What Happened to the Boston Massacre Defendants?

After being acquitted of murder at the Boston Massacre on 5 Dec 1770, Cpl. William Wemys and five private soldiers “went their Way thro’ the Streets,” the Boston Gazette reported. They probably boarded a boat to Castle William, where the 14th Regiment of Foot was stationed.

Nine days later, fellow defendants Edward Montgomery and Mathew Kilroy joined them, each with one hand bandaged after branding.

Lt. Col. William Dalrymple of the 14th had already decided how he would send those men back to the 29th Regiment, which had been moved to New Jersey. The commander wrote:

A bad disposition appearing in the Soldiers who were confined I shall send them round by sea, we have but too much reason to suspect their ententions to desert they are not at all to be depended on.

“I do not chuse to trust them any other way,” he added on 17 December. It would be great to know why Dalrymple was suspicious, but we don’t.

Until recently, the story of those eight British enlisted men stopped there. But Don Hagist has been doing thorough research on British troops during the War for Independence, culminating in the new book Noble Volunteers. Don found more information on some of those soldiers in the muster rolls and Chelsea pensioner records, which he generously let me publish here. I’ve added information on others over the years. So here’s what happened to all the defendants.

By May 1771, William Wemys was promoted to sergeant. He was still a sergeant when the company was stationed at Chatham, England, on 29 July 1775. His company’s muster rolls end there, so we lose track of him.

In the grenadier company, John Carroll and William Macauley were both made corporals. William Warren, despite being the tallest of the defendants, transferred out of the grenadiers to another company in the 29th.

As I related in this posting from 2006, Pvt. James Hartigan died on 4 Nov 1771 at the 29th’s next assignment in St. Augustine, Florida.

The regiment was in England when the war began, and army commanders decided to send it back to North America. That could have exposed Pvts. Montgomery and Kilroy to being captured by the American rebels, their hands still bearing the brand of the Massacre. On 22 Feb 1776 those two men appeared before a board of examiners for military pensions administered by Chelsea Hospital. Montgomery, age forty-one, was deemed “Worn Out,” and Kilroy, only twenty-eight, was found to have “a Lame Knee.” The board discharged both men from the army with pensions.

The rest of the 29th Regiment sailed to Canada, where different fates awaited different companies. Pvt. Warren and Pvt. Hugh White, the sentry, spent the American war at separate stations in Canada. White was finally discharged from the army on 10 Nov 1789, then aged forty-nine.

John Carroll, promoted to sergeant by February 1777, and Cpl. Macauley were still with the 29th’s grenadier company, which was assigned to Gen. John Burgoyne’s invasion force. Those two men might therefore have become part of the “Convention Army” of prisoners of war marched from Saratoga to Cambridge at the end of that year. But there’s no record of anyone in Massachusetts recognizing those two soldiers from the Massacre trial.

I discussed the evidence about Capt. Thomas Preston’s retirement here. He started to receive an annual £200 royal pension in 1772, and it continued until at least 1790. In the 1780s Preston was living in Dublin.

Of the defendants in the third trial, I profiled Hammond Green in this posting. He evacuated Boston in 1776 as a Customs employee, and his wife and children followed the next year. The royal government gave Green a Customs job at his new home of Halifax, and he was still working there in 1807.

Thomas Greenwood was working for the Customs service in 1770 but wasn’t listed among the employees who evacuated in 1776. I don’t know anything more solid about him.

Edward Manwaring retained the post of chief Customs officer on the Gaspé peninsula until 1785 when he was succeeded by his neighbor Felix O’Hara.

John Munro carried on his business as a notary “at his Office South Side of the Town House.” The 12 Jan 1775 issue of the Massachusetts Spy reported that he had died the previous Tuesday at the age of thirty-nine after a “tedious illness.” He was buried out of Christ Church on 13 January.

The Forgotten Trial for the Boston Massacre

On 12 Dec 1770, 250 years ago today, the third trial for the Boston Massacre began.

This is the trial that later generations of Bostonians preferred to forget. In 1771 the Loyalist printer John Fleeming published a seven-page report including witness testimony as an appendix to the much longer record of the soldiers’ trial. But Harbottle Dorr didn’t buy that expanded edition and keep it with his collection of Whig newspapers.

In 1870, when Frederic Kidder assembled his History of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770; consisting of the narrative of the town, the trial of the soldiers: and a historical introduction, containing unpublished documents of John Adams, and explanatory notes, he reprinted John Hodgson’s transcript of the soldiers’ trial but not the appendix. He replaced those seven pages with a single paragraph on the verdict.

Because John Adams wasn’t involved in the third trial, its record also makes no appearance in his Legal Papers, the most complete source of documents on those proceedings.

When I started my Revolutionary research, the only way I could read about the third trial was to visit a library that owned a first edition, second state of The Trial of William Wemms… from 1771. But now Google has digitized that book, so everyone can find its account of the third trial starting at page 210.

The defendants on 12 December were:

• Edward Manwaring, a Customs officer assigned to Douglastown on the Gaspé peninsula in Canada, who was in Boston on 5 Mar 1770.
• John Munro, a notary public and friend of Manwaring who had the bad luck to be socializing with him that evening.
• Hammond Green, a boat builder whose family worked for the Boston Customs office.
• Thomas Greenwood, a low-level local Customs officer.

