Hopestill Capen’s Last Decades in Boston

Before the Revolutionary War, Hopestill Capen regularly advertised British dry goods in Boston newspapers.

After his two years in jail on suspicion of being inimical to the newly independent state, Capen kept a lower profile. He ran no ads—though he may not have had many goods to sell, either.

Nonetheless, Capen’s shop sign, the Cornfields, continued to be mentioned in the newspapers as a landmark in central Boston.

On 26 July 1786, Boston’s selectmen met to draw names of citizens in good standing to serve as jurors “for a Maritime Court” the next month. The first name chosen was Paul Revere, now with “Esq.” after his name.

The second name was Hopestill Capen, showing he had been fully reintegrated into Boston society.

Interestingly, the third name was David Spear. Capen and Spear had married sisters, Patience and Sarah Stoddard.

Hopestill and Patience Capen had had eight or nine children between 1761 and 1774. Most died in their first year, and only one, Thomas, was still alive when the British left.

Sarah Spear and Patience Capen died within a few days of each other in January 1791. Patience was 57 years old.

On 21 Nov 1795, Hopestill Capen placed this advertisement in the Columbian Centinel:

A Theft.

On Tuesday Evening last, between the hours of 6 and 10 o’clock, was stolen from the Subscriber’s house, the following PLATE, marked as follows, viz

Three table Spoons, one H.C. to P.C. made by Mr. HOMES, one d[itt]o A.B. to P.S. made by A. OLIVER; one d[itt]o. T. S. S. and 1 Porringer, marked T. S. A. Engish mode. Whoever will discover the person, so that he or she may be brought to justice, and the property restored, shall receive TEN DOLLARS reward.

I rather hope Hopestill Capen got his family silver back, including the spoon with his and his late wife’s initials on it.

On 2 Mar 1807, Hopestill Capen died at the age of 76. His funeral proceeded from the house his son Thomas had inherited, 47 Hanover Street—now the Union Oyster House.

The Capens were buried in the Copp’s Hill cemetery. Patience and Hopestill’s gravestones were still readable in the late 1800s, but they no longer appear to exist.

“To be a liege subject of the State of Massachusetts Bay”

In May 1778, the Massachusetts General Court began a new legislative year.

On 17 September, Council member John Pitts brought the lower house “a Petition of Hopestill Capen, a Prisoner in Boston Goal, praying that he may not any longer be confined.”

This was a breakthrough. For the first time, Capen was addressing the General Court as a legitimate government. Previously he had insisted that doing so would violate his religious scruples.

Once again, the legislators formed a joint committee to consider Capen’s petition, along with a similar plea for release from the shorthand expert John Hodgson.

On 19 September, the Council approved a resolution “liberting them on certain Conditions.” This time, the House fully concurred. The official resolve stated:

that the prayer of Hopestill Capen’s petition be so far granted, that he be liberated from his confinement upon his giving bond to the Treasurer of this State for the sum of Two thousand pounds, with sufficient sureties that he will subscribe and closely adhere to the following declaration by him proposed in his petition, vizt. “I, the subscriber, acknowledge myself to be a liege subject of the State of Massachusetts Bay, and hold myself obliged to assist in supporting peace and good order in this State and when called on by lawfull authority I am ready so to do.”

Back in February 1778, the legislature had stipulated this oath of allegiance:

I, A.B., do swear (or affirm as the case may be) that I will bear faith and allegance to the state of Massachusetts Bay, and will faithfully support and maintain and defend the same against George the Third, king of Great Britain, his abettors and all other enemies and opposers whatsoever, and will discover all plots and conspiraces that shall come to knowledge, against said state or any other of the United States of America. So help me God.

Hodgson was ready to take that oath, but Capen still shied from explicitly renouncing his loyalty to George III. After all, what if the tide of war turned, and the Crown prevailed? According to his faith, he would have to be a Loyalist again. But for now, Capen would acknowledge the state of Massachusetts as his sovereign. (It’s notable he used the term “subject,” not “citizen.”)

In the fall of 1778, after twenty-five months of confinement, Hopestill Capen got out of jail.

TOMORROW: The last years.

Hopestill Capen Still in the Boston Jail

We left the Boston merchant Hopestill Capen locked up in the Boston jail in mid-1777.

