“A company from Bradish’s caused disorders at College”

In discussing Charles Adams’s final semester at Harvard, I must now introduce the setting of the Blue Anchor Tavern in Cambridge.

Located at what’s now the intersection of Mount Auburn and J.F.K. Streets, the Anchor Tavern was run for decades by Ebenezer Bradish (1716-1785). It appears to have been a respectable public house, patronized by Massachusetts legislators when the General Court couldn’t meet in Boston because of smallpox or orders from London.

Because Bradish’s tavern was so close to Harvard Yard, however, it was also where the college students went when they wanted to dine beyond the direct reach of their tutors.

That may have created a conflict of interest for Ebenezer Bradish because, in addition to selling the students drink, he also had the contract for replacing window glass at the college. Here’s the account from the decade before the Revolutionary War. Prof. Eliphalet Pearson’s “Journal of disorders” records a lot of window-breaking during the winter of 1788-89.

By then the tavern had passed to the next generation of Ebenezer Bradish, who was the innkeeper the Adams brothers came to know. I don’t know if he was also a glazier, but his brother Isaac was the college blacksmith and, in these years, keeper of the town jail. So the family may still have had a financial temptation to let students get drunk and rowdy. (Town historian and genealogist Lucius Paige wrote of Isaac Bradish, “Like many of his relatives in different branches of the family, he was occasionally insane, and d. by suicide, May 1790, a. nearly 67.”)

In his journal Prof. Pearson recorded this disorder on Monday, 16 Mar 1789:

A company from Bradish’s caused disorders at College P.M.—In ye. evening the door of ye. Lecture room was burst in & thrown down, ye. table turned topsy turvy, & the chair placed in its frame; & squares of glass also was broken in one of the windows.

It’s not certain that the students coming home from Bradish’s were the same who vandalized the lecture room. There was a lot of uproar that season.

The faculty met the next day and again on 19 March to discuss the trouble. The official records discuss two students by name. The first was a junior named Paul Trapier (1772-1824), from South Carolina. Back on 24 February, the faculty had ordered him to sit out college for six months because he was leading “a dissipated and disorderly life.” The local gentleman who had “the care of him” was Thomas Russell, the same Boston merchant whose own son Daniel had been similarly suspended back in 1787.

On 16 March, Trapier had come back to Cambridge and dined with some classmates at Bradish’s tavern. In response to the trouble that followed, the faculty ordered him not to “visit the college yard or be in company with any student” until his rustication was over.

The faculty record give more attention to Francis Withers (1769-1847), another junior from South Carolina—eventually he settled in the handsome coastal town of Georgetown. The minutes say that Withers

returned to the College about half an hour after four o’clock, and in a noisy and tumultuous manner ran violently up the stairs in the west entry of Massachusetts Hall, by which an Officer of the College [Isaac Smith, the librarian, a cousin of Abigail Adams and a former Loyalist], while attending the exercises of a Class, was greatly disturbed; upon which the said Officer immediately ascended the stairs and overtook Withers at his chamber door; at which place, and also in another part of the entry a short time after this, Withers was guilty of insulting the said Officer by insolent & profane language, of disobedience to his orders, and of uttering a vile and impious imprecation against him; and it also appeared that the said Withers was guilty of behaving with irreverence at evening prayers of said day and of leaving the chapel, before divine worship was closed, with apparent insolence;…and Withers adducing no counter evidence, and making no other apology for his malconduct, but that he was too much heated by wine.

Withers was suspended for six months.

The official minutes don’t mention any other students, but Prof. Pearson named many. He wrote that Trapier sat down to dine with three classmates, and then four seniors and three juniors “called & drank wine with them.” Of that party, “most of them returned to College in a noisy manner.”

Among that group was “Adams 1,” or Charles Adams. (Another member was Daniel Russell.) Adams was in the drinking party, but there wasn’t enough evidence to say he was part of the rowdy return to campus, or the vandalism in the lecture hall. And he certainly hadn’t misbehaved as conspicuously as Withers. As a result, Charles not only suffered no punishment, but there’s not even an official notice of his conduct. Only Prof. Pearson’s journal shows that he was involved in this incident at all.

TOMORROW: An attack on a prayer service.

The Mystery of “William Benson a Negro Man”

On 6 Nov 1775, the Boston Gazette, then being published in Watertown, ran this announcement from the keeper of the jail at Cambridge:

Cambridge, October 20, 1775.

BROKE out of the Goal in Cambridge, the following Prisoners, Thomas Smith, and William Benson a Negro Man. Said Smith is a very noted Thief, hath been in almost all the Goals on the Continent; had on when he broke Goal, a blue Jacket, a Pair of striped Trowsers, sandy coloured Hair about 5 Feet 4 Inches high.

Said Benson the Negro had on when he went away, a dark coloured old Coat, a Pair of old black knit Breeches, about 5 Feet 6 Inches high. Whoever will take up said Prisoners, and return them to said Goal, shall be handsomely rewarded, by

ISAAC BRADISH, Under Keeper.

The name of William Benson caught my eye. I wondered if this might be the black man of that name who appears in the records of the town of Framingham.

