“Wounded in the cheek, and it is tho’t will not recover”

Lt. Thomas Hawkshaw went out of Boston with his soldiers in the 5th Regiment of Foot on 19 Apr 1775.

He came back wounded. The always helpful Lt. Frederick Mackenzie recorded that Hawkshaw was wounded on the cheek.

Almost half a century later, provincial militiaman Joseph Thaxter recalled this rumor:

Lieutenant Hawkstone, said to be the greatest beauty of the British army, had his cheeks so badly wounded that it disfigured him much, of which he bitterly complained.

That looks like a memory of Lt. Hawkshaw. But I can’t find any British source inside Boston that includes a handsome lieutenant’s lament. That’s the sort of thing fellow officers would be likely to mention or remember.

If Hawkshaw was indeed handsome, that might be why Bostonians remembered him being at disputes and couldn’t identify the other officers with him. That might also make it more appealing for Patriots to imagine him grieving his lost beauty.

I don’t think Thaxter is a reliable source here. Not only did he recall the lieutenant’s name imperfectly, but he described the man being wounded at Concord’s North Bridge, and he wasn’t. Hawkshaw was probably hit between Lexington and Charlestown.

Ezekiel Russell’s “A Bloody Butchery, by the King’s Troops” broadside offered readers outside Boston another significant detail:

Lieutenant Hawkshaw was wounded in the cheek, and it is tho’t will not recover.

For at least the first week, many people expected the lieutenant to die.

By 6 May, that medical prognosis had improved. David Greene wrote from Boston of “Hawkshaw, of the 5th, badly wounded, but like to recover.”

TOMORROW: How bad was Lt. Hawkshaw’s wound?

Talks on Bullet Strikes and Women Printers

Sestercentennial talks are starting to come fast. I’ll have some of mine to announce soon, and here are two happening tonight and tomorrow.

Wednesday, 29 January, 7:00 P.M., at the Acton Town Hall and livestreamed
“‘Dreadful Were the Vestiges of War’: Bullet Strikes from the First Day of the American Revolution”
Joel Bohy

Bohy, historic arms & militaria specialist at Blackstone Valley Auctions and Estates, will discuss the arms and ammunition used by both British and provincial forces on April 19, 1775, as well as the battle damage that remains. Modern shooting-incident reconstruction, archaeology, live fire studies, and new research sheds new light on the heavy fighting along the route of the British retreat back to Boston.

This free event is an Acton 250 program, and a recording will be available through Acton TV.

Thursday, 30 January, 7:00 P.M., at the Westford Museum
“In the Margins: Women Printers in the 18th Century”
Michele Gabrielson

In the 18th century, newspapers and pamphlets were crucial in spreading information and stoking the fires of conflict during the revolutionary period. Although printing was primarily seen as a masculine profession, women—such as widows, wives, and daughters—stepped up to embrace the responsibilities of a free press. These women not only set the type but, in some cases, also owned and managed their own printing businesses. This lecture will lay out the essential contributions of women in the printing industry leading up to the American Revolution.

Gabrielson is an award-winning educator, a historical interpreter, and secretary for the recently formed Mercy Otis Warren Society.

The suggested donation for this event is $10 per person.

(The picture above shows the broadside “A Bloody Butchery, by the British Troops,” issued after the 19th of April by Ezekiel Russell, whose wife Sarah helped run the print shop.)

Looking at Lexington and Concord through Eighteenth-Century Eyes

Last month Alexander Cain at Historical Nerdery announced a resource for people researching the Battle of Lexington and Concord ahead of next spring’s Sestercentennial: a list of links to eyewitness accounts of the day.

That listing will be very useful, and it can grow. Perforce these are texts that have been digitized in one way or another. I’m sure that more lurk within books, newspapers, and letters. It’s a matter of ferreting them out and/or digitizing them in usable forms.

For instance, here is the list’s link to Gen. Thomas Gage’s instructions to Lt. Col. Francis Smith for the march to Concord on 18–19 April.

We also have what appears to be Gage’s notes or first draft of those instructions, quoted in General Gage’s Informers (1932) by Allan French. A digital version of that book can be borrowed from the Internet Archive, at least for now. Look on pages 29–30.

Since the Massachusetts Historical Society has scanned merchant John Rowe’s diaries, we can see his response to the news coming into Boston here. A transcription of what a descendant thought were the most important parts of that diary was published a century ago. Among the details one can find only in the handwritten journal is that on 20 April Capt. John Linzee, R.N., dined and spent the evening at Rowe’s house after fending off an attack on his ship on the Charles River.

It’s possible to identify the sources of some anonymous accounts. One resource on the list, Ezekiel Russell’s “Bloody Butchery by the British Troops” broadside, includes text headlined “SALEM, April 25.” Those paragraphs commence: “LAST Wednesday, the nineteenth of April, the troops of his Britannic Majesty commenced hostilities upon the people of this province…”

The preceding paragraphs come with a source citation—not coincidentally, to Russell’s own Salem Gazette newspaper. But Russell didn’t give his competition publicity by revealing that he took the second and longer passage from Samuel Hall’s Essex Gazette for 25 April. That text was later imperfectly transcribed in Peter Force’s American Archives.

The 3 May Massachusetts Spy on the list includes an unsourced story about what happened “When the expresses [from Boston] got about a mile beyond Lexington.” That story matches one that William Dawes’s family recalled hearing from him, revealing that Dawes was probably printer Isaiah Thomas’s source.

Among the lately revealed visual resources is this hand-drawn map in the Library of Congress. I’m convinced by Ed Redmond’s hypothesis that Ens. Henry DeBerniere created this map ahead of the march to Concord. It thus offers a look at what British army officers knew of the countryside west of Boston. (I discussed details of that map starting here.)

TOMORROW: A source from May 1775.

“When forty-two countrymen Sure bid their friends adieu.”

Ezra Lunt and Henry-Walter Tinges printed the Essex Journal in Newburyport with the financial backing of Isaiah Thomas, who made a hasty move from Boston to Worcester in April 1775.

On 26 May, the Essex Journal published this verse in a section of the back page titled “The Parnassian Packet”:

A Funeral ELEGY, to the Immortal Memory of those Worthies, who were slain in the Battle of CONCORD, April 19, 1775.