As a Sandemanian, Capen had stayed loyal to the British Crown—but then he’d stayed in Boston after the British military left. He refused to pledge allegiance to the colonies declaring independence in July 1776, rendering himself suspicious.

As I previously quoted, Capen tried a public plea for his release. His wife Patience petitioned the state government. His friends in the merchant community vouched for him.

On 20 June 1777, the Massachusetts Council approved a petition from merchant Robert Pierpont and others for Capen’s release. The lower house of the General Court “concurr’d as taken into a new Draught.”

A resolution is printed in Massachusetts Acts and Resolves, stipulating that Pierpont and friends would give “Give bond to the Treasurr. of This State in the sum of five hundred Pounds” that Capen would “appear before any Court in the County of Suffolk.”

But apparently the House never agreed to that wording, or those terms. Capen remained in jail.

On 24 Feb 1778, the Council took up a new petition from Patience Capen. That board named Benjamin Austin to a committee to consider it along with whatever members the House named.

On 3 March, the Council accepted that committee’s recommendation. Moses Gill (shown above) delivered the news to the House. And the House disagreed, telling the committee instead to “enquire of the Committee of Correspondence, &c. of the Town of Boston, respecting Mr. Capen.”

A week later, there was a new report. The Council again agreed with the committee, Jabez Fisher reported. The House again disagreed, and voted to set the petition aside.

The Council, made up of richer men, was apparently inclined to be more lenient, but the House, dominated by rural delegates, was still not in a forgiving mood.

The Massachusetts government had exchanged some of its Loyalist prisoners to bring captives back from New York. That wasn’t an option for Capen since he didn’t want to go over to the enemy.

And thus the legislative term ended in the spring of 1778 with Hopestill Capen still in the Boston jail.

TOMORROW: Change of heart.

“We have esteemed him to be an honest and peaceable citizen”

In May 1777 Boston had a series of town meetings concerned chiefly with its military defenses.

On 17 May that discussion went further to assembling a list of “Persons belonging to this Town, as have been endeavouring since the 19th. of April 1775, to counteract the united Struggles of this & the neighbouring States.”

The town meeting voted to have those twenty-nine men “apprehended & confined”—while recognizing that would require an order from the Massachusetts Council.

Boston’s official list of suspected Loyalists included the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, Dr. James Lloyd and four other physicians, William Jackson of the Brazen Head, and others. Three of those men were already in jail: Hopestill Capen, Thomas Edwards, and Benjamin Davis, Sr.

On 22 May the town elected seven representatives to the Massachusetts General Court, with John Pitts and Ellis Gray getting the most votes—more than 500.

Some prominent people disagreed with the town’s list of Loyalists. Soon after the new legislative session started, the Council received a petition “praying the Court to give Orders for the Removal of Hopestill Capen, a Prisoner in Boston Goal.” That petition came from a group headed by Robert Pierpont, a Roxbury merchant and official with impeccable Patriot credentials.

Furthermore, it appears Patience Capen had collected ninety signatures on this statement, transcribed in American Archives:

We, the subscribers, inhabitants of Boston, do hereby certify, that Mr. Hopestill Capen is well known to us, and we have esteemed him to be an honest and peaceable citizen; some of us in particular, have experienced his kind and faithful services in securing and saving our interest and property when we were out of the town; and we all join with the petitioner that he may be released from gaol and restored to his family.

The phrase “when were were out of the town” referred to the siege of Boston. Capen had evidently looked after other shopkeepers’ goods or real estate.

Again, those signers included some men deeply involved in Boston’s Patriot movement and town government: William Dawes, Samuel Dashwood, Moses Grant, Timothy Newell, Edward Payne, John Scollay, Pool Spear, Henry Bass, and so on. Other signers were more moderate Whigs—Ezekiel Price, John Andrews, Thomas Fleet, Thomas Handysyd Peck, Duncan Ingraham. But none of those names would raise political or religious suspicions.

Ninety signatures on a petition was a very impressive number. Nonetheless, those men would have been a decided minority in a town meeting attended by up to 500 citizens worried about the town being attacked from without or undermined from within.

On 18 June, Council member Dr. Samuel Holton brought the businessmen’s petition to the House with a proposal to form a committee “to examine the Commission of the Court of Enquiry, and their Doings thereon at large, together with this Petition, and report what is best to be done thereon.” The House approved that step the next day.

And then, it appears, nothing happened for months.

