“So they painted the little maid”

The Discover Quincy website now says in its description of the Dorothy Quincy Homestead in Quincy:

The childhood home of Dorothy Quincy, who became Mrs. John Hancock; the second President of the Continental Congress, first signer of the Declaration of Independence and the first Governor of Massachusetts.

There’s no mention of any other Dorothy Quincy.

But there was (at least) one, and records are clear that that house was named after an earlier woman named Dorothy Quincy (1709–1762, shown here courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society). She was an aunt of the woman who married Hancock.

The earlier Dorothy Quincy married the merchant and mill-owner Edward Jackson. One of their children was the merchant and politician Jonathan Jackson. The other child, a daughter named Mary Jackson, married the Boston merchant and politician Oliver Wendell.

A portrait of young Dorothy (Quincy) Jackson descended in the Wendell family to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who became a very popular author. He wrote about the painting and its subject in “Dorothy Q.: A Family Portrait” in 1871. That poem begins:

Grandmother’s mother: her age, I guess,
Thirteen summers, or something less;
Girlish bust, but womanly air;
Smooth, square forehead with uprolled hair;
Lips that lover has never kissed;
Taper fingers and slender wrist;
Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade;
So they painted the little maid.

On her hand a parrot green
Sits unmoving and broods serene.
Hold up the canvas full in view,—
Look! there's a rent the light shines through,
Dark with a century’s fringe of dust,—
That was a Red-Coat’s rapier-thrust!
Such is the tale the lady old,
Dorothy’s daughter’s daughter, told. . . .

This was one of several poems Holmes wrote about the memory of the Revolution and its shadow on his time, such as “The Last Leaf” and “Under the Washington Elm.” He was so good at creating images and phrases that people overlook how he often simultaneously raised questions about those icons.

But Holmes wasn’t correct on the painting’s subject, either. His footnote for this poem said:

Dorothy was the daughter of Judge Edmund Quincy, and the niece of Josiah Quincy, junior, the young patriot and orator who died just before the American Revolution, of which he was one of the most eloquent and effective promoters. . . . The canvas of the painting was so much decayed that it had to be replaced by a new one, in doing which the rapier thrust was of course filled up.

Dorothy (Quincy) Jackson’s father was an Edmund Quincy, but a later Edmund Quincy was the father of the later Dorothy Quincy. That Dorothy Quincy did have an uncle named Josiah Quincy, but a later Josiah Quincy was the Patriot who died in 1775. So the confusion is understandable.

Nonetheless, it’s worth maintaining the knowledge of how the Dorothy Quincy Homestead got its name. It represents a confluence of the Colonial Revival and the Fireside Poets, and it stood for decades of family history. Discover Quincy’s current write-up is all about big names from the Revolutionary years only.

Thompson on Hardesty, Mutiny on the Rising Sun

Last month the H-Early-America list shared Mark L. Thompson’s review of Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate by Jared Ross Hardesty.

Here’s a taste:

…Hardesty draws on this Dutch and Atlantic research but offers something new: a microhistorical account of a single smuggling venture and the wide cast of characters who were involved in and touched by it. If most contraband trade was a prosaic affair that attracted little notice, this ill-starred voyage from Barbados to Suriname in 1743 proved in several respects to be quite the opposite, as it led to murder trials, official investigations, gory printed accounts, and transcontinental legal wrangling.

Working from the long paper trail that followed in the Rising Sun’s bloody wake, Hardesty and a team of researchers in New England and the Netherlands (in particular, Ramona Negrón, a doctoral candidate in history at Leiden University) have been able to trace out the story in many directions through extensive archival research. The result is a detailed account that weaves together multiple historical threads into a well-constructed narrative.

Although the book calls itself a tragedy, it borrows its form (and appearance) from true crime with a splash of gothic horror. The dust jacket is printed in muddy black and brown tones with blood-red accents (while the cloth cover beneath is bright red with golden print along the spine). True to form, the introduction begins with an apparently placid but foreboding scene—the Rising Sun’s boatswain steering the ship on a calm June night—but by the third page the captain, supercargo, and clerk have been stabbed about twenty times, chopped with an axe, sliced with a cutlass, and, in the case of the captain, thrown overboard, “scream[ing] as he plunged into the dark abyss”. . . .

