The Limits on Fatal Violence in Boston, 1765-1774

Though Boston earned a reputation as a riotous town in the ten years after the first public Stamp Act protests of 1765, those Boston rioters never killed anyone.

A mob did ruin Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s North End mansion in 1765, and damaged several other royal officials’ houses in the same months. In 1768, the Customs service’s seizure of John Hancock’s ship Liberty prompted another crowd to manhandle three Customs officials.

The next year, Bostonians learned the ritual of tarring and feathering, which they inflicted on several lower-level Customs employees over the next few years. But those actions all stopped short of killing people.

There are examples from elsewhere in New England of fatal, or nearly fatal, resistance to the Crown. In April 1769, as detailed here, sailors out of Marblehead resisting impressment into the Royal Navy killed Lt. Henry Panton at sea.

During the Gaspée seizure of 1772, the Rhode Islanders storming that Royal Navy vessel shot its commander, Lt. William Dudingston, in the chest—which sure sounds like he could have been killed. But he survived with medical care. Guns were also fired, though not hitting anyone, during some rural demonstrations against mandamus Council members in the fall of 1774.

One might argue that the lack of fatalities in Boston riots was only a matter of luck. There were some close calls:

• After Ebenezer Richardson shot Christopher Seider on 22 Feb 1770, he was nearly lynched by an angry crowd. The Whig leader William Molineux insisted on taking the unpopular Customs employee to a magistrate for indictment.
• Later that year, a crowd frightened importer Patrick McMaster with tar and feathers so badly he collapsed.
• In 1774, a mob attacked John Malcolm, yet another Customs employee, after he clubbed George Robert Twelves Hewes. That attack lasted for hours, and involved choking Malcolm with a noose as well as beating, whipping, and tarring and feathering him. But he survived.

In addition, Hutchinson felt that his nephew Nathaniel Rogers was hounded to an untimely death in 1770.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that during those tumultuous years no Crown official, soldier, or supporter was killed in political violence in Boston. In contrast, during a month-long stretch of early 1770 employees of the royal government shot dead four men and two boys, and wounded several more. A big reason for that difference was that Bostonians didn’t use guns in their conflicts, preferring to intimidate their opponents through numbers.

On 18 Oct 1774, an angry sailor named Samuel Dyer broke that pattern. He attacked two Royal Artillery officers at noon on Boston’s main street, firing pistols at their heads. Both his guns misfired, but the army naturally saw Dyer’s actions as an escalation.

I’ll talk about Dyer, his claims of mistreatment, what the record actually shows, and how his assault with deadly weapons might have started the American War off quite differently at this Saturday’s History Camp.

The Non-Fatal Battle of Golden Hill

Yesterday was the anniversary of what New York historians later called “The Battle of Golden Hill.” That’s a mighty name for what was really the biggest of a series of brawls between British soldiers stationed in the city and local men over the first Liberty Pole.

Some accounts of the fighting 19 Jan 1770 say that it produced “the first blood of the Revolutionary War.” Others even say it included the first death. New York historians were pleased to find an event that predated the killing of Christopher Seider and the Boston Massacre (which also got a mighty name).

There was surely some bloodletting in the fight, but there had been blood shed earlier as well. The first violent death of the conflict might have been the killing of Lt. Henry Panton at sea in April 1769, or we might interpret that as part of sailors’ ongoing resistance to Royal Navy impressment, with no direct link to the Revolutionary argument.

As for fatalities, there were indeed early reports that a citizen was killed in the fighting on 19 Jan 1770. For example, a letter dated 22 January and published in the St. James Chronicle stated, “One sailor got run through the body who has since died, &c.”

However, no New York newspaper ever published the name of that dead man, and the local Whigs would surely have made a public martyr of him. We know from the Boston Massacre that activists publicized the names of all the dead and then some. Paul Revere’s print of the shooting says Christopher Monk and John Clark had been wounded “mortally,” but both apprentices lived for years. I think that sailor fell into the same category, dead enough to complain about but not really dead.

A special supplement to the New-York Journal on 1 Mar 1770 printed a long, detailed account of the fighting dated 31 January. Though signed “An Impartial Observer,” the writer clearly leaned toward the local side of the conflict. And that account stated there were no fatalities, though only by luck. Here’s a sample of that blow-by-blow between soldiers wielding bayonets, swords, and clubs and locals wielding, well, swords and clubs:

Those few that had the sticks maintained their ground in the narrow passage in which they stood, and defended their defenceless fellow citizens, for some time, against the furious and unmanly attacks of armed soldiers, until one of them missing his aim, in a stroke made at one of the assailants, lost his stick, which obliged the former to retreat, to look for some instrument of defence; the soldiers pursued him down to the main street; one of them made a stroke, with a cutlass at Mr. Francis Field, one of the people called Quakers, standing in an inoffensive posture in Mr. Field’s door, at the corner; and cut him on the right cheek, and if the corner had not broke the stroke, it would have probably killed him.

