“The only two Gentlemen of the Town who have visited Lieut. Hawkshaw”

Alongside Lt. Thomas Hawkshaw’s declaration of what he’d said about the first shots of the war, quoted yesterday, Lt. Col. William Walcott collected a signed statement from two gentlemen inside Boston.

That undated document is also in the Thomas Gage Papers at the Clements Library. It says:

Mr. Lewis Gilbt. De Blois & Doctor Byles who were the only two Gentlemen of the Town who have visited Lieut. Hawkshaw since his being brought into Boston, both declare That,

Neither of Them had any the least Conversation with Lt. Hawkshaw upon the Subject of the affair of Wednesday last the 19th. April; & particularly that They nor Either of them ever heard Lt. Hawkshaw say that the King’s Troops had fired first upon the Country People

Gibert Deblois
Mather Byles

Gilbert Deblois (shown above, in a portrait made by John Singleton Copley a few years later) was a Loyalist merchant. Evidently Col. Walcott didn’t know him well enough to distinguish him from his brother Lewis.

The Rev. Dr. Mather Byles was one of the few Congregationalist ministers in Massachusetts siding with the royal government.

These two witnesses were thus inclined to be more friendly to the army and Gen. Thomas Gage than the average Bostonian. But what Patriot would be admitted to Lt. Hawkshaw’s sick chamber?

In an article for Common-place, Edward M. Griffin asked, “Could anyone believe that when Byles and Deblois had visited him [Hawkshaw] they simply passed the time in pleasant conversation without ever discussing the previous week’s armed confrontation between British troops and rebellious locals?”

I think the state of Hawkshaw’s health does make that plausible. He probably felt weak, had trouble speaking, and expected to die soon. I can imagine a scenario in which the lieutenant was renting a room from Deblois, who could think of nothing more helpful than bringing in the Rev. Dr. Byles to provide religious comfort. And the men kept their conversation brief.

When Edmund Quincy wrote that Hawkshaw “Call’d Several Credible persons to him & told ’em as a dying man…that the first Action of ye Whole at L. was done by the Kings troops,” he said that he’d heard that from “Capt. [John] Erving, at his house yesterday,” and that Erving said it was “proved to him at ye No: End yesterday to be real.”

The British mercantile economy ran passing on rumors like that because hard information was so hard to come by. In this case, Quincy or Erving or both were probably sucked in by wishful thinking. Or perhaps some Patriot propagandist thought it would be effective to attribute a confession to an officer on his deathbed.

So far as I can tell, no newspapers or other sources outside Boston picked up on the rumor about Hawkshaw, though Salem printer Ezekiel Russell did learn about his life-threatening wound. Perhaps the documents that Lt. Col. Walcott collected helped to quash the whispers. Perhaps they were so wispy to start with (who were these “Several Credible persons”?) that they dissipated on their own.

As I wrote before, Lt. Hawkshaw proved more durable. He recovered. In November 1777 he attained the rank of “Captain Lieutenant and Captain” as officers in the 5th moved up because another captain had “died of his wounds.” A year later, Hawkshaw was promoted to full captain in place of Capt. John Gore, the officer he had first spoken to on the evening of 19 April when he was brought back, bleeding, to Boston.

“A weekly and brilliant assembly at Concert Hall”?

It was no coincidence that James Joan moved from Halifax to Boston in October 1768, just as the 14th and 29th Regiments made the same journey. In fact, the same sloop that brought Joan and his family, Nehemiah Soanes’s Ranger, might well have carried soldiers’ families.

The market for Joan’s services as a performing musician, ball host, and instructor in dancing, fencing, and French depended on a good supply of young men of genteel habits and ambitions. So it made sense for him to follow the army officer corps.

Joan advertised his second “Concert of MUSIC” at his dwelling on Brattle Street on 5 December in the Boston News-Letter, Boston Chronicle, and Boston Post-Boy—the three newspapers closest to the Crown.

Soon, however, Joan’s “Music Hall” faced competition. Boston already had a largish building known as “Concert Hall,” built by the Deblois family in 1754. The first Debloises in Boston were musicians in the entourage of Gov. William Burnet; they played the organs at King’s Chapel and Christ Church. But by the 1760s brothers Lewis and Gilbert Deblois weren’t professional performers like Joan. They were substantial import merchants. They sold musical scores and instruments, but only as a small part of a much wider assortment of goods. (Lewis’s 1757 trade card appears above, courtesy of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.)

