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.

Gunshots in the Countryside

On 7 Sept 1774, 250 years ago today, Henry Vassall was riding in Lincoln when he heard a gunshot.

The only Henry Vassall I was able to find on the family tree at this time was a nineteen-year-old son of William Vassall, discussed yesterday.

Henry was either visiting or staying with his cousin Elizabeth, wife of Dr. Charles Russell (1739–1780, shown here). I wonder if he was studying medicine.

Later that month Henry Vassall told the Charlestown committee of correspondence about his experience. He then wrote out an account for two Middlesex County magistrates, Henry Gardner of Stow and Dr. John Cuming of Concord:

Passing between the House of Mrs. Rebecca Barons [?] & Doct. Russell’s between the Hours of 7 & 9 in the Evening of the 7 instant [i.e., this month] & to the best of my Knowledge as I rose [?] a little Hill a little a past the first Canopy [?] I heard the report of a Gun saw the light and a Ball Enter’d the Carriage which I was in being Doct. Russells.

I immediately step’d out of the Carriage & stood about five or six Minutes & then stepp’d into the Carriage Again & road in haste to the Doctor when I had gone a small Distance from the Place where the Gun was discharged I met a person on Horse back

when I had past a small Distance further I met several Persons riding on two Horses,

whether the Ball was aim’d at the Carriage I can’t say I further declare I do not know or even suspect who the Person was that Discharg’d the Gun as above mentioned . . .

NB. The above affair I declar’d to no person in Lincoln but the Revd. Mr. [William] Lawrence & desired him to keep it secret—Till the Friday Following.

Gardner and Cuming also gathered statements from a local man named Joseph Peirce and Luck, enslaved to Dr. Russell. Both declared that they had been traveling near young Vassall and had heard no gunshot.

Three members of the Lincoln committee of correspondence then wrote back to Charlestown agreeing that they detested “the Crime of Assassination” but casting doubt on Vassall’s complaint:

We shall only add that as the evening on which this event was said to have happened was very calm it is the general opinion here that it is very improbable if not utterly impossible that a gun should be Discharged at that time & place without being heard by many persons, you have Doubtless seen the impression in the Carriage & are able to judge & Declare whether it is the efect of a Bullet Discharged from a Gun or Not as well as any person in this town

This incident provided yet another reason for members of the Vassall family to seek safety surrounded by the king’s soldiers. (And on the same day that the magistrates wrapped up their investigation, people in Bristol, Rhode Island, threw stones at the chaise of Henry’s father and stepmother, William and Margaret Vassall. Newspapers reported that “next morning [they] set out for Boston.”)

This shot in Lincoln is only the second example I’ve found of someone in Massachusetts firing a gun at a supporter of the royal government. The first had occurred a couple of weeks earlier in Taunton.

According to Daniel Leonard, a veteran of the last war named Job Williams came to his house with a warning that “the People were to assemble” to protest how he had joined the mandamus Council. Leonard left, thinking that would head off the problem. Instead, on 22 August , or perhaps make it clear he wouldn’t be welcomed back. That crowd did arrive. Leonard wrote:

about five hundred persons assembled, many of them Freeholders and some of them Officers in the Militia, and formed themselves into a Battalion before my house; they had then no Fire-arms, but generally had clubs. . . .

My Family supposing all would remain quiet, went to bed at their usual hour; at 11 o’Clock in the evening a Party fixed upon the house with small arms and run off; how many they consisted of is uncertain, I suppose not many; four bullets and some Swan-shot entered the house at the windows, part in a lower room and part in the chamber above, where one Capt. Job Williams lodged. The balls that were fired into the lower room were in a direction to his bed, but were obstructed by the Chamber floor. . . . I conclude it possible that the attack upon the house was principally designed for him.

Back in 1769–1770, there had been three increasingly notorious incidents of government supporters shooting at crowds of protestors: the “Neck Riot,” Ebenezer Richardson killing Christopher Seider, and of course the Boston Massacre. But even in that period Massachusetts protestors had never shot at royal officials or their supporters.

These untraceable gunshots in the late summer of 1774 show that some people in Massachusetts were starting to think it was acceptable to use that level of violence against Loyalists.

A Few More Tidbits from Along the Way

Here are a few more observations on the sources I examined in my hunt for traces of Dr. Samuel Prescott this month.

First, in 1835 Lemuel Shattuck, probably relying on local and family traditions in Concord, wrote that when Prescott met Paul Revere and William Dawes, he “had spent the evening at Lexington,…and having been alarmed, was hastening his return home.”

In other words, Dr. Prescott had left his fiancée, Lydia Mulliken, because he had heard about the approaching regulars. Given the timing, that news had probably reached Lexington when the Boston men arrived at the Lexington parsonage. By the time the riders met on the road, Revere and Dawes didn’t need to tell Prescott.

If Dr. Prescott had indeed already heard the alarm, that helps to explain two details:

• why he left the Mulliken house—because he wanted to get back to his home town and prepare for any necessary military or medical action. He may therefore have planned to spend the night.
• how Revere and Dawes quickly learned that Prescott was a “high Son of Liberty.” They were probably all talking about what the army might be up to.

Second, in The Road to Concord, I wrote that James Barrett’s family and friends probably took the four cannon stolen from Boston to Stow and hid them near the house of Henry Gardner, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s reciever-general (equivalent of treasurer).

I based that on a statement in a Bicentennial-era history of Stow citing a local tradition. I wished I had a stronger source, but I presented it only as a possibility.

In the 24 Apr 1824 Concord Gazette and Middlesex Yeoman article I quoted this month I spotted this sentence:

Five pieces of cannon, a quantity of ammunition had been previously conveyed to Stow, and put under the care of Mr. GARDNER.

That’s still an unsourced statement from a newspaper story published forty-nine years after the event. Nonetheless, it’s gratifying to find people in Concord believed that was true.


Finally, in the 14 Feb 1778 article from the Providence Gazette where I found Dr. Prescott’s name among the men who had died in Halifax prison, another name is “Samuel Dyre.”

Samuel Dyer (whose name was spelled other ways as well) was the subject of the two articles I wrote for the Journal of the American Revolution published earlier this month.

Early in those articles I noted how hard it is to trace that Samuel Dyer since he was a sailor, thus transient and unlikely to leave a mark on institutional records, and since there were other men with the same or similar names.

Therefore, I resist the temptation to say that sailor Samuel Dyer from 1774–75 was the same man who died in Halifax in late 1776 or early 1777, most likely after being captured on a privateer.

After all, the last time my Samuel Dyer definitely appears in the historical record, he had been working for the royal authorities as a trustie inside the Boston jail. Would he really have enlisted aboard an American privateer after that?

All I can say is, given my Samuel Dyer’s habit of switching sides and telling powerful men what they wanted to hear, I can’t rule out that possibility.

“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.