“We have esteemed him to be an honest and peaceable citizen”

In May 1777 Boston had a series of town meetings concerned chiefly with its military defenses.

On 17 May that discussion went further to assembling a list of “Persons belonging to this Town, as have been endeavouring since the 19th. of April 1775, to counteract the united Struggles of this & the neighbouring States.”

The town meeting voted to have those twenty-nine men “apprehended & confined”—while recognizing that would require an order from the Massachusetts Council.

Boston’s official list of suspected Loyalists included the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, Dr. James Lloyd and four other physicians, William Jackson of the Brazen Head, and others. Three of those men were already in jail: Hopestill Capen, Thomas Edwards, and Benjamin Davis, Sr.

On 22 May the town elected seven representatives to the Massachusetts General Court, with John Pitts and Ellis Gray getting the most votes—more than 500.

Some prominent people disagreed with the town’s list of Loyalists. Soon after the new legislative session started, the Council received a petition “praying the Court to give Orders for the Removal of Hopestill Capen, a Prisoner in Boston Goal.” That petition came from a group headed by Robert Pierpont, a Roxbury merchant and official with impeccable Patriot credentials.

Furthermore, it appears Patience Capen had collected ninety signatures on this statement, transcribed in American Archives:

We, the subscribers, inhabitants of Boston, do hereby certify, that Mr. Hopestill Capen is well known to us, and we have esteemed him to be an honest and peaceable citizen; some of us in particular, have experienced his kind and faithful services in securing and saving our interest and property when we were out of the town; and we all join with the petitioner that he may be released from gaol and restored to his family.

The phrase “when were were out of the town” referred to the siege of Boston. Capen had evidently looked after other shopkeepers’ goods or real estate.

Again, those signers included some men deeply involved in Boston’s Patriot movement and town government: William Dawes, Samuel Dashwood, Moses Grant, Timothy Newell, Edward Payne, John Scollay, Pool Spear, Henry Bass, and so on. Other signers were more moderate Whigs—Ezekiel Price, John Andrews, Thomas Fleet, Thomas Handysyd Peck, Duncan Ingraham. But none of those names would raise political or religious suspicions.

Ninety signatures on a petition was a very impressive number. Nonetheless, those men would have been a decided minority in a town meeting attended by up to 500 citizens worried about the town being attacked from without or undermined from within.

On 18 June, Council member Dr. Samuel Holton brought the businessmen’s petition to the House with a proposal to form a committee “to examine the Commission of the Court of Enquiry, and their Doings thereon at large, together with this Petition, and report what is best to be done thereon.” The House approved that step the next day.

And then, it appears, nothing happened for months.

COMING UP: The repetition of Patience Capen.

“Touching the delivery of the Papers found upon Mrs. Hill”

As recounted yesterday, on 21 Oct 1776 Boston’s committee of correspondence, inspection, and safety questioned Elizabeth and Mary Hill about the documents they had tried to carry into British-occupied New York.

One of those letters was from Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr. The Patriot authorities were pretty certain he had spied for Gen. Thomas Gage, but they were still lacking solid evidence. If that letter had been incriminating, they would have used it.

In the second letter, Elizabeth’s husband John suggested that the merchant John Timmins was a fellow Loyalist.

And when asked who had brought John’s letter out of the Boston jail to her, Elizabeth said it might have been Richard Newton.

The committee sprang into action:

Collo. [Nathaniel] Barber and Mr. [Ebenezer] Dorr were appointed to go to Mr. [Alexander?] Orracks where Newton lodges in order to secure his Papers for the Inspection of the Committee.

A Complaint signed by the chairman [William Davis], was entered with Mr. Justice [Joseph] Greanleaff one of the Court of Enquiry; praying that the said Newton, might be immediately apprehended, & examined, touching the delivery of the Papers found upon Mrs Hill.

Richard Newton appears to have been a merchant, but not one who had been in Boston for long. He had evacuated Boston on the brig Elizabeth in March along with the Hills, William Jackson, Crean Brush, and other hopeful Loyalists. But Capt. John Manley captured that ship.

In April the Massachusetts Council had ordered Newton, Jackson, Brush, and a couple of other men to be detained in the Boston jail. Later they sent John Hill to jail, too.

In August, Newton signed a bond for good behavior, so he was presumably let out then. It seems quite plausible that Newton brought out a letter from Hill to his wife. That letter probably had more to say about the family’s survival than Boston’s defenses. After all, how much could Hill have learned over the summer in jail?

On 22 October the committee met “at their Chamber in King Street,” perhaps in the Town House. This time Ellis Gray chaired.

The Committee appointed to secure Mr. Newtons Papers Reported, that they had examined the same and could not find any one of a criminal nature among them.

Voted, that Mr. Newton shall have his Trunks of Papers returned him by the Committee — also —

Voted, that the Complaint entered with Mr. Justice Greanleaff, one of the Court of Enquiry against Richard Newton be withdrawn.

As for John Timmins, he was also a merchant. In 1768 he had married the young widow Mary (Olney) Greene, and they had children baptized at Trinity Church. During the tea crisis of 1773 he was agent for the cargo on the Beaver and publicly promised not to unload the East India Company’s tea.

The following year, Timmins signed the merchants’ addresses to Govs. Thomas Hutchinson and Thomas Gage. All of which is to say Timmins really did look like a Loyalist before the war. But he hadn’t left town with the British military.

The committee record says:

Mr. John Timmons name having been mentioned in one of the Papers found upon Mrs. Hill, the Committee sent for her Husband who gave the Paper, and having examined him strictly with respect to what he had written, together with his Wife and Daughter, and also made inquiry of Mr Timmins — the Question was put viz. — “Whether the Committee are fully satisfied, that Mr. Timmons conduct with respect to what passed between Mrs. Hill & himself has been quite unexceptionable — passed in the Affirmative unanimously.

The letters that Elizabeth and Mary Hill had been carrying therefore turned out to be less incriminating than first newspaper reports hinted. Yes, John Hill had communicated to them from the jail. Yes, he’d written about Timmins as a potential helper. Yes, Mary Hill and Ralph Cunningham, attached to the British army, were on their way to marrying. But the committee found no sensitive military information or the like.

Nonetheless, Elizabeth and Mary Hill were still locked up in the Boston jail in February 1777. According to John’s claim to the Loyalists Commission, the family “were all tried For their lives, but not Condemned.” Instead, “In November 1777, they were Exchanged, went to Halifax, and afterwards to New York…”

As for John Timmins and Richard Newton, both those men eventually left Boston for Britain. They decided to be Loyalists in the end.