The Debloises rented out Concert Hall, and in 1768 the Commissioners of Customs used that space for meetings. Apparently the Debloises spoke with those high officials about hosting weekly music and dancing assemblies during the winter, no doubt catering to the same crowd of army officers and local gentility who supported James Joan’s concerts.

Naturally, that prospect gave the the Boston Whigs something to complain about in their “Journal of the Times” for 10 December:

While the friends of their country are recommending and countenancing by their example, the strictest economy, C[om]m[issione]r [Charles] P[a]x[to]n and Company are endeavouring to establish a weekly and brilliant assembly at Concert Hall; where their Board is again held in the day time, and a centinel placed for their guard:

One of their livery boatmen has waited upon the gentlemen and ladies of the town with the proposals and a subscription paper; which to use a courtly phrase has been almost universally treated with the contempt it deserves,—

C[om]m[issione]r [John] R[obinso]n, in order to throw a splendor upon office, and so to dazzle with its brightness, the eyes of Americans, that they might not perceive the incomparable insignificancy of his person, nor how ridiculously the fruits of their industry are bestowed; intends soon to make his appearance in a suit of crimson velvet, which will cost him a sum that would have been a full support to some one of the families, that are almost reduced to poverty themselves; who are yet obliged, not indeed by the laws of Christianity, but by that Revenue Act, to feed the hungry and cloth the naked C[om]m[issione]rs, not barely with what is convenient and necessary, but with all the luxury and extravagance of high life.

On 14 December the Whigs claimed that those plans had been foiled, at least temporarily, by Boston’s patriotic young women:

The Commissioners expected they would have been able this evening with the countenance of the military gentlemen, to have opened an assembly at Concert Hall, for the winter season; but the virtue and discreetness of the young ladies of the town, occasioned a disappointment; It is probable they may have one the next week, with a small number of matrons of their own core: It must ill become American ladies to dance in their fetters.

The Whigs could thus stir together old anti-aristocratic Puritan traditions, current feelings of economic anxiety, and resentment of army troops, and then blame the whole mess on those extravagant and tyrannical Customs Commissioners.

The Beggar’s Opera Comes to Lexington, 11 Aug.

In December 1750 the New-York Gazette announced performances of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera at the Nassau Street Theatre. That was, theater historians say, the first musical play staged in America. It had already been popular in Britain for twenty-two years.

On 6 May 1751, the New York players announced their “last Time playing the Beggar’s Opera this season” on the upcoming Monday. In the same advertisement they asked if anyone had a copy of a comedy called The Intriguing Chambermaid which they could borrow.

New England, with its Puritan roots, was much more resistant to theater. Opera had to sneak in under the guise of uplifting musical concerts, not full-fledged productions. On 16 Sept 1769 the Providence Gazette announced a “reading” of The Beggar’s Opera in which “All the songs will be sung.”

In Boston, the Deblois family—Anglican and Loyalist—pushed the boundaries for musical entertainment, especially after the arrival of a large number of British army officers in 1768. On 23 Mar 1770 the merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary:

In the evening I went to the Concert Hall to hear Mr [James] Joan read the Beggars Opera & sing the Songs. He read but indifferently but Sung in Taste. there were upwards one hundred people there.

That provides a precedent of sorts for an event at the Lexington Historical Society on Saturday, 11 August. The organization will host “a bawdy singalong and a presentation of The Beggar’s Opera,” as abridged by Diane Taraz, founder of the society’s Colonial Singers.

This concert will take place starting at 7:00 P.M. at the Depot in the center of town. Tickets cost $15-20. There will be snacks, non-alcoholic beverages, and an open bar, so attendees must be over age 21.

Capt. Thomas Preston in Retirement

I’ve been considering this statement about the Boston Massacre, which Caleb Bates, born in Hingham in 1780, gave to the librarian of Harvard University in 1856:

He said he was well acquainted with Miss Troutbeck who resided in Hingham, daughter of the clergyman in Boston, & that they went to Halifax at the evacuation of Boston by the British & that he had many of her letters.

