Honoring Massachusetts’s First Provincial Congress

As I’ve been writing, in early October 1774 the elected representatives of Massachusetts’s towns gave Gov. Thomas Gage one last chance to resume regular legislative sessions and then formed themselves into a Provincial Congress instead.

The congress carefully didn’t claim to be that official legislature. It gave some of its officers different titles, for instance. John Hancock was president instead of speaker, and Henry Gardner was receiver instead of treasurer. (Benjamin Lincoln was still clerk.)

The Provincial Congress also couched its acts as recommendations to the towns instead of requirements. Thus, it was up to the towns to decide to send their tax revenue to Gardner instead of to royal treasurer Harrison Gray. It was up to the towns to reorganize their militia companies, which is why some towns formed minute companies, others didn’t, and the terms for those companies’ training were different.

Nonetheless, this was a big and unmistakable step toward self-government. The congress was the de facto government of Massachusetts until July 1775, when a newly elected General Court took over, acting as if the governor was absent (instead of holed up inside besieged Boston).

Next week we’ll see two commemorations of the first convening of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, on the 250th anniversaries of the inaugural session in Salem and the day when a larger group got down to business in the Concord meetinghouse (shown above, as rendered by Ralph Earl and Amos Doolittle).

Monday, 7 October, 6:00 to 8:00 P.M.
250th Anniversary of the First Massachusetts Provincial Congress
Hawthorne Hotel, Salem

Essex Heritage is the main host of this event. The program promises:

• welcome remarks from Jonathan Lane, executive director of Revolution 250 Massachusetts.
• brief lecture on the significance of the date by local historian Alexander Cain.
• presentation of federal, state, and local citations commemorating the bravery of those who met at Salem in 1774.
• keynote address by Robert A. Gross, author of The Minutemen and Their World.
• brief question-and-answer session with the speakers.

There will be light refreshments and a cash bar. Register for this free event here; space is limited.

Friday, 11 October, 9:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.
The 2024 Massachusetts Provincial Congress: “Exploring Democracy—Our Rights and Our Responsibilities”
First Parish and the Wright Tavern, Concord

The featured speakers will be four noted scholars:

• Robert A. Gross
• Woody Holton
• Manisha Sinha
• Lawrence Lessig

The event flyer says attendees can buy boxed lunches and there will be a reception afterwards. It’s not clear when the presentations will be. Register here to attend.

“A solemn League and Covenant of a most dangerous Nature”

At the start of the month, I described the 28 June 1774 Boston town meeting that endorsed the committee of correspondence and the Solemn League and Covenant boycott it had promulgated.

Boston’s merchants, including men who usually supported the Whigs as well as those who leaned Loyalist, were far outvoted at that meeting. But they nonetheless lodged a protest.

Or actually two.

Those documents were dated 29 June. They appeared in the 4 July Boston Post-Boy, and three days later in the Boston News-Letter. Those newspapers had become the voice of the town’s Loyalists.

The 4 July Boston Evening-Post also published the protests, though trying to remain neutral. The Whig newspapers didn’t touch them.

The longer of those protests said:

WHEREAS at a Meeting of the Freeholders and other Inhabitants of this Town, held at Faneuil-Hall, the 27th Instant [i.e., of this month], and from thence adjourned to the South Meeting-House, Copies of certain Circular Letters, wrote by the Committee of Correspondence, so called, for this Town, to the other Towns of this Province, and other Places on the Continent, and Answers thereto from the several Towns and Colonies were read, likewise a certain Circular Letter, accompanied with a solemn League and Covenant of a most dangerous Nature and Tendency, which hath been drawn up by the said Committee of Correspondence, Copies whereof have been by them clandestinely dispersed through the Province, without the Consent or Knowledge of the Town; and recommended to the People of the Country, to execute without Loss of Time, “least their Enemies should defeat its Purpose.”

These Points being fully spoke to, with Candour and Moderation, by Gentlemen of different Sentiments, it was at length motioned and seconded, That the Committee of Correspondence be censured by the Town, and dismissed from any further Service in that Capacity: after some Discussion on the Subject, and other Letters produced and read, the Question was put, and passed in the negative.

Wherefore we, the Dissentients, do now make this public and solemn Protest against the Doings of the said Committee, as such, against the solemn League and Covenant aforementioned, and against the Proceedings of the Town, so far as they have adopted the illegal Proceedings of the said Committee of Correspondence, for the following Reasons, viz.

