For and Against the Committee of Correspondence

During Boston’s town meeting session on 27 June 1774, town clerk William Cooper didn’t record who spoke.

But the merchant John Rowe did.

In his diary, Rowe listed the defenders of the standing committee of correspondence as:

• Samuel Adams.
• Dr. Joseph Warren.
• William Molineux.
• Josiah Quincy, Jr.
• Dr. Thomas Young.
• Benjamin Kent (1708–1788), a lawyer. He was a Whig, but he had Loyalist relatives and after the war he actually moved to Canada to be with his children.

Aside from Kent, those names are familiar to Boston 1775 readers. They were most of the town’s most visible Whig leaders. All but Kent had been named to the committee of correspondence back in 1772.

Speaking “against the Behaviour of the Committee” were:

• Harrison Gray (1711–1794, shown here), treasurer of Massachusetts, merchant.
• Thomas Gray (1721–1774), merchant, elected to the General Court for one term in 1764, half-brother to Harrison Gray.
• Samuel Elliot (1739–1820), merchant, later president of the Massachusetts Bank.
• Samuel Barrett (1722–1798), merchant, occasional town official, later a justice of the peace.
• John Amory (1728–1803), merchant, owner of a distillery.
• Edward Payne (1721-1788), merchant, shot during the Boston Massacre, later in marine insurance.
• Francis Green (1742–1809), merchant, British army veteran.
• Ezekiel Goldthwait (1710–1782), insurance broker, former town clerk, clerk of the courts, registrar of deeds.

Those men were evidently representing Boston’s merchants, not the friends of the royal government. Most of them weren’t politically active. Only Harrison Gray, Green, and Goldthwait had signed the addresses to the royal governors that spring. Gray and Goldthwait did have major government appointments, but they tried to present themselves as moderate centrists serving both the people and the Crown.

We don’t know what paths Thomas Gray would have chosen when war broke out and when the British military left Boston because he died after a carriage accident in November 1774. But we do known the political choices of all the other men.

Harrison Gray, Amory, and Green left Boston with the redcoats, becoming Loyalists. Amory and Green eventually returned to Massachusetts, however.

Elliot, Barrett, Payne, and Goldthwait stayed in Massachusetts, some serving in civic offices under the new republican order. Barrett appears to have thrown in with the Patriots just a couple of months after this town meeting, participating in the Suffolk County Convention and taking on wartime tasks for the state. In contrast, Goldthwait retired from public life.

The argument of this group was likely that, while it was important to stand up for liberty and protest unjust laws, the Boston committee of correspondence’s methods had been too confrontational and led the town into trouble. It was time to back off, settle accounts for the Tea Party, and reopen for business.

John Rowe himself wrote privately: “the Committee are wrong in the matter. The Merchants have taken up against them, they have in my Opinion exceeded their Power.” But he didn’t speak up in the meeting himself.

COMING UP: Mutual resentments.

“Arms (deliver’d by the Inhabitants in April 1775)”

On 27 Apr 1775, Boston’s selectmen and designated committee members delivered to the royal governor, Gen. Thomas Gage, “the return made to them by the constables of the town relative to the delivery of arms in their respective wards.”

In other words, the count of how many weapons people had turned over to town officials in exchange for being allowed to leave the besieged town.

The next day, one member of that committee, former selectman Henderson Inches, left Boston and went to where the Massachusetts committee of safety was meeting in Cambridge. He brought the same data:

Mr. Henderson Inches, who left Boston this day, attended, and informed the committee, that the inhabitants of Boston had agreed with the general, to have liberty to leave Boston with their effects, provided that they lodged their arms with the selectmen of that town, to be by them kept during the present dispute, and that, agreeably to said agreement, the inhabitants had, on yesterday, lodged 1778 fire-arms, 634 pistols, 973 bayonets, and 38 blunderbusses, with their selectmen.

In 1900, Boston published an inventory of these weapons with the owners’ names attached (and somewhat different figures from Inches’s). The date on this record is 24 April, the first full day after the town voted to start collecting weapons, but that process took three days at least. It’s notable that this count of weapons “in the Town House” includes guns owned by the town itself. 

Recently Caitlin G. DeAngelis reported finding another inventory of “Arms (deliver’d by the Inhabitants in April 1775) in the Town House Chambers,” dated 1 March 1776, as the British military was slowly preparing to depart. (That process sped up considerably a few days later.) This list comes from Francis Green’s file submitted to the Loyalists Commission, preserved in the British National Archives, series AO 13 (Massachusetts). The photo above from DeAngelis shows the totals, including a note that most of the weapons were in poor repair.

Over the last twenty years I’ve mentioned the published list in a few history forums, hinting that it might provide useful data for a study of gun ownership in occupied Boston. The Green list, which differs slightly in what’s counted and in the totals, could add to that data. No one’s taken up that challenge so far.

The publications that discuss Gage’s demand that Bostonians lodge their firearms with the town are by and large those arguing that a significant factor in the American Revolution was the royal government’s attempts to confiscate individuals’ guns, with implications for modern political conflicts.