The epilogue, meanwhile, offers a fascinating account of the origins of the book, which began as an earnest effort to learn more about the namesake of “Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop,” a tourist attraction and heritage site associated with the Old North Church along the Freedom Trail in Boston. In a strange turn of events, the research for the book (sponsored in part by the candy company Mars Wrigley Confectionary) actually led to the shutting down of the chocolate shop. . . . Today the eighteenth-century Clough House that once marketed historic chocolate is home to a colonial-style print shop and an artisanal gift store. Captain Jackson’s lurid past has been well scrubbed away.

I think that last sentence could easily be read as suggesting Old North “scrubbed away…Jackson’s lurid past.” The bloody story of this voyage was scrubbed away centuries ago; Boston historians didn’t know about it.

Hardesty and his team, with the support of Old North, have brought that “lurid past” back into the light. To be sure, knowing more about Edward Jackson means his name is no longer attached to a church shop selling candy to tourists and school groups, but that seems like a Good Thing.

Thompson’s full review can be downloaded here.

The Ministers and Officials of Woburn: What Happened Next

So what happened to the other people involved in Woburn’s Kezia Hincher scandal besides her and the man she married, Ebenezer Richardson? [Came in late? The whole juicy story starts here.] Within a couple of years, all of the men prominent in the dispute were gone.

The Rev. Edward Jackson, the minister accused of fathering Hincher’s child, enjoyed his vindication in August 1753 for only about a year. He died on 24 Sept 1754 at the age of fifty-four. His supporters blamed the stress of fighting off those rumors for his death. Ironically, Jackson’s sickly rival, the Rev. John Fox, outlived him, dying on 12 Dec 1756 at age seventy-eight.

Among Jackson’s enemies, Jonathan Poole, the Woburn justice of the peace, died in 1755.

Roland Cotton moved out of Woburn in 1754, settling in Sandwich, where his father had been the minister. His new town elected him to the Massachusetts General Court, which in 1759 once again chose him as its Clerk. In 1760 he married Deborah Mason of Boston. However, Cotton’s reputation never recovered after the scandal in Woburn, and his behavior became more grandiose. Commenting in his diary in July 1767, John Adams wrote:

Cotton is insane, wild. His Proposal of giving his House and Farm at Sandwich to the Province, is a Proof of Insanity. He has Relation that are poor. Jno. Cotton [his brother, a minister in Newton?] is now poor enough. He has a Brother Josiah Cotton the Minister whom he procured to be removed to Woburn, and thereby to be ruin’d, who is very poor, maintained by Charity. Roland was Josiahs ruin; yet he did not choose to give his Estate to Josiah.

Besides his Behaviour at Boston upon that occasion, was wild. His sitting down at the Council Table with his Hat on and Calling for his Deed and a Justice to acknowledge it, when the Council was sitting.

Boston merchant William Molineux was more blunt, telling Cotton that he was a “forsworn Rascall,” that “all the boys in…Boston have made Songs of You…being a perjured Villain and sing them about the streets.” Cotton sued Molineux for libel, demanding £2,000 in damages. In 1768 a Superior Court jury decided that Cotton’s reputation was worth £10 and court costs.

By then Roland Cotton had lost the post of House Clerk to a new representative from Boston: Samuel Adams. (The salary that came with that post was probably Adams’s main income in the following years.) During the protests against the Massachusetts Government Act in 1774, Cotton at first refused to sign a declaration by his county’s justices of the peace not to act under the new law. Then a crowd pressured him personally, and he agreed. He died on 16 May 1778, aged seventy-six.

Finally, there was the Rev. Josiah Cotton. After Jackson’s death and his brother’s departure, he sensed that his congregation wished to reunite with Woburn’s first parish. Cotton resigned in July 1756, and then spent some time seeking a new pulpit in the new towns of New Hampshire. In 1759, he became the first minister for the town of Sandown, incorporated only three years before. (The following year, Woburn’s first and third parish finally completed the financial negotiations to reunite.)

There’s no evidence to support John Adams’s lament that Josiah Cotton was “maintained by Charity”; he owned significant property in New Hampshire. But of course living in such a small, remote town was far from luxurious. Nonetheless, the Rev. Mr. Cotton got along with his congregants in Sandown better than at his first two postings. He died in 1780 and was fondly remembered.