Those men were indicted on the evidence of one person: Charles Bourgate, a fourteen-year-old francophone servant of Manwaring. Earlier this year I traced the French boy’s evolving story starting here. Despite the forensic slipperiness of that account, a Boston grand jury indicted those four defendants for murder.

On 11 December, acting governor Thomas Hutchinson, who was still on leave as Chief Justice, had two other Superior Court justices visit him at the Province House. He urged them to “continue,” or postpone, those men’s trials till the spring session. That would have been a full year since the shooting on King Street. Perhaps he hoped the accusation would just go away. Senior justice Benjamin Lynde declined.

Thus, the third Massacre trial started on 12 December. Massachusetts advocate general Samuel Quincy prosecuted, though he considered the attempt to convict these defendants “another Windmill adventure” with himself as “poor Don Quixot.” The record doesn’t say who served as defense counsel, and legal historian Hiller B. Zobel suggests the defendants didn’t need one.

The first prosecution witness was Samuel Drowne, who said he had seen “two flashes from the Custom-house” behind the soldiers as they fired. Stationer Timothy White testified that he had hosted and employed Drowne for two years and “never observed any thing to impeach his veracity and understanding”—though “Some people thought him foolish.”

Charles Bourgate then told his story of being pulled into the Customs house and forced to fire out at the crowd by a “tall man” with a sword-cane—some suspected Customs Commissioner John Robinson, notorious for cutting James Otis’s scalp with his walking-stick. Charles said he’d seen his master Manwaring shoot a gun, too. The prosecution rested.

Four upper-class defense witnesses then testified that they had watched the confrontation on King Street and seen no shots from the Customs House. One of those gentlemen was Edward Payne, who had actually been wounded in the shooting and had no reason to protect any shooters.

Two women who lived in the Customs House said they had viewed the shooting from the very room that Charles described, and there had been no men with guns there.

Manwaring’s landlady, Elizabeth Hudson, stated that he and Munro had been at her house during the shooting along with the traveling entertainer Michael Angelo Warwell and young Charles.

The court brought the French boy back to the stand. He insisted that he’d told the truth and Hudson (and everyone else) had lied. The judges summoned four men known for speaking French well, including schoolmaster John Lovell and merchant Philip Dumaresque, and asked them to question the boy to make sure there was no language barrier. He stuck to his story.

At that point the defense lowered the boom. James Penny, a debtor who had been in the jail while Charles was housed there as a witness, stated that the teenager had admitted to him:

That what he testified to the Grand Jury and before the Justices…was in every particular false, and that he did swear in that manner by the persuasion of William Molineux, who told him he would take him from his master and provide for him, and that Mr. Molineux frightened him by telling him if he refused to swear against his master and Mr. Munro the mob in Boston would kill him: and farther that Mrs. [Elizabeth] Waldron, the wife of Mr. [Joseph] Waldron a taylor in Back-street, who sells ginger bread and drams, gave him the said Charles gingerbread and cheese, and desired him to swear against his master.

Charles “positively denied that he had ever made any such declaration.” He asked that another debtor, cabinetmaker William Page, be called to the stand. But Page testified that he’d seen the French boy in deep conversation with James Penny, who was taking notes, so that ended up bolstering Penny’s claim.

The case of Rex v. Manwaring et al. went to the jury. The record ends:

The Jury acquitted all the Prisoners, without going from their seats.

The third Boston Massacre trial thus ended within a day, as was usual in that period. But it also set up a fourth Boston Massacre trial: of Charles Bourgate on the charge of perjury.

“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] 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.

“The Grand Jury haveing found bills against them”

As I recounted back here, the Suffolk County grand jury inquiring into the Boston Massacre took a lot of testimony about whether people had fired down at the crowd from the Customs House behind the soldiers.

The foreman of that grand jury was William Taylor of Milton. (At the time, Suffolk County included all of present-day Norfolk County, so most of its population was outside Boston.)

According to A. K. Teele’s History of Milton, Taylor was born in Jamaica in 1714. His older brother John became Milton’s minister in 1729, and William went into business as a merchant in Boston, living on Cornhill near the Old Brick Meeting-House.

(It looks like another William Taylor was warden at King’s Chapel early in the century, and another William Taylor was a sea captain sailing in and out of the harbor, and another William Taylor had a mercantile store on Long Wharf and became a Loyalist.)

The Rev. John Taylor died in early 1750, and William advertised many times in the Boston newspapers over the next few years to sell and then rent property in Milton. He described that estate as “suitable for a Gentleman’s Seat, being but 8 Miles from the Town of Boston.” Also in the 1750s he paid Joseph Blackburn to paint his portrait, shown above.

William Taylor was active in Boston’s militia regiment, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel in December 1764. He also held offices in the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company and served for one year as a fireward.

In late 1765, Col. Taylor remarried, to the widow Sarah (Cheever) Savage. The following summer, the Taylors left Boston, apparently moving to that “Gentleman’s Seat” in Milton. His name then appears mainly in advertisements promoting land in Pownalborough, Maine. Thus, while Taylor was a country gentleman as he led the grand jury in 1770, he had close ties to the Boston elite.

After war broke out in 1775, soldiers broke into Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s uninhabited mansion in Milton and found a trunk of letters, among other things. Col. Taylor took charge of that property. The letters went into the Massachusetts state archives while other goods “were sold at auction, at the barn of Col. Taylor.” This William Taylor died in 1789.