AID me ye nine! my muse assist,
A sad tale to relate,
When such a number of brave men
Met their unhappy fate.
At Lexington they met their foe
Completely all equip’d,
Their guns and swords made glitt’ring show,
But their base scheme was nipp’d.
Americans, go drop a tear
Where your slain brethren lay!
O! mourn and sympathize for them!
O! weep this very day!
What shall we say to this loud call
From the Almighty sent;
It surely bids both great and small
Seek GOD’s face and repent.
Words can’t express the ghastly scene
That here presents to view,
When forty-two brave countrymen
Sure bid their friends adieu.
To think how awful it must seem,
To hear widows relent
Their husbands and their children
Who to the grave was sent.
The tender babes, nay those unborn,
O! dismal cruel death!
To snatch their fondest parents dear,
And leave them thus bereft.
O! Lexington, your loss is great!
Alas! too great to tell,
But justice bids me to relate
What to you has befell.
Ten of your hardy, bravest sons,
Some in their prime did fall;
May we no more hear noise of guns
To terrify us all.
Let’s not forget the Danvers race
So late in battle slain,
Their courage and their valor shown
Upon the crimson’d plain.
Sev’n of your youthful sprightly sons
In the fierce fight were slain,
O! may your loss be all made up,
And prove a lasting gain.
Cambridge and Medford’s loss is great,
Though not like Acton’s town,
Where three fierce military sons
Met their untimely doom.
Menotomy and Charlestown met
A sore and heavy stroke,
In losing five young brave townsmen
Who fell by tyrant’s yoke.
Unhappy Lynn and Beverly,
Your loss I do bemoan,
Five of your brave sons in dust doth lye,
Who late were in their bloom.
Bedford, Woburn, Sudbury, all,
Have suffer’d most severe,
You miss five of your choicest chore,
On them let’s drop a tear.
Concord your Captain’s fate rehearse,
His loss is felt severe,
Come, brethren, join with me in verse,
His mem’ry hence revere.
O ’Squire Gardiner’s death we feel,
And sympathizing mourn,
Let’s drop a tear when it we tell,
And view his hapless urn.
We sore regret poor Pierce’s death,
A stroke to Salem’s town,
Where tears did flow from ev’ry brow,
When the sad tidings come.
The groans of wounded, dying men,
Would melt the stoutest soul,
O! how it strikes thro’ ev’ry vein.
My flesh and blood runs cold.
May all prepare to meet their fate
At GOD’s tribunal bar,
And may war’s terrible alarm
For death us now prepare.
Your country calls you far and near,
America’s sons ’wake,
Your helmet, buckler, and your spear,
The LORD’s own arm now take
His shield will keep us from all harm,
Tho’ thousands gainst us rise,
His buckler we must sure put on,
If we would win the prize.

This tribute to the local men killed the previous month started with the town of Lexington, not just because redcoats had fired the first fatal shots there but because that town lost more men than any other.

Seven Danvers men were killed in and around Jason Russell’s house in Menotomy, so that town got the next mention—which the newspaper’s Essex County audience probably appreciated.

Eventually the poet got to individuals, naming a couple of men at the top of society—Capt. James Miles of Concord and Isaac Gardiner, Esq., of Brookline—and Benjamin Pierce of Salem, also killed at the Russell House. Other dead officers went unnamed, however.

Ezekiel Russell printed this poem at the bottom of his “Bloody Butchery of the British Troops” broadside, shown above. You can peruse that page more closely through the American Antiquarian Society, founded by Thomas.

The Russell broadside contained some errors (a missing “brave,” “young” became “your,” another “your” dropped out), suggesting that shop hastily copied the text out of the newspaper. I would have expected the transmission to go the other way: from the Russell print shop, which was known for publishing a young woman’s elegiac verses, to the Essex Journal.

That in turn suggests that Russell didn’t issue the “Bloody Butchery” broadside until more than a month after the battle. Maybe he needed that time to engrave all those coffins.

Fallout from the “Tradesmen’s Protest”

Bostonians gathered on short notice in Faneuil Hall for a town meeting on 5 Nov 1773. Their first act was to choose John Hancock as moderator.

The reason for this meeting was the news that the East India Company was shipping tea to America. By a process not spelled out, the result would be: “our liberties for which we have long struggled, will be lost to them and their Posterity.”

The town’s eventual response to that news was to endorse the resolutions of a Philadelphia meeting condemning the Tea Act, the company, and anyone who cooperated with it.

A closer problem, however, was that some locals had distributed a handbill titled “Tradesmen’s Protest Against the Proceedings of the Merchants Relative to the New Importation of Tea,” printed by Ezekiel Russell. The Massachusetts Historical Society has digitized that flyer here.

A group of merchants, claiming to speak for Boston’s business community, had issued a call to boycott tea. The “Tradesmen’s” handbill responded in kind, also claiming to speak for local businessmen. “You are hereby advised and warned by no means to be taken in by the deceitful Bait of those who falsely stile themselves Friends of Liberty,” it said. “WE are resolved, by Divine Assistance,…to Buy and Sell when and where we please; herein hoping for the Protection of good Government.”

At the town meeting, someone moved for all tradesman to gather on the south side of the hall so they could vote on whether they agreed with this handbill. This question “passed in the Negative, unanimously—there being in the estimation of the Town at least four hundred Tradesmen present.”

That afternoon Ezekiel Russell appeared and addressed the gathering. The official record reads:

He then acquainted the Town that he was the Printer of the Paper called the Tradesmen’s Protest against the Merchants, & that he was paid for the same by the Person who Employed him.—this Information was not given at the desire of the Town; it being their sense, that as a Town they had nothing to do with the Printer or Author of the said Paper——

Russell had a reputation for printing almost anything as long as he was paid. I can’t tell if in this case he kept the name of his customer secret or if town clerk William Cooper chose not to record it. In any event, the point of this item in the meeting record was that Russell was below official notice.

In the morning, “one of the Inhabitants openly declared that he saw Charles Paxton one of the Commissioners of the Customs, giving them away the Day before in Kings Street.” Paxton (shown above) had been one of the most disliked royal officials in Boston for over a decade.

On 10 November, Commissioner Paxton went to justice of the peace Edmund Quincy and swore to a deposition:

WHEREAS a Number of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston being assembled at Faneuil-Hall on Friday the 5th of November Instant, unanimously voted that I the Subscriber was a Distributor of a Paper called the Tradesmen’s Protest—

Now I solemnly declare, that I never was possessed of more than one of said Papers, which I bought for Three Half-Pence of a Boy in the Street, and not finding it worth Notice, in a few Minutes after I gave it to a Bystander, whom to my Knowledge, I never saw before nor since.—And I further declare, that I never before heard such a Paper was published or intended to be published.

Paxton had that testimony published in the Boston News-Letter and Boston Post-Boy, two Loyalist newspapers, over the following week. He remained unpopular.

TOMORROW: Talking to the tea consignees.

The Journey of Phillis Wheatley’s First Published Poem

As related in yesterday’s posting, a storm in September 1767 pushed a schooner packed with whale oil onto Cape Cod.

But that ship wasn’t lost, the cargo was preserved, and nobody died. Not much drama after all.

Nonetheless, the stories of two survivors—evidently Nantucketers Stephen Hussey and Richard Coffin—contained enough emotion to inspire John Wheatley’s enslaved teen-aged servant Phillis to write 24 lines of poetry (plus a prose interlude).

Titled “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” that poem appeared in Samuel Hall’s Newport Mercury on 21 Dec 1767—the first recognized publication by Phillis Wheatley. You can read the lines here alongside Amelia Yeager’s essay about the publication for the Newport Historical Society.

David Waldstreicher starts his new study of the poet, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, with this poem and returns to it often as a touchstone of her work, particularly for her braiding of classical and Calvinist motifs and her ocean imagery.