(Image above courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection.)

Roland Cotton’s Reward

The 27 Sept 1753 Boston News-Letter carried this advertisement from Roland Cotton of Woburn:

WHEREAS, some malicious Persons have of late violently broken into two small Houses belonging to me the Subscriber, at Woburn; have destroyed the Windows and Shutters, &c. and have stolen sundry small Things out of the same; and have cut Holes in the Bottom of my Fishing-Boat, and have with Stones sank her to the Bottom of the Pond: And whereas on the first Instant [i.e., of this month] some Person or Persons (suppos’d the same Gang) went into my Stable, and dangerously wounded my riding Horse in one of his Eyes:

IF any Person will inform of any one or more that have been guilty of any one of the Enormities aforesaid, that so he or they may be brought to Justice, shall be entituled to ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS from the Subscriber.
Roland Cotton.
September 21. 1753.

This sort of mob attack was a colonial community’s way of telling a gentleman he was unwelcome. They couldn’t assault his person, but they could damage his property. Several years earlier the town had chosen not to reelect Cotton to the Massachusetts General Court, but this sustained vandalism shows that by 1 Sept 1753 he’d completely lost his neighbors’ respect.

Reading between the lines of Samuel Sewall’s history of Woburn makes it apparent that Roland Cotton had not only spread rumors about the Rev. Edward Jackson fathering Kezia Hincher’s illegitimate child, but had also manufactured the evidence for those rumors—most likely paying Hincher to either point her finger at Jackson or to keep quiet about the real father. And suddenly in August 1753, his neighbors all knew what he had done.

TOMORROW: Meanwhile, at Kezia Hincher’s home...

“The Defendant...did not appear”

Samuel Sewall, historian of Woburn, recorded a story of what happened when the Rev. Edward Jackson reopened his libel suit against the Rev. Josiah Cotton. But reading between the lines makes it clear that Sewall didn’t believe that tale. It had probably been reshaped over time for dramatic effect.

In January 1753 the Massachusetts Superior Court had ruled Cotton justified in calling Jackson “a vile, wicked man, a fornicator, and unfit to be a minister.” Then in August, Jackson told the court he had new evidence. Here’s the tradition of what happened the following January, in Sewall’s words:

When the Court was assembled and ready to attend to the Review petitioned for, Mr. Jackson put the letter above referred to [see yesterday’s posting] into his Attorney’s hand. The lawyer [Edmund Trowbridge] shows it to its author, a leading man of the Fox [i.e., anti-Jackson] party, then present, and asks him if he knew and would own his own hand? The writer blushed and was confounded.

The cause being explained to Rev. Mr. Cotton, he ran out of the Court house, and cried like a child at perceiving how deceived or mistaken he had been.

How’s that for drama? Jackson vindicated! His rival in tears! His main accuser (probably Roland Cotton) blushing in embarrassment.

But Jackson wasn’t the type to keep quiet about being vindicated for five months, even as his reputation suffered and his livelihood was at risk. During earlier controversies he’d been quick to take action against his critics.

Furthermore, as Sewall notes, the record of the Superior Court hearing in 29 Jan 1754 says:

The Defendant altho’ solemnly called to come into Court, did not appear, but made Default, and the Plaintiff (the Defendant having paid him the Costs) Releases his Demand for Damages.

So by that winter date, Cotton had already paid Jackson his court costs, implying those two men had reached a private settlement. The hearing that Cotton didn’t attend was just a formality. (Jackson had already promised to forgo any damages for libel if Cotton would apologize.)

Instead of January 1754, it looks like the crucial breakthrough in this case occurred in August 1753.

TOMORROW: What folks in Woburn were up to that month.

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.

The Case of Edward Jackson v. Josiah Cotton

In September 1752, the Rev. Edward Jackson filed suit against his cross-Woburn rival, the Rev. Josiah Cotton, for calling him “a vile, wicked man, a fornicator, and unfit to be a minister.” And all because Cotton’s brother Roland had said he’d seen evidence that Jackson had fathered a child by his housekeeper, Kezia Hincher.

For his attorney, Jackson hired Edmund Trowbridge (1709-1793), a scholarly lawyer from Cambridge. (Both men had grown up in Newton.) At some point midwife Hannah Poole and her husband gave him a written statement that, contrary to report, they had never heard Hincher identify Jackson as the child’s father.