COMING UP: The repetition of Patience Capen.

“Mr. Capen insults the State, by denying their jurisdiction”

At the end of 1776, Hopestill Capen was still locked away from his wife Patience.

And Capen lost patience in another way. On 30 December, he sent a letter from “Boston Prison” to Joseph Greenleaf, a justice of the peace.

As transcribed in American Archives, that letter says:

It is now one hundred and forty-seven days since you, with John Hill, Joseph Gardner, and Samuel Pemberton, Esqrs., accused and judged me unfit to go at large, for no other cause whatever than my plainly and simply pleading conscience in obeying the plain Scripture commands; and for that only, you, with the other three of my accusers, committed me to close prison in a felon’s room, there to be kept until delivered by a due course of law.

Can any one with truth say this is not unjust, and against the law of the God of Heaven, who speaketh in the Scriptures? Is there any law that forbids any man’s obeying the plain commands of the great Lawgiver, who is the Maker and Judge of all men? [Multiple citations from the Bible follow] . . .

But I shall be very glad of my just liberty; and I beg that you will not persecute me any longer for that I cannot in conscience do. Can you, on a cool reflection, take any pleasure in such tyranny, while you profess to be the supporters of liberty? What liberty is dear as the liberty of conscience? And I again beg of you to release me from such cruel oppression. . . .

P.S. Surely injustice continued will not atone for past wrongs; and I most heartily entreat you not to keep me away any longer from my just and lawful liberty.

Capen sent similar letters to Sheriff William Greenleaf (not a close relative of the justice) and jailer Joseph Otis (not a close relative of the Barnstable family).

Justice Greenleaf forwarded his copy to James Warren, speaker of the Massachusetts House (and not a close relative of the Roxbury family), with this request:

I must beg the protection of the Court from the insults of Mr. Capen, who stands committed for signing an association to join the enemies of his country whenever called upon, and other crimes. Mr. Capen insults the State, by denying their jurisdiction. He disowns me as a Magistrate, because appointed by the present Administration, while he owns the jurisdiction of the other members of the Court of Inquiry, because appointed by the King’s Governour, and (as he apprehends derive) their authority from thence.

The “association” Greenleaf referred to was a Loyalist militia formed during the siege of Boston. Capen hadn’t just signed up; he’d volunteered to be a sergeant. Greenleaf had “the Books, which contain the Names of the Associations.”

This letter might help to explain why the Massachusetts General Court took no action on Patience Capen’s petition asking for her husband’s release. He was still in jail as the spring of 1777 arrived.

TOMORROW: Yet another approach.

“the long Confinement of her said Husband in close Goal”

Yesterday’s post recounted Hopestill Capen’s plea to be let out of jail, where he was locked up on suspicion of being inimical to the newly independent Massachusetts in August 1776.

That long, religiously based argument, printed as a broadside, didn’t work. So on 22 October his wife Patience took over the case.

It’s possible that, like Benjamin Davis, Hopestill refused to petition the Massachusetts legislature because that would mean recognizing that as a legitimate government authority.

It’s also possible that Patience Capen was willing to argue a position that her husband would not. Or she expected that as a woman she could garner more sympathy than he did.

The Massachusetts Archives displays a digital copy of Patience Capen’s petition to the Council in this online exhibit, albeit captioned with her husband’s name.

Patience Capen acknowledged that her husband handbill hadn’t gone over well:

That altho your Pet[itione]r’s said Husband signed certain Obnoxious Papers, in which he declares he acted from the Principles of his Religion and the Dictates of Conscience, by “Submitting to the Powers that be,” yet he never had in his Heart the least intention of taking up Arms against his country but on the contrary exerted himself and was actually the means of securing and saving the Property and Interest, to a very considerable Value of several of the Inhabitants of Boston, who removed out of Town, and left their Interest & Property exposed to the Ravage and Plunder of our Enemies.

That by means of the long Confinement of her said Husband in close Goal, she and her Children have suffered great Distress

She asked that the authorities release Hopestill so he could get busy “obtaining a support for them”—with the implied threat that the family might soon need public charity. That sort of plea was designed to catch officials’ attention.

On 24 October, Council member Caleb Cushing shared Patience Capen’s petition with the Massachusetts House. Which of course referred the matter to a committee.