Hutchinson singled out another member of this grand jury as influential: “Mr Sam Austin of Boston.” Samuel Austin was a merchant and active Whig, playing a prominent role in the march on Hutchinson’s home earlier in 1770. In 1773 Austin was elected one of Boston’s selectmen, a position he held until the end of the siege.

One of Samuel Austin’s sons was Jonathan Williams Austin, who graduated from Harvard in 1769 and started clerking for John Adams that August. The younger Austin was also a witness at the Massacre trials, identifying Pvt. William Macauley.

In their deliberations, the grand jury led by Col. Taylor decided to believe the young French servant Charles Bourgate and the people who testified to seeing flashes from the Customs House windows. They therefore rejected the testimony of the men Bourgate accused. According to an anonymous Crown informant:

Notwithstanding [John] Munro & [Edward] Manwarring proveing a perfect Alibi they were this day (27th March) committed to Jail, as was also Green’s son and Thomas the manservant—the Grand Jury haveing found bills against them, as seven people positively swore to guns being fired that night out of the Custom House Windows.

Thus, 250 years ago today, the response of the grand jury to hearing Hammond Green, Thomas Greenwood, and others testify that there was no conspiracy to shoot people from the Customs House was to indict those men as being part of the conspiracy.

TOMORROW: The real villain—or the real target?

The Superior Court “Overawed”

Even as the royal army and the town of Boston took steps to respond to the Boston Massacre in March 1770, a third institution was moving, albeit more slowly: the Massachusetts court system.

Under the provincial charter, governors appointed the judges in consultation with their Council. Judges served as long as they wanted. That meant the judiciary leaned toward the establishment and the Crown.

In fact, the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court was still Thomas Hutchinson, the acting royal governor. He had stopped exercising that judicial role, however, so the acting chief was Benjamin Lynde of Salem (1700-1781, shown here).

The court was scheduled to start sitting in Boston on 20 Mar 1770, but Judge Lynde’s diary shows that he didn’t arrive (with his enslaved servant Primus) until the following afternoon. Then on 22 March, “Two of the Judges being sick, the Court came to a Determination to adjourn to the 2d. Tuesday in June,” according to a report to Crown officials.

The Boston Whigs had anticipated that possibility. As I noted back here, the town meeting had already discussed now judges falling ill would delay the murder trials of Ebenezer Richardson and the soldiers involved in the Massacre. They didn’t want that.

On 22 March or the next day, some of the town’s leading Whigs went to the courthouse. The informant stated:

a committe consisting of Ad[am]s Mol[ineu]x, War[re]n H[ancoc]k & others waited upon them in court, and in a very pathetic Speech, made by Mr. A---s, Represented the necessity of proceeding to the trial of the Criminals this Term, particularly those concerned in the late bloody Massacre. . . .

Numbers even of the Sons of L----y were shocked to see their Sup-----r C---t overawed and insulted in this manner.

The Superior Court remained in session, but it did business slowly, starting with the civil cases.

Also on 23 March, or 250 years ago today, Boston Whigs revived the case against Customs officer Edward Manwaring for shooting at the crowd during the Massacre. As I’ve been tracing, that case rested on the testiomony of Manwaring’s young French servant, Charles Bourgate.

Charles had told his story to a shopkeeper on 6 March, then denied it to a magistrate, then retold it to that magistrate, was then refuted by an alibi witness named John Munro, then accused Munro of being complicit, and was finally refuted by a second alibi witness. Since his first testimony, Charles had been in the Boston jail, either for perjury or for his own protection—the courts would sort out which.

According to Lt. Gov. Hutchinson:

Mr. [Richard] Dana, a Justice zealous for the cause of Liberty, had examined the boy and was so fully convinced of the falsity of his evidence that he would not issue a warrant for apprehending the persons charged. . . . Among other reasons given for the refusal of the Justice to issue his warrant it was said that the facts to which the boy swore were of such a nature that it was impossible they should have escaped the observation of the great number of other persons present

More radical Boston Whigs disagreed. They had a handful of witnesses ready to testify they’d observed shots come from the second floor of the Customs House during the Massacre, just as Charles claimed.

On 23 March, magistrates John Hill and John Ruddock took down the French boy’s sworn story, presumably in the jail. Also present to attest to the boy’s mark were Dr. Elisha Story, Ruddock’s son-in-law, and Edward Crafts, brother of coroner Thomas Crafts. All those men were strong Whigs.

The justices duly recorded that “Edward Manwaring, Esq; and John Munroe…were notified and present; and interrogated the deponent.” But the boy stuck to his tale.

This deposition would go into the town’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre report. It would also go to the grand jury, which didn’t need warrants or judges to indict people and put them in jail.

“Not to trust the said boy out of his sight”

After young Charles Bourgate accused both his master, Edward Manwaring, and his master’s alibi witness, John Munro, of participating in the Boston Massacre, as I related here, Manwaring summoned “a third person who happened to be that Evening in company with them.”

That person was the traveling actor and singer Michael Angelo Warwell.

On 15 Mar 1770, Warwell gave a long and detailed recollection of the night of the Massacre to Justices Richard Dana and Edmund Quincy, the magistrates who had quizzed Charles. It stated:

On Monday the 5th of this present March, 1770, about three o’Clock, afternoon, I called upon Mr. Edward Manwaring, at his lodgings in back-street Boston, and immediately proceeded with him and mr. John Monroe, to the house of mr. Brown in Charlestown, to settle an affair between the said Brown and one doctor Brown in Boston, relative to a horse, which the last mentioned Brown had hired of the aforementioned Brown in Charlestown, where we staid ’till something after six in the evening, and returned to Mr. Manwaring’s lodgings about seven, and sat ourselves down to spend the evening with him, which we accordingly did.

