The Samuel Maverick Inquest

Three of the people shot in the Boston Massacre died almost immediately: Crispus Attucks, James Caldwell, and Samuel Gray.

The soldiers’ guns also wounded several men and boys, and by the next morning one of those had died: seventeen-year-old Samuel Maverick.

On 6 Mar 1770, Thomas Crafts convened his second coroner’s inquest in two days to consider Maverick’s case. While the jury that had looked into Caldwell’s death included some prominent Bostonians and the victim’s employer, this men on this second jury appear more typical: ordinary citizens from the neighborhood.

The foreman was Benjamin Harrod. The town had two men by that name, father and son. The father owned the building where Henry Knox rented space for his bookstore in 1775. After the war they moved to Haverhill and Newburyport, respectively.

Harrod and his thirteen fellow jurors determined that Maverick had died after a “Musket Bullet entered into his Belly and lodged between his Ribs.” Later Crafts produced that musket ball in court, according to the notes of John Adams.

Samuel Maverick had worked for and lived with Isaac Greenwood, an ivory turner in the North End. The teen-aged apprentice shared a bed with Greenwood’s nine-year-old son John, a notable voice in this week’s American Revolution documentary on P.B.S.

Two years after the Massacre, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson appointed Isaac Greenwood to be another coroner in Suffolk County.

“Mr. Craft producd the Ball in Court”

Yesterday I showed a list of the men appointed as coroners in Suffolk County from 1747 to 1774. And that list made me nervous.

For nearly two decades now I’ve been writing that Thomas Crafts, Jr., member of the Loyall Nine and reader of the Declaration of Independence on 18 July 1776, was a coroner at the time of the Boston Massacre.

In my mind, that position showed how he was rising in society from the middling mechanical class into gentility, and how he was involved in all the political events of his time.

I think I saw that statement first in The Legal Papers of John Adams. Volume III quotes thus from John Adams’s notes on the soldiers’ trial for the Massacre: “Mr. Craft producd the Ball in Court.” A footnote adds: “The reference is probably to Thomas Crafts, the Suffolk County Coroner, and is presumably JA’s note, not the witness’ testimony.”

Hiller B. Zobel, one of the editors of those Adams papers, shortly afterward wrote in The Boston Massacre about the morning of 6 Mar 1770: “County Coroners Robert Pierpoint and Thomas Crafts were arranging for inquests on Johnson and the other victims.”

Note, however, that the only primary source I had on hand referred to “Mr. Craft” with no given name.

Now look back at the list of coroners yesterday, from The Massachusetts Civil List for the Colonial and Provincial Periods, 1630-1774. The name “Thomas Crafts” doesn’t appear anywhere.

There was a “Thomas Crofts” appointed or reappointed on 5 Nov 1761, and that could be an easy error for “Thomas Crafts.” But it could just as easily be an easy error for “Thomas Cross,” first named on 18 Apr 1749.

Furthermore, William Crafts was made a coroner on 11 Apr 1768. Based just on that list, the coroner called “Mr. Craft” in Adams’s notes would be William, not Thomas. Indeed, that list offers no confirmation Thomas Crafts, Jr., was ever appointed a coroner at all.

Newspapers also reported the governors’ appointments of new coroners in formulaic lines, as in the 18 June 1772 Boston News-Letter:

At a General Council held on Thursday the 4th of June Instant [i.e., of this month], at Boston, His Excellency the Governor was pleased to nominate,…

Thomas Allen, Esq; to be a Justice of the Peace for the County of Suffolk.

Mr. Isaac Greenwood, to be a Coroner for said County…

To which Nominations His Majesty’s Council did advise and consent.

(All the new justices of the peace were labeled “Esq.” while the coroners were ordinarily “Mr.,” showing the gap in prestige between the two offices.)

I couldn’t find such a newspaper item for Thomas Crafts, Jr., however. (Nor for the other Crafts/Crofts/Cross coroners discussed above.)

Thus, at the beginning of this month I was contemplating the possibility that Thomas Crafts, Jr., wasn’t a coroner in 1770 after all. I needed to see some original documents.

TOMORROW: To the archives!

Memories of Samuel Maverick

Samuel Maverick was the youngest person to die in the Boston Massacre: only seventeen years old. Printers Edes and Gill of the Boston Gazette and their engraver Paul Revere highlighted Maverick’s youth in the woodcut to the left by decorating his coffin with a sickle and hourglass—symbols that he’d been cut down before his time.

I recently wrote a short script about Maverick’s death, which forced me to reconcile the three overlapping but different accounts of what he was doing before the shooting.

First, keg-maker Jonathan Carey provided a few details at the trial of the British soldiers:

Did you know young Maverick, who was killed by the firing in King street, on the 5th of March?

Yes, very well.

Did you see him that night?

He was at my house that night at supper with some young lads, and when the bells rung, as we all thought for fire, he run out in order to go to it.

Maverick wasn’t one of Carey’s apprentices, however. He worked for ivory carver and dentist Isaac Greenwood, and bunked with Greenwood’s son John.

In a 1922 publication of John Greenwood’s memoir, editor Isaac Greenwood (yes relation) included what is apparently that family’s memory of how Maverick went to his death:

Isaac Greenwood, Jr., the elder brother of John..., was a witness of the massacre, being then in his twelfth year.