That William Benson was born in 1732. His parents, Nero Benson and Dido Dingo, had been kidnapped from Africa to New England. They married in 1721. Nero Benson served in Massachusetts army units around 1725 and died in 1757.

William Benson was sold to a man named Joseph Collins about 1762 but somehow gained his freedom shortly afterward—though he had to fight for it. Collins and two helpers tried to forcibly take Benson back into captivity and resell him. A Middlesex County grand jury indicted Collins in 1764. He formally acknowledged Benson’s freedom and refunded the buyer’s money (or, under another interpretation, bought Benson back and freed him). Under those circumstances, the court accepted Collins’s plea of no contest and let him off with a small fine.

By early 1762 William Benson was husband to Sarah Perry of Sudbury, born in 1747. Or as Shrewsbury warning-out records from 1762 said, “Perry, Sarah, alias Benson, white, called by William Benson, (colored) his wife.”

According to William Barry’s history of Framingham and the town’s published vital records, their children included:

• Katy or Cate, born 8 Apr 1763, later the wife of Peter Salem.
• Abel, born in 1766.
• Polly, born in 1773.
• Sally, born in 1782.
• William, who died young.

Traditions in Framingham and Needham say that a black trumpeter helped to summon the militia in one part of the region on 19 Apr 1775. Various authors have named that military musician as Nero or Abel, both recorded in other documents as playing the trumpet. But Nero was dead by 1775, and Abel was no more than nine years old and didn’t mention such service in his military pension application. I’ve posited that William—Nero’s son and Abel’s father—is a candidate for being that trumpeter.

Was the same William Benson locked up in the Cambridge jail a few months later? Unfortunately, I’ve found no more detail on this escaped prisoner. On 9 October the besieging army’s general orders had said:

If any Negroe is found straggling after Taptoo beating about the Camp, or about any of the roads or Villages, near the encampments at Roxbury, or Cambridge, they are to be seized and confined until Sun-rise, in the Guard, nearest to the place where such Negroe is taken up.

That was confinement in a military stockade, not the town or county jail, but it reflects the general hostility toward blacks that Gen. George Washington’s army adopted in that season.

Of course, African-American soldiers were already serving in that army, and at the end of December Washington reversed course and decided they could continue to serve. William Benson’s son Abel became one of those Continental soldiers, signing up in 1780 at the age of fourteen (saying he was sixteen). He received a plot of Framingham land as payment. After Abel’s mother died, his father William came to live there.

Reviewing Thomas Nichols’s Case

In late February 1775 a Massachusetts magistrate had Thomas Nichols of Natick, labeled variously a “free Negro” or “mulatto,” locked up for “enticing divers Servants [slaves] to desert the Service of their Masters.”

Nichols was still in the jail at Concord when the Revolutionary War broke out. He must have witnessed the British troops under Maj. John Pitcairn force their way into the jailyard to disable three large cannon that belonged to the town.

On 13 May, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety took up Nichols’s case. Its records say:

One Thomas Nicholas, a negro, brought before this committee on account of his suspicious behavior for some time past, having been examined, Resolved, that it be recommended to the council of war to commit said negro, until there be further inquiry into his conduct. . . .

Ordered, That Mr. Isaac Bradish, keeper of the jail in Cambridge, be directed and empowered to confine one Thomas Nicholas, negro, till further orders.

A week later the committee voted:

That Capt. Edward How, Ebenezer Cutler, and Nicholas, a black fellow, now under guard, be sent up to Congress for examination and trial, and Capt. White is appointed to attend Congress, with the above named persons.

Voted, That the general [Artemas Ward] be desired to furnish a guard for the occasion.

On that same day the Committee of Safety recommended against enlisting anyone but “freemen” into the Massachusetts army. There were multiple reasons behind that decision: ideological distaste for forcing slaves to fight in the name of liberty, potential complaints from slaveowners, and a lingering fear of unreliable troops. (The Massachusetts government didn’t decide to bar free black men from the ranks until shortly after Gen. George Washington’s arrival in July.)

On 22 May, a committee of the full Massachusetts Provincial Congress in Watertown, chaired by Edward Mitchell of Bridgewater, considered the evidence against those three jailed men. The decision on Thomas Nichols came last, and it was recorded this way:

Whereas Thomas Nicols, a negro man, hath been brought before this Congress, and there being no evidence to prove any matters or things alleged against him: therefore,

Resolved, That the said Thomas be sent to the Town or District where he belongs, and that the Committee of Correspondence, or Selectmen of said Town or District, take such care of the said Thomas, that he may be dealt with as they, in their judgment, shall think proper.

Ordered, That Captain [Caleb] Kingsbury be directed to appoint some persons to conduct the above-mentioned negro to Natick, agreeably to the foregoing Resolve.

So that was it. The slave conspiracy that had made the papers as far away as Norwich, Connecticut, and resulted in Nichols being jailed for almost three months had “no evidence” to back it up.

And even after that, according to Natick historian Horace Mann, the town “confined” Nichols at the tavern of Pelatiah Morse (shown above courtesy of the Historic Buildings of Massachusetts blog). Morse’s bill for the food he supplied to Nichols and his guard is the evidence for that, but I don’t know how long the confinement lasted.

TOMORROW: Nichols’s in-laws.