American Archives included the transcription of a document datelined “In the House of Representatives, November 25, 1776.” It laid out a plan for Hopestill Capen to be released once he arranged for a bond of £100. However, there’s no sign of that proposal in the official records of the House. I suspect this was a draft that went nowhere.

Hopestill Capen remained in jail.

TOMORROW: Hearing from Hopestill again.

“I am to be confined in Prison for that I cannot in Confidence do”

A month ago, Boston 1775 followed Hopestill Capen (1731–1807) to the Boston jail, suspected of being disloyal to the new U.S. of A. And left him there.

Postings veered off onto the trail of Benjamin Davis, already in the jail after being captured while sailing from Haliax to New York.

Both Capen and Davis were Sandemanians. They grounded their attitude to the new independent state on their religion. They felt bound to remain loyal to King George III, they said, until events showed that this new republican government had God’s approval. 

When the Massachusetts Council ordered that Capen and dozens of other suspected men be detained, it named seven Suffolk County magistrates to question them: Joseph Palmer, Benjamin White, Joseph Greenleaf, Samuel Niles, Thomas Penniman, Theophilus Cushing, and Thomas Crafts.

Capen wrote an address to that “Court of Enquiry” dated 29 August. It doesn’t look like he had a chance to deliver it, at least as he had imagined, because he later wrote this preface:

The following was written with an expectation that I should have the Liberty to lay the same before the Court of Enquiry, before whom I was impeached as an Enemy to my country and cast into Prison, (in Boston 6th August 1776) but it has been said by some I was not rightly understood, and if opportunity be given to me to open my simple meaning to the Court, and I am restored to my just right of Liberty, cause of Complaint will end; and if not, this will serve to inform all whom it may concern, the Principles I acted upon, and if I am to be confined in Prison for that I cannot in Confidence do, it will be happy for me if I am indeed taught to suffer with Patience.

Several copies of that text survive because Capen had his address printed—an act that probably reinforced militant Patriots’ fear that he was a troublemaker.

On the copy of that handbill offered by Sotheby’s in 2013, Capen also wrote a note to Sheriff William Greenleaf:

You have never yet shewed me by what authority you have kept me thus in prison which you ought to have dun & now demand of you a coppey of my commitment and I likewise demand of you my just liberty as I look on you answerable for all the consequences of unjust imprisonment.

Again, perhaps not the most politic way of winning over the authorities.

Capen kept a copy of his handbill sold by Heritage Auctions in 2006 with Biblical citations for his argument and notes about exactly how long he was in jail. That copy appears above.

While Boston 1775 may have just left Capen in the Boston jail for a month, 250 years ago the Massachusetts authorities kept him locked up for much longer.

TOMORROW: Another sort of plea.

Hopestill Capen from the Cornfields to the Jail

On 6 Aug 1776, 250 years ago today, authorities in Boston locked merchant Hopestill Capen (1731–1807) in jail for “aiding and abetting those called enemies to the Colonies.”

For decades Capen had run his dry goods business at the sign of the Cornfields in a building he owned, now known as the Union Oyster House. He served as a militia officer and held minor town offices.

Late in 1769 Capen took on Benjamin Thompson as an apprentice, but that arrangement didn’t last long. The merchant later reportedly told the teenager’s mother “he oftener found her son under the counter, with gimblets, knife, and saw, constructing some little machine, or looking over some book of science, than behind it, arranging the cloths or waiting upon customers.”

From 1771 until just before the war, one of Capen’s tenants in the building was the Whig printer Isaiah Thomas.

During that time, Capen had become known as a mild Loyalist. He signed the complimentary addresses to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and Gen. Thomas Gage, and he joined the protest against the Solemn League and Covenant.

Capen chose not to evacuate with the British military in 1776, however. Unlike many Loyalists, he had deep family roots in Massachusetts, and all his property was there.

In April 1776 the Massachusetts House directed the Suffolk County justices and sheriff to detain and question dozens of individuals suspected of disloyalty. Capen was fifth on that list, showing his prominence in town.

But it wasn’t until the summer, after Massachusetts had declared independence from the Crown, that the Council ordered those authorities to lock Capen up. No one ever appears to have ever produced evidence of him “aiding and abetting” Crown forces, but he did refuse to pledge allegiance to the new state.

Capen presented himself as a conscientious objector, motivated by religion. In the 1760s he had joined Boston’s small Sandemanian sect, and he said that his faith required him to stay out of the war.