(You just know I tried to find out more about that horse. I regret to say I’ve learned no additional information.)

About an hour and half after our arrival at the said Manwaring’s lodgings, we heard the cry of fire in the street, and thereupon ran to the windows to be informed where it was, when some person under made answer at the south-end; others in the street were also enquiring where it was, and they were answered that they would soon see, and other expressions to the same purpose, which made us conclude, that something more was than in the case than fire alone; on which we came to a resolution not to [go] from the said Manwaring’s apartment, soon after this determination we were confirmed more in our former opinion by a noise in the street, and some people saying four out of five were killed, which words tho’ we did not know the meaning of, fully satisfied us there was something more than fire.

On this occasion Mr. Manwaring’s boy, several times attempted to go into the street to join the multitude, and once had got as far as the gate next the street, when Mr. Monroe fetched him back, and shut the gate after him. After this Mr. Manwarring kept the said boy, in his the said Manwaring’s own room, being determined not to trust the said boy out of his sight.

Then we the said Edward Manwaring, John Monroe, myself and Mrs. [Elizabeth] Hudson the Landlady of the House, who was afraid to stay in her own apartment alone; I say we the aforesaid persons sat over a bottle or two of mull’d wine ’till half an hour after Ten, when the tumult seemed to be subsided, and Mr. Monroe proposed to go to his own lodgings, which Mr. Manwaring would have persuaded him from, apprehending there might be danger in so doing; but he persevered in the resolution of going, and went accordingly, but told us at parting, that if any tumult still remained he would immediately return, but if he did not return we might depend upon it all was quiet, and he did not return that night.

Elizabeth Hudson’s wife John was “a custom-house clerk,” according to a Whig writing in the 8 Apr 1771 Boston Evening-Post. He was “out of town that evening,” she testified. She might have been nervous about an angry crowd mobbing her house because of its ties to the Customs service.

After this, myself, Mr. Manwaring and Mrs. Hudson (and the boy still in company) remained together ’till about twelve the same night, when she left us to go to her own bed. After this, myself, Mr. Manwaring and his boy sat up together about three hours longer; it being then too late for my returning to my own lodgings, Mr. Manwaring proposed my sleeping with him, which I accordingly did in the same bed, and, the boy was ordered to go to his bed, which he accordingly did, it being in the same room. These particulars I could not suppress, in justice to Mr. Manwaring and Mr. Monroe.

Warwell’s testimony prompted Justice Dana to dismiss the accusation against Manwaring and Munro, and to order Bourgate to be taken back to the Boston jail. Despite supporting the Whigs politically, Dana refused to have anything more to do with that charge.

On 16 March, 250 years ago today, Manwaring wrote a triumphant letter to the printers of the Boston Gazette, which had first reported the accusation against him:

Messieurs EDES & GILL,

Gentlemen,

As the villainy of my servant (who is a Boy under age without principle, sense or education, and indeed unacquainted with our language) has subjected myself and one of my friends to a suspicion that we were concerned in the unhappy transaction of Monday the fifth instant. I thought it necessary to publish the following affidavit as an additional (till further) proof of my innocence, and the extreme injury done my sentiments and reputation.

I am, Gentlemen,
Your humble Servant,
EDWARD MANWARING.

In their 19 March issue, Edes and Gill apologized for just not having enough space to print Warwell’s deposition. They finally got around to publishing it on 26 March. Later this month, we’ll see what effect it had.

“Both he and the boy were at Home that Evening”

An anonymous letter now part of the Sparks Manuscripts at Harvard relates what happened when Justice Richard Dana (shown here) gave Customs surveyor Edward Manwaring a chance to respond to his young servant Charles Bourgate’s accusation.

That letter says:

a little French boy servant to Manwarring the tide Surveyor, declared that he at the Desire of his Master, and several other Gentlemen, who were that night in the board room, fired three guns from one of the windows & that a number more, were fired by other people——

Manwarring was Immediately summon’d before them, but on his proving by the evidence of Mr. [John] Munro that both he and the boy were at Home that Evening, he was acquitted, & the boy retracting every word he had said was committed to Jail—

Munro was a notary public. He died in January 1775 at age thirty-nine, so he didn’t get to be on any Loyalist lists.

Young Charles had another trick up his sleeve the next morning, though.

day on the boys declaring [i.e., One day on, the boy declaring] that both Manwarring & Munro were that night at the Custom House, both were Summon’d before the Justices & Munro’s affadavit set aside, he being now a party—

Munro couldn’t be an alibi witness for Manwaring because they were allegedly in on the crime together. But then Manwaring pulled out another name.

but a third person who happened to be that Evening in company with them, appear’d & Confirmed, what Munro had the day before advanced, & they were dismissed and the boy remanded back to prison.—

I’ll share that witness’s testimony tomorrow.

For now, we leave young Charles Bourgate back where we picked up his story yesterday: he was in jail and discredited. Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote:

Mr. Dana, a Justice zealous for the cause of Liberty, had examined the boy and was so fully convinced of the falsity of his evidence that he would not issue a warrant for apprehending the persons charged.