The poem and its publication raise some small questions beyond the identity of the two men, discussed yesterday. One is why Hussey’s name appears first in the poem’s title and in the anecdote published with it in the newspaper even though Coffin was the ship’s captain and the only person named in the reports of the grounding.

I suspect this was a matter of personality. Hussey seems to have been a sociable man, connecting the Boston and Nantucket business communities before the war; serving in Whig political gatherings; speaking for Nantucket businessmen to both the British and Patriot governments during the war (islanders wanted to stay neutral for both economic and religious reasons); and eventually taking a post with the federal Customs bureau. I suspect he just told the story better.

Another question is whether Phillis Wheatley and the family who owned her sought this publication. I think the answer to that is clear in how the poem appeared in the Boston Post-Boy when that newspaper reprinted it on 11 Jan 1768. The “Wheatley” name was eliminated:

• “belonging to one Mr. Wheatley of Boston” became “belonging to a Gentelman [sic] of Boston”
• “being at Mr. Wheatley’s, and, while at Dinner” became “being at Dinner”
• The name at the bottom of the poem changed from “Phillis Wheatley” to simply “PHILLIS.”

Obviously printers John Green and Joseph Russell thought the Wheatleys didn’t want their surname linked to the poem. They may even have heard directly from the family. However supportive of their protégée and property the Wheatleys became later, at the start of 1768 they were still reticent about what we’d call publicity.

I suspect that’s why this poem didn’t appear in a Boston newspaper until after it could be credited as “From the Newport Mercury.” John Wheatley was a wealthy merchant who occasionally advertised, the sort of gentleman local newspaper printers would want to keep happy.

Still, someone must have circulated the poem privately in manuscript for it to get from Boston to Newport. That might have been the Wheatleys, sharing the news among friends and expecting it to stay private. Conversely, the poem might have been spread by Hussey and Coffin within their Quaker network. (I doubt the teen poet had developed her own out-of-town network yet.)

I tested a couple of other possible explanations for the first publication in Rhode Island:

• Did the Newport Mercury run poetry while the Boston papers weren’t yet in that habit? No, Boston printers shared a lot of poems in the 1760s.
• Was Capt. Coffin’s near-shipwreck bigger news in Rhode Island than in Boston since it involved a Nantucket ship? Not only is Nantucket closer to Newport, but both places had large Quaker communities. However, Samuel Hall didn’t pick up the Boston reports about the schooner grounding. (The Providence Gazette for 10 October did carry the second item, reporting Coffin’s ship was safe.*)

In the end, I think someone in Newport who didn’t know the Wheatleys learned about the poem and the story behind it, and asked the local printer to publish it. Hall in turn was beyond John Wheatley’s reach.

What would have prompted such a Newporter to send to poem to Hall? That person was clearly struck by how the author was “a Negro Girl,” and enslaved at that. That’s not merely a footnote to the poem; it’s in the preface, the implicit reason for printing it.

Even the name “Phillis Wheatley” at the bottom of the poem might be significant. Many other early publications credited the poet only by her first name. For example, Ezekiel Russell’s broadside of her elegy to the Rev. George Whitefield said: “By PHILLIS, a Servant Girl of 17 Years of Age, Belonging to Mr. J. WHEATLEY, of Boston.” By 1770 the Wheatley family had become comfortable having their names attached to such publications, but the prevailing style was still not to formally acknowledge enslaved people’s surnames.

Those details make me think whoever asked Hall to print the poem wanted readers of the Newport Mercury to know an enslaved girl had written it—and perhaps to see that that girl was an individual. And, though nothing about the presentation commented on the injustice of slavery, was it possible to avoid that thought?

(* In the database that I access through Genealogy Bank, the 10 October and 3 October Providence Gazettes are mushed together. Looks like something went wrong when they were photographed for microfilm.)

The Mystery of Phillis Wheatley’s First Published Poem

Earlier this month the Newport Historical Society shared Amelia Yeager’s essay on a question about the career of Phillis Wheatley: Why did the teenager’s poetry first appear in print in the 21 Dec 1767 Newport Mercury rather than a Boston newspaper?

Yeager phrases the question as “Why would Phillis Wheatley publish her first poem in a Newport paper rather than one of the many newspapers local to Boston?” She writes of printer Samuel Hall’s choice “to accept the poem,” as if it had been a submission to a literary magazine.

As much as I’m all for recognizing the agency of enslaved people, I doubt the young poet had much say in that matter. Not only was she enslaved, but she was still in her early teens. Furthermore, in a society without copyrights, writers rarely had control over where their words might appear in print. In modern terms, printers compensated young creatives with exposure.

In the Newport Mercury Hall prefaced this poem with the cover message he had received:

To the PRINTER.

Please to insert the following Lines, composed by a Negro Girl (belonging to one Mr. Wheatley of Boston) on the following Occasion, viz. Messrs Hussey and Coffin, as undermentioned, belonging to Nantucket, being bound from thence to Boston, narrowly escaped being cast away on Cape-Cod, in one of the late Storms; upon their Arrival, being at Mr. Wheatley’s, and, while at Dinner, told of their narrow Escape, this Negro Girl at the same Time ’tending Table, heard the Relation, from which she composed the following Verses.

That paragraph wasn’t written from the perspective of the “Negro Girl” herself, or even from the family of her legal owner John Wheatley, identified unfamiliarly as “one Mr. Wheatley of Boston.” Rather, it’s the voice of someone who heard this fascinating anecdote and wanted to pass it on. (To be sure, anyone in the Wheatley family could have adopted that persona, but it doesn’t match how they presented her later work.)

Likewise, Yeager also writes:

Later in her life, Wheatley would have difficulty placing poems for publication; it was only with patronage from England that her first and only book of poetry was published.

Again, I think that misinterprets the situation by viewing it through the lens of hopeful writers in a more recent environment. Wheatley had many poems printed in Boston in the early 1770s. She was recognized locally. What she wanted, understandably, was to be paid for her writing—and to minimize the publication costs that authors usually assumed for a first edition.

By that time, Phillis Wheatley was five years older, with several publications under her belt, including an elegy on the Rev. George Whitefield that had been reprinted in multiple cities and formats (with no payment to her). By 1772, sources say, she was making decisions about her authorial career despite still being enslaved.

Wheatley’s first attempt to publish a collection for sale was to solicit subscriptions for a collection to be printed by Ezekiel Russell, as I discussed back here. John Andrews’s letters indicate that some Americans did pledge money for that crowdfunding effort. But then, that merchant wrote, Wheatley was “made to expt [expect] a large emolument if she sent ye copy home [i.e., to Britain], which induced her to remand yt of ye printer & dld [delivered] it Capt [Robert] Calef.” In other words, she still had prospects in Boston, but she had better prospects in London.

TOMORROW: My thoughts on why this early poem appeared in Newport before Boston.

“Having on the usual garb of an ANGEL”

The Wonderful Appearance of an Angel, Devil and Ghost described the experiences of an unnamed “Gentleman of Boston” over the course of three days and nights, 14–16 Oct 1774.

On the morning of 17 October, that man reportedly narrated his experiences to a friend, identified by the initials S.W., in front of three witnesses: S.P., J.W., and P.R.