I. Because with regard to the solemn League and Covenant aforementioned, we look on it to be a base, wicked, and illegal Measure, calculated to distress and ruin many Merchants, Shopkeepers, and others, in this Metropolis, and effect the whole commercial Interest of this Province; to put a Check at once to our Industry by stopping the Exportation of all the staple Articles of our Trade, such as Oil, Pot and Pearl-Ashes, Flax-Seed, Naval-Stores, Lumber of all Sorts, and likewise Cod Fish by way of Spain and Portugal, the proceeds of which go to Great-Britain as Remittance for Goods; also will put an End to a very valuable Branch of Trade to the Province, the Ship-Building; to create unhappy Divisions in Towns and in Families; to open a Door for the most wicked Perjuries, and to introduce almost every Species of Evil, that we have not yet felt, and cannot serve any good Purpose.

II. Because the Committee of Correspondence, in many of their Letters held forth Principles, which instead of extricating us from our Difficulties, serve in our Opinions still further to involve us, to which Principles we cannot accede.

III. Because the Committee of Correspondence, in some Letters that were read from them to New-York, Philadelphia, and other Places, particularly two to New-York, of the 28th and 30th of May, have falsely, maliciously and scandalously, vilified and abused the Characters of many of us, only for dissenting from them in Opinion, a Right which we shall claim, so long as we hold any Claim to Freedom or Liberty.

Both newspapers then printed three long columns of signatories—129 in all. They didn’t arrange those names in the same order, but provincial treasurer Harrison Gray (shown above) appeared in the top row in both papers, and he had also led the debate in the town meeting, so he’s taken to be this protest’s principal author.

It’s extremely rare to see so many men’s names attached to a document in the newspapers. Devoting that amount of space shows how much weight these men and their message carried for these printers. At the same time, 129 men was a decided minority in the town meeting. That test had already been run.

TOMORROW: The second protest.

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.

Two Salaries for Chief Justice Peter Oliver

One of the Massachusetts Whigs’ complaint about Thomas Hutchinson in the 1760s is that he amassed too many offices for himself.

Hutchinson was simultaneously the lieutenant governor, as such a member of the Council, the chief justice of the superior court, and a probate judge.

When Gov. Francis Bernard went home to Britain and Hutchinson became the acting governor, he gave up his judicial posts. Benjamin Lynde seemed like a natural fit for that role—his father, also named Benjamin Lynde, had been chief justice from 1729 to 1745.

After less than two years, however, Lynde resigned. Hutchinson, now governor in his own right, looked for a new chief justice. But first, he appointed his brother Foster to the court.

(Lyndes and Hutchinsons weren’t the only judicial dynasties. In 1772, William Cushing became a third-generation justice.)

Gov. Hutchinson decided to recommend elevating associate justice Peter Oliver (shown above) to the chief position. Oliver had been on the court since 1756. He was a strong supporter of unpopular Crown officials, as he’d shown at the trials of Ebenezer Richardson, Capt. Thomas Preston, and the British soldiers in 1770.

Oliver was also related to Hutchinson by marriage in three different ways. And his own brother Andrew was lieutenant governor. For the Whigs, Hutchinson giving his old jobs to his in-laws didn’t really look like sharing power.

One aspect of royal rule that should seem foreign to us is that Crown officials could keep a lot more of their actions secret from the public. Since the people’s representatives weren’t involved in choosing governors and justices or paying their salaries under the Townshend Acts, why did they need to know?

In July 1772 the Massachusetts General Court demanded that Gov. Hutchinson tell them whether he was getting paid by the Crown. He said he was. Joseph Hawley, a lawyer and representative from Northampton, drafted resolutions condemning this arrangement, but the legislature couldn’t do anything more about it.

It took even more time for the assembly to confirm that the royal government had offered salaries to Chief Justice Oliver and his colleagues. And even then it wasn’t clear the justices would accept that money. That didn’t stop Samuel Adams and the new Boston committee of correspondence from making that their primary complaint to other towns in late 1772.

In early 1773 the General Court tested the system by appropriating £300 to pay Oliver for the previous judicial term and £200 for the associate justices. In June, the newly elected legislature (many of the representatives having been reelected) asked treasurer Harrison Gray if the justices had collected that money. They had taken only half, Gray reported.

Aha! said the legislators. That means the justices were living off the royal government’s tax revenue. At the end of June, the General Court demanded that those men renounce any pay except what it had voted on. This is one of the paradoxical moments in Revolutionary confrontations: Massachusetts politicians demanding to pay government officials they disliked instead of letting the royal government do it. But it was the principle of the thing, you see.

The associate justices agreed that they wouldn’t accept any more royal pay. Chief Justice Oliver didn’t. The next move was up to the Whigs. But according to the provincial charter, they had no role in picking judges. So what could they do?

