William Jackson in and out of the Boston Jail

One month after he’d decided to sail out of Boston with his goods, the brazier William Jackson was locked up in the town jail, suspected of stealing from his fellow merchants.

Cdre. John Manley had captured him on the Elizabeth. Crowds in Newburyport, Salem, and Boston had jeered him. The Massachusetts Council had ordered him into prison.

Bostonians already had some reasons to dislike Jackson. The great fire of 1760 started in his shop. He defied the non-importation movement in 1770, and on top of that he hosted Capt. Thomas Preston before the Massacre.

Then in 1774 Jackson signed the complimentary Addresses to Govs. Thomas Hutchinson and Thomas Gage. He stayed in town when war broke out. He joined the Associators, the Loyalist militia formed in Boston during the siege, though he tried to explain that away:

General [William] How…isued a Proclamation for the Inhabitants to Associate themselves and bear Arm’s in defence of the Town, being what I did not thing [think] was my duty I did not sing [sign],

sometime After he Isued another recommending to the Inhabitants to Associate themselves for preserving the peace and good Order of the Town by preventing any Riotous doings by the Soldier’s or other’s which I thought Incumbent with every good Citizen to comply

The Patriot government naturally looked askance at any “associators” who fell into its hands.

At the same time, William Jackson had some local support. Unlike Crean Brush and the other merchants locked up alongside him, Jackson had grown up in Boston. His mother Mary and older brother James still lived there. His shop sign, the Brazen Head, was a long-time landmark for locals and visitors.

The jailers had been ordered not to let Jackson have pen and paper, but he could ask his family for help. He stated, “after my Committment my brother wrote Mr [Joshua] Wentworth for my Baggage.”

More surprisingly, other members of Boston’s business community spoke up for him. I already quoted Isaac Smith, Sr.’s comment that he hadn’t really done anything bad. A few years back, Chris Hurley told me that Jackson garnered letters of support from selectmen John Scollay and Samuel Austin, printer John Gill, and other Patriots. (Among those names is John Peters, who could be the future husband of Phillis Wheatley.)

Later William Jackson would tell the Loyalists Commission that he was let out of jail after 126 days, or in August 1776. Some of his fellow prisoners would be locked up for much longer.

TOMORROW: Back to Cape Ann.

“They were much insulted by the people”

Yesterday we left William Jackson on the road from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Boston, having reached the town of Newburyport on 11 April 1776.

Jackson and dozens of fellow Loyalists had been captured aboard the brig Elizabeth while trying to sail to Halifax with the rest of the British evacuation fleet.

Most of the king’s army, and most of the Loyalists inside Boston, had managed to get away. Which meant popular anger about those people focused on the prominent few remaining—like Jackson.

In Newburyport, an angry crowd surrounded the tavern where the captives were eating, objecting to how they were riding in carriages. Carriages that Jackson, ship captain Peter Ramsey, and the others had hired.

Jackson later recounted:

we sent for the Committe of safety to Appease them, but all to no purpose, finding our selves in such a situation we comply’d, the Committe not thinking it safe they Appointed a Guard of five Men and Obliged us to pay the Expence the rest of the Journey,

as soon as we came out of the Inn we received Blow’s, mud, stones, Eggs, and every other abuse and proceeded to Boston being 40 miles on foot

In Salem, the lawyer William Pynchon (1723–1789) wrote in his diary:

Wm. Jackson, merchant, and others, with some regular soldiers, went thro’ Salem on foot for Boston, under guard; ’t is said they were much insulted by the people (it must be presumed to be the rabble) at Newburyport, in their way hither; that Jackson was stopped and obliged to leave his carriage, and walk on foot from Newbury to Salem, and thence to Boston

Pynchon then said: “in Newbury street he was stopped again and obliged, after his hat was knocked off, to fall on his knees and beg pardon of the mob and of the Country, and to say whatever was required of him.” At first I thought that might be a reference back to the streets of Newbury, but the placement suggests this story described when Jackson reached Newbury Street in Boston’s South End. Jackson himself didn’t specify such an incident.

Fellow gentlemen—merchants, professionals, landowners—sympathized with Jackson for coming under fire from crowds of poorer citizens. On 16 April, Isaac Smith, Sr., wrote to John Adams from Salem:

You have heard of Bill Jackson’s being taken. He received some Insult on the road which am sorry for and lamented by all, persons of any consequence. He is in Boston goal, but I dont learn he has behavd any way Ill att Boston dureing the seige.