Now I’ve written a book about the competition between Gage’s government and the Patriot underground for artillery pieces in 1774 and 1775. I argue that was a precipitating factor in how the war began. But I don’t see evidence for a similar conflict over muskets, pistols, and other individually owned and operated weapons.

Gen. Gage arrived in Boston in May 1774. The “Powder Alarm” in September made both sides shift to military preparations. Samuel Dyer tried to assassinate two British officers with pistols in October. A small British army squad and the New Hampshire militia exchanged fire at Fort William and Mary in December. And at no time before 19 April 1775 did Gage try to confiscate people’s muskets or pistols.

Only after the war had started, the redcoats had suffered hundreds of casualties, and thousands of militiamen were besieging his base did Gen. Gage seek to disarm the civilians all around him. Until then, he’d respected private property and the province’s militia law. And even after he took this step to protect his soldiers from an armed uprising, Gage asked elected town officials to collect and store the weapons, not his army or appointees. This was a wartime measure, not a peacetime policy.

COMING UP: The bargain collapses.

“What an unparallel’d Stock of Assurance & Self-Confidence”

In the fall of 1769, Boston’s non-importation controversy heated up. The town’s merchants, supported and pushed by the radical Whigs, had agreed not to order anything but necessities from Britain until Parliament repealed the Townshend duties.

Boston’s merchants had set up a committee of inspection to enforce that boycott, which had the added effect of showing the merchants of other towns that they were serious.

Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette ran on the front of each issue a short list of the merchants who hadn’t signed on. One of those names was the bookseller John Mein.

Mein, who also published the Boston Chronicle newspaper, responded by running documents from the Customs office showing what goods were being imported and by whom. Many of Boston’s most prominent merchants appeared in those documents, and they filled the newspapers with angry denials that they had actually imported anything. Or if they had, they had very good reasons.

Few of those angry denials were as angry and denialist as what Francis Green (1742-1809) published in the Boston Evening-Post on 25 Sept 1769, two hundred fifty years ago today. Mein had published Green’s manifest in late August. Green responded with a denial in the Boston Gazette on 4 September. Mein answered in his Chronicle on 7 September and then, when no reply appeared, again on 18 September.

Green then unleashed this magnificent diatribe:

To the PUBLIC.

A Most thorough Disdain of John Mein, is the true Cause of my not having hitherto given any Attention to his late public impertinent and arrogant Queries and Objections.

What an unparallel’d Stock of Assurance & Self-Confidence must this contemptible Fellow be possessed of, to imagine himself entitled to call, Time after Time, with the most audacious Effrontery, upon one and another of his Superiors, for Answers to the most pert and saucy Questions that ever issued from the conceited, empty Noddle, of a most profound Blockhead!

Who gave this Mushroom Judge, Authority, to summon even a Chimney-Sweeper to his ridiculous Tribunal? or wantonly, presumptuously, and very fallaciously to assume the respectable Title of The Public, in his romantic and indecent Addresses to an affronted Community? From whence does this so late an abject and Cap-in-Hand Beggar of Favours in a strange Country, derive the Shadow of Right, to put on a dictatorial Air, and publickly to insult his Benefactors? Ingratitude, Perverseness, and the most obstinate Self-Sufficiency, with a large Share of egregious Folly, can alone account for such Insolence and Stupidity; to the natural Consequence of which I drop him with ineffable Contempt.—

But lest any Part of the Public should be deceived by his Insinuations respecting my Importation in the Susanna, H. Johnson, Master. I now assure the World, that, (tho’ I hold not myself so cheap as to yield any Account to John Mein) if any Gentleman is yet unsatisfied, and chuses to apply either to the Committee of Merchants or to me, he may and shall be convinced, beyond all Possibility of Doubt, that I did not deviate from the Agreement in any Instance, of Course did not import any Tea.

But as I consider the entering into any kind of Contest with John Mein, as too great a Stoop, and as any Notice being taken of him, even in Opposition, may tend to make him of some little Consequence, and seems to be what he is aiming at, the Public, will, I doubt not, excuse my adding to the general Neglect of him, by never answering any of his future Publications, even though his consummate Impudence, should prompt him to be more vulgarly scurrilous, than he has already repeatedly been to the Committee of Merchants.

FRANCIS GREEN.
Sept. 20, 1769.

Green thus attacked Mein as an upstart mechanic, a recent arrival in Boston, and a purveyor of fake news who didn’t deserve to question a gentleman like himself.

For all his anger, however, Green proved to be a less than staunch supporter of non-importation. He had brought in proscribed goods. According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, “he was dropped from [the Whigs’] ranks in 1769 for violating the non-importation agreement.” By May 1770 Green was probably arguing to end the boycott, and in early 1774 he was among the Loyalists voting to have the town meeting quash its committee of correspondence.

During the siege of Boston, Green stayed in town with the British military, was an officer in a Loyalist militia company, and evacuated to Halifax. He became just as much of a Loyalist as John Mein.