Manwaring was free, and he set about writing to the Boston Gazette.

TOMORROW: Michael Angelo Warwell?

“The flashes of two guns fired from the Custom-house”

Soon after Charles Bourgate reaffirmed his earlier story of being made to shoot down at the crowd during the Boston Massacre, the Boston Whigs (William Molineux in particular) got the young servant in front of a magistrate.

This time that magistrate was Richard Dana, a higher authority than Edmund Quincy, the official who had collected Bourgate’s testimony. Quincy was merely a justice of the peace. Dana was a justice of the peace and of the quorum, which I think means that some level of the county court couldn’t meet without him.

The notion that one or more people shot at the crowd from the Customs House behind the soldiers actually had some support. A young gentleman named Jeremiah Allen stated that he was on the balcony of Joseph Ingersoll’s Bunch of Grapes tavern (shown above) during the incident.

he heard the discharge of four or five guns, the flashes of which appeared to be to the westward of the centry box; and immediately after, he the deponent heard two or three more guns, and saw the flashes thereof from out of the house now called the Custom-House, as they evidently appeared to him, and which he the said deponent at the same time declared to the aforesaid Molineux and [John] Simpson, being then near him, saying to them, at the same time pointing his hand toward the Custom-House, there they are out of the Custom-House.

The “aforesaid Molineux” was William Molineux, Jr., son of the Whig leader. He no doubt passed Allen’s story on to his dad, who then went looking for confirmation.

Other witnesses would soon tell even more damning stories. Those later quoted in the town’s report were:

• George Coster, sailor from Newfoundland: “the deponent heard the discharge of four or five guns more, by the soldiers; immediately after which the deponent heard the discharge of two guns or pistols from an open window of the middle story of the Custom-house, near to the place where the sentry box was placed, and being but a small distance from the window, he heard the people from within speak and laugh, and soon after he saw the casement lowered down”
• Cato, enslaved servant to postmaster Tuthill Hubbart: “he stood near the sentry box and saw the soldiers fire on the people, who stood in the middle of said street; directly after which he saw two flashes of guns, one quick upon the other, from the chamber-window of the Custom-house; and that after the firing was all over, while the people were carrying away the dead and wounded, he saw the Custom-house door opened, and several soldiers (one of whom had a cutlass) go into the Custom-house and shut the door after them”
• Samuel Drowne, shop assistant to a stationer on Cornhill: “during the time of the soldiers firing, the deponent saw the flashes of two guns fired from the Custom-house, one of which was out of a window of the chamber westward of the balcony, and the other from the balcony, the gun which he clearly discerned being pointed through the ballisters, and the person who held the gun in a stooping posture, withdraw himself into the house, having a handkerchief or some kind of cloth over his face.”

All those witnesses would testify before Justice Dana and Justice John Hill on 16 March. Their stories might have been circulating even before then.

Faced with Charles Bourgate’s accusation, Dana summoned Edward Manwaring and asked him how he responded to what his servant had said.

COMING UP: A singing alibi?

When Mr. Molineux Visited Charles Bourgate in Jail

When we left Charles Bourgate, 250 years ago, the young French servant was locked up in the Boston jail for “profane Swearing.”

Charles had told shopkeeper Elizabeth Waldron that he and his master had shot guns out of the Customs House at the crowd on the night of 5 March, thus participating in the Boston Massacre.

But when magistrate Edmund Quincy summoned Charles to tell his story under oath, the French boy denied everything. And vehemently enough, it appears, that Justice Quincy sent him to the jail.

William Molineux, the merchant and Whig organizer, then got involved. As the 18 Mar 1771 Boston Gazette recounted the situation:

Mr. Molineux hearing of this, and like a good citizen, being anxious, if there was any truth in what the boy had related, that it might be brought to light, desired it as a favour, of Mrs. Waldron, that he might see them together; with which she readily comply’d, and they both went up to the prison-house, where they had conversation with the boy…

This conversation became a legal issue later, so Molineux asked multiple people to testify about that encounter before Justices Richard Dana and Samuel Pemberton on 15 Mar 1771. Those sworn witnesses included:

• Joseph Otis, “keeper of the Goal”
• Bathsheba Hyland, who “was present ironing of clothes in the parlour of Mr. Otis”
• Lindsey George Wallis, deputy sheriff, dropping in on business

In addition, Marcy Otis, the jailer’s wife, stated for the newspaper that she was there and offered to leave her front room along with Hyland to do their ironing elsewhere, but “Mr. Molineux desired that I would not go out.”

All those witnesses declared that Molineux had told young Charles “to declare nothing but the truth,” that “there was no offer of bribery or anything like it.” Nonetheless, it was probably easy for the imprisoned boy to discern what Molineux wanted to hear.

During that conversation, with the ironing board standing nearby, Charles Bourgate reversed himself again. Everything he had told Mrs. Waldron was true, he now said; “he had deny’d it before the justice, because his master, [Edward] Manwaring, had whip’d him severely for reporting it, and had threatened to kill him if he repeated it.”

Molineux asked Justice Quincy to come to the jail for another hearing on the “Saturday evening next after the Massacre,” or 10 March. Among the other people present was Thomas Chase, the South End distiller and member of the original Loyall Nine. Everyone told the French boy once again to be truthful. Chase stated, “the Boy then in the most full and explicit manner, declared before said Justice, that both he and his master did fire out of the Custom-House window.”