Attracted by the ringing of bells, indicating a fire, Maverick and Greenwood were proceeding along hand in hand when, in King Street, Samuel left his companion and joined in the popular tumult about some soldiers at the custom-house. In the volley which ensued Maverick fell just as he was throwing up his arms and shouting, “Fire away, you d—— lobster-backs!”

The word “lobsterbacks” might well be an anachronism, and a sign that details of this tale had changed before it was written down, but its core can easily fit with Carey’s testimony from 1770.

Finally, William H. Sumner felt he was doing a great service to history when he put into his A History of East Boston an account of Maverick’s death that he’d heard from a son of Joseph Mountfort (1750-1838):

He, with Samuel Maverick, Peter C. Brooks, Samuel and Thomas Carey, were playing marbles in the house of Mr. Carey, at the head of Gardner’s wharf, near Cross street, at the time the bells rang the alarm, and were thereby attracted to State street before the British troops fired.

Here they observed that a tumult had arisen between some men and boys and the soldiers. Angry words were being exchanged, and missiles of various kinds were thrown. Some one threw pieces of ice, when the soldiers, exasperated by the boldness and taunts of their rebel opponents, discharged their guns at the crowd.

Young Maverick cried out to his relative Mountfort, “Joe! I am shot!” and ran down Exchange street, then called Royal Exchange lane, to Dock square, where he fell to the ground, and was conveyed to his mother’s house. He died the next morning. At that time the widow [Mary] Maverick kept a genteel boarding-house in Union street, at the corner of Salt lane.

It is not a little singular, that Mr. Mountfort’s name does not appear among the witnesses examined at the trial. . . . Yet, there can be no doubt as to the authenticity of Mr. Mountfort’s narrative. The writer has it from his son, Judge Napoleon B. Mountfort, of New York [1800-1883], who is well informed on the subject.

As Hiller B. Zobel pointed out in The Boston Massacre, Peter Chardon Brooks was only three years old and living in Medford in 1770. So he was very unlikely to have been playing marbles with the seventeen-year-old Maverick on the 5th of March.

Sumner got the impression that Joseph Mountfort was a “relative” of Samuel Maverick. I believe that became true only later, when Mountfort married Maverick’s first cousin Mary Gyles.

The Mountfort family seems to have been earnest in putting their ancestor on the scene of patriotic events. His name doesn’t appear on the earliest and most reliable list of men involved in the Boston Tea Party, but it surfaces in Samuel A. Drake’s Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston (1876). Mountfort did not, however, make the roll in Francis S. Drake’s Tea Leaves (1884).

Nonetheless, the Mountfort family tradition does seem accurate in putting Maverick at the Carey house. I’m just not convinced that Mountfort was really there, too. This may be what I call a “grandmother’s tale”—a historical tale that older relatives embroider for children as a private entertainment or special lesson, yet is so vivid that the children grow up believing that every detail is true, that their relatives were in the thick of history, and that the tale should go into history books.

Curiously, the editor of John Greenwood’s memoir theorized that Greenwood and Mountfort encountered each other as prisoners of war, with Mountfort (remembered by the Greenwood family as “Mumford”) spilling hot soup on Greenwood. It was a small world.

Who Took Over Dr. Baker's Dental Practice?

After John Baker left Boston for colonies to the south, as described in yesterday’s posting, other “surgeon dentists” arrived from Europe, but none seem to have stayed long. Rather, a couple of locals adopted his methods.

During his time in Boston, Baker taught some of his techniques to Isaac Greenwood (1730-1803), a craftsman living on Salem Street next to what’s now called Old North Church. Greenwood made umbrellas and tools, and was an “ivory-turner”—hence the affinity for tooth repair. His apprentice Samuel Maverick was the youngest fatality of the Boston Massacre.

Greenwood in turn passed his knowledge to his sons William P. (1756-1851), Isaac, Jr. (1758-past 1806), and John (1760-1819), who advertised their dental services in Boston, Salem, Providence, Savannah, New York, and other towns in the early republic. Like Baker, they often had to travel to find enough clients to support themselves.

John Greenwood is known in dental history for inventing a treadle-powered drill, reportedly inspired by his mother’s spinning-wheel (though he was probably also familiar with his father’s lathes). At the age of fifteen, John had enlisted in the American army as a fifer, and I’ve quoted some passages from his memoir The Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood of Boston and New York, 1775-1783 here on Boston 1775.

But the most direct pitch to Bostonians who had come to rely on John Baker’s dental techniques appeared in the Boston Evening-Post on 5 Sept 1768:

Whereas many Persons are so unfortunate as to lose their Fore Teeth by accident, or otherways, to their great Detriment, not only in Looks, but Speaking, both in public and private:—

This is to inform all such, that they may have them replaced with false Ones, that look as well as the Natural, and answer the End of Speaking, to all Intents, by PAUL REVERE, Goldsmith, near the Head of Dr. Clarke’s Wharf, Boston.——

All Persons who have had false Teeth fix’d by Mr. John Baker, Surgeon Dentist, and they have got loose (as they will in Time) may have them fastened by the abovesaid Revere, who learnt the method of fixing them from Mr. Baker.

Revere turned to dentistry when his goldsmithing business had fallen off due to economic doldrums and boycotts. Because he focused on building false teeth and cleaning teeth, he could apply his existing skills in metalwork and, well, scraping. Jayne Triber’s biography A True Republican notes that Revere stopped advertising his dental services in 1770, after he began to earn more from other tasks—including engraving “cane heads” for ivory-turner and fellow dentist Isaac Greenwood.

TOMORROW: Pulling teeth in colonial Boston.