The Unusual Ambitions of Joseph Greenleaf

As I quoted back here, on 14 Nov 1771 the Massachusetts Spy published an essay signed “Mucius Scævola” that called Gov. Thomas Hutchinson a “USURPER,” which was at least close to sedition. After some effort, the governor convinced his Council to respond to that essay.

That body didn’t summon just Isaiah Thomas, the newspaper’s printer. They also sent a message to Joseph Greenleaf, who in January had put his “30 Acres of choice Land” and “handsome Dwelling-House” in Abington up for sale and moved into Boston—to devote more time to the press.

That was an extraordinary action for an eighteenth-century gentleman. British society had an established social ladder. Journeymen aspired to become independent craftsmen with prosperous workshops, no longer managed by another man. Independent craftsmen aspired to become merchants arranging lucrative ventures, no longer working with their hands. Merchants aspired to become landed gentlemen overseeing large farms, no longer subject to the vagaries of trade because their fortune was now in “real estate.”

Furthermore, British society still considered printing a craft, not a gentleman’s profession. Printers literally got their hands dirty, after all. Even writing for publication was less than genteel. Most upper-class authors published anonymously or under pseudonyms, though their neighbors and rivals often knew the real identities behind those pen names. All told, giving up a rural estate in order to go into publishing looked like a step or two down the social ladder.

When 1770 began, Greenleaf was a country squire—a big man in Abington. He was a justice of the peace for Plymouth County. His had married Abigail Paine, older sister of Robert Treat Paine, thus allying him with some other genteel families in southeastern Massachusetts.

But Greenleaf got excited about Massachusetts’s resistance to Parliament’s new policies. He drafted sixteen resolutions that his town adopted two weeks after the Boston Massacre, laying out a political philosophy that started with “a state of nature” and went on to reject any new taxes “passed in either of the Parliaments of France, Spain, or England” as “a mere nullity”—a striking way of saying that the legislature in London had no authority over the people of Massachusetts.

Abington’s resolutions were published widely. The Essex Gazette ran a letter from New York that said:

The Resolves of those illustrious, and immortal Friends to the RIGHTS OF MEN—The Abington Resolves, have given their Brethren here, INFINITE PLEASURE, and I imagine some others as much Pain.

The same paper also ran a letter from London:

The Abington Resolves are too flaming and rash. They are rather like the transient flashes of passion, than the cool, steady, equal flame of patriotism and liberty…

Either way, Greenleaf seems to have been hooked on imperial political debate. Abington became too small for him.

In 1771, as I said, Greenleaf moved into Boston. What’s more, he made some sort of deal with Isaiah Thomas, the young printer of the Massachusetts Spy. It’s not clear what their arrangement was because the culture of the time didn’t have the occupational category of “publisher”—i.e., someone who finances and manages the printing and selling of a periodical or books without actually operating the press.

The Council stated in December that Greenleaf “was generally reputed to be concerned with Isaiah Thomas, in printing and publishing a News-Paper, called the Massachusett’s Spy.” The following year, the Censor magazine, set up to support the royal government, said Greenleaf was “reputed…to be in Co-Partnership with Mr. Thomas.”

In October 1772, Greenleaf himself advertised that he “carries on the Printing Business with E. Russell.” But that was a footnote to an announcement that he had opened “A STORE, INTELLIGENCE-OFFICE, and VENDUE ROOM,” or auction house, selling imported goods, cloth, “Bristol Beer,” and more. He was presenting himself mainly as an import merchant, with the printing as a side business.

A lot of people then and since nonetheless referred to Greenleaf as a “printer.” I doubt he set type or worked the levers on the press (as demonstrated above by Gary Gregory of the modern Edes & Gill Print Shop). But he definitely worked with Thomas to publish the Spy and later the Royal American Magazine, probably by putting up money and writing and editing copy. In between those ventures he also funded work in Russell’s shop (but not the Censor, both the magazine and Greenleaf were anxious to assure people).