Some analysts have described the Sandemanians as pacifist because of statements like Capen’s. But he wasn’t opposed to military action in principle. He’d been an active member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company as well as the colonial militia, and during the siege he became a sergeant in a Loyal Associated Volunteers under Capt. Adino Paddock.

Rather, the Sandemanian creed said believers should be loyal to the government in control on the grounds that it must be divinely ordained. With the war still going on, and thus divine will not yet clear, Capen insisted that he couldn’t promise his allegiance to the U.S. of A.

COMING UP: Capen’s release.

“Prisoners in Boston Goal” in February 1777

On 18 Feb 1777, deputy jailer Joseph Otis wrote down “A List of Prisoners in Boston Goal,” transcribed and published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

This document says:

Doctṛ̣ [Benjamin] Church for holding a Tratirus Correspondence with the Enemy

John Hill for being Enemical to the States

Thoṣ̣ Mews for ditto

Thoṣ̣ Edwards for ditto

Crean Brush for ditto

Benjạ̣ Davis for ditto

Hopestill Capen for ditto

Miss [Elizabeth?] Hill & Daughter for attempting to Carry Intillegence to the Enemy

John Dean Whitworth A prisoner of War

Seven Men & two Women prisoners of War taken Near fort Cumberland

Richḍ̣ Luby for theft Sentens’d

Mary Young Sentens’d

Mary Voax Sentens’d

John Lovell for theft not had his trial

Five Debtors

It’s no surprise that Dr. Church headed this list. But it is surprising to see Brush listed fifth, given his notoriety. But perhaps the order reflects their cell assignments or some other factor.

I’ve just written about how John Hill was jailed in May, and his wife and daughter arrested in October. Those two women were the only ones explicitly locked in Boston’s jail for actions to aid the enemy, as opposed to being prisoners of war or criminals.

As for the other political prisoners, Thomas Mewse was an English “wollen-manufacturer,” as the Massachusetts Spy once put it. William Molineux had recruited him into a public-works scheme that ended with the two men suing each other. Aside from that, I know no reason to think him “Enemical.”

Thomas Edwards is usually identified as the 1771 Harvard graduate and former Braintree schoolteacher who became suspect because he apprenticed in law to a Tory. Within a couple of years, however, that Thomas Edwards was a high-ranking Continental Army officer, and he went on to a long political career. I have yet to see any contemporaneous sources describing that man as a suspected Loyalist. So I wonder if there might have been two Thomas Edwardses.

Benjamin Davis and Hopestill Capen were merchants who had sided with the Crown. Davis was captured while sailing from Halifax to New York in June 1776. Capen had stayed in Boston after the evacuation was undoubtedly regretting that decision. I may discuss them, as well as Lt. John Dean Whitworth of the Queen’s Rangers, at more length in the future.

By the time Joseph Otis wrote out this list, John Hill had been imprisoned for nine months, his wife and daughter for four. It looks like they were held separately. And it would be several more months before their situation changed.

COMING UP: An exchange.

“Pool Spear informs, that last Week he heard one Kilson a Soldier…”

I’ve been looking into Pool Spear, the Boston tailor accused of tarring and feathering sailor George Gailer in October 1769.

A little more than four months after that event, the young apothecary Richard Palmes met Spear near the center of town on the evening of 5 Mar 1770. Palmes had gone out as the alarm bells rang, learned there had been a brawl outside Murray’s barracks instead of a fire, and headed back home. He stated:

I then saw Mr. Pool Spear going towards the Townhouse, he asked me if I was going home, I told him I was; I asked him where he was going that way, he said he was going to his brother David’s. But when I got to the town-pump, we were told there was a rumpus at the Custom-house door; Mr. Spear said to me you had better not go, I told him I would go and try to make peace.

Palmes appears to have had a short temper, so he probably wasn’t the best person to pacify the situation that grew into the Boston Massacre. Indeed, after hearing a shot and seeing a man dead on the ground, Palmes started swinging his walking stick at soldiers and Capt. Thomas Preston.

