives who were not members of the Sect, naturally did not take kindly to their exclusion from their own tables, and, at last, the third Madam Davis felt constrained to return to her family, thus, practically, deserting her husband.

A legal divorce being then unobtainable, the Sandemanians took the matter under consideration and concluded to sanction another matrimonial alliance on the part of Mr. Davis, declaring his to be one of those cases where voluntary abandonment by the wife justifies the dissolution of the marriage tie in the sight of Heaven.

Benjamin Davis didn’t actually remarry, though.

Unlike Capen, Davis chose to sail away to Nova Scotia with the British military in March 1776. But then he got on a ship headed to New York, presumably to help supply or administer Britain’s reinvasion.

TOMORROW: Captured at sea.

(The John S. Copley portrait above shows Anstice [Greenleaf] Davis, Benjamin’s second wife, courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum. She died in 1764, only two years after their marriage.)

“Liberated upon each of them giving bail”

Back on 27 March, I described how a Suffolk County grand jury indicted four civilians for murder in the Boston Massacre.

As acting governor Thomas Hutchinson wrote, those four men had been “committed to close prison, where they lay about a fortnight,” because of the testimony of Charles Bourgate.

That “French boy” claimed that his master, Edward Manwaring, had fired a gun out of the Customs House window. The other three men were charged with being part of the fatal conspiracy simply because they testified in support of Manwaring’s denial.

Ordinarily, there was no bail for people charged with murder. But some Superior Court judges thought the evidence against those men was weak enough to make an exception.

According to an anonymous correspondent keeping track of events in Boston for the Customs service, the town committee gathering evidence about the Massacre “threw every obstacle in the way in order to prevent this affair coming to a hearing by informing the Court that they daily expected new Witnesses from the Country.”

Eventually the court scheduled a bail hearing on Saturday, 7 Apr 1770—250 years ago today. According to the diary of acting Chief Justice Benjamin Lynde, it took “all forenoon.” The anonymous report described the event this way:

The Witnesses brot. against the Custom house People Manwarings french boy and one [Samuel] Drown, the former had sworn to so many falsities that the Court paid no regard to his evidence—the latter was proven in Court to be a fool, unable to utter one coherent sentence. . . .

Upwards of 40 Creditable people were summoned by Manwaring to disprove Guns being fired out of the Custom house but only the family of Mr. [Benjamin or Edward] Davis who lives directly opposite was examined—they all declared they had their eye upon the Custom house during the whole affair, and that they saw no Guns fired nor believ’d any were fired. their Evidences were so very clear that the Court thought it unnecessary to examine any other of his exculpatory Witnesses.

Lynde was nonetheless still inclined not to grant bail. Judge Peter Oliver (shown above), brother of province secretary Andrew Oliver and related by marriage to Hutchinson, already believed there was “little cause of Confinement.” Judge John Cushing (1695-1778) cast the deciding vote.

The court let the four men out of jail pending trial if they paid bail of £400 each. As comparison, in 1770 Paul Revere paid £213 for an entire house in the North End. With the help of sixteen sureties, the defendants came up with the necessary money. They still had to go on trial, but until then they were free.

A Sestercentennial Stand-Off on King Street

By publishing Customs house documents that embarrassed the Whig merchants of Boston, John Mein knew that he made himself unpopular.

In fact, a confidential informant, the painter George Mason, told Customs Collector Joseph Harrison on 20 Oct 1769 that Mein was “oblig’d to go Arm’d, and ’tis but a few Nights since that two Persons who resembled him pretty much were attack’d in a narrow Alley with Clubs, and would in all probability have lost their Lives if the Mistakes had not been timely discover’d.”

Mein’s insulting “Characters” of top Whigs, published in his Boston Chronicle newspaper on 26 October and republished in a pamphlet two days later, pushed some of those enemies over the edge. Toward the end of the day on Saturday, 28 October, Mein and his printing partner John Fleeming, were walking along King Street.

Merchant captain Samuel Dashwood (1729?-1792) confronted Mein, angry at being called “the Grunting Captain.” With him were other Whig merchants, such as William Molineux (1713?-1774), Edward Davis (1718-1784), and Duncan Ingraham (1726-1811). Two of those men were in their forties, the other two in their fifties, but they were about to behave like the twenty- and thirtysomething gentlemen who had thrust themselves into the Otis-Robinson fight the month before.