Indeed, Jackson’s letter complained that after reaching Boston:

we was again carried to Wartertown 9 miles before the late Councill and being each seperately ask’d a few Question’s and not properly Examined was sent back to Boston and committed on a supposed Crime of being concern’d with Crean Brush denied the Use of pen Ink and paper and Candle light not suffer’d to speak to any one but in presence of the keeper whare we have been ever since 13th April

That accusation must have been especially galling to Jackson since one month before he’d been trying to stop Crean Brush from taking away Cyrus Baldwin’s goods.

TOMORROW: In the Boston jail.

“Itt’s said she has a large quantity of the Stolen goods”

It didn’t take long for New England Patriots to realize that Cdre. John Manley’s capture of the Elizabeth on 2 April 1776 was a big deal.

On 6 April, Isaac Smith, Sr. (1719–1787, shown here courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery), wrote to his niece Abigail’s husband, John Adams, from Salem:

Commodore Manleys fleet has taken a brigantine bound to Halifax on board of which is Bill Jackson and all his Effects and itt’s said she has a large quantity of the Stolen goods—

and there is on board likewise One Greenbrush, receiver general of the stolen goods and has distinguisht himself in that way by demanding People’s propaty from them. Itts said he came from York and itts said those Carpenters and runagarders from that way has behaved worse than any Others.—

A sloop is on shore at the Cape, beleive nothing very Valuable on board but itt Appears they (the inhabitants) went away in a most dismal Cituation, not haveing even Water sufficient and crowded and some sick with the small pox.

That sloop was the Sally, commissioned by Jolley Allen and captained by no one who knew what he was doing, as described back here.

As a merchant in Boston before the siege, Isaac Smith knew William Jackson and his troubles well. But Smith wasn’t familiar with Crean Brush, who had arrived from New York after the siege began—hence his reference to the man as “One Greenbrush.”

John Rowe was all too familiar with Brush, having watched that royal appointee confiscate some of his property. On 8 April he wrote in his diary with surprising calm:

Capt. Manly is come to Town & brings the Accot. of his Taking Crian Brush Wm. Jackson & Twenty other passengers in A Brigg bound with The Fleet—

This Vessell tis Said has Twenty five Thousand pound Sterling On board—in English Goods & Other Merchandise—

among the Prisoners is A Sergiant & 12 Men of the Kings Troops

On 8 April Rowe added:

There is a Confirmation of Crean Brush & Wm. Jackson being taken & also My Negro Fellow Adam

Adam was one of the four enslaved people found aboard the Elizabeth. Remarkably, this is the only time in his published diary that Rowe mentioned the man. We therefore have no clue about how he came to be on the brig. Had Adam asked to evacuate the town, or had Rowe sent him away?

TOMORROW: Following the money.

“The accomplishments of her mind”

On Friday, 18 August, the American Revolution Institute will host one of its “Lunch Bite” seminars, looking at a copy of Catharine Macaulay’s 1776 pamphlet An Address to the people of England, Scotland, and Ireland: on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs.

As the event description says, “Using events such as Parliament’s passing of the Stamp Act and the Boston Massacre, Macaulay’s pamphlet was written as an appeal to Great Britain to change its policies towards the colonies.”

Research Services Librarian Rachel Nellis will also discuss Macaulay’s life, including her connections to John and Abigail Adams and Mercy Warren.

Macaulay was well known as a Whig historian of Britain by the late 1760s. As a measure of her stature across the British Empire, she was the one woman designated to receive a copy of the town of Boston’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre report.

In the summer of 1770, the merchant Moses Gill told John Adams that Macaulay would be interested in a letter from him as the author of essays recently reprinted in London as A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law.

Adams got worked up about that prospect. He wrote a draft letter into his diary and “heavily corrected” it in many little ways before sending it off.

And then he didn’t hear anything back for months. In February 1771 a cousin of Abigail Adams named Isaac Smith, Jr., was visiting London. Smith wrote:

I have had the pleasure of meeting with Mrs. McAulay, at their house; who enquired of me with regard to you, and informed me, sir, that she should write to you, as soon as she had published a fifth Vol. which she has now in her hands.

