“By Doctor Church I send”

As recounted yesterday, after returning from besieged Boston on 23 Apr 1775, Dr. Benjamin Church told Paul Revere that he’d been detained by Gov. Thomas Gage’s troops and kept in a North End barrack for most of his time in town.

Church’s Patriot colleagues accepted that story, probably even admired his daring. They chose him to travel to Philadelphia and consult with the Continental Congress, and the Congress in turn made him Surgeon-General of its army.

However, the documentary record I explored earlier this week casts doubt on Church’s story. While in Boston he was clearly communicating with relatives of his colleagues and offering to deliver letters for them.

On 22 April, Edmund Quincy gave Church two letters to carry out of town: to his daughter Dorothy and to her fiancé, John Hancock. The letter to Dolly Quincy refers to the “opporty (unexpected) by Doctr. Church” to communicate. There’s no apparent worry about Church being under the royal authorities’ control.

In addition, Edmund’s son Henry Quincy wrote a letter to the elder Dr. John Sprague in Dedham, shown here. That too stated: “Dr. Church Arrived here this PM. from Concord on Business with the General is Allowed in the Morning to Return.”

In further addition, Rachel Revere (shown above) wrote a short, undated note to her husband Paul. That began “by Doctor Church I send a hundred & twenty five pounds”—probably devalued Old Tenor currency.

All those documents are in the files of Gen. Gage. Did soldiers seize them from Dr. Church as he left Boston? That wouldn’t explain how those same files contain Dr. John Homans’s note to Dr. Joseph Gardner asking for surgical knives, which Church carried into town. 

When Allen French explored Church’s activities in General Gage’s Informers (1932), the letter from Rachel Revere was one of the prime pieces of proof that the doctor was cooperating with the royal authorities. I wrote about the Homans letter in an article for New England Ancestors in 2006. The Quincy letters add more evidence to that pile.

I wonder what Dr. Church told his colleagues when he arrived back in Cambridge, knowing that their relatives inside Boston would eventually mention that they’d given him letters to deliver. Presumably to maintain his cover the doctor spoke ruefully of having the big, bad soldiers take all his papers away. No one appears to have spoken of those missing documents as evidence of Church’s treachery, even after Gen. George Washington put him under arrest in October.

All the documents I’m speaking of remain in the Thomas Gage Papers at the Clements Library in Michigan. The library has just released digital scans of Gage’s correspondence in the weeks after the start of the war (along with poor computerized transcriptions which I’ve largely ignored). I’m sure there are some surprises to be found, as well as more evidence for what we already know.

Accounting for New England Ancestors

The Holiday 2006 issue of New England Ancestors magazine, from the New England Historic Genealogical Society, has an article titled “Cataloging unidentified account books,” by Timothy G. X. Salls, which is now available online. This article examines one item from the N.E.H.G.S.’s archives: an account book.

Such a document can be valuable for showing commercial relationships, cycles of business and debt, availability of certain goods, &c. But if you have no way to put an account book in its original context, it looks like a maddening string of names and numbers. Salls explains how clues in this book let him identify its original user and glean a bit of his story.

This book, it appears, was owned by Henry Quincy (1727-1780), son of the prominent Boston magistrate Edmund Quincy. He was first cousin to the lawyers Josiah Quincy, Jr., and Samuel Quincy. His sister Dorothy married governor John Hancock, his sister Esther married provincial attorney general Jonathan Sewall, and his sister Sarah married militia general William Greenleaf. According to this account book, in 1774-75 Henry’s customers included several British army officers. He seems to have stayed out of politics (especially after financial reverses in 1766).

The Revolutionary War didn’t go well for Henry Quincy. Salls writes:

The six unnumbered pages are the most interesting since they contain an “Account of furniture & their cost & value left in the dwelling house of Henry Quincy also an account of stock in his warehouse left by him when he by permission of General Gage with his family left his possessions in Boston May 6th 1775”.

After the war began, there was, naturally, a rush to get out of the besieged town. You didn’t want cannonballs falling on your head. Of course, once you had left, who would look after your home and business property?

Paul Revere’s wife left his eldest son, fifteen-year-old Paul, Jr., to look after the family’s North End shop. Years later former British soldier John Moies recalled how “I was desired of John Andrews to go into Mr. Samuel Elliot's Store in Wilsons Lane and to watch there” as the military prepared to evacuate in March 1776. In Henry Quincy’s case, the best he could do was take an inventory of everything he left behind.

The four-page inventory was valued at £261:4:9 and sworn before Justice of the Peace John Foster in Providence on December 28, 1776. The fifth unnumbered page notes that in March 1775 Henry Quincy left “one box containing books & accts of every denomination in his own private concerns” dating from 1748; “two boxes of my father Salter’s [i.e., belonging to the father of his first wife, Mary Salter] books & papers including Mr & Mrs Powndings books accts & other domestick papers as well foreign; one large trunk of Edmd Quincy’s papers, receipts, bills, & letters foreign & domestick”; and in his warehouse a “blue painted chest on wheels with the late compy of Edmd & Josa Quincy’s accts & books of every sort as well as their foreign & domestick papers.”

A note at the bottom of the page states that Henry returned to Boston on April 17, 1776, “to collect what effects might be left & found my house emptied of every thing, my warehouse as well, not a floor to the store from the roof to the cellar all carried off or destroy’d.”