It looks like Pool Spear took his own advice and didn’t stay to see what happened near the Customs office that night. But the next morning he went to Faneuil Hall, where there was supposed to be a town meeting, to share a story. The town meeting records say:

Mr. Pool Spear informs, that last Week he heard one Kilson a Soldier of Pharras Company say, that he did not know what the Inhabitants were after, for that they had broke an Officers Windows (meaning [landlord] Nathaniel Roger’s Windows) but that they had a scheeme on foot which would soon put a stop to our proceedure—that Parties of Soldiers were ordered with Pistols in their Pockets, and to fire upon those who should assault said House again, and that Ten Pounds Sterling was to be given as a Reward, for their killing one of those Persons, and fifty pounds sterling for a Prisoner—

Spear’s testimony wasn’t used in the town’s report or the trials as Palmes’s was, but it reflects the conviction of many Bostonians that the soldiers were eager to hurt people.

The next glimpse of Pool Spear that I’ve found comes from the siege of Boston. He and his wife Christiana were staying in her home town of Pembroke with six children. In March 1776, the Rhode Island Quaker philanthropist John Brown gave them £2 as charity.

The Spear family moved back into Boston after the British evacuation. Late that year Pool (now spelling his name “Poole”) was among scores of Bostonians who signed a petition on behalf of Hopestill Capen, a Sandemanian Loyalist who had helped to preserve their property during the siege but was locked up in the Boston jail on suspicion of disloyalty.

In 1779, the Boston town meeting elected Pool Spear, then forty-four years old, to be a constable. Often the meeting chose recently married young men for this office as a joke, and those men declined because they wanted to stay home. Spear accepted and was reelected in 1780 and later. The Fleets’ pocket almanac for 1782 lists him as a deputy sheriff of Suffolk County. Those jobs were more about delivering writs than patrolling the town, but it’s still a striking shift from being accused of tarring and feathering a man to working as a law-enforcement officer.

Also in 1779, the Independent Chronicle newspaper reported that the Spears were living in a house that the state was confiscating from the late Loyalist absentee John Borland. Six years later, Spear was in the Boston jail himself because of a debt to Borland’s estate, as brought to court by Richard Cranch. (See this note from the Adams Papers about Cranch’s tangled relationships with the Borland properties.) The court case may have involved that Boston house or Spear’s duties as a sheriff. In any event, the Massachusetts General Court passed a special law freeing Spear.

Pool Spear died in 1787, aged fifty-one. His widow Christiana helped to administer his estate. He didn’t leave her a lot of money, but he didn’t leave her in debt.

TOMORROW: The third tailor.

A Dispute within the Artillery Company in 1768

Here’s an anecdote from Zachariah Whitman’s 1842 History of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. As I’ve described before, that organization wasn’t a part of the provincial militia but a private organization men joined to improve their military skills and show they had what it took to be officers. According to Whitman:

In 1768, several regiments of British troops were in Boston. On a field day, under command of Capt. [William] Heath, then Lieutenant [Footnote: It was customary before the Revolution, and so continued until recently, to give the Lieutenant the privilege of command one field day during the year.], it appearing probable that the Ar. Co. would not leave the Common until after the roll-call of the troops, their commanding officer sent orders that he must retire without beat of drum, and that there must be no firing at the deposit of their standard.

The Company opposed a compliance; but Lieut. Heath, conceiving it his duty to comply with the orders of a superior officer in his Majesty’s service, marched to Faneuil Hall in silence, and without firing.

This appeared to some of the members an infringement of their privileges. One Hopestill Capen, then Orderly, resented it so highly, that he went to the top of his house, and fired his musket three times, and even many years after would not vote for Gen. Heath.

Remarkably, while Heath served in the American army from the very first day of the Revolutionary War to the very last, Capen, who had resented the orders of an army officer, became a Loyalist. He had joined the Sandemanian sect, convinced of his religious duty to obey the king. Despite the general Sandemanian teaching of pacifism, during the siege Capen joined Boston’s Association, a Loyalist militia.

The photo above, from the Boston Public Library’s Flickr collection, shows Capen’s house and rooftop as they appeared in 1930.

Benjamin Thompson: Worst Apprentice in the World, part 3

The teen-aged Benjamin Thompson was clearly excited to be working in Boston in 1769, not in his home town of Woburn or even the smaller port of Salem. He sketched his master Hopestill Capen’s building in his notebook, marking the shop where he worked and the dormer attic room where he lived.

Benjamin signed up for private lessons in French and “the Back-Sword” from a Scottish army veteran named Donald McAlpine, and drew fencers in his notebook. Then he ended up skipping half the French lessons.