S.W. prepared the manuscript for publication, adding “a few Marginal Notes,” a preface, and a paragraph and poem at the end. He completed his work on 1 December, and John Boyle advertised the book on sale a week later.

At least, that’s what the booklet said. All but the most credulous readers knew that this presentation was a sham, designed to lend a wild cautionary tale some veneer of veracity.

There was in fact a genre of pamphlets about supernatural visitations, as Robert Girouard studied in a paper published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts in 1982. The printer Ezekiel Russell was especially active in issuing these, and he soon reprinted A Wonderful Appearance.

In the 1769–1791 period Girouard studied, most of the supernatural visitors voiced a mix of religion and politics, as did those in A Wonderful Appearance. There were also older ghostly booklets with more purely religious messages, such as the oft-reprinted Prodigal Daughter.

This gentleman’s story starts with him “supping abroad among a select company of my jovial acquaintance” and returning to his “lodgings”—he doesn’t have a wife or appear to own his home. As the man gets ready for bed:

I heard an uncommon noise, which to me appeared but at a little distance from the house; the sound, though awful, was very harmonious; it continued I apprehended about ten minutes; I was amazingly terrified at it, not knowing how to account for such an unnusual sound. However, being very anxious of knowing what it was, I immediately went to the window, opened it, and looked out, but before I was able to unfasten it the noise ceased, though my astonishment still continued.

The noise recurs for short bursts as the gentleman goes to bed at midnight. (The booklet is interesting evidence about sleeping hours, at least for a wealthy gentleman in Boston.)

Then, “just after the town-clock struck two,” the noise returns along with “a violent wrap against the window next my bed-side.” The shutter bursts open.

About two minutes afterwards a person appeared outside of the window, having on the usual garb of an ANGEL, (with a sword in one hand, and a pair of scales in the other) who unfastened it, and entered the room—— . . .

He…taking a large chair which stood by the bed-side, seated himself close by me, and said, “Arise man from your bed—put on your cloaths—take a chair and seat yourself down by me—I have something to communicate of the greatest importance—your temporal—your eternal welfare are interested in it.”

I like the detail of the Angel (shown above) being able to appear in midair in the midst of unearthly harmonies but needing to unfasten the window and pull up a chair.

The Angel tells the gentlemen he brings a warning to “you, and through you, all those of your cast,…such abandoned, such hell-deserving wretches as you are”:

“…unless prevented by a speedy repentance, and restitution being made to the many hundreds who are now groaning under the weight of that oppression you have been instrumental in bringing upon them, you may expect (and that justly) to meet with the severest punishment, if not in this, in the future state, the hottest place in hell being reserved for all those who have proved themselves TRAYTORS to their KING and COUNTRY.”

The gentlemen begins to repent of being “tempted as I have been, to sell my country for unrighteous gain.” A footnote explains that some suspected he “received an annual stipend for his unwearied endeavors to carry into execution the wicked designs of a cursed Cabal.”

But once the angel “flew rappidly out at the same window” at “about three o’clock in the morning,” the gentleman starts thinking the visitor “might be nothing more than a delusion, as I had drank a little too freely in company the last evening.” He concludes: “I at last determined…to sit up the next night and if the Devil should chance to come, as the Angel had predicted, to arm myself with courage, and stand, if possible, the combat, like a man of spirit and resolution.”

TOMORROW: Oh, yeah, that’ll work.

John Boyle’s Big Publication for December 1774

On 8 Dec 1774, with the Massachusetts government riven, the port of Boston closed, and more redcoat soldiers arriving in town from other parts of North America, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy newspaper ran this advertisement:

This day was published, (price Half a Pistareen) and sold at JOHN BOYLE’s Printing-Office, next door to the Three Doves in Marlborough-street.

THE WONDER of WONDERS!
Or, the WONDERFUL APPEARANCE of an Angel, Devil and Ghost, to a Gentleman in the Town of Boston, in the Nights of the 14th, 15th, and 16th of October last: To whom in some measure may be attributed the Distresses that have of late fallen upon this unhappy Metropolis.

Related to one of his neighbours the morning after the last visitation, who wrote down the narrative from the Gentleman’s own mouth; and it is now made public at his desire, as a solemn warning to all those, who, for the sake of aggrandizing themselves and their families, would entail the most abject wretchedness upon MILLIONS of their fellow creatures.

Adorned with four plates, viz. 1. The Devil. 2. An Angel, with a sword in one hand, a pair of scales in the other, 3. Belzebub, holding in his right hand a folio book, and in his left a halter. 4. A Ghost, Having a white gown, his hair much dishevilled

The young printer Boyle ran almost exactly the same advertisement through early January in the Boston Evening-Post, the Boston Gazette, and even the Loyalist-leaning Boston News-Letter. He arranged for the printers of the Essex Gazette of Salem and the Essex Journal of Newburyport to advertise and sell the book.

In 1775 The Wonderful Appearance of an Angel, Devil and Ghost was reprinted in Marblehead by Ezekiel Russell and in New York by John Anderson.

This 32-page booklet purported to be the account of a wealthy friend of the royal government whose sleep was disturbed by three supernatural visitors warning him to change his ways and start caring more about his neighbors.

COMING UP: Extracts for the holidays.

“When Washington Went to War at Sea” at Historic Beverly, 14 Sept.

On Monday, 14 September, I’ll deliver an online presentation through Historic Beverly on “When Washington Went to War at Sea: How Beverly Became the General’s Naval Base.”

Our teaser:

In the fall of 1775, Gen. George Washington adopted a new strategy to drive the British army out of Boston—attacking its supply ships at sea.

The semi-secluded cove of Beverly was the first base for those missions, and soldiers from Essex County sailed out on armed schooners to hunt British ships. This talk looks at the ups and downs of America’s first naval campaign, overseen by a general who never saw the ships he commissioned.

I’m drawing this talk from the National Park Service study I wrote about Washington’s work in Cambridge.

The online session is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. A Historic Beverly membership or $10 donation provides access to it. Sign up through this page before 5:00 on Monday the 14th.

This talk is moored to Historic Beverly’s exhibit of paintings of the Revolutionary War created for Henry Cabot Lodge’s 1898 book The Story of the Revolution. Lodge commissioned a select group of American illustrators to paint images of crucial moments in the war. Those pictures are all now owned by Historic Beverly.

Interestingly, while some of those artists worked in full color, others created their images in black and white, or what today we’d call “grayscale,” sometimes with splashes of red for the British army uniforms. That made those pictures easier to reproduce in Lodge’s book. Above, for example, is a detail of a picture of Gen. Washington reviewing his troops by Hugh W. Ditzler (1871-1949).

Historic Beverly is displaying at its 1781 John Cabot House two dozen of those paintings and additional period artifacts, including one of the first copies of the Declaration of Independence printed in Massachusetts, commissioned by the state government from Ezekiel Russell. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, the society couldn’t welcome visitors to its sites for some months this year, but folks can visit this exhibit in its final weeks.