The Monday issue of Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette, dated 13 March and marked with the black bands of mourning, broke the news to readers in a supplement:

A Servant Boy of one Manwaring the Tide-waiter from Quebec is now in Goal, having deposed that himself, by the Order and Encouragement of his Superiors had discharged a Musket several Times from one of the Windows of the House in King-Street, hired by the Commissioners and Custom House Officers to do their Business in; more than one other Person swore upon Oath, that they apprehended several Discharges came from that Quarter.—

It is not improbable that we may soon be able to account for the Assassination of Mr. [James] Otis some Time past; the Message by [George] Wilmot, who came from the same House to the infamous [Ebenezer] Richardson before his firing the Gun which kill’d young [Christopher] Snider, and to open up such a Scene of Villainy acted by a dirty Banditti, as must astonish the Public.

The Boston Whigs were about to break the murderous Customs House conspiracy wide open!

Gingerbread, Cheese, and Spilling the Beans?

Even as some Bostonians crowded Faneuil Hall on 6 Mar 1770 to report threatening encounters with British soldiers, the young French servant Charles Bourgate was telling his story for the first time.

That morning, according to a sympathetic article in the 8 Apr 1771 Boston Evening-Post, Charles went into Joseph Waldron’s shop on Back Street “to buy bread, &c., as usual.”

Waldron was legally a tailor. In August 1767 the selectmen had licensed him to sell distilled spirits from his shop, but he didn’t handle that business. Instead, Waldron had married Elizabeth Bell at the Old South Meeting-House in 1766, and she maintained the shop selling “ginger bread and drams,” and perhaps other comestibles.

Everyone must have been talking about the fatal clash the night before. Charles Bourgate spoke to Elizabeth Waldron—“Showing much anxiety,” the Evening-Post stated. Soon the French boy was “confessing that he had fired two guns, and his master [Edward] Manwaring one, from the first chamber of the custom-house.”

Elizabeth Waldron may have rewarded Charles for his confession. Months later, a fellow prisoner in the Boston jail, James Penny, testified to hearing the boy say that at some time Waldron gave him “gingerbread and cheese, and desired him to swear against his master.” It seems more likely that Waldron felt sympathy after hearing Charles’s story than that she induced him to level a false accusation.

According to the 18 Mar 1771 Boston Gazette, “Mrs. Waldron…immediately went to Justice Quincy, and declared what she had heard, upon oath.” Edmund Quincy (1703-1788, shown above) was a staunch supporter of the Whigs. Other people were also talking about seeing flashes of gunshots from the Customs house windows.

Word of the French boy’s claim probably got back to Manwaring. Charles later declared that that night “my master licked me…for telling Mrs. Waldron about his firing out of the Custom house.”

Justice Quincy summoned the servant boy for examination. I can’t tell when that happened, but the clues point to Wednesday, 7 March, or the couple of days that followed. Standing before the magistrate, supposedly fearing another licking from his master, Charles denied all that he’d told Mrs. Waldron.

The boy must have denied his previous story quite vehemently because Quincy sent him to jail for “profane Swearing.” Or perhaps that was just the Whig magistrate’s legal excuse to get Charles Bourgate away from his master.

Charles Bourgate’s Massacre

Today, 5 March, is the Sestercentennial anniversary of the Boston Massacre. I’ve written a lot about the Massacre over the years, including this post from 2007 about how the trouble started and how easily people could have avoided it.

So today I’m sharing a rarely recounted perspective on the event from a teen-aged servant named Charles Bourgate. He was reportedly born at Bordeaux, France, but also identified as “a Jersey boy.”

This was the French boy’s testimony at the trial on 12 Dec 1770 of his master, Customs official Edward Manwaring, along with Manwaring’s friend John Munro and lower-level Customs employees Hammond Green and Thomas Greenwood.

All four of those men were charged with participating in the murders on King Street, with muskets actually shot out an upper window of the Customs house, as shown above from the print by Paul Revere.

Charles testified:

I am an apprentice to Mr. Edward Manwarring. On the evening of the 5th March last, I was at Mr. [John] Hudson’s in Back-street, at the North-end, where my master then lodged, Mr. Hudson and his wife [Elizabeth] were at home;…

According to the boy’s earlier deposition for town magistrates, Manwaring and Munro had gone to the Customs house to “drink a glass of wine” about half an hour before he heard an alarm.

when the bells rung I ran into King street, and to the door of the Custom-house which was on a jarr partly open, and a young man one Green, he with one eye, (pointing to Hammond Green) opened the door and pulled me in; two or three gentlemen came down stairs, and one of them a tall man, pulled me up stairs, and said to me, you must fire, the tall man gave me a gun, and said to me “if you don’t fire I’ll kill you”—

In his deposition, Charles said, “I saw my Master and Mr. Munroe come down stairs, and go into a room; when four or five men went up stairs, pulling and halling me after them.” So not exactly the same detail, but the same result.

I went up stairs and stood by a front window in the chamber, and the tall man loaded two guns with two balls each, and I fired them both; as soon as I had fired one gun, he, the tall man, said again to me, “if you don’t fire I will kill you.” He had a cane with a sword in it in his hand, and compelled me to fire both the guns.

After I had fired these two guns, Mr. Manwarring fired one gun also out of the same window. The tall man loaded the three guns, and I see him put the balls in each of them and heard them go down. The two guns I fired, I pointed up the street and in the air. When my master Mr. Manwarring pointed his gun out of the window I was in the room, but went out and was on the stairs before his gun went off, I heard it, but did not see it.