TOMORROW: John Adams’s bright idea.

“To see the minutes made by the secretary”

Here’s another controversy from 1770 that I didn’t note on the exact 250th anniversaries of its notable dates since I had other topics at hand and, frankly, it was drawn out more than it really deserved.

On 6 March, the day after the Boston Massacre, Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and his Council met in the Town House (now the Old State House museum, maintained by Revolutionary Spaces).

As I discussed back here, the town of Boston also had a meeting that day to urge the royal authorities into moving the army regiments out of town. Eventually Hutchinson and the army commander, Lt. Col. William Dalrymple, agreed to do that as long as the other took at least an equal share of the blame for conceding.

The provincial Secretary, Andrew Oliver, wanted the authorities in London to understand the pressures that Hutchinson—his friend, relative, and political ally—was under. So in his first draft of the official records of that Council meeting, Oliver wrote:

Divers gentlemen of the council informed his honour the lieutenant-governor, They were of opinion, that it was the determination of the people to have the troops removed from the town; and that this was not the sense of the inhabitants of the town of Boston only, but of other towns in the neighbourhood, who stood ready to come in, in order to effect this purpose, be the consequence of it what it may; unless they shall be withdrawn by the commanding officers, which, in their opinion, was the only method to prevent the effusion of blood, and, in all probability, the destruction of his Majesty’s troops, who must be overpowered by numbers, which would not be less than ten to one.

The next morning, however, the Council met again and asked “to see the minutes made by the secretary of this day’s proceedings set in order.” They thought Oliver’s summary sounded like a threat of rebellion and violence. The Councilors adopted new language instead:

That the people of this, and some of the neighbouring towns, were so exasperated and incensed, on account of the inhuman and barbarous destruction of a number of the inhabitants by the troops, that they apprehended imminent danger of further bloodshed, unless the troops were forthwith removed from the body of the town, which, in their opinion, was the only method to prevent it.

That text went into the official minutes.

But a week later, on 13 March, Oliver wrote out a more detailed description of what Councilors had told the governor. This time he named names, quoting one seasoned politician at length:

Mr. [Royall] Tyler had said, “That it was not such people as had formerly pulled down the lieutenant-governor’s house which conducted the present measures, but that they were people of the best character among us—men of estates, and men of religion: That they had formed their plan, and that this was a part of it to remove the troops out of town, and after that the commissioners: That it was impossible the troops should remain in town; that the people would come in from the neighbouring towns, and that there would be 10,000 men to effect the removal of the troops, and that they would probably be destroyed by the people—should it be called rebellion—should it incur the loss of our charter, or be the consequence what it would.”

Divers other gentlemen adopted what Mr. Tyler had said, by referring expressly to it, and thereupon excusing themselves from enlarging. Mr. [James] Russell of Charlestown and Mr. [Samuel] Dexter of Dedham, confirmed what he said respecting the present temper and disposition of the neighbouring towns; every gentlemen spoke of the occasion, and unanimously expressed their sense of the necessity of the immediate removal of the troops from the town, and advised his honour to pray that colonel Dalrymple would order the troops down to Castle William;

one gentlemen [Harrison Gray], to enforce it, said, ”That the lieutenant-governor had asked the advice of the council, and they had unanimously advised him to a measure; which advice, in his opinion, laid the lieutenant-governor under an obligation to act agreeably thereto.” Another gentlemen [John Erving] pressed his compliance with greater earnestness, and told him, “That if after this any mischief should ensue, by means of his declining to join with them, the whole blame must fall upon him; but that if he joined with them, and colonel Dalrymple, after that, should refuse to remove the troops, the blame would then lie at his door.”

Oliver swore to the truth of that account and put it on the next ship to London. There it was printed along with depositions about local hostility to the king’s soldiers in A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance at Boston in New England. And then that pamphlet came back to Boston.

TOMORROW: More pamphlets.

“The Road to Concord” Ends in Stow, 20 July

On Thursday, 20 July, I’ll speak about The Road to Concord at the Randall Library in Stow, Massachusetts.

For this talk I plan to stress the end of the story, as Gen. Thomas Gage strove to find the cannon that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress was accumulating in the countryside—particularly in Concord.

On 29 Oct 1774, that congress appointed Henry Gardner (1731-1782) of Stow as its “receiver general”—the shadow treasurer for a shadow government. The congress asked towns to send Gardner all the taxes they collected for Massachusetts instead of sending them to Harrison Gray, the royal government’s treasurer in Boston.