In addition, on Thursday, 24 September, at 4:00 P.M. curator Abby Battis will offer an online peek of the exhibit, walking through the display space, discussing the artists, and showing several paintings in the collection that didn’t make it into the main exhibit except for this final week. That online event will be live on Historic Beverly’s Facebook page, and it’s free to all.

“In drinking of outlandish TEA”

On 22 July 1774, more than half a year after the Boston Tea Party, this item appeared in Daniel Fowle’s New-Hampshire Gazette:

Mr. FOWLE,
If you think the following Lines upon the Use of Tea worthy a Place in your valuable Collection, by inserting them in your next, you will oblige a Customer.

I.
ROUSE ev’ry generous thoughtful Mind,
The rising Danger flee;
If you would lasting Freedom find,
Now then abandon TEA.
II.
Scorn to be bound with golden Chains,
Though they allure the Sight;
Bid them Defiance if they claim
Our Freedom and Birth-Right.
III.
Shall we our Freedom give away,
And all our Comfort Place,
In drinking of outlandish TEA,
Only to please our Taste.
IV.
Forbid it Heaven, let us be wise,
And seek our Country’s Good;
Nor ever let a Thought arise,
That Tea should be our Food.
V.
Since we so great a Plenty have,
Of all that’s for our Health;
Shall we that blasted Herb receive,
Impoverishing our Wealth,
VI.
When we survey the breathless Corpse,
With putrid Matter fill’d;
For crawling Worms a sweet Resort,
By us reputed ill.
VII.
Noxious Effluvia sending out,
From it’s pernicious Store,
Not only from the foaming Mouth,
But ev’ry lifeless Pore.
VIII.
To view the same enrol’d in TEA,
Besmeared with such Perfumes,
And then the Herb sent o’er the Sea,
To us it tainted comes.
IX.
Some of it tinctur’d with a Filth
Of Carcases embalm’d;
Taste of this Herb then if thou wilt,
Sure me it cannot charm.
X.
Adieu, away O TEA be gone,
Salute our Taste no more;
Though thou art coveted by some,
Who’re destin’d to be poor.

This newspaper contributor urged readers not to drink any tea, harnessing various rumors about how it was tainted with “Perfumes” and “a Filth of Carcases embalm’d,” not to mention politically and economically unhealthy. These particular verses seem designed to be sung to familiar New England hymn tunes, making the reminder of “the breathless Corpse” fit right in.

Ezekiel Russell reprinted these lines in his Salem Gazette a week later under the title “On the Use of Tea,” but I don’t see a lot of other newspapers picking up the item.

In 1855 Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck printed the lyrics, with updated spelling and punctuation, in their Cyclopædia of American Literature. The following year, George Moore included them in his Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution, appending the titles “The Blasted Herb” and “India Tea.” That book said the song was also issued as a broadside (though I haven’t found a listing for one).

Moore also wrote of the song that “It has been attributed to Meshech Weare” (1713-1786), a leading New Hampshire Patriot. He shared no evidence for that attribution and didn’t appear fully convinced of it himself. I haven’t found other mentions of Weare writing verse. Nonetheless, later collections have confidently stated that Weare is the author.

Thomas Melvill and “a small parcel of the veritable Tea”

On 2 Mar 1850 the Boston Evening Transcript published a letter over the signature “Native Bostonian.” The editors described the writer as “a venerable citizen of a neighboring city, now a member of the House of Representatives, but a native of this city, whose father was an active partizan with Paul Revere, Melville, Sprague, and others, Sons of ’76.”

They then added more detail:

In a private note, the writer speaks of the new building on the corner of Essex and Washington streets, describing it with all the familiarity of his boyhood, as “near by where Ezekiel Russell’s Printing Office and Book Shop, sign of the Bible and Heart, near Liberty Pole, once was to be found.”

I think the mention of the Russell name was supposed to be a clue to the identity of the “Native Bostonian.”

Almost a quarter-century later, in 1874, an article in the Essex Institute Historical Collections named the letter writer as John Russell of Salem, son of William Russell (1748-1784) of Boston. (For more about William, see Francis Cogliano’s American Maritime Prisoners in the Revolutionary War.)

John Russell was born in 1779 and therefore had few direct memories of his father or Revolutionary events. That’s why he remembered “Liberty Pole” but not Liberty Tree, which came down in 1775. Russell used the stories and documents in his family to speak and write about that local history. One of his claims, first published in the Transcript article, concerned a medal carried by Sons of Liberty to identify themselves, which the Russells had lost and no one else in greater Boston ever claimed to have seen; I’m quite skeptical about that.

But today I’m looking at another artifact Russell wrote about in 1850:

Having ever felt an interest in the transactions of that eventful period, and knowing the late Major [Thomas] Melville had preserved a small quantity of the prohibited article, he having been, in common with my father and others, engaged in its destruction, he gratified me, a short time before his death [in 1832], with the sight of a small parcel of the veritable Tea, which he obtained at the time, although it was intended that not a particle of it should have been preserved;—he had it securely sealed up in a small phial;—it was of a coarse twist, and appeared to be in perfect order.

Russell added, “It is to be hoped that this interesting relic is now in safe hands, and that it will eventually, if not so already, be in the possession of the Historical Society.” But it never would be.

TOMORROW: The track of the tea.

(The picture above shows Thomas Melvill in old age and is from the collections of the Bostonian Society.)

“Likewise This Day Published”

As I reported yesterday, in February 1769 the printer Ezekiel Russell advertised the publication of Pvt. William Clarke’s play The Miser in the Boston Gazette and Boston Post-Boy.

On 6 March Russell had the Edes and Gill shop expand that ad to promote another pamphlet as well. I was amused by the juxtaposition of the two titles. The second part of the expanded notice read:

LIKEWISE THIS DAY PUBLISHED,
(Price Eight Pence,)
And Sold at the above Place,
ANOTHER High Road to Hell,—An ESSAY on the pernicious Nature and destructive Effects of the modern Entertainments from the PULPIT.—Occasioned by a Pamphlet, entitled, The Stage the High Road to Hell, &c.——Said to be wrote by the learned Mr. PIKE, one of the Author of the Twenty Six Cases of Conscience, and an eminient Sandemanian Speaker in LONDON. 


The Russell print shop was thus simultaneously marketing both a theatrical comedy and a pamphlet built on a denunciation of the theater as the quickest path to damnation.

You might think that Boston’s orthodox Congregationalists would have been in accord with English authors denouncing plays and “modern Entertainments from the PULPIT” since they also disliked theater and high-church Anglicanism. They certainly wouldn’t have favored Henry Flitcroft’s response to the first pamphlet, titled Theatrical Entertainments Consistent with Society, Morality, and Religion.

But the Russell shop presented The Stage the High Road to Hell as the work of the Rev. Samuel Pike, a convert to Sandemanianism. (I don’t see any bibliographers echoing that credit, so I don’t know how reliable it is.) Likewise, Another High Road to Hell is thought to have been written by another Sandemanian: John Chater, one of the first edition’s publisher who was also a former minister.