As soon as I had fired, the tail man took me down stairs, and said he would give me money if I would not tell: I replied, I did not want any money, but if I was called before the Justices, I would tell the truth.

There were a great many people in the house, and a number of people round me in the chamber where I fired, I can’t tell the precise number, but there were more than ten, Mr. Munro and Hammond Green were in the house below stairs, Mr. Manwarring was in the chamber when all the three guns were loaded and fired, there was the space of a minute and an half between the second gun I fired, and the third which my Master fired. There was a candle in the chamber, but I cannot tell whether there were one or two windows in it. When I came up into the chamber, there were two guns in it, I fired twice out of the same gun, but I cannot tell whether Mr. Manwarring fired the same gun I did.

At the time I and my master fired, the street below was full of people, and the mob were throwing sticks, snow-balls, &c. It was pretty dark, but I don’t know but there might be a little moon. I can’t tell whether the guns my master and I fired, were fired before or after the firing by the soldiers.

When I went from Mr. Hudson’s to the Custom-house, I passed through the lane that leads from the Market to the Custom-house, (Royal-exchange-lane) and I did not see the Sentry-box or any soldiers near the Custom house; there were many people round there in the street.

Immediately after I went down stairs, I went out of the house and saw a great number of people throwing snow-balls and sticks, but I saw no soldiers. I returned to Mr. Hudson’s house, Mr. Hudson and his wife were then at home, and no other person in the house.

Earlier Charles had declared, “I ran home as fast as I could, and set up all night in my master’s kitchen.”

At the trial, attorneys asked the French boy again “where he was when be heard the report of his master’s gun?” He said “he was quite down stairs,” thus not able to declare positively that Manwaring had shot at the crowd but certainly implying he had.

Asked whether William Molineux had asked him about his story, Charles said “he was in the goaler’s house with Mrs. Otis the prison-keeper’s wife, Mr. Wallis, deputy sheriff, and Mr. Molineux, and that the latter told him to tell the truth.”

Of course, none of this was the truth. Except, probably, that Hammond Green had only one eye.

TOMORROW: The morning after a Massacre.

Hammond Green on Trial

Most people who follow early American history know that after the Boston Massacre the British soldiers were put on trial for murder. People who study the topic more closely know that there were separate trials for Capt. Thomas Preston and the eight enlisted men.

At those trials John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., handled the defense alongside future Loyalists Robert Auchmuty and Sampson Salter Blowers. They won acquittals for most of the accused, convictions for manslaughter instead of murder for two. Americans remember the Whig lawyers’ work for the soldiers as a touchstone of every defendant’s right to a vigorous legal defense.

But there was a third murder trial after the Massacre which we hear very little about. While the record of the soldiers’ trial was reprinted multiple times in the 1800s, the publishers left out the description of that third trial which was originally printed with it.

That trial grew out of the claims of Charles Bourgate, a teenager of French extraction who worked for Customs official Edward Manwaring. For reasons of his own, Charles accused his master of having fired a gun out of an upper floor of the Customs house at the crowd on King Street.

When the teenager first made this accusation, Manwaring quickly refuted it by bringing in a friend, notary John Munro, to testify that the two of them had been somewhere else at the time. In addition, Hammond Green and Thomas Greenwood testified that they had been in that room of the Customs House during the violence, not seeing Manwaring or anyone else shoot out the windows.

Bourgate then revised his testimony to say that both Manwaring and Munro had been up in the room with guns. And that Hammond Green had yanked him into the Customs House to shoot a gun as well. This made no sense, but it allowed the Boston Whigs to arrest all four of those men and discount their testimony—after all, one should expect accused murderers to lie to protect themselves. Soon the town was proclaiming that it had evidence for a Customs service conspiracy against the people.

It looks like the judicial system recognized the relative weaknesses of this case. While Capt. Preston and the soldiers remained in jail until their trial, Green was released on bond on 7 April, as this document from the Boston Public Library collection shows. It identified Green as a “Boat builder.” His sureties were fellow boatbuilder Thomas Hitchbourn and the printers Richard Draper of the Boston News-Letter and John Green and Joseph Russell of the Boston Post-Boy.

The Customs men’s trial finally started on 12 December, after the soldiers’ ended. Samuel Quincy (shown above) had the difficult task of prosecuting. Bourgate repeated the latest version of his story under oath. Another youth (“Some people thought him foolish”) described seeing flashes from the Customs House windows. Then the defense called its witnesses.

Four merchants stated they had seen no shots from the windows. One of those men, Edward Payne, had been wounded in the Massacre, so he had no reason to cover up anything. Elizabeth Avery testified that she had watched the shooting with Hammond Green:

There was no other people in this room, (except them I have mentioned) during the whole time of my being there, but Thomas Greenwood who came in and went out again in a minute. Nor was there any gun or pistol, or candle in the room. Nor was the door of the balcony or any of the windows of the chamber opened that evening to my knowledge, and I verily believe they were not. The French Boy, who has just been sworn in this Court was not there that evening, nor did I ever see him there in my life. Nor was Mr. Manwarring or Mr Munroe there on that evening.

Hammond’s sister Ann stated the same.

Later the defense attorneys called a man who had spent time in the Boston jail with Charles Bourgate and said the boy had boasted of the reward he would get for perjuring himself. Charles denied that, but the jury cleared the Customs men of murder without getting up from their seats. The acquittal even made the London Chronicle.