She is not so much distinguished in company by the beauties of her person, as the accomplishments of her mind.

Macaulay didn’t get to her reply until 19 July, so she started with an apology: “A very laborious attention to the finishing the fifth vol of my history of England with a severe fever of five months duration the consequence of that attention has hitherto deprived me of the opportunity of answering your very polite letter…”

Macaulay praised Adams’s book (while getting the title wrong). She stated: “A correspondence with so worthy and ingenious a person as your self Sr will ever be prised by me as part of the happiness of my life.” And they did exchange a few letters before the outbreak of war.

Then, as I related back in January, the forty-seven-year-old widow Macaulay married William Graham, the twenty-one-year-old brother of her physician. How did that affect the Adamses’ impression of her? This seems like a good time to return to that storyline.

Meanwhile, the seminar about Macaulay’s 1776 pamphlet will take place online and at Anderson House in Washington, D.C., on Friday at 12:30 P.M. Register to attend either way through this page.

TOMORROW: The talk of Bath.

Paying for the Defense in the Massacre Trials

On 12 Nov 1770, after receiving word that Capt. Thomas Preston had been found innocent of the Boston Massacre, Gen. Thomas Gage wrote to him from New York.

Gage was pleased Preston was no longer “oppressed by the most malicious Prosecution” and able to help the enlisted men to go on trial next. “I readily Consent to your going home when all is over,” he wrote. He also addressed Preston’s expenses:

I Flatter myself that Government will readily comply with an Application in your Behalf, to reimburse the unavoidable Expence you have been put to. A Packet sails tomorrow, and I shall write to Lord Barrington on the Subject, In the mean time send me an Account of the Expences the Prosecution has cost you, and have a Copy Ready to produce when you arrive in England. . . .

If you are in want of Money I shall with the greatest Pleasure assist you, with any Sum my private Purse will afford, and will answer your Draught.

Gage expected Preston and, apparently, himself to have to dip into personal funds. There was no budget line for defending soldiers against criminal charges.

Preston sailed from Boston on 7 December, the day after the verdict in the men’s trials. (He thus didn’t wait around for the sentencing and punishment of Pvts. Mathew Kilroy and Edward Montgomery.)

Lt. Col. William Dalrymple of the 14th Regiment (shown above later, during his political career) sent Gen. Gage a list of expenses on 17 December:

To a retaining fee to C: Prestons Lawyers – £10.10
To Do: to the mens D[itt]o: – £10.10
To a fee for pleading at the tryal to C: Prestons Lawyers – £63
To Do: to the Mens Do: – £42
To an Attorney to assist at their tryal – £10.10
To an Attorney for taking some affidavits – £3.12
To certain people employed to enquire about town and collect Affidavits and Evidences [witnesses] – £25.10
To Summons’s and serving them on 93 Evidences – £13.19
To Evidences for the time they waited in Court before examin:n – £5.19
To Joalers fees – £15
To Turnkeys fees and Civility money – £21
To a Clerk at several times – £15.7.6
To small presents to particular people in Boston – £21
To postage of Letters – £2.5
[subtotal] £260.2.6
To extra: expences in coming express from Portsmouth to London with Governour [Thomas] Hutchinsons and Comodore [James] Gambiers dispatchs to Government – £4.4.6
[total] £264.7

The four defense lawyers involved in the two cases thus split more than £140.

On 5 Mar 1771, exactly one year after the shooting on King Street, Secretary of War Barrington assured Gage that “Captain Preston has had all his expences paid and a Pension of £200 a Year bestowed upon him.” In fact, the pension didn’t become official for another year, perhaps time to let Preston sell his commission.

Isaac Smith, Jr., a young cousin of Abigail Adams, was in London that spring, and he wrote to John Adams: “It is said that Capt. Preston will be reimbursed in the expences of his prosecution and meet with some further compensation for his confinement.”

Adams replied: “If Preston is to be reimbursed his Expences, I wish his Expences, at least to his Council, had been greater.” In other words, if Adams had known that he was working for the Crown government, and not just an army officer paying out of pocket, he would have charged more.

