When Owen Richards Sued Joseph Akley for Assault

My last posting about Joseph Akley argued that despite being indentured away from his impoverished family at the age of ten and seeing his master die five years later, Akley turned out okay.

But, Boston 1775 readers might ask, we started looking into young Joseph only because Owen Richards sued him for being part of a tar-and-feathers attack in May 1770. Might that suggest the teenager ran wild and got into trouble?

That’s still a possibility, but today I’ll argue that Akley’s relationship to his master’s family played into both how he got sued and how he got out of that jam.

To start with, let’s go back to the attack on Owen Richards. He was a tide waiter for the Customs service, involved in that department’s disputes with John Hancock in 1768. On 18 May 1770, Richards confiscated a Connecticut ship for smuggling, and that evening a mob came to his house.

It makes sense to assume that most of the people in that mob were sailors, waterfront workers, and others with a grudge against the Customs service. The most prominent person Richards sued for assaulting him was Joseph Doble, a sea captain and son of a sea captain.

A teen-aged wigmaker like Joseph Akley could have joined that crowd, but he wouldn’t have led it. Why, then, did Owen Richards single out Joseph as another of only three people he sued for assault?

My answer starts in 1758 when peruke-maker Timothy Winship’s daughter Margaret, aged twenty-three, married John Gregory at King’s Chapel. Nine months later the couple returned to that church for the baptism of their first child, John.

There were three sponsors at that baptism. One was the mother’s older sister, Sarah. Back here I guessed that she was helping to manage the Winship household and her younger siblings after her mother’s death.

Another sponsor was Owen Richards.

Thus, Richards was close to members of the Winship family. He may well have met the indentured boy who arrived in the peruke-maker’s house in 1762, seen him grow up at church, and even attended the master’s funeral.

I theorize that Richards sued Joseph Akley not because that teenager was a leader of the tar-and-feathers mob but because he recognized the kid’s face.

We don’t have many records of that lawsuit, but we know who represented Akley and his fellow defendants in court: John Adams. He collected fees of 12s. and 48s. for defending the teen, more than twice what he charged Joseph Doble.

Beside the second payment Adams wrote: “at Elizabeth Winship’s Instance.” That was Timothy Winship’s widow, who had raised Joseph Akley since 1762 and was evidently still looking after him.

TOMORROW: A barber at the Tea Party?

What Would Become of Young Joseph Akley?

When Timothy Winship died at the end of 1767, the apprentice he’d taken in for Boston’s Overseers of the Poor, Joseph Akley, was fifteen years old.

Though Joseph had been living with and working for the peruke maker for five years, he was still five years short of his majority.

He didn’t have the legal standing, and he probably didn’t have all the skills, to set up his own shop.

Joseph did have parents nearby in Boston. However, that family had its own troubles. In the spring of 1768, three younger Akley children were admitted into the alsmhouse, to be bound out to masters outside Boston by the fall.

So what happened to Joseph? I haven’t found many clues from the next few years, and that’s a good thing. Because Joseph did not reappear on the Overseers of the Poor records, unlike his parents and his brother Thomas.

It seems likely that Joseph was a bright lad. Winship chose him as an apprentice ahead of his older brother, and for a profession that required social graces.

Furthermore, the Winship shop was still a going concern when the peruke-maker died in 1767. Timothy Winship still had his shop and his tools. His estate owed wages to George Bellamy, presumably a journeyman.

As executrix, the widow Elizabeth Winship collected on debts; paid off creditors like Bellamy, landlord Hugh Hall, Dr. Nathaniel Perkins, and Dr. Joseph Warren; and came out ahead. She still had her husband’s goods and a pew at King’s Chapel. She continued to sponsor friends’ baptisms there.

I suspect that Elizabeth Winship or other wigmakers in her husband’s circle saw potential in Joseph, already partly trained, as well as an obligation. Someone kept him on as an apprentice, but because that was a private arrangement we don’t know who.

The biggest clues about how Joseph Akley weathered the death of his master is how he appeared in Boston records after the Revolutionary War. As of 1796, he was established as a hairdresser on “Hanover street, corner Wing’s Lane.” He owned a little real estate.