Josiah Cotton hired Benjamin Kent (1708-1788) of Charlestown to defend him. According to Woburn historian Samuel Sewall, Cotton

rested his defense, not upon any direct answer to what had been alleged against him in Mr. Jackson’s Declaration, but upon the denial of some promise that Mr. Jackson had averred that he (Mr. Cotton) had made him

I suspect Cotton argued that he’d never promised Jackson a public apology like that already delivered by his brother Roland, which should have been enough to restore Jackson’s reputation.

At the Court of Common Pleas, Jackson won a judgment of £1,000, plus court costs of £1.16s.6d. That was a huge sum by any measure. The magistrates might have meant to pressure Cotton into a public apology before things went any further.

Instead, Josiah Cotton appealed to the Superior Court. The ministers had another chance to settle, but let the case go to a jury. And then Jackson lost almost everything he had won.

In January 1753, the jurors decided that Jackson should not receive any damages and owed Cotton legal costs, implying that his libel suit was baseless and that he was indeed the father of Hincher’s child, then about one year old.

Perhaps the Cottons had mounted a firmer defense at this level, gathering evidence that they hadn’t had before. In the next century Sewall would hear this story from a man named Bartholomew Richardson:

Two of them [enemies of Jackson] in particular, according to a tradition derived from a source of high respectability, encouraged Mrs. Henshaw to go before a magistrate, and swear to the truth of the report which she had put in circulation [about Jackson fathering her child]; and that when she had taken an oath to this effect, they were seen by a friend of Mr. Jackson who was looking on, to put money into her lap.

However the Superior Court verdict came about, Jackson’s reputation was now even lower than before. Reportedly, an official council of ministers gathered to deliberate on his standing.

TOMORROW: But Jackson hadn’t given up.

“I do Acknolege My Misconduct Therein”

By now, with all the feuds, splits, rifts, elopements, affairs, inflated bills, and insulting pamphlets, even I’m losing track of what was going on in Woburn in 1752. The major points are:

• Some powerful citizens, particularly former town representative Roland Cotton and justice of the peace Jonathan Poole, really didn’t like the Rev. Edward Jackson, junior minister of the town’s first church.
• In fact, since Jackson had arrived in 1729, that congregation had split into four meetings, with the newest and closest led by Roland Cotton’s brother, the Rev. Josiah Cotton.
• Jackson, a bachelor, employed Kezia Hincher as a housekeeper. She was a poor unmarried widow who lived with her sister and brother-in-law, Rebecca and Ebenezer Richardson.
• Hincher gave birth to an illegitimate child early in 1752.
• The Cotton brothers accused Jackson of being the baby’s father, Roland privately and Josiah publicly.

Jackson, of course, denied the accusation. He challenged the Cottons to produce evidence, which they didn’t have.

On 28 Aug 1752, Roland Cotton sent Jackson (who was, incidentally, his old college classmate) a one-sentence letter of apology:

Sir

Some months Past Upon my Seeing a Writeing Purporting a Certificate Under the hand of Mrs. Hannah Poole of Reading a Midwife “That she Diliverd the Widow Keziah Hincher your late housekeeper of a Bastard Child and That ye Said Hincher in the Time of her Travil Charged You with being the Father of it,” I Mentioned To Sundry Persons (Some of Whom were Under your Pastoiral Care) That ye Said Poole had in Writeing Under her hand Certified Those Facts, and That I Believed them to be True, as Indeed for Want of due Examination & Consideration I then did,

But being Now Senseable That I was Mistaken therein, and being also Convinced That the Writeing aforesaid was false & Counterfeit, Malisiousely Contrived Made and Published With an Intent Unjustly to procure your Removal from the Ministerial Office by Induceing your Church & Congregation to believe you were the Father of That Bastard Child a Crime Whereof I believe You are Altogeathere free & clear, I think Myself in Justice bound to make you Sattisfaction as far as it is in my Power for ye Injury done you in Mentioning a thing so Prejudicial to your Carracter & Reputation and declareing My belief thereof before any persons but More Expetially before those under your Pastoral Care

And I do Acknolege My Misconduct Therein and Ask Your Pardon therefor, And as the Injury done you has been Made Publick I am Content this Also Should be Made so if you think Proper

In other words, the minister could show Roland Cotton’s written apology to everyone in town as a way to clear his reputation.