Because of his financial interest in the Spy, Gov. Hutchinson and the Council summoned Greenleaf to discuss the “Mucius Scævola” essay. According to Greenleaf:

On the 15th of November last [i.e., in 1771] I received a polite message from the Governor and Council, by Mr. Baker, desiring my attendance at the Council Chamber, this I have no fault to find with: The distress of my family, on account of a sick child, who died that day, was such that I could not possibly attend, and I excused myself in the most polite manner I was capable of.

Indeed, the 18 November Boston Evening-Post ran a death notice for “Mr. Joseph Greenleaf, jun, in the 18th Year of his Age, Son of Joseph Greenleaf, Esq.”

But Gov. Hutchinson wasn’t satisfied with Greenleaf’s excuse for not coming to the Council chamber. Because he didn’t think the man was simply Thomas’s partner in putting out the Spy. He believed that Greenleaf was “Mucius Scævola.”

TOMORROW: Greenleaf’s claims.

“To prosecute the Printer at Common Law”?

Yesterday I quoted the essay published in the 14 Nov 1771 Massachusetts Spy over the signature “Mucius Scævola.” It attacked Thomas Hutchinson, declaring him to be an illegitimate governor.

(On what grounds? Mostly because Hutchinson was being paid by the London government with revenue from Parliament’s tea tax. But also because he had issued a Thanksgiving proclamation. Such a bad man.)

The Boston Evening-Post reported some people thought this essay “(from its nature, and tendency) is the most daring production ever published in America.”

On the afternoon after it appeared, Gov. Hutchinson summoned the Massachusetts Council to their usual meeting-place in the Town House and laid the issue of the Spy before them. The Councilors debated the crisis until sundown without coming to any conclusion. The next day, they started up again.

The first thing the Council could agree on was to summon the printer of that newspaper, Isaiah Thomas. According to the Boston Gazette, Thomas, “in answer to their summons, told the messenger he was busy in his office and should not attend.”

Someone on the Council then proposed committing Thomas to jail for contempt. But there was no majority for that action—“Whether through the abundant lenity of the honourable Board, or from their having no legal authority in the case, has not yet transpired to us,” the Gazette’s Edes and Gill stated.

About the Council meeting that newspaper concluded, “The final result was, their unanimous advice, to the Governor to order the King’s Attorney to prosecute the Printer at Common Law.” According to Hutchinson, “the attorney general [Jonathan Sewall] thought it so plain a case that no grand jury could, upon their oaths, refuse to find a bill.”

But Hutchinson must have suspected that approach would be doomed. Back in early 1768 his predecessor as governor, Francis Bernard, had tried to take legal action against another newspaper essay, this one penned by Dr. Joseph Warren and published in the Boston Gazette. After getting unsatisfactory responses from both houses of the legislature, Bernard had presented the offending material to a grand jury.

Hutchinson had presided over that hearing in his role as Massachusetts Chief Justice. He had told the jurymen “that they might depend on being damned if they did not find against the paper, as containing high treason.” Nevertheless, the grand jury had refused to return any charges. The governor had no reason to expect citizens in 1771 would do anything different.

Sure enough, the grand jury session in February didn’t go Hutchinson’s way. The foreman asked if the statements in question could be libel if they were true. The Boston Gazette compared the proceeding to the John Peter Zenger case in New York, already a free-press precedent. The jury returned no charges. The royal authorities dropped the case.

Gov. Hutchinson did get the Council to punish someone, however.

TOMORROW: Tracking down “Mucius Scævola.”

Thomas Hutchinson as “a monster in government”

You might think that getting through November meant the end of the saga of Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s controversial 1771 Thanksgiving proclamation. But he wasn’t that lucky, and neither are we.

On 14 November the actual holiday was still a week away, but the controversy was at its height in newspapers and meetinghouses. Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy published this essay from one of its regular contributors:

If it be true, that the exceptionable clause in the late proclamation, was not proposed by Mr. Hutchinson, but by ONE of the council; yet there it stands, and is nevertheless exceptionable, and must reflect dishonor somewhere, even though it were inadvertently inserted.