In 1907 Edward Everett Hale wrote for the Massachusetts Historical Society, “It would seem as if Henry Gardner might be called the first person who by public act was instructed to commit high treason against the King.”

Be that as it may, Gardner was responsible for managing payments for the cannon, carriages, and artillery equipment that the congress bought over the months before the war. Given how the economy worked, he may simply have kept track of the debts that tradesmen or wealthy Patriot merchants were accruing. Many towns apparently chose to keep their tax collections themselves rather than forwarding them on to either side.

Stow has another link to the story in The Road to Concord. It looks like that town was the farthest west that the Boston militia artillery company’s four brass cannon traveled in 1775. The town’s website says, “Cannon were hidden in the woods surrounding the Lower Common, gunpowder and other armaments in the Meeting House and a small powderhouse on Pilot Grove Hill.” I look forward to seeing those sites.

This talk will start at 7:00 P.M. at the Randall Library, 19 Crescent Street in Stow. It is free and open to the public. I’ll have copies of The Road to Concord and other books available for sale and signing.

“All the Seals have been taken out of the Council Chamber”

Hace you seen the last royal seal of Massachusetts?

At left is a picture of the impression the seal made. It shows the royal arms of Great Britain, with the lion and unicorn fighting for a crown, within a motto denoting the reign of George III.

As the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s website explains, royal governors Francis Bernard, Thomas Hutchinson, and Thomas Gage used this seal on official commissions in the 1760s and early 1770s.

And then, in the middle of the siege of Boston, the royal seal disappeared. Gen. Gage issued a proclamation dated 3 Oct 1775 offering “a Reward of Ten Guineas” for its return.

The governor also summoned his Council and appointed a committee to find out where the seal had gone. On 6 October, Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, Chief Justice Peter Oliver, Treasurer Harrison Gray, William Browne, and Richard Lechmere reported back that they had conducted “a strict enquiry and examination under oath, of all those persons who have been returned to us, as having had access to the Council Chamber between the Ninth day of September and the Fourth of October.” They had collected affidavits. But they had found no answers and no seal.

As reported in the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Transactions, Gage had to report to the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State:

Boston 9th October 1775

My Lord…

I must inform Your Lordship that a Theft has been committed on the Province, and that all the Seals have been taken out of the Council Chamber where they were kept. This was observed on the 4th Inst; on the 6th I sent a Message to the Lieutenant Governor and Council, to make every necessary enquiry they possibly could, into the matter, which they have done, and I am sorry to tell Your Lordship without any good effect; which you will see by their answer to my message, which I have now the honor to transmit to Your Lordship.

I’m curious why the governor reported that people had noticed the seal was missing on 4 October when his proclamation was dated 3 October. Perhaps the young printer John Howe had made an error, or perhaps Gage had. He was about to leave Massachusetts for good, sailing away on 11 October, so he had a lot of other things on his mind.

TOMORROW: Did Patriots steal the seal?

The Young Gentleman in the Gallery

There’s a third description of what Josiah Quincy, Jr., said in the Old South Meeting-House on 16 Dec 1773, preserved in the biography of the young lawyer authored by his descendants.

But not in the first edition of that biography, published by the subject’s son Josiah Quincy (1772-1864) in 1825. That book had little to say about the destruction of the tea, which had not yet gained fame and respect as the “Boston Tea Party.”

Instead, the anecdote first came into print in the second edition, edited by the subject’s granddaughter Eliza Susan Quincy (1798-1884) for publication almost fifty years later. (Actually, this Massachusetts Historical Society webpage says she had prepared the first edition as well, though it was published under her father’s name.)

The 1874 book says:

During the interval, speeches were made by Samuel Adams and others. Josiah Quincy, Junior, standing in the east gallery of the Old South meeting-house, spoke in a tone of bold and animated invective against the measures of the British government.

Harrison Gray [royal treasurer of Massachusetts], standing on the floor, in reply warned the young gentleman in the gallery against the consequences of the intemperate language in which he indulged, saying that such language would be no longer borne by administration; that measures were in train which would bring the authors of such invectives to the punishment they deserved.

Mr. Quincy replied, “If the old gentleman on the floor intends, by his warning to ‘the young gentleman in the gallery,’ to utter only a friendly voice in the spirit of paternal advice, I thank him. If his object be to terrify and intimidate, I despise him. Personally, perhaps, I have less concern than any one present in the crisis which is approaching. The seeds of dissolution are thickly planted in my constitution. They must soon ripen. I feel how short is the day that is allotted to me.”

The remarks about “my constitution” alluded to the tuberculosis Quincy was suffering from, but also brought up thoughts of the British constitution. Was it also doomed to dissolution?