Meanwhile, Benjamin was supposed to be working in Capen’s dry-goods shop. But according to an 1837 profile in The American Journal of Science and Arts:

Mr. Capen once told his [Benjamin’s] mother, that “he oftener found her son under the counter, with gimblets, knife, and saw, constructing some little machine, or looking over some book of science, than behind it, arranging the cloths or waiting upon customers.”

According to his home-town friend Loammi Baldwin, Benjamin was already working on a perpetual-motion machine, and that’s bound to take up all of one’s time.

By the spring of 1770, Benjamin Thompson was back at his mother’s house in Woburn, having shown he was thoroughly unsuited for work as an apprentice. But he was on his way to becoming Count Rumford, one of the greatest scientists of his age.

Benjamin Thompson: Worst Apprentice in the World, part 2

Yesterday I described how as a teenager Benjamin Thompson left his first apprenticeship in Salem at age sixteen and sought work in the Boston shop of Hopestill Capen, at the “Sign of the Cornfields.” His old master, John Appleton, evidently agreed to the equivalent of selling the indenture contract. On 19 Oct 1769 Benjamin wrote back with thanks:

I take this oppertunity to inform you that I am Come to Live with Mr Hopestill Capen. I like him and his Family very well as yet. I am Greatly obliged to you for your kind Recommendation of me to Mr. Capen, and shall always retain a Gratefull Sense of the many other Kindness’s I always Recd Whilest I remained with you.

Never shall I Live at a place again that I delighted so much as at your house nor with a Kinder Master. My Guardian says he will Come to Salem and pay you some money very soon, which he expects dayly. Sir I would beg of you not to Give yourself any Concern or Trouble about it as you may depend upon having the Money Very soon.

And he had just a few favors to ask.

Sir if you would Give yourself the Trouble to send Round my things that remain at your house I shall Be obliged to you, and if you will send down the two trunks which I improved [i.e., used] whilest at your house and Charge them to me I will send you the money; please to put up all my small things you can find, vizt scates, hautboy, some Blue paper, a box of Crayons, or dry Colours, some Books, Together with all my Things remaining at your house. Please to stow them in the Trunk that stands in the Kitchen Chamber and please to put that, that stands in the Garret on Board Mr West with it and desire him to Bring them down the first oppertunity. I shall Come to Salem the first opportunity that I can be Spared.

Meanwhile, Capen was probably teaching young Benjamin (who was obviously a boy of many talents) how to serve customers in his shop.

TOMORROW: And how did that work out?

Benjamin Thompson: Worst Apprentice in the World, part 1

In 1766, at the age of thirteen, Benjamin Thompson of Woburn was indentured to John Appleton, a Salem merchant. He was a bright and ambitious lad, and had apparently sought extra lessons from a minister in town.

Benjamin did not, however, throw himself into the clerical work Appleton probably assigned to him.

Three years later, well before his indenture was to expire, Benjamin showed up at the Boston dry-goods shop of Hopestill Capen (in the building that now houses the Union Oyster Shop, shown here) and asked for a position there.

Capen wrote to Appleton on 11 Oct 1769:

I understand that you have had a young Ladd, not long since, that live with you, named Benja. Thompson. He now offers himself to live with me, saying that he was sick was the Occasion of his comeing from you, and that now Business is Dull, you dont want him.

I should be greatly oblig’d to you if you will Inform me by the first oppertunity If he be clear with you or not; if he is, please to give me his True Character, as to his Honesty, Temper and Qualifications as a Shop Keeper. Such a lad will suit me if he can be well Recommended, and as he is a stranger to me I know of no body else that can be so good a Judge of him as you.

Benjamin had indeed left Appleton to go home to Woburn and recuperate, but not because he’d been “sick.” He had injured himself making fireworks.

Appleton apparently sent Capen a letter recommending young Benjamin. Perhaps he wanted to get rid of the lad.

TOMORROW (assuming Blogger will cooperate): Benjamin has a message for his old master.

Gen. Howe Endorses the Loyal American Association

Boston selectman Timothy Newell reported two disparate events in his journal entry for 30 Oct 1775:

A soldier, one of the Light-horse men was hanged at the head of their camp for attempting to desert.

Proclamation issued by General [William] Howe for the Inhabitants to sign an Association to take arms &c.