The Sandemanian sect was a recent arrival in New England. They weren’t yet seen as allies of the royal government, but the descendants of early Puritan settlers were nonetheless suspicious of their ideas. Another High Road to Hell is thus another example of the Russell print shop printing something unusual—and they advertised it in the radical Whigs’ favored newspaper.

“A Comedy of Three Acts, Never Before Printed”

When I read the broadside seeking money to print William Clarke’s play The Miser: or, The Soldier’s Humour in 1768, I thought the (very few) published interpretations of this artifact were all wrong.

This wasn’t a sincere solicitation for a new play, I theorized. It didn’t really come from Pvt. William Clarke of the 29th Regiment. Elisha Brown didn’t print it, as many bibliographers had guessed. Instead, it was a satire using the format of a play proposal to comment on the recent Manufactory siege. In early 1770 the Boston Chronicle played the same game, running an advertisement for a tragedy called The Witches to criticize the non-importation protests roiling the town.

In the case of The Miser, I theorized, the broadside preserved some jokes that the people of Boston recognized but which are lost to us today. “The SOLDIER’S HUMOUR, A Comedy of Three Acts, As it is acted by his Majesty’s Servants,” had to refer to the actions of the king’s soldiers in town. Pvt. Clarke, named on the sheet, must have made himself notorious in some way. And the last paragraph’s reference to “ELISHA BROWN, at the Manufactory-House,” drove home the joke. After all, it was silly to think that a private soldier would be publishing a three-act comedy in Boston, selling copies through a cloth weaver whose family had just been fighting off the army.

But on 27 Feb 1769, a notice appeared in both Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette and Green and Russell’s Boston Post-Boy (this version of the text from the latter):

This Day Published,
(Price Eight Pence, covered in blue Paper,)
And sold by Ezekiel Russell, at the New Printing-
Office, a few Doors Northward of Concert-Hall,
Hanover-Street: The
MISER:
Or, The
Soldier’s Humour.
A
COMEDY
Of Three Acts,
Never Before Printed:
By WILLIAM CLARKE, of the 29th Regiment.
Non possum placeto Omnibus.

Ezekiel Russell and his wife Sarah were printers who had no newspaper in pre-Revolutionary Boston but kept busy printing two other things: crowd-pleasing ballads about recent events and whatever authors or sponsors were willing to pay for. Isaiah Thomas, who worked briefly for Ezekiel Russell as a runaway apprentice in 1766, had little praise for the shop’s publications in his history of printing.

But the Russels actually issued a lot of interesting material—they were bold or desperate enough to take chances. Ezekiel Russell was the printer, though not the publisher, of the Censor magazine supporting the royal administration in the early 1770s. The Russells issued Phillis Wheatley’s first proposal for a collection of poems and James Swan’s argument to abolish slavery. They partnered with Joseph Greenleaf when he decided to go into printing. They published the disabled young almanac-maker Daniel George and the female poets Hannah Wheaton and Jenny Fenno.

And the Russells evidently published Pvt. William Clarke’s comedy, The Miser, exactly as proposed in December 1768. Clarke must have raised enough money through Elisha Brown and other people passing out his broadside proposal (no doubt printed at the Russell shop, not in the Manufactory). Maybe the customers were British military gentlemen—that seems more likely than Bostonians investing in an unproduced play by a soldier.

It’s still a mystery how Elisha Brown came to be soliciting advance orders for Clarke. I suspect an important factor is that, just as Clarke was an unusual redcoat with literary ambitions, Brown wasn’t a typical Boston craftsman. I believe the Browns were English by birth, bringing their weaving skills to Massachusetts. Elisha Brown might therefore have been more open to working with a soldier and peddling a play than the sons of Puritans.

Unfortunately, no copies of The Miser are known to have survived. That comedy wasn’t the end of Pvt. William Clarke’s literary ambitions, however, or of his adventures in Boston. It looks like he’ll play a notable role in Serena Zabin’s upcoming book Occupying Boston: An Intimate History of the Boston Massacre.

The Unusual Ambitions of Joseph Greenleaf

As I quoted back here, on 14 Nov 1771 the Massachusetts Spy published an essay signed “Mucius Scævola” that called Gov. Thomas Hutchinson a “USURPER,” which was at least close to sedition. After some effort, the governor convinced his Council to respond to that essay.

That body didn’t summon just Isaiah Thomas, the newspaper’s printer. They also sent a message to Joseph Greenleaf, who in January had put his “30 Acres of choice Land” and “handsome Dwelling-House” in Abington up for sale and moved into Boston—to devote more time to the press.

That was an extraordinary action for an eighteenth-century gentleman. British society had an established social ladder. Journeymen aspired to become independent craftsmen with prosperous workshops, no longer managed by another man. Independent craftsmen aspired to become merchants arranging lucrative ventures, no longer working with their hands. Merchants aspired to become landed gentlemen overseeing large farms, no longer subject to the vagaries of trade because their fortune was now in “real estate.”

Furthermore, British society still considered printing a craft, not a gentleman’s profession. Printers literally got their hands dirty, after all. Even writing for publication was less than genteel. Most upper-class authors published anonymously or under pseudonyms, though their neighbors and rivals often knew the real identities behind those pen names. All told, giving up a rural estate in order to go into publishing looked like a step or two down the social ladder.

When 1770 began, Greenleaf was a country squire—a big man in Abington. He was a justice of the peace for Plymouth County. His had married Abigail Paine, older sister of Robert Treat Paine, thus allying him with some other genteel families in southeastern Massachusetts.

But Greenleaf got excited about Massachusetts’s resistance to Parliament’s new policies. He drafted sixteen resolutions that his town adopted two weeks after the Boston Massacre, laying out a political philosophy that started with “a state of nature” and went on to reject any new taxes “passed in either of the Parliaments of France, Spain, or England” as “a mere nullity”—a striking way of saying that the legislature in London had no authority over the people of Massachusetts.

Abington’s resolutions were published widely. The Essex Gazette ran a letter from New York that said:

The Resolves of those illustrious, and immortal Friends to the RIGHTS OF MEN—The Abington Resolves, have given their Brethren here, INFINITE PLEASURE, and I imagine some others as much Pain.

The same paper also ran a letter from London:

The Abington Resolves are too flaming and rash. They are rather like the transient flashes of passion, than the cool, steady, equal flame of patriotism and liberty…

Either way, Greenleaf seems to have been hooked on imperial political debate. Abington became too small for him.

In 1771, as I said, Greenleaf moved into Boston. What’s more, he made some sort of deal with Isaiah Thomas, the young printer of the Massachusetts Spy. It’s not clear what their arrangement was because the culture of the time didn’t have the occupational category of “publisher”—i.e., someone who finances and manages the printing and selling of a periodical or books without actually operating the press.

The Council stated in December that Greenleaf “was generally reputed to be concerned with Isaiah Thomas, in printing and publishing a News-Paper, called the Massachusett’s Spy.” The following year, the Censor magazine, set up to support the royal government, said Greenleaf was “reputed…to be in Co-Partnership with Mr. Thomas.”