It is not denied, even by Mr. Hutchinson’s friends, that the other part of the proclamation was drafted by him: We may consider him then as triumphing over us as SLAVES, or persons who have no priviledges; and though we well knew it would be a piece of mockery, to lead us to the throne of grace, with thanksgivings, for the preservation of privileges, which, by his means, in part, we have been deprived of; yet he thought fit, with the advice of six, out of twenty-eight of his council. (if by HIS CRAFT, could make it their act) to insert it.

We have need of the wisdom of serpents, who are concerned with such rulers; to be considered by them as fools, is irritating; for fools they must think us, if they can imagine that we can complain of loss of liberty in one breath, and with the next solemnly thank God for the preservation of it. What account can be given for such conduct, consistent with common honesty, mankind must judge.

It would give me pain to harbour one thought, that the six members, who it is said voted for the insertion of that impious paragraph, intended thereby to curry favour with the ministry; I cannot indulge such a thought, besides there is no danger that this people will ever receive a council appointed by the KING himself: And certainly it is unlikely, that if the representatives of this people should once adopt such a sentiment of them, that these men should ever again be re-chosen into the council. Mr. Hutchinson may think we are easy, because we have for so long waited for a redress of grievances; but our patience is nearly exhausted. It cannot be that we shall hear much longer, to have our money forced from us.—

(It’s interesting to read that argument about the Council while looking ahead to the popular response to the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774, which created just what this essay said the people of the province wouldn’t stand—“a council appointed by the KING himself.”)

An Englishman should never part with a penny but by his consent, or the consent of his agent, or representative, especially as the money thus forced from us, is to hire a man to TYRANNIZE over us, whom his Master calls our Governor. This seems to be Mr. Hutchinson’s situation; therefore I cannot but view him as a usurper, and absolutely deny his jurisdiction over this people; and am of opinion, that any act of assembly consented to by him, in his pretended capacity as Governor, is ipso facto, null and void, and consequently, not binding upon us. A ruler, independent on the people, is a monster in government; and such a one is Mr. Hutchinson; and such would George the third be, if he should be rendered independent on the people of Great-Britain

A Massachusetts Governor, the King by compact, with this people may nominate and appoint, but not pay. For this support, he must stipulate with the people, and until he does, he is no legal Governor; without this, if he undertakes to rule, he is a USURPER.

It is high time then, my countrymen, that this matter was enquired into, if we have no constitutional Governor, it is time we had one. If the pretended Governor, or Lieut. Governor, by being independent on us for their support, are rendered incapable of compleating acts of government, it is time, I say, that we had a lawful one to preside, or that the pretended Governors, were dismissed and PUNISHED as USURPERS, and that the council, according to the charter, should take upon themselves the government of this province.

MUCIUS SCÆVOLA.

This essay attacked Hutchinson personally as a “USURPER” and denied is authority as governor. It also explicitly stated that the king could be deposed on the same grounds, and that might have galvanized Hutchinson more than the attack on himself.

TOMORROW: The governor returns to his Council.

Boston in 1774 with Notes from Later

Cortney Skinner alerted me to this item in the New York Public Library’s digital images collection.

It’s a leaf from Isaiah Thomas’s Royal American Magazine in early 1774 that featured Paul Revere’s engraving of the eastern shore of Boston with Royal Navy ships in the harbor.

This page from the American Antiquarian Society reports that the magazine included a key for this frontispiece inside on page 40. That key identified the labeled landmarks along the water’s edge and the ships. (Though the latter were simply “1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8 Ships of War. 9 and 10. armed Schooners.”)

However, this copy of the print was removed from the magazine, and sometime in the early 1800s someone created his or her own key in the margins.