The general’s proclamation was dated 28 October, and the Institute for Advanced Loyalist Studies offers its full text. The picture of Howe comes from NNDB.com.

“Association” meant a sort of Loyalist militia, responsible for patrolling the streets of Boston. Some members of Association companies went on to serve in other Loyalist units or the regular British army.

On the 29th, a group calling itself “Royal North British Volunteers,” a socially acceptable way of referring to their origins in Scotland, formed a similar group. They included printer John Fleeming, a link in the Dr. Benjamin Church spy case. On 7 December, the Loyal Irish Volunteers officially formed; their officers included James Forrest and Ralph Cunningham, apparently son of provost-martial William Cunningham.

By 17 November, the main Loyal American Association had formed its official command structure under Timothy Ruggles, who had been a brigadier in the pre-war militia. Ruggles’s orders to company captain Francis Green, dated two days before, give a sense of the group’s duties:

I have it in command to acquaint you, that the General expects (for the present) you take charge of the District about Liberty Tree & the Lanes, Alleys & Wharves adjacent, & that by a constant patroling party from sunset, to sunrise you prevent all disorders within the district by either Signals, Fires, Thieves, Robers, house breakers or Rioters;

Again, that text comes courtesy of the Loyalist Institute.

However, other documents indicate that the Loyalists in Boston had formed themselves into companies as early as the preceding July, so Howe was merely giving his official blessing to those groups. Those early muster rolls from that month show some familiar names and intriguing patterns. Capt. Adino Paddock was head of Boston’s militia artillery company before the war. Without any cannon to command, he became an infantry captain in July 1775. Among his troops were shopkeeper Theophilus Lillie; the younger John Lovell, balanced on the edge of madness; Joshua Loring, Jr., whose wife became Howe’s mistress; Martin Gay, who had supported the Whigs in 1770 and would return to Boston after the war; &c.

An especially intriguing name is Sgt. Hopestill Capen, who was briefly the employer of Benjamin Thompson and the landlord of Isaiah Thomas. Capen was jailed by Massachusetts authorities after the British evacuation. He told them that his religion (Sandemanian Christianity) forbade him from taking up arms against a government, and some historians have treated that to mean it was a pacifist sect. But Capen’s church preached against taking up arms in rebellion; defending a government was apparently just fine.

Rocks on My Mind and Hopestill Capen

Yesterday the Boston Globe ran a story about what happens to the items confiscated at security checkpoints in Logan Airport. Eighty percent of those things are lighters—"as many as 10,000 a week." Other objects we're not allowed to take into airplane cabins now include gassed-up chainsaws (though, to be fair, have you ever seen a sign saying those aren't allowed?), "Little Red Sox baseball bats," and, of course, toothpaste.

The lighters are incinerated. Knives and other tools are shipped to the White Farm in Concord, New Hampshire, and sold through the state's surplus property sales office.

What does any of that have to do with Revolutionary-era Boston? This passage in the article caught my eye:

The most recent jaw-dropper: a 15-pound cobblestone a tourist from Iowa tried to carry on his flight home.

"I asked him," [TSA manager Patrick] O'Connor said, "where the heck it came from, and he said he found it on one of the streets over behind the Union Oyster House, and he wanted to take it back home because it looked so historic. I said, 'For crying out loud, if every visitor did that, we'd have no more history!'"

And so the cobblestone joined the next load bound for the White Farm.

So how exactly does shipping a cobblestone to New Hampshire preserve Boston's material history?

For a more portable artifact of the Union Oyster House building, on 22 September heritageauctions.com starts accepting bids for a broadside printed for Revolutionary-era owner Hopestill Capen. He was a small merchant and shopkeeper who converted to the Sandemanian sect and thus became a Loyalist—but he didn't leave Boston in 1776. As a result, suspicious authorities put Capen in jail for nearly a year after independence; he commissioned this broadside to make his case to the public that, even though he refused to renounce his loyalty to the king, he was no threat to the state. On the back of his personal copy, Capen wrote notes about his imprisonments and religious tenets.

Not enough gossip for today? Capen was landlord for printer Isaiah Thomas and the Massachusetts Spy newspaper in the early 1770s. For a brief and unfruitful time in 1769 he employed Benjamin Thompson of Woburn, later Count Rumford, as a shopboy. And in 1775, Thompson had an affair with Thomas's wife.