She told him many times that she knew Capt. [Thomas] Preston well when in Halifax, that as newspapers from Boston often came, containing very severe reflections on his conduct on the evening of the 5th of March 1770, he repeatedly said that the Bostonians “wronged” him, he never gave the order to “Fire,” that when the riot broke out he was in his loose gown & slippers sitting by his fire, that he immediately went, at the peril of his life, & did all he could to suppress it, that the truth was there was a great tumult among the people, the rabble calling the troops damned lobster-backs & other hard names, & from the mass went out the word “Fire”, by whom given it was not known, & such was the noise that it could not be known where it originated, some supposing it was given by one person, others by another, & that he had nothing to do with it.

The Troutbeck family did go to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1776, before moving on to Britain. And they did live in Hingham in the early 1800s. Yesterday I discussed two sisters in that family. The most likely informant was Sarah Troutbeck (1760-1840), who was in her mid-teens during the evacuation.

But was Capt. Thomas Preston in Halifax in 1776? He’s not easy to track after he left Boston, but there’s no sign he was ever in Nova Scotia.

Preston was acquitted of ordering the shooting in the fall of 1770. In the first week of December, Boston newspapers reported, he sailed for London on H.M.S. Glasgow. On 5 Mar 1771, the first anniversary of the Massacre, Secretary of War Barrington wrote to Gen. Thomas Gage, “Captain Preston has had all his expences paid and a Pension of £200 a Year bestowed upon him. He is a perfectly satisfied Man, which is a thing not to be found every Day.”

That might simply have been a promise of a pension since the Parliamentary Register dates Preston’s annual payments (“during pleasure”) from 29 Sept 1772. Edmund E. Everard’s history of the 29th Regiment echoed that figure: “In November [1772] Captain Thomas Preston was granted a pension of £200 a year upon the military establishment of Ireland, in consideration of his faithful services.” Everard also stated that Preston was Irish in origin, aged 43 in December 1773 with eighteen years of army service.

Preston continued to be listed on British Army Lists as a captain in the 29th Regiment until 1774, but by then he must have sold his rank and retired. And he probably retired to Ireland. Sometime between 1783 and 1787 Preston submitted testimony to the Loyalists Commission on behalf of the Boston merchant Gilbert Deblois; at that time he was living on Merrion Street in Dublin.

“Captain Preston” was still receiving £200 per year on the Irish establishment in January 1790, according to a list published in Walker’s Hibernian Magazine.

In 1822, speaking to descendants of Josiah Quincy, Jr., John Adams said that he had once passed Preston on the street in London. That would have been in the 1780s, when Adams was an American diplomat. However, Adams didn’t say that Preston spoke to him about their earlier acquaintance, so the former President could have been mistaken about whom he saw. Adams never mentioned such a meeting in his own writings.

In any event, there’s no evidence to corroborate that Preston was in Halifax during the short period when the Troutbeck family was there, or ever. Perhaps Troutbeck heard these statements from someone else, perhaps she met Preston somewhere else, perhaps Bates’s memory wasn’t as accurate as he thought. But the provenance of this information doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Furthermore, the internal evidence of the Troutbeck story renders it dubious. Capt. Preston was “captain of the day” on 5 March 1770, and thus on duty. He would not have been “in his loose gown & slippers sitting by his fire” that evening.

(In addition, the term “lobster-backs” doesn’t appear in authentic sources from Revolutionary America, so far as I can tell. It became popular in histories written in the mid-1800s.)

The basic political points of the Troutbeck anecdote are true: There was fighting between locals and soldiers earlier that night. Capt. Preston did arrive on King Street to find another violent confrontation. He didn’t give the soldiers any order to fire. (After the trial, Pvt. Edward Montgomery reportedly admitted he yelled out the order.) The “loose gown & slippers” is the only aspect of this anecdote that’s new, and that’s the most dubious detail.

The Drama of Dr. Byles

Also in the new Common-place is Edward M. Griffin’s dramatically written article about the experiences of the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles (shown here). Byles was the Boston Congregationalist minister closest to the royal government—yet he also remained in Boston after the British evacuation.

“A Loyalist Guarded, Re-guarded, and Disregarded: The Two Trials of Mather Byles the Elder” identifies this moment as crucial to how the Patriot public came to view Byles:

Within four days after the battle [of Lexington and Concord], this rumor swirled through Boston: the king’s troops admitted firing first. Lieutenant [Thomas] Hawkshaw had said so to the elder Reverend Mather Byles and the Boston merchant Gilbert Deblois.