I can’t tell if Hammond Green worked for the Customs service in 1770 or simply lived with his father who did. But by the time the war broke out, he was on the payroll as a tidesman. In March 1776 Hammond Green evacuated to Halifax with the British army, leaving behind his wife, Mary, and their child. In July 1777 the Massachusetts legislature granted permission for them to join him in Nova Scotia. Mary died in the following years, and in 1785 Hammond married Elizabeth Mott, young daughter of a former Royal Artillery mattross. Green was still working as a tidesman at Halifax in 1807, thirty-seven years after being tried and acquitted for the Boston Massacre.

Charles Bourgate: questionable witness

Charles Bourgate (whose name was also rendered as Charles Bourgat, Charles Bourgatte, and even Charlotte Bourgatte) was yet another youth caught up in the Boston Massacre. In March 1770, he was indentured to Edward Manwaring, a Customs officer who normally worked in Douglastown on the Gaspé peninsula in Canada. They had spent that winter in Boston, living with a family named Hudson on Back Street. According to various sources, Charles had been born in Bordeaux, was fourteen years old, and could not sign his own name.

There are two conflicting versions of what Charles Bourgate did on the night of the Massacre. He said that he left the Hudsons’ when church bells rang to see what the alarm was. When he got to the Customs House, one of the family who lived in that building, Hammond Green, yanked him inside, and several men forced him upstairs. A tall man with a sword-cane loaded three guns and forced Charles to fire two of them out the window. The boy insisted that he had shot “up the street and in the air.” He then left the room as his master Manwaring fired the third gun. The tall man offered him money to keep quiet, but Charles nobly declared he would tell a magistrate what had happened if asked. He then ran back to the Hudsons.

And indeed, a few days after the shooting Charles did tell Justice Richard Dana this story. In response, Manwaring produced a friend, John Munroe, who swore that the two had been together at the Hudsons’ house all evening. After thinking hard in jail overnight, Charles told Dana that he remembered a man named Munroe had been at the Customs House, too. That made Munroe into a potential defendant, so he couldn’t be an exculpatory witness. Both men, Green, and another Customs employee were indicted for murder, though only Charles was put in jail. This was a form of protective custody, I suspect, as well as a way to make sure he didn’t disappear.

In a 16 Mar 1770 letter to the Boston Gazette, Manwaring described Charles as “a boy under age, without principle, sense, or education, and indeed unacquainted with our language.” But many Whigs thought the story of “the French boy” had exposed the dreadful conspiracy within the Customs office that they had long suspected. Boston’s official narrative report on the “horrid Massacre,” written mainly by James Bowdoin, placed great weight on his testimony. Henry Pelham drew a gun firing from an upper window of the Customs House in his engraving of the Massacre, which Paul Revere copied.

By the time the Customs officials’ trial started on 12 December, however, people seemed much more dubious. Capt. Thomas Preston and most of the British soldiers had been acquitted, with two convicted of manslaughter. Charles told his story again. Defense attorneys quickly put up witnesses who said they had seen no shots from the Customs House. Two women who lived in the Customs House said they had watched the confrontation from the very room that Charles described, and there had been no men with guns.

Elizabeth Hudson then offered the other story about what Charles had done back on 5 March. She testified that Manwaring and Munroe had been at her house all night. And as for Charles, she said, his master had “kept him there the whole evening, until after the bells had all ceased ringing, and until after ten o’clock.”

The court brought Charles back to the stand and asked what he had to say about Hudson’s testimony. He insisted he had told the truth. The judges summoned four men known for speaking French well and asked them to question the boy. He passed up the opportunity to claim that this was all a linguistic misunderstanding and stuck to his story.

The defense attorney then called James Penny, a debtor who had been living in the jail. He testified that Charles had admitted:

That what he testified to the Grand Jury and before the Justices…was in every particular false, and that he did swear in that manner by the persuasion of William Molineux, who told him he would take him from his master and provide for him, and that Mr. Molineux frightened him by telling him if he refused to swear against his master and Mr. Munro the mob in Boston would kill him: and farther that Mrs. Waldron, the wife of Mr. Waldron a taylor in Back-street, who sells ginger bread and drams, gave him the said Charles gingerbread and cheese, and desired him to swear against his master.

Charles denied that his testimony could be bought for gingerbread and cheese, but he had no credibility left. The jury acquitted all the Customs men without getting up from their seats to confer. The judges sent Charles back to jail to face perjury charges. Molineux soon placed angry notices in the newspapers declaring he had never told Charles to say anything but the truth. And I think he may very well have told the boy that, but in a way that made clear exactly what he wanted to hear.

In the spring, Charles was convicted of perjury and sentenced to stand for an hour at the whipping-post on King Street and suffer twenty-five lashes. On 28 March, the merchant John Rowe wrote in his journal:

This Day The French Boy & a Charcoal Follow stood in the Pillory. The French Boy was to have been whipt but the Populous hindered the Sheriff doing his duty.

Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf oversaw the end of the job two days later.

And then Charles Bourgate disappears from the historical record. Did he have to go back to Manwaring, or had that official gladly tossed him aside? Did Molineux or the other local Whigs look after him? Did he wish to return to French-speaking Canada, or to Bordeaux? Alas, he’s a lost youth.

TOMORROW: Or is he?