According to Mein, writing on 5 November:

Davis first made a push at me with his Cane which struck me on the left side of the belly, and has left a Bloody Contussion, which now, 8 days after, still remains with great hardness all round; on being struck I immediately took a Pistol out of my Pocket, cocked, and presented it; instantly a large Circle was formed

As one would expect.

Mein, pointing his pistol, backed toward the main guard near the Town House (now the Old State House). “I often told them I would shoot the first Man who touched me,” he declared. Fleeming followed. The crowd, still at a distance, grew larger. Shopkeeper and importer Elizabeth Cumings, visiting a friend on King Street, heard “a violent skreeming Kill him, kill him” outside. Mein said people were throwing things. He spotted selectman Jonathan Mason within the crowd.

The main guard was the building where the army organized its sentries and patrols, where soldiers on duty that night were gathered. As the printer approached, an officer recognized him and “desired the Centries to keep their Posts clear” of people. Those soldiers probably stepped forward and presented their bayonets. Mein began “cooly stepping up the Guardroom steps.”

Thomas Marshall (1719-1800, shown above) didn’t want to see Mein get away. He was a tailor with a shop on King Street, but he was better known in Boston as the colonel in charge of the town’s militia regiment. Mein listed Marshall among the men who had first confronted him, but it seems just as likely that he came out of his store after he heard the commotion.

The colonel grabbed “a large Iron Shovel” from the hardware shop of Daniel and Joseph Waldo, the sign of the Elephant. He slipped around the sentries and came at Mein from the rear, swinging the shovel. Mein stated, “the Blow cut thro’ my Coat & Waistcoat, and made a Wound of about two Inches long in my left Shoulder.”

And then a gun went off.

TOMORROW: Manhunt.

“Three persons which I saw lay on the snow in the street”

I’ve been tracking the experience of Ann Green on the night of 5 Mar 1770 through the testimony of people with her. Yesterday I left Ann in an upper room of the Boston Customs House where she lived, looking down on the increasingly violent crowd on King Street.

Customs employee Thomas Greenwood described the sight:

I went into the back room and got the key of the little drawing-room, being the lower west corner chamber, and went up
stairs, and Elizabeth Avery, Mary Rogers and Ann Green followed me into the room; we all looked thro’ the glass, I saw some persons standing by the centry-box striking with sticks, but did not see them hit any body, tho’ a number of persons were close by them; I told the women above mentioned that I would not stay, for I was afraid that the house would be pulled down, there being about forty or fifty persons consisting of men and boys…

So Greenwood left. He went to the army’s main guard for help, but I can’t help but think that the three women felt he was deserting them just after saying the situation looked dangerous.

Ann’s brother Hammond finished locking all the doors and windows below and then joined the young women in that “lower west chamber, next to Royal Exchange lane,” he testified. Elizabeth Avery later told the court:

I lived with Mr. Bartholomew Green at the Custom-house on the 5th of March last, and when the noise was in the street, before the house I went with [Hammond Green,] Nancy Green and Mary Rogers up into that chamber of the house, which is next to Royal-exchange-lane and right over the Sentry-box as it then stood, and from the west window in that room saw the party of soldiers come down from the Main-guard to the Sentry…

The merchant Edward Davis (1718-1784) later described seeing “two women standing in the chamber of the Custom-house, which is next to Royal-Exchange-lane, with their hands under their aprons, in the posture of spectators.”

Hammond stated, “I…saw several guns fired in King-street, which killed three persons which I saw lay on the snow in the street, supposing the snow to be near a foot deep.” Avery said she “tarried in this room till the firing was all over, and the soldiers had returned from whence they came.” Then Hammond “let Eliza Avery out of the front door, and shut it after her.” The record doesn’t say why she was leaving the house where she lived.

Ann and Hammond’s father Bartholomew Green then came home. Hammond said they spoke in the kitchen:

he asked me what was the matter, I told him that there were three persons shot by the soldiers who stood at the door of the Custom-house; he then asked me where the girls were, I told him they were up stairs, and we went up together…

Unfortunately, we don’t have any description from Ann Green of what she had experienced. She testified at one of the trials that followed, but the surviving record says only that she “confirmed in every particular the testimony of Elizabeth Avery, the preceeding witness.” So we have to guess what it was like to be in that room—watching the fight develop outside, wondering if the crowd would attack the house, not knowing where her brother John or others were.

And then the authorities came for her brother.

TOMORROW: The third murder trial to follow the Boston Massacre.