Furthermore, in adult life Akley was an Anglican/Episcopalian. His parents were Congregationalists, like most Bostonians, but he joined the denomination of the Winship family. That suggests how much influence his apprenticeship had on him.

No doubt Joseph Akley faced some challenges after Winship’s death. Being sued for tarring and feathering a royal official was one. Joseph may have had to grow up quickly. He married in May 1771, a few weeks short of his nineteenth birthday, and was a father before he turned twenty-one. But he was able to support that family with the skills he learned.

COMING UP: What about that lawsuit?

What Timothy Winship Died With

When peruke-maker Timothy Winship died, he made his third wife, Elizabeth, his executrix.

Late in 1767 she filed an inventory of her husband’s property with the probate judge, Thomas Hutchinson (who was also Massachusetts lieutenant governor and chief justice of the superior court).

Winship wasn’t a rich man. He owned no real estate, and a lot of his goods were assessed as common or old. On the other hand, his household had touches of gentility: four feather beds and four pillows, a “Square Mahogany Table,” two pictures under glass, two wineglasses and a decanter, six teacups and saucers, a silver watch.

Required by law to serve in the militia, Winship owned two guns with bayonets and two swords.

The inventory listed Winship’s books:

• “1 Bible” (3s.)
• “Hervey’s Life and Letters, 2 books, 1 lost” (4s.), probably Collection of the Letters of James Hervey, to which is prefixed an account of his Life and Death, by Thomas Birch (1760, reprinted in Boston two years later by Zechariah Fowle and Samuel Draper). The Rev. James Hervey (1714-1758) was an Anglican theologian. 
• “Life and Reign of Queen Ann” (2s.8d.), probably Abel Boyer’s History of the Life and Reign of Queen Anne (1722).
• “1 Companions the Feasts & Fasts of the Church of England” (2s.8d.), or Robert Nelson’s A Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England (1704), which Brent S. Sirota describes as “arguably the most popular and important Anglican devotional work of the eighteenth century.”

In her study of colonial New England probate inventories from 1774, Alice Hanson Jones found that only the top fifth of inventoried estates contained non-religious books. Winship’s book about Queen Anne was therefore unusual.

Another page of Winship’s inventory detailed what the assessors found in his shop. So this is what you might find walking into a middling peruke-maker’s workspace in 1767 Boston:

• “6 ounces of white Horse hair @ 1/6”
• “3 lb. Brown ditto 16/ p lb.”
• “1 lb. Grey & Brown”
• “18 oz. Goat ditto 2/ p oz.”
• “7 oz. Mo. Grown hair”
• “4 Blocks @ 6/”
• “1 Card & brush 8/”
• “1 pr. brushes 3/”
• “1 doz. Razors @ 7/”
• “1 Hone”
• “7 Wiggs @ 12/”
• “7 1/2 Pewter More [?] @ 10”
• “1 Looking Glass”
• “1 Lamp Lanthorn”
• “1 Table”
• “2 old Chairs”
• “1 Round Do.”

All told, Winship’s tools and inventory were worth a little less than £14.

TOMORROW: Where did Winship’s death leave young Joseph Akley?

Timothy Winship, Peruke Maker of Boston

Yesterday I described how in October 1762 the Boston Overseers of the Poor indentured ten-year-old Joseph Akley to a man named Timothy Winship.

The Akley family was falling on hard times. In the following years Joseph’s parents would end up (separately) in the Boston almshouse, and most of his siblings would be bound out to other households across the province, from Springfield to Maine.

Joseph’s placement was unusual in several ways. He was the first Akley child to be apprenticed even though he wasn’t the oldest. He remained in Boston instead of being sent to a smaller town. And he was to learn a trade that catered to the genteel class rather than housework or making wheels and barrels.

Timothy Winship was a “peruke maker,” meaning he made wigs and shaved gentlemen so they looked good wearing them. In an eighteenth-century British seaport, that meant steady work.

There are two genealogical sources of information about Timothy Winship. One consists of the records of Boston and its Anglican churches. The other is the Barbour Collection’s index of vital records from Middletown, Connecticut, even though there’s no sign Timothy Winship ever lived in that town. I’m guessing that descendants settled there and inserted their family’s backstory into the local record.