There’s no way to know how much of the legal fees came to Adams. However, it’s very hard to reconcile the figures from 1770 with what Adams wrote in his autobiography decades later:

[James] Forrest offered me a single Guinea [worth £1.1] as a retaining fee and I readily accepted it. From first to last I never said a Word about fees, in any of those Cases, and I should have said nothing about them here, if Calumnies and Insinuations had not been propagated that I was tempted by great fees and enormous sums of Money. Before or after the Tryal, Preston sent me ten Guineas and at the Tryal of the Soldiers afterwards Eight Guineas more, which were all the fees I ever received or were offered to me, and I should not have said any thing on the subject to my Clients if they had never offered me any Thing.

This was all the pecuniary Reward I ever had for fourteen or fifteen days labour, in the most exhausting and fatiguing Causes I ever tried: for hazarding a Popularity very general and very hardly earned: and for incurring a Clamour and popular Suspicions and prejudices, which are not yet worn out and never will be forgotten as long as History of this Period is read.

This is of course another of John Adams’s stories about doing the right thing and not being appreciated for it.

When Balch Came Back

In early October 1775, Nathaniel Balch the hatter left London and sailed back home to America.

On 23 December, the Providence Gazette reported on news from the preceding days:

Captain Gorham is arrived at Nantucket from London, after a Passage of eleven Weeks. With him came passenger Mr. NATHANIEL BALCH, late of Boston.  

Balch was soon on the mainland. On 20 December, the Boston court official and insurance broker Ezekiel Price, taking refuge from the siege in Stoughton, wrote in his diary:

Mr. Bailies, from Taunton, says that Mr. Nathaniel Balch was there last night. He is lately from London, and reports that the great men in England are against us, but that the common people are in our favor.

However, four days later Price wrote that young Benjamin Hichborn had told him:

Mr. Balch says our Boston gentry that lately went to England were, most of them, very desirous of getting back; that the people there in general were against us, and continually threatening to scourge us till they had obliged us to submit.

I don’t trust Hitchborn about anything. But the discrepancy between Price’s entries may simply be due to him using the word “people” to refer to two different groups: ordinary people as opposed to “great men” in his first entry, British gentry as opposed to Loyalist gentry in the second.

Finally, there’s a mention from Isaac Smith, Sr., father of one of the men Balch had sailed and seen some sights in London with. Smith wrote to his niece’s husband, John Adams, on 2 Jan 1776:

Itts likely you may have heard Mr. Balch is returnd from England but came Out the begining Octbr. so cant bring any thing New of a publick Nature tho possibly he may of his One invention.

Balch’s own invention might have meant private information he’d picked up, though, knowing him, it might just as well have been some new funny stories. I haven’t come across any other references to Massachusetts men debriefing the hatter about his trip.

Which means I still have the mystery of why Balch went to Britain at all.

TOMORROW: Post-war legends.

Seeing London with Nathaniel Balch

I’ve long puzzled over why hatter Nathaniel Balch chose to sail to Britain in May 1775, a month after war broke out in Massachusetts.

Balch may have been planning the trip for a while for business or personal reasons and just didn’t want to cancel, even in wartime.

But John Andrews’s letter (quoted yesterday) suggests that the price of the passage was unusually high. Passengers paid Capt. John Callahan extra to sail the Minerva across the Atlantic without a full cargo.

Like a lot of Bostonians, Balch had good reason to get out of the besieged town before it came under attack. But he didn’t take his wife and five children with him. He also still owned real estate in Providence, so he probably could have found refuge for the whole family in America.

Balch doesn’t appear to have been so deeply involved in politics that he would need to go to London to lobby for a patronage job, like his fellow traveler Samuel Quincy, or to talk with British opposition politicians on behalf of the Boston Whigs, as his friend Josiah Quincy had just done.

I know of no documents from Balch explaining his motives for the voyage—no letters, diary, business accounts, memoir.