Two days ago, I quoted a report of that meeting written by a Crown informant inside Old South. It didn’t describe Quincy speaking “against the measures of the British government,” even though the informant’s job was to pay attention to such remarks. It didn’t mention Harrison Gray, a royal appointee by then firmly on the side of the Crown, at all.

That report did say Quincy was heckled, but it described the voice coming down from the gallery, not directed up to it. And that voice insinuated that Quincy had taken money to support the Rotch family, not that he was using “intemperate language.”

So was that exchange between Quincy and a suspicious radical transmuted by memory into this back-and-forth between Quincy and a leading Loyalist?

TOMORROW: Quincy looks at clouds from both sides.

Massachusetts Towns Line Up Against the Stamp Act

Two hundred and fifty years ago, representatives to the Massachusetts General Court were heading home after a very short legislative session.

Gov. Francis Bernard had called the lower house of the Massachusetts legislature to convene on Wednesday, 25 September, in Boston. Most of the representatives summoned to that meeting had been elected back in May, and their towns had given them instructions about how to vote on the big issues of the day. But the Stamp Act, and New England’s forceful response to it, had produced a bigger confrontation than anyone imagined. Many towns therefore held another meeting to come up with additional instructions for their legislators.

On 23 September, Boston’s town meeting approved its special instructions, reiterating its opposition to the Stamp Act and anything that looked like compromise about that new law. That argument came out of a committee, but the man who gets the most credit for drafting it is Samuel Adams. Though the instructions didn’t use the phrase “taxation without representation” (not coined until 1767), that idea was the philosophical basis for Boston’s objection to the stamp tax.

When Boston created its instructions, its representatives in the House were:

• James Otis, Jr., the fiery attorney who a few years before had resigned his royal appointments and started to represent the interests of the Boston merchants.
• Thomas Cushing, one of those merchants. His late father had employed Samuel Adams in his mercantile house as a young man, with results that convinced both of them that Adams’s talents didn’t lie in business.
• Thomas Gray (1721-1774), also the province’s auditor. As a sign of how cozy the political class was then, the province treasurer whose accounts he checked was his older brother, Harrison Gray.

And there was a player to be named later.

Other Massachusetts towns came up with similar instructions for their representatives. In Braintree, Samuel Adams’s second cousin John was the principal drafter. John Adams later claimed that his draft had been adopted nearly without editing (there was a moderate amount of editing), and that it was the model for many other towns’ instructions (other towns were already making the same arguments). Braintree’s protest did use an impressive amount of legal jargon, however.

TOMORROW: The governor’s opening speech.

“This ball I took from his body”

Longtime Boston 1775 readers will recall our keen scholarly interest in Dr. Joseph Warren’s body, head, skull, and teeth after the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In the same vein, we now report that on 5 Mar 1833, the Rev. William Montague of Dedham went to a magistrate and prepared the following affidavit:

I, William Montague, of Dedham, County of Norfolk, State of Massachusetts, clergyman, do certify, to whom it may concern, that in the year 1789 or 1790, I was in London, and became acquainted with Mr. [Arthur] Savage, formerly an officer of the customs for the port of Boston, and who left there when the Royalists and Royal troops evacuated that town in 1776.

When in London, Mr. Savage gave me a leaden ball, which is now in my possession, with the following account of it, viz.:—

“On the morning of the 18th of June, 1775. after the battle of Bunker or Breed’s Hill—I, with a number of other Royalists and British officers, among whom was Gen. [John] Burgoyne, went over from Boston to Charlestown, to view the battle field. Among the fallen we found the body of Dr. Joseph Warren, with whom I had been personally acquainted. When he fell he fell across a rail. This ball I took from his body, and as I shall never visit Boston again, I will give it to you to take to America, where it will be valuable as a relic of your Revolution. His sword and belt, with some other articles, were taken by some of the officers present; and, I believe, brought to England.[”]

Montague had been rector at Christ Church in Boston from 1786 to 1791, and then went out to Dedham to reopen the Episcopal church there.

Arthur Savage (1731-1801) served as Comptroller of Customs at Falmouth (now Portland), Maine, until 1771, when a mob attacked him for seizing a ship. He then moved to Boston and worked in that Customs office until the evacuation.

Montague died only a few months after preparing his affidavit, in 22 July. His son William then reported finding a 1792 letter to his father from Harrison Gray, the last royal Treasurer of Massachusetts, which said:

I hope you will take good care to preserve that relic which was given you at my house, for in future time it will be a matter of interest to you rebels.

And indeed it did become a matter of interest.

TOMORROW: Where is that musket ball now?