In October 1772, Greenleaf himself advertised that he “carries on the Printing Business with E. Russell.” But that was a footnote to an announcement that he had opened “A STORE, INTELLIGENCE-OFFICE, and VENDUE ROOM,” or auction house, selling imported goods, cloth, “Bristol Beer,” and more. He was presenting himself mainly as an import merchant, with the printing as a side business.

A lot of people then and since nonetheless referred to Greenleaf as a “printer.” I doubt he set type or worked the levers on the press (as demonstrated above by Gary Gregory of the modern Edes & Gill Print Shop). But he definitely worked with Thomas to publish the Spy and later the Royal American Magazine, probably by putting up money and writing and editing copy. In between those ventures he also funded work in Russell’s shop (but not the Censor, both the magazine and Greenleaf were anxious to assure people).

Because of his financial interest in the Spy, Gov. Hutchinson and the Council summoned Greenleaf to discuss the “Mucius Scævola” essay. According to Greenleaf:

On the 15th of November last [i.e., in 1771] I received a polite message from the Governor and Council, by Mr. Baker, desiring my attendance at the Council Chamber, this I have no fault to find with: The distress of my family, on account of a sick child, who died that day, was such that I could not possibly attend, and I excused myself in the most polite manner I was capable of.

Indeed, the 18 November Boston Evening-Post ran a death notice for “Mr. Joseph Greenleaf, jun, in the 18th Year of his Age, Son of Joseph Greenleaf, Esq.”

But Gov. Hutchinson wasn’t satisfied with Greenleaf’s excuse for not coming to the Council chamber. Because he didn’t think the man was simply Thomas’s partner in putting out the Spy. He believed that Greenleaf was “Mucius Scævola.”

TOMORROW: Greenleaf’s claims.

Isaiah Thomas’s Travels and Togs

When Isaiah Thomas reached Halifax in early 1765, he didn’t have much. That’s what happens when you leave your apprenticeship early. Having worked for printer Zechariah Fowle for nine years, the sixteen-year-old knew he was taking a risk.

According to his grandson Benjamin Franklin Thomas, “He used to say, not without satisfaction in the contrast with his affluent condition in later life, that his linen was reduced to one check shirt, and that the only coat he had he sent to a tailor to turn, and the tailor ran away with it.”

But we know that Thomas built up his wardrobe quickly. In 1846 the Portsmouth Journal and Boston Courier reported that builders had discovered a document inside an “old building belonging to Mr. Supply Ham.” It was “a marble covered memorandum book” with the inscription “Isaiah Thomas His Book 1766,” and its text recorded the young printer’s travels and compensation:

Left Mr. Fowle the 19th of September 1765, and sat sail the next Day about 10 o’clock for Halifax, and arrived there on the 24th Day about 10 o’clock, which was just four Days from the Time I left Boston.

Went to Mr. [Anthony] Henry’s and engaged work with him for 3 Dollars per month and he to find me Boarding, Washing, &c. Work extremely scarce.

Received of Mr. Anthony Henry the following Articles, viz.
1 Pair of Broadcloth Breeches 0 15 0
Two pair of Stockings 7 0
1 pair of Shoes 8 0
Two Check Shirts 16 0
1 Pistereen 1 0
1 Bottle of [torn] 1 0
Two Dollars in Cash 10 0
To 1 yard of Black Shallon 4 0
To 1 yard of Blue Ditto 3 9
______________________
Halifax Currency 3 5 9

Work’d with Mr. Henry 5 months, 3 Weeks and 3 Days. Sailed from Halifax the 19th day of March, 1766, and arrived at Old York [Maine] the 27th (at Dark) of said Month.

Work with Mr. [Daniel] Fowle of Portsmouth [New Hampshire] 13 Days.

Friday, April 10, 1766. Came to work with Messrs. [Thomas] Furber & [Ezekiel] Russell for eight Dollars per month and my Board.

Received of Messrs. Furber & Russell 5 yards & half of Black Serge at 9 Shillings Lawful money per yard 2 9 6.

Thomas later said that friends in Boston recognized his work in Furber and Russell’s newspaper. He suggested that was the quality of his typesetting, but it may have been his woodcuts. Or Daniel Fowle may simply have written to his brother Zechariah that his wayward apprentice had reappeared, hungry for work. In any event, the Boston printer invited young Isaiah to return.

Thomas’s grandson wrote, “On his arrival at Portsmouth the people were celebrating with great enthusiasm the repeal of the Stamp Act.” But 27 March was too early for that. The young printer might have stayed in Portsmouth through that town’s celebration in May, but it’s also possible that he returned to Boston just in time for its big celebration on 19 May, and the memory got garbled.

According to Benjamin Franklin Thomas, back in his old master’s shop the teenager “gets along quietly for a few weeks. In July 1766, on the day of the funeral of Jonathan Mayhew [11 July], whom the whole town followed to his grave, he has fresh trouble, but the difficulty is compromised and he lives with him once more. He remains but a few weeks and then, with the full consent of his master, leaves his service finally.”

Isaiah Thomas’s next stop: Wilmington, North Carolina.

Daniel George, Teen-Aged Almanac Maker

Daniel George was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, on 16 Dec 1757, son of David and Anne (Cottle) George. He was the second boy named Daniel born to that couple, indicating that the first had died young. He had both older and younger siblings of both sexes.

From infancy Daniel was “a Cripple,” possibly having cerebral palsy. That made life as a farmer almost unthinkable. But the boy’s mind was sharp, and he took to mathematics and then astronomy. In 1775, Daniel prepared an almanac for the upcoming year, calculating the movements of the Sun and Moon and the tides for eastern Massachusetts.

On 26 August, Daniel George and his father visited the Rev. Samuel Williams (1743-1817) of Bradford. Williams was known for his scientific investigations, including two trips to observe the transit of Venus in the 1760s.

Williams talked with the teenager and wrote a recommendation of him to the printer Ezekiel Russell, then in Salem:

Mr. David George, of Haverhill, is now with me; he has brought his son Daniel, who appears to be a singular object of pity and compassion. But with all the disorders of body under which he labors, his mind does not seem to have been at all affected. He has composed an Almanack, which, as far as I have inspected it, seems to be equal to other compositions of that kind; and perhaps from the singular situation of the Author, bids fair to engage the popular attention. If it would be consistent with your business and interest to print it, it would be an act of kindness to the distressed, and a great encouragement to a rising Genius, in early years laboring under uncommon disadvantages, but yet bidding fair for very considerable improvements.—

I write this from motives of compassion to the unhappy Cripple, and because I really think his talents may be of use to mankind if encouraged. How far this will be consistent with your interest is not for me to say. But if you can favor the productions of a Cripple, in the seventeenth year of his age, it must not only give pleasure to him, but to the benevolent and humane who wish success to the ingenious, and comfort to the wretched.

Russell was open to new authors: he was the first printer to engage to issue Phillis Wheatley’s book, before she went to London, and he routinely published other female poets, such as Hannah Wheaton. In part that was because Russell was never a very successful printer, so he and his wife were often scrounging for business.