We have a few glances of what Balch actually did in London after arriving on that ship full of Loyalists. They come from the diary of Samuel Curwen, a Loyalist from Salem who had crossed the ocean after a visit to Philadelphia. On 31 July, Curwen wrote:

Went in company with Messrs. I[saac]. Smith, N. Balch, J[oseph]. Greene Esq. and Berry [or was this John Barrell?], Colburn Barrell, a Mr. Peacock, a Glass Dealer in Fleetmarket Street, our Guide and young Oliver, to the [word?] Flintglass house over blackfryar’s bridge where we saw a drinking glass formed, completely made, ink bottles and smelling bottles, from which place returning we proceeded through a paved ally so called on this Side the Bridge to a glass grinder and polisher, whom we saw work. Dined at Kingshead Jury Lane, the glass grinder worked in a loft up 50 or 60 stairs. From dinner we repaired to St. Paul’s…

(A rumor was going around London that day that Lord North had shot himself. It was false.)

Three of those men and one more got together on 22 August:

Went to Bow with Nathaniel Balch, lying beyond White Chappell, from whence we took Coach, 2 Miles in order to see the China Manufacture, but the clerk received and dismissed us very cavalierly, with an abrupt answer, that he should not show it to us.

We met J. Berry and Mr. Silsbee at the door having trudged it afoot, returned by Bromley, stopping at Mile End, we took a bowl of punch and some bread and cheese, and from thence walked together to the Exchange, where J.B. and Mr. S. departed together.

Mr. B. and myself entered Lamp Chop House in Bartholomew Lane, took each a porringer of broth, and after taking a Survey of different rooms in the Bank, departed each for his lodgings, I being weary and lame.

Those expeditions might indicate that Balch was studying English manufactures. Then again, that might just have been a sort of sightseeing that businessmen from the provinces did.

On 24 August, Curwen, Balch, Silsbee, Isaac Smith, “John Berry and his Brother,” and “Capt. Martin” took a boat up the river to Barnes, then hiked through Kew Gardens and Richmond to Hampton Court Palace. Curwen thought the royal family should get out there more often. “Out of hatred to his grandfather the last excellent Geo. 2, the present King seems to make it a point to hate every object of his worthy grandfather’s approbation,” he wrote. The next day the men took a coach on to Windsor Castle as well.

Finally, on 28 August Balch called on Curwen “to go to Mr. Gilbert Harrison’s to dine from whence we went to puddledock.” Curwen visited the “Herald’s office” to inquire about his coat of arms, and there the men had tea.

The diary of former governor Thomas Hutchinson shows that in those same months he often saw people that Balch had sailed with, but he never mentioned meeting Balch. That might indicate a political gap between them, or perhaps just a social gap between a hatter and a governor.

The genial hatter’s reason to be in London that summer remains a mystery.

TOMORROW: Home again.

“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 British Plan to Burn Harvard College

On 22 Nov 1775, the Rev. Isaac Mansfield, Jr., a Continental Army chaplain, preached a Thanksgiving sermon in the camp at Roxbury. He leveled this accusation about the British military’s plans the previous April:

What, but the hand of Providence preserved the school of the prophets from their ravage, who would have deprived us of many advantages for moral or religious improvement.[?]

Okay, most of Mansfield’s listeners would probably have had little idea of what he was talking about. “School of the prophets”? But when he published this sermon the following year after becoming minister in Exeter, New Hampshire, Mansfield added a footnote:

“General Gage, as governor of this province, issued his precepts for convening a general assembly at Boston, designing to enforce a compliance with Lord North’s designing notion; they were to be kept as prisoners in garrison, till under the mouth of cannon and at the point of the bayonet they should be reduced to a mean and servile submission. To facilitate this matter, he was to send out a party to take possession of a magazine at Concord; presuming that this might be done without opposition, the said party upon their return from Concord were to lay waste till they should arrive at Cambridge common; there, after destroying the colleges [i.e., Harvard] and other buildings, they were to throw up an entrenchment upon the said common, their number was to be increased from the garrison [in Boston], and the next morning a part of the artillery to be removed and planted in the entrenchment aforesaid. This astonishing manoeuvre, it was supposed, would so effectually intimidate the constituents, that the general assembly by the compliance designed would literally represent their constituents.”

The author is not at liberty to publish the channel through which he received the foregoing; but begs leave to assure the reader, that it comes so direct that he cannot hesitate in giving credit to it. He recollects one circumstance, which renders it highly probable; Lord Percy (on April 19.) suspicious his progress to Concord might be retarded, by the plank of the bridge at Cambridge being taken away, brought out from Boston several loads of plank, with a number of carpenters; not finding occasion to use them, he carried them on his way to Concord, perhaps about a mile and an half from the bridge: About an hour after the plank were returned. If he had intended to repass that river at night, he must have reserved the plank; if he designed to stop in Cambridge, the plank must be an encumbrance. This conduct, in returning the plank, may be accounted for upon supposition of the foregoing plan of operation.