Here’s the handwritten key along the left side; if the key from 1774 said something different, I put that information in brackets:

A- is Long Whf.
B- is Hancock’s Whf.
C- is North Battery
D- is Fort-hill Battery [South Battery]
E- is Fort-Hill
F- is Fosters Whf. [Wheelwright’s Wharf]
G- is the Province house [Beach Hill]
H- is Tilteston’s Whf. [Hubbard’s Wharf]
I- is Hallowell’s Ship Y’d [Hollaway’s Ship-Yard]
K- is [blank] [Walker’s Ship-Yard]
L- is Gee’s Ship Yard [Tyler’s Ship-Yard]
M- is [blank] [Island Wharfs]
N- is [blank] [ditto]

Originally there was no key for the meetinghouse and church spires dominating the top of the image, but the annotator put a lot of effort into labeling them. And I put a fair amount of effort into reading those labels, including some in pencil that required raising the contrast on those parts of the scan.

The results are:

Hollis St. Ch.

Summer St. Ch. [Though was a term for Trinity Church, that building had no steeple; this spire was the New South Meetinghouse on Summer Street.]

First Ch. Federal St.
now Dr. Channings [Rev. William Ellery Channing preached to this congregation from 1803 to 1842; this building was replaced in 1809.]

Old So. Ch. Washington
St. Dr. Eckley’s [Rev. Joseph Eckley’s tenure at Old South ended in 1811.]

Old King’s Chapel

Province house
Beacon light
Old Brick ch. now [?]
Joy’s buildings Cornhill
Sq.
Town house at head
of State St.

West Ch. (Howard’s) [Rev. Simeon Howard died in 1804, and a new church was erected on the site in 1806.]
Faneuil Hall
Brattle St. ch.

New Brick ch. Hanover
St. Dr. Lathrop’s [Rev. John Lathrop died in 1816.]

Ch. in No. Square site
now built over with
dwelling houses. In 1775
it was distroyed. [This was the Old North Meetinghouse.]

Christ Ch. Salem St. [Now best known as Old North Church.]

Dr. Elliot’s Hanover
St. [Rev. Andrew Eliot died in 1778, Rev. John Eliot in 1813.]

Those labels offer some clues about when the notes were written. The annotator put Old South on “Washington St.,” and that stretch of the street wasn’t officially renamed Washington until 1824. For the Federal Street Church still to be “now Dr. Channings” means that the labels predate 1842. So let’s say around 1830.

It’s a bit confusing that the annotator included the names of some ministers who were dead by that date. I suspect the notes were an attempt to identify who presided over those meetinghouses during the Revolutionary War, at the approximate time of the picture. In the case of Howard, Lathrop, and the older Eliot, they were indeed preaching under those spires in 1774, but Eckley wasn’t installed at Old South until 1780.

The Governor’s Thanksgiving Proclamation as a “solemn mockery”

By law, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s Thanksgiving proclamation for 1771 was supposed to be read out by the ministers of all the meetinghouses in Massachusetts.

That’s why the colony commissioned Richard Draper to print the proclamation in broadside. Those sheets were distributed across the province. The four weeks between the proclamation and the holiday left time for the announcement to reach the far corners of British settlement.

Those weeks also gave the Whigs time to organize resistance. As I noted last week, the first sign of opposition was Boston’s most radical newspapers not printing the governor’s proclamation. But the real battleground would be in the province’s pulpits.

On 7 November, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy carried the Whigs’ message to congregations inside Boston and out:

We are informed that the ensuing Thanksgiving affords matter of more serious thought, and general conversation than any thing of the king that has yet happened in New-England. Is it not amazing indeed, that the Governor should recommend it to the ministers and their congregations to return thanks to Almighty God, that he has been pleased to continue to them their civil and religious privileges?

It is said some of the clergy have already come to a resolution to leave out that extraordinary clause, as they cannot in conscience carry on such a solemn mockery before their people; and many gentlemen of character have declared, that in case their ministers should read it as it stands in the proclamation, they will immediately depart the meeting.

It is full time to put off that false and dangerous compliance, which can only encourage our enemies to make farther experiments of what we will bear.

We can assure the public, that a number of the members of one of the Worshiping Assemblies in this town, waited upon their Reverend Pastor yesterday,…and that their minister expressed his hearty concurrence with them in sentiment, and declared that he should omit reading the Proclamation.

A second reverend clergyman has declared, that it is against his conscience to offer up such an insult to the Deity, and shall therefore read no part of the proclamation.