Whereupon the Rev. Mr. Jackson sued for libel.

TOMORROW: Jackson takes the Rev. Josiah Cotton to court.

Roland Cotton’s “Circumstances and Contrivances”

Though Jonathan Poole was a justice of the peace in Woburn, he wasn’t the town’s most prominent critic of the Rev. Edward Jackson. That man was Roland Cotton (1701-1778), a militia colonel and politician—and a Harvard classmate of the minister.

Cotton was a descendant of the famous Rev. John Cotton of seventeenth-century Boston (shown here), and son and namesake of the respected minister at Sandwich. On his mother’s side, Cotton had a rich uncle in Woburn. Though his local roots were shallow, he augmented them with wealth and audacity.

Cotton arrived in Woburn in 1737 and almost immediately was elected one of the town’s representatives to the Massachusetts General Court. After two terms, the House made him its Clerk, which provided a steady income. In contrast to most gentlemen of the time, Cotton was relatively open about asking for political favors and votes. In 1740 a rival accused him of using “many little, low, mean Circumstances and Contrivances” to get reelected. The same pamphlet noted that Cotton’s dying uncle had given him property instead of bequeathing it, thus keeping that estate away from his many creditors.

Also in 1740, Cotton led the Woburn congregation to refuse Jackson a raise in pay. Jackson responded by campaigning against Cotton’s reelection the next spring. But the town kept sending Cotton to the General Court until May 1746. He appears to have lost his seat then only because he’d angered people by aggressively drafting militiamen to attack Louisbourg and to put down a riot in Swansea. Cotton was so popular among the province’s politicians, however, that he remained Clerk of the House even though he was no longer a member.

Those were the same years when Poole and some other Woburn families decided they’d had enough of Jackson and his rival, the Rev. John Fox, and founded their own meeting. Cotton’s name doesn’t appear on the petitions to form a new church, but there’s little doubt he was a driving force in the effort. For their first minister that new congregation chose...Roland Cotton’s brother Josiah.

The Rev. Josiah Cotton (1703-1780) had been presiding over a church in Rhode Island, and then fell into his own feud with a deacon starting in 1741. He jumped at the chance to move to Woburn. The Boston News-Letter reported that his installation at that town’s third meeting-house on 15 July 1747 “was carried on with the utmost Peace and Dignity”—a likely acknowledgment of how notoriously undignified the arguments in Woburn had become.

Then in early 1752, the Rev. Edward Jackson’s unmarried housekeeper, Kezia Hincher, gave birth. Col. Cotton told people that he’d seen a certificate from the midwife—who happened to be married to Jonathan Poole’s cousin—identifying Jackson as the baby’s father. The Rev. Cotton took up the tale, publicly calling Jackson “a vile, wicked man, a fornicator, and unfit to be a minister.”

TOMORROW: Which was ironic, given the stories about Roland before he came to Woburn.

[This series of postings started back here.]

Woburn Splits into Parishes and Factions

As I described yesterday, in 1736 Jonathan and Esther Poole of Woburn were reportedly hoping their nineteen-year-old daughter would marry the first meeting’s junior minister, the Rev. Edward Jackson. (The thumbnail here shows what’s left of the gravestone of the couple’s son Eleazar, born in 1734, courtesy of yeoldewoburn.net.)

Instead, the younger Esther Poole preferred a younger Harvard graduate, Joseph Burbeen (1712-1794). In October 1736 they eloped to Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, and got married there. According to a descendant writing about 1830, the Pooles were at first upset at their daughter and Burbeen, but then reconciled themselves to the match.

Meanwhile, resentment was growing between Jackson and the ailing minister he’d been hired to assist, the Rev. John Fox. The older man refused to leave his pulpit or the town-supplied parsonage, despite often being unable to preach because of poor health and encroaching blindness. When the town was slow to pay him in the 1730s, he petitioned the Massachusetts General Court and filed a lawsuit, winning a judgment of over £164.