Russell engaged to print George’s Cambridge Almanack; or, the Essex Calendar. For the Year of our Redemption, 1776. Being Leap-Year, the Sixteenth of the Reign of George III. To make sure customers realized what a remarkable production it was, he credited it “By Daniel George, a Student in Astronomy at Haverhill, in the County of Essex, who is now in the Seventeenth [sic] Year of his Age, and has been a Cripple from his Infancy.” And he printed Williams’s letter at the front.

In his own introduction, dated September 1775, Daniel added:

This, however, my public-spirited Friends and Countrymen, you will be certain of, by becoming a Purchaser of my Almanack, you are helping one who is not able, or perhaps ever will have it in his power to help himself; which motive alone may be a sufficient incitement to a generous mind, even should your expectations with regard to my calculations, be in some measure disappointed.

But he then turned to the patriotic material he’d chosen to include, such as “A Narrative of the excursion and ravages of the King’s troops, under the command of Gen. [Thomas] Gage, on the 19th of April, 1775; . . . This concise and much admired narrative is said to be drawn up by the reverend and patriotic Mr. G——n, of the third parish in Roxbury.” (I believe that’s one of our earliest pieces of evidence that the Rev. William Gordon drafted that report for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.)

The calendar pages inside highlighted such anniversaries as:

• “Feb. 21 [actually 22]. Christopher Snyder, aged 14 [actually about eleven], cruelly massacred in Boston, by Ebenezer Richardson, the noted informer. He was the first Martyr to American Liberty.”
• “March 5. Boston massacre.”
• “April 19. Concord Fight, 1775, when began the bloody civil war in America, by the British Troops.”
• “June 17. Bloody battle of Charlestown, where were killed and wounded 324 provincials, 1,450 regulars; there were destroyed in Charlestown by the latter 1 meeting-house, 350 dwelling-houses, and 150 other buildings.”
• “Dec. 16. E. I. Tea destroyed in Boston, 1773.”

And all for only “6 cop.”

George’s Almanac sold well enough that Russell issued a second edition with added content: a “Narrative of the Bunker-Hill Fight” and “A Poem On The Late Gen. [Joseph] Warren.” But wait—there was more! The extra page also included “An Acrostic On Gen. Warren” (the same one I quoted here) and a woodcut portrait of the late doctor (shown above).

The next year Daniel, still a teenager, prepared an almanac for 1777 for new printers in Boston and Newburyport. Having established his name, he continued to publish almanacs into adulthood. Sometime in the mid-1780s he moved to what is now Portland, Maine, and eventually became a newspaper publisher.

In The History of the Press of Maine (1872), H. W. Richardson wrote:

George was a remarkable character. He is described as a man of genius, but so exceedingly deformed that he had to be moved from place to place in a small carriage, drawn by a servant. He came here in 1784 or ’5 from Newburyport, where he had published almanacs, as he afterwards did here. He was a printer, but kept school in Portland, and had also a small bookstore in Fish, now Exchange, street. In 1800 he became the sole owner of the Herald.

George “died suddenly at Portland” on 4 Feb 1804, age forty-six, having seen and accomplished much more than anyone expected back in 1758, the year when the George family probably realized that their new baby had a physical disability.

Hannah Wheaton, Hard-Working Versifier

Yesterday I noted how the American Antiquarian Society recently found Ezekiel Russell’s 1787 broadside lamenting a fire in Boston’s South End credited the author not just as “H.W.” but as “Miss H---. W---.”

That WorldCat page speculates about those initials:

Possibly by Hannah Wheaton, the author of several poems published during the 1790s. However, there are an insufficient number of dashes to match the name Wheaton and it is not known whether Wheaton was her maiden or a married name.

Hannah Wheaton’s name is preserved on a handful of broadside verses. The earliest one with a date is from December 1793 and starts:

A New Year’s wish.

The author being absent by reason of the small-pox, prevented her addressing her friends the last year.

That suggests Wheaton had issued a similar verse at the end of 1791 and perhaps earlier, but couldn’t do so in 1792. That surviving “New Year’s wish” mentions the death of John Hancock, meaning it was designed for a Massachusetts audience. It’s quite similar to the sheets that newspapers’ delivery boys printed and sold at the end of each year, suggesting that Hannah Wheaton was fitting herself into that tradition.

In 1795 Wheaton published “An independent ode, dedicated to the illustrious president of the United States [George Washington], the governour of this commonwealth [Samuel Adams], and all true patriots of liberty.” She issued elegies after the deaths of Ephraim May (a Boston businessman and father-in-law of the luckless schemer Dr. Amos Windship) in 1797 and of Washington in 1799.

A 1799 broadside from Wheaton is titled “On Taking an Affectionate Farewell of My Kind Benefactors in Boston.” I haven’t been able to find the text for that. Its library record suggests it’s about death, making me wonder whether she was announcing that she was mortally ill. Was she publishing a poetic eulogy for herself?

However, Brown University has a Hannah Wheaton broadside titled “For the commencement of a new century,” dated 1801. So she lived to keep writing and selling her verses.

Nobody has spotted a definite link between Wheaton and the print shop of Ezekiel Russell, known for issuing the same type of poetic broadside at any opportunity. Perhaps a close reading of the verses Wheaton signed would reveal similarities to the unsigned verses that came from the Russell shop near the Liberty Pole (and the 1787 broadside newly discovered to have been credited to “Miss H---. W---.”).

But that analysis would require someone with a stronger stomach for eighteenth-century doggerel.

A Clue to the Poet in Ezekiel Russell’s Print Shop?

The September 2014 issue of the American Antiquarian Society’s Almanac magazine reports on the recent acquisition of a 1787 broadside headlined “A Poem, Descriptive of the Terrible Fire, which Made such Shocking Devastation in Boston.” (The picture here is the Rev. Jeremy Belknap’s diagram of the area of that fire in the South End.)

Ezekiel Russell printed three versions of this broadside, all featuring the same woodcut of a fire but with different type layouts below that. The magazine says:

Two versions (one owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society and the other by the John Carter Brown Library) were documented in early bibliographies. The third version was unrecorded before it was acquired by AAS this April.

The authorship of the poem is credited on all three broadsides to “H.W.” The AAS printing significantly reveals that the author was an unmarried woman by crediting the text to a ”Miss H.--- W.---.” Consequently, all three sheets can be added to the just over 200 texts written by women in the United States before 1788.

When looking into that further, I came across WorldCat’s description of the broadside, which includes the line:

Responsibility: Composed by H----h W----n.

I can’t reconcile those final Ns with the magazine’s commentary, though.

Putting that mystery aside, longtime Boston 1775 readers might recall how Isaiah Thomas, printer and founder of the A.A.S., wrote about a woman writing memorial verses for Russell to publish. In the first edition of his History of Printing in America, Thomas credited those verses to Russell’s wife, who I found was named Sarah. In notes incorporated in that book’s posthumous second edition, Thomas changed that reference to “a young woman who lived in Russell’s family.” Was Thomas referring to “H.W.”?

Personally I suspect that Sarah Russell also wrote verses for her husband. She certainly helped keep the shop running from the early 1770s, and it was issuing those sorts of poetic broadsides back then.