According to the Barbour Collection, Timothy Winship was born on 3 May 1712 in Westminster, England. That’s close but not an exact match to the Boston report that he was fifty-seven years old in 1767. Not being from an old, Puritan New England family explains why he was an Anglican.

Boston records state that Winship married Margaret Mirick of Charlestown on 5 Aug 1731, with the Rev. Hull Abbott of that town presiding. The bride appears in the Connecticut data as Margaret Merrick. Their children listed in the Middletown records were:

• Samuel, born 3 May 1732
• Sarah, 20 Jan 1734
• Margaret, Nov 1735
• Timothy, 3 Dec 1737
• Joseph, 2 Oct 1739
• John, 30 Mar 1742
• Jacob, 6 Jan 1744
• Anna, 26 Apr 1746

Of those, King’s Chapel recorded baptisms of Timothy, Jr., on 30 Dec 1737; Joseph on 12 Oct 1739; and Jacob on 9 Feb 1744.

Timothy Winship never advertised in Boston’s newspapers, but there are signs that he became an established tradesman. He owned an enslaved man named Caesar, who on 23 Sept 1742 married a free black woman named Margaret Codner at Old South. That same year, Winship took in a couple as tenants from Cambridge, which we know because Boston cited him for not informing the selectmen. In 1748, the Boston town meeting elected Winship as one of the Scavengers responsible for keeping the streets clean.

The peruke maker also suffered losses. Margaret Winship died “about one hour after birth of Anna,” the couple’s youngest, according to the Barbour Collection. King’s Chapel records state that Timothy Winship’s wife was buried on 29 Apr 1746.

A little less than a year later, on 9 Apr 1747, Timothy Winship married Sarah Rogers at King’s Chapel. That was none too soon because the couple had a son, William, baptized less than eight months later on 28 November. A second son, Benjamin, was baptized on 1 Jan 1750.

Sadly, that new Winship family did not thrive. William died before age seven and was buried from the new King’s Chapel building on 1 June 1754. Timothy’s wife Sarah died on 23 Jan 1755 at age thirty-eight. Their surviving son Benjamin died on 10 Jan 1758 at age eight. (The Connecticut records say nothing about this family.)

This time, Timothy Winship found a new wife even more quickly. On 25 Aug 1755, seven months after becoming a widower again, he married Elizabeth Vila of Watertown at Christ Church in the North End. I see no sign of Timothy and Elizabeth having more children of their own.

Thus, when Timothy Winship took in Joseph Akley in 1762, the peruke maker was about fifty years old and thrice married. His youngest surviving child, Anna, was in her mid-teens. His oldest, Samuel, had married Sarah Miller of Glastonbury, Connecticut, in October 1758 and had twin girls with several more kids on the way.

We can see in the King’s Chapel records that Timothy Winship and his wives were in a network of other Boston Anglicans, sponsoring the baptism of each other’s babies. Notably, on 6 Sept 1765 Timothy, Elizabeth, and Timothy’s daughter Sarah all sponsored the baptism of a baby born to James and Mary Vila, probably from Elizabeth’s family.

That eventful year of 1765 brought big changes to the family. The brothers Timothy, John, and Jacob Winship all died in their twenties. On 28 October, Sarah Winship married Nicholas Butler, a twenty-seven-year-old barber, at King’s Chapel. As the eldest daughter, she had most likely shouldered the household and childrearing responsibilities after her mother had died. Now, at age thirty-one, she was leaving to start a family of her own.

On 3 Mar 1767, Timothy Winship wrote out his will. He declared that he was in good health but wanted to tend to his business and his soul. Owning no real estate, he left all his personal property “unto my Beloved Wife Elizabeth Winship,” to be shared after her death among his children Samuel, Joseph, and Anna Winship. For Sarah Butler, about to give birth to her first child, Winship left only five shillings, to be paid out after her stepmother’s death.

On 12 Nov 1767, Timothy Winship, “Peruke Maker,” was buried out of King’s Chapel.

TOMORROW: A wigmaker’s estate.