Boston 1775

The Rev. Jeremy Belknap ’s account of how Gen. Thomas Gage ’s plan for the march to Concord leaked out to the Patriots, quoted yesterday , ...

Last month I wrote about William Molineux obtaining eight cannon for the Massachusetts resistance in the last weeks before he died on 22 ...

Yesterday we left Henry Hulton  under attack in his home in Brookline . Hulton, one of the five Commissioners of Customs for North Ame...

On 19 June 1770, 250 years ago today , political violence broke out again in greater Boston. With the 14th Regiment off at Castle Will...

After his fight with James Otis, Jr. , became a big deal, Customs Commissioner John Robinson published his version of what had led up to ...

Owen Richards was born in Wales, according to what he testified to the Loyalists Commission in 1784. Two years earlier he had told the roy...

“The Liberty Song” by John Dickinson and Arthur Lee (to music by William Boyce ) became so popular in Boston after July 1768 that by th...

I’ve focused on Charles Paxton as the chief target of Boston’s Pope Night processions in 1767, but two other new Commissioners of His Ma...

On Saturday, 4 November, Faneuil Hall will host a reenactment of the Boston town meeting I described yesterday , setting up a non-import...

On 24 Apr 1775, many British army officers planned to celebrate St. George’s Day , honoring the patron saint of England. St. George’s Day...

While I was at the Colonial Society of Massachusetts on Friday, I got a glimpse of its latest publication, Henry Hulton and the American Re...

In a footnote for his contribution to The Era of the American Revolution (1939), Oliver M. Dickerson quoted the American Commissioners of C...

When the Revolutionary War began in 1775, a little more than eighty years had passed since Massachusetts was convulsed by the witchcraft hys...

Almost all the anecdotes I know about children in Revolutionary Boston concern locals. I have a few more about the children of British impe...

On Wednesday, I quoted a manuscript memoir written by Henry Hulton, one of the Commissioners of Customs stationed in Boston from 1767 to 17...

Yesterday's post described the arrival of Customs Commissioner Henry Hulton (1731-1790) in Boston in 1767, and his opinion of the loca...

Henry Hulton was an English bureaucrat who arrived in Boston as one of the new Commissioners of Customs in 1767, responsible for collecting ...