Mansfield thus accused the British commanders of planning to capture the Massachusetts legislators, destroy Harvard College, and fortify Cambridge common. He refused to identify his source for that inside information about enemy plans. And of course he was speaking in the midst of a war, when rumors and accusations fly at their fastest.

In fact, Mansfield’s claims don’t make sense. Gen. Thomas Gage did issue a call in September 1774 for the Massachusetts General Court to convene, but they were to gather in Salem, not Boston, and he quickly canceled that summons after the “Powder Alarm.” (The politicians gathered in Salem anyway, out of his reach, and formed a Provincial Congress instead.) There was no call for a legislature in April.

There was also nothing in Gen. Gage’s orders about Harvard. Indeed, the college was so little on Col. Percy’s mind on 19 April that he had to ask tutor Isaac Smith, Jr., which road led from there toward Concord. Percy didn’t have entrenching tools, and Cambridge was a poor place to stop and defend. So when Percy brought the column back through Cambridge, they didn’t pause at the college or the common, nor tried to recross the bridge over the Charles River, but pushed straight on to Charlestown, which was closer to the troops in Boston and more easily defended.

Not many authors repeated Mansfield’s accusations, but one who did say the British planned to burn Harvard was Frank Warren Coburn in The Battle of April 19, 1775, published in 1912. Coburn had found no further evidence of this plot. He merely wrote, “Mr. Mansfield fully believed such plans to have been made and states that his information came so direct that he could not hesitate to accept it…”

Coburn’s was one of the last histories of the Battle of Lexington and Concord written without access to many British sources or much interest in what the British actually planned or experienced, as opposed to what the provincials assumed and published about them. And however sincere those stories and accusations were, they aren’t solid evidence.

Arrests After the Battle of Bunker Hill

For the past two days I quoted responses to the Battle of Bunker Hill from people who were on their best behavior. But not everyone reacts to stress in such an admirable way. Merchant Isaac Smith, Sr. (shown here) described this fallout from the battle in a letter dated 30 July 1775, after leaving Boston for Salem:

Poor, harmless Shrimpton Hunt, standing by the door at the time of the engagement, was overheard saying he hoped our people would get the better of the others, was taken up and confined in gaol.

Sam. Gore, for calling over to his sister to come and see a funeral pass, was taken up and confined some time; and a person who came out by water yesterday says Jemmy Lovell is in close gaol or in the dungeon, but nobody can tell for what.

Hunt was a shopkeeper in his fifties, not active in politics. And is it possible to have a more harmless-sounding name than “Shrimpton”?

I presume painter Samuel Gore’s offense was referring to British soldiers, either on their way to the battlefield or on the way from it to the hospital, as a funeral procession. Despite his nasty joke, he was probably let out after a short time because his father was a Loyalist. The military authorities didn’t know the extent of Gore’s Patriot activities, and his father probably didn’t, either. In 1773 Gore had participated in the Boston Tea Party, and in 1774 he had helped remove the Boston militia artillery company’s cannons from an armory under redcoat guard.

Gore’s father left town with the British military in March 1776. Samuel stayed—and in April the Massachusetts Provincial Congress ordered his arrest, along with a lot of other men who had remained in town through the siege. He might not have gone to jail that time; one of the magistrates charged with arresting people was his brother-in-law, Thomas Crafts. But Gore might have the rare distinction of being arrested by both sides of the war.

James “Jemmy” Lovell was the usher (assistant teacher) at the South Latin School. He was an avid Patriot, delivering the town’s first official oration about the Boston Massacre in 1771. He thought about leaving to join the provincial army, but in May 1775 he wrote that “a most violent Diarhea, from being too long in a damp place, has confirm’d Doctr. [Joseph] Gardners advice to me not to go into the Trenches.”

Instead, Lovell remained in Boston, sending what seems to have been sensitive information to Dr. Joseph Warren. The British army found those papers on the doctor’s body after the battle. Lovell was locked up for the rest of the siege and taken to Nova Scotia in chains.