The expense of two ministers actually helped to split up Woburn. The new town of Wilmington broke off in 1730, and some of its citizens asked for refunds of what they’d just been taxed for Jackson’s salary. (Woburn refused.) Soon afterward, another part of town officially became a “second precinct,” with its own meeting-house and minister; this section eventually became Burlington.

That left the old part of Woburn paying both Fox and Jackson, and they were feuding. There’s no sign of a theological difference between the two men. Rather, both had quirks that made them tough to work with. Families started to take sides. The Pooles, after their daughter’s marriage, ended up in the anti-Jackson camp—which was awkward since they were still Jackson’s landlords.

One night in October 1744, the junior minister was hosting the Rev. Ebenezer Wyman of Union, Connecticut, who was a Woburn native and had taught school there a decade earlier. Between eleven and twelve in the evening, according to a later legal complaint, Poole threw Jackson and his guest out of the house “with out hat or Coat” even though “the Night was Cold and the Latter part Stormy.” Wyman was an avid hunter, so he probably fared all right; but he died fifteen months later of pleurisy from hunting too long that winter.

In the summer of 1745, Jonathan Poole, his in-laws, and other prominent citizens took steps to leave Fox and Jackson’s parish and set up a third Woburn meeting-house. That fall, Poole also gave Jackson an invoice for “six years board due from him.” Jackson retaliated by sending Poole a bill of his own, listing food, liquor, laundry, tobacco, pipes, “fresh sowering,” candles, and cash, totaling over £150. Reportedly a magistrate refused to let the minister enter that document in court, saying it would amount to perjury. But a higher court accepted it, making Poole liable for a large sum plus legal costs.

Poole and his friends retaliated by having Jackson’s outlandish accounting published in 1750. Their anonymous pamphlet concluded: “You may possibly think the above affair alone was sufficient for our withdrawal from such a spiritual guide.” Jackson, they hinted, was a liar with extravagant tastes.

Thus, the Rev. Mr. Jackson had plenty of critics and enemies in Woburn when folks started hearing whispers that Kezia Hincher had named him as the father of her child.

TOMORROW: The Cotton brothers spread the rumor.

The Midwife and Mr. Jackson

Early in 1752, Kezia Hincher of Woburn gave birth to a child. As I described yesterday, Kezia was an unmarried widow living with her older sister Rebecca and her brother-in-law, Ebenezer Richardson.

Kezia was also working as a housekeeper for the Rev. Edward Jackson, the unmarried minister of Woburn’s first parish. People whispered that he was the new child’s father. In particular, Roland Cotton, a militia colonel and town representative to the General Court, wrote to Jackson on 28 August that he had seen

a Writeing Purporting a Certificate Under the hand of Mrs. Hannah Poole of Reading a Midwife “That she Diliverd the Widow Keziah Hincher your late housekeeper of a Bastard Child and That ye Said Hincher in the Time of her Travil Charged You with being the Father of it”

Hannah Poole, the midwife, was married to a cousin of Jonathan Poole, a Woburn justice of the peace. And the Pooles had a long and complex history with Jackson.

In 1728 Woburn invited Edward Jackson, who had graduated from Harvard in 1719, to become their town’s junior minister. Clearly most parishioners wanted him to replace the Rev. John Fox, who was going blind and often unable to preach—but also would not give up his post or his salary demands.

When a new minister was ordained in colonial New England, it was traditional for the town to invite the minister, elder, and “Messengers” from each nearby town to attend the ceremony. Jonathan Poole was responsible “for subsisting the Ministers and Messengers and Gentlemen in the time of Mr. Jackson’s Ordination,” and then sent the town a bill for:

• 433 dinners
• 178 breakfasts
• 6.5 barrels of cider
• 25 gallons of wine
• 2 gallons of brandy
• 4 gallons of rum
• loaf sugar and lime juice (for punch, most likely)
• pipes
• keeping 32 horses for four days

The total was more than £83, or about two-thirds of what the town had promised to Jackson for his annual salary. Since the town was now supporting two ministers, that seemed extravagant.

Poole and his wife, Esther, apparently had hopes that Jackson would eventually marry their only daughter, also named Esther (1717-1776). She would have been a good catch for a man with expensive tastes, being heir not only to her father’s estate but also to property from her maternal grandfather.

TOMORROW: But young Esther wasn’t interested in the Rev. Mr. Jackson.

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.