Hawkshaw, an officer of Hugh Earl Percy’s 5th Regiment of Foot, scoffed at the rumor, issuing a sworn statement that “the Country People” had fired first, but on the streets of Boston, residents muttered about a cover-up. Hadn’t the lieutenant privately said otherwise to Byles and Deblois? Pressed on the issue, Byles and Deblois, each a prominent citizen and a Loyalist supporter of the Crown, responded with their own sworn declaration that they, “the only two Gentlemen of the Town, who have visited Lieut. Hawkshaw since his being brought into Boston, both declare that, neither of them had the least Conversation with Lt. Hawkshawe upon the Subject of the Affair of Wednesday last the 19th April; + particularly, that They nor Either of Them ever heard Lt. Hawkshaw say that the King’s Troops had fired first upon the Country People.”

Hawkshaw had been wounded on the road near Lexington. Could anyone believe that when Byles and Deblois had visited him they simply passed the time in pleasant conversation without ever discussing the previous week’s armed confrontation between British troops and rebellious locals? But the two gentlemen swore that they had not asked about the first shot. And that put Mather Byles Sr. in the thick of it.

Of course, Patriots already disliked how close Byles was with royal officials, and his insistence on not discussing politics took on new meaning in a highly political time.

The long article has some glitches. The Loyalist judge Peter Oliver coined the term “black Regiment” for James Otis’s clerical supporters; that wasn’t Otis’s own term. Thomas Crafts was not sheriff of Suffolk County when he bellowed the Declaration of Independence out the State House window; he was helping the sheriff, the more soft-spoken William Greenleaf.

More important, the article retells many amusing anecdotes about Byles—and there are a lot of those stories because Byles was such a big personality and known for his jokes. But some of those tales were recorded decades after all the supposed witnesses had died. Griffin not only accepts them without question (at least in this online format), but also elaborates on them in dramatic detail. See, for example, his retelling of the encounter between Byles and Col. Henry Knox in March 1776. Do we really know all that?

Common-place at the Museum of Fine Arts

The new issue of the Common-place online magazine includes David Jaffee’s review of the Museum of Fine Arts’s new American wing:

I applaud the "en suite" installations where paintings stand before furniture, needlework beside silver: the fine and decorative arts are no longer consigned to different spaces. While the museum had done this mixing before in its American galleries, the results here are quite striking.

Most dramatically as you enter on the first level from the courtyard, you see the museum's perhaps most iconic object, the John Singleton Copley portrait of Paul Revere but standing before, in a vitrine, is the Sons of Liberty Bowl (1768). The silver bowl can be seen as a political declaration on its own from its inscription and iconography.

Further on in this gallery of Revolutionary Boston [shown above] is displayed the clothespress owned by Gilbert DeBlois, a wealthy merchant and prominent loyalist. The history of this object facilitates a discussion of the trade and consumption of textiles and the important story of loyalists in Revolutionary Boston.

And in the early federal period, with its emphasis on neo-Classicism:

I applaud the clever idea to lay out the gallery as a gendered space—after entering and seeing the initial display of the gallery on "Neoclassical Dining," you must go either to the left of the display or the right.

If you choose the left, you have a series of objects interpreted as "Men in the New Nation" with Duncan Phyfe furniture and portraits of elite men. If you go to the right, you encounter a display of domesticity and "Women in the New Nation" with a lady's writing desk and a piano on view. This approach is subtle but effective as a way to lead the visitors to view the spaces as separate spheres.

However, Jaffee thinks the curators missed an opportunity by putting rural, vernacular, and folk art in separate galleries—indeed, on separate floors, instead of showing some of those examples alongside the expensive art for the urbane elite. And in separating the products of British North America from those of Latin America and the Native nations. But of course that’s what British North Americans tried their best to do. “Separate spheres” indeed.

Jaffee adds:

I found the "Behind the Scenes Galleries" to be most innovative in their compelling focus on questions of collecting and conservation, classification and curatorial choice. The ample space devoted to these areas is located literally behind the galleries, and that means that they receive a lot less visitation; however, those who do notice and venture over to the galleries are rewarded by some striking media walls with images from many aspects of museum work.

I agree. While those spaces are situated “behind the scenes,” they’re well worth looking for and spending time in. Sometimes one can even see the museum staff at work restoring or studying art.

(ADDENDUM: Soon after posting this, I got a reminder that David Jaffee is speaking on “Learning to Look at Early American Material Culture” at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester on Thursday, 3 November, at 7:30. Free and open to the public.)