This party that came down to the main street cut a tea-water man driving his cart, and a fisherman’s finger; in short they madly attacked every person that they could reach: And their companions on Golden-Hill were more inhuman; for, besides cuting a sailor’s head and finger, that was defended himself against them, they stabbed another with a bayonet, going about his business, so badly, that his life was thought in danger.

Not satiated with all this cruelty, two of them followed a boy going for sugar, into Mr. Elsworth’s house, one of them cut him on the head with a cutlass, and the other made a lung[e] with a bayonet at the woman in the entry, that answered the child. Capt. Richardson was violently attacked by two of the soldiers, with swords, and expected to have been cut to pieces; but was so fortunate as to defend himself with a stick for a considerable time, ’till a halbert was put into his hands, with which he could have killed several of them; but he made no other use of it, than to defend himself, and his naked fellow-citizens.—

Mr. John Targe, hearing from his house, the cry of murder, went out unarmed, to see the occasion of it, and when he came in view of the soldiers, three of them pursued him to his house, with their arms drawn, from whence he took a halbert, with which he defended himself against their attacks (with sticks of wood, which they took from a heap that lay in the street, and threw at his legs, as they could not reach his body with their arms) and obliged them to retire to their companions; in which time their lives were in his power, had he been disposed to have taken them.

And so on. I suspect the man whose “life was thought in danger” was the sailor earlier rumored to have died.

Most modern accounts agree with me and say the “Battle of Golden Hill” produced no deaths, but every so often a chronicler repeats the claim that it was the first fatal confrontation of the Revolution.

(The image above is Charles Lefferts’s painting of “The Battle of Golden Hill,” completed about 1920 and now at the New-York Historical Society.)

The Shifting Tides of “Terrorism”

The question of whether America’s Revolutionary Sons of Liberty were terrorists, made briefly controversial this Thanksgiving season, is actually rather old and uncontroversial. Many textbooks and basic studies of terrorism cite the Sons of Liberty’s more violent actions as historic examples while acknowledging that Americans tend to be uncomfortable with the “terrorist” label.

Popular writers have raised the same issues. Todd Alan Kreamer’s essay “Sons of Liberty: Patriots or Terrorists?” appeared on EarlyAmerica.com back in the fall of 1996. Ten years later, a student in Pepperell wrote a short essay in Teen Ink concluding that the Sons of Liberty were terrorists and “unacceptable.”

I always want to add that the Sons of Liberty were not murderers. They destroyed property. They inflicted corporal punishment, sometimes brutally. They intimidated and frightened their opponents. But I can’t think of any Crown official, employee, or political supporter in New England who died as a result of political violence until the North Bridge on 19 Apr 1775. (By writing “in New England,” I’m sidestepping the possible example of Royal Navy lieutenant Henry Panton, killed at sea by sailor Michael Corbet while resisting impressment in 1769.) It might have been sheer luck that none of the Sons of Liberty’s victims died, but that’s how it worked out.

Back in the fall of 2001, when terrorism was on everybody’s minds, I took part in discussions on H-Net, a network of email lists for historians, about whether recent events had useful parallels in the Sons of Liberty or the Barbary States. [That was so far back I was still using a Compuserve email address.] H-Net organized a resource page for teachers that mentioned my comments, among others.

I was skeptical of those parallels, partly because people were stretching the evidence or working with incomplete information to construct them, and partly because of that lack of killing. I thought it was more useful to consider how terrorism had changed over time. On 15 Oct 2001 I wrote:

The word “terrorism” was coined in 1795. Originally it referred to Revolutionary France’s Reign of Terror: an angry urban populace and an ideologically fervent government using their control of the streets and the courts to punish many enemies, real and perceived. We can draw a parallel between that behavior and the Sons of Liberty, especially after the Revolutionary War began, though the Americans didn’t use their gallows to the same extent. Certainly historians of the Loyalist community like James Stark drew that parallel.

Stark’s The Loyalists of Massachusetts (1910) uses the phrase “reign of terror” three times, suggesting that the Sons of Liberty’s behavior presaged the worst of the French Revolution. Loyalists themselves had used similar language. Gov. Francis Bernard wrote of “the terror which the troops of the faction have occasioned” in Boston (19 July 1768) and “the terror of the mobs” (6 Aug 1768).

Though Bernard called his political opponents “the faction,” he acknowledged that their power came from their numbers (“the troops of the faction,” “the mobs”). Eighteenth-century terrorism usually consisted of violence performed by crowds and supported by the majority of the populace. The Boston Tea Party fits that pattern, but because it was so tightly controlled and targeted, it was actually exceptional. When experts speak about the Sons of Liberty’s terrorism, they usually point to riots, the tarring and feathering of Customs employees like John Malcolm (as shown above), and the destruction of upper-class officials’ houses.

COMING UP: What changed terrorism since the Revolution?

BUT FIRST: Answers to the Deck Calendar Challenge!