We have authority to say that a number of the Rev. Pastors of the CHURCHES in this town, are determined, not to offer up on the day of our Thanksgiving, the solemn mockery recommended to them by Mr. Hutchinson in his proclamation, “for continuing to us our civil and religious privileges” which he well knows are RAVISHED from us.

It is hoped the Clergy in the country will follow the laudable example. The favours of providence are innumerable, and it is among the first of them that we unanimously agree, to resist TYRANNY. Let us be unfeignedly thankfull for them all, and in sincerity express it on that day.

The Boston Whigs of course had the most influence in Boston and nearby, and the merchants in Massachusetts’s smaller ports shared many interests with the Bostonians. But most of the province still consisted of country farming towns, and they had never been as militant about London’s new measures.

TOMORROW: How well did that campaign work?

Publishing the 1771 Thanksgiving Proclamation

I’ve been considering Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s Thanksgiving proclamation in 1771, one of the many bones of contention in Revolutionary Boston. Hutchinson’s own account may have been accurate in the basics but it wasn’t in all details, so I’m doubling back into other sources, starting with the newspapers.

On 17 October the Boston News-Letter, the paper closest to the royal government, reported that Hutchinson would name 21 November as the holiday. The Monday papers, most in opposition to the governor or neutral, repeated that news. People wanted early notice to plan for the holiday.

Gov. Hutchinson didn’t issue his official proclamation until 23 October. He might well have been working on its text. Some people later said “ONE of the council” had proposed reinstating language from before 1761 about the province’s “civil and religious Rights and Liberties.” Harbottle Dorr wrote in his newspaper collection that this Councilor was “supposed to be Colo. [William] Brattle.”

In 1765 Brattle (shown above) had marched with Ebenezer Mackintosh against the Stamp Act. He was one of Gov. Francis Bernard’s biggest thorns on the Council. In the 1770s he moved closer to the royal prerogative party, eventually sealing his fate as a Loyalist by setting off the “Powder Alarm” of 1774. But in 1771 Brattle might have sincerely still felt he was a Whig and that his colleagues should be pleased by the new governor acknowledging traditional liberties in traditional phrasing. Hutchinson probably liked the idea of reestablishing normalcy.

The governor’s final text went to Richard Draper, the printer with the contract from the province and Council to issue such official announcements as broadsides. Draper also published the News-Letter, and the proclamation appeared in that newspaper on 24 October. The Boston Evening-Post, Boston Post-Boy, and Essex Gazette of Salem ran the text on their front pages the following week.

Notably, Gov. Hutchinson’s proclamation didn’t appear in Edes and Gill’s 28 October Boston Gazette or in either 24 October or 31 October issues of Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy. Those were the most radical newspapers in Boston. Their printers appear to have made a choice not to give any space to the governor’s proclamation.

Those newspapers ran another item of Council business instead—Hutchinson’s complaint about the Gazette publishing an essay by “Junius Americanus” (the Virginia-born London lobbyist Arthur Lee) that called province secretary Andrew Oliver a “perjured traitor.” The Spy also published another in a series of essays signed “Mucius Scaevola,” this one complaining about the governor, the Customs Commissioners, and Secretary of State Hillsborough all at once.

TOMORROW: The Whig objections to Gov. Hutchinson’s language.

Colonial Newspaper Subscription Prices

Last month I posted twice about the cost of advertising in colonial American newspapers.

One source of those articles, the 1884 U.S. Census Office report “The Newspaper and Periodical Press” by S. N. D. North, also discussed what pre-Revolutionary newspapers charged their readers for subscriptions:

The colonial newspapers were sold at prices which varied according to the location and the currency of that location. The latter fluctuated so frequently in value that it is not always possible at this date to determine precisely the sum that the publisher regarded himself entitled to receive from his patrons; but there is sufficient reason to believe that this sum was a nearly uniform one in the respective colonies, and that it did not vary greatly in any one colony from the standard established in all the others.

John Campbell, when he founded the News-Letter in 1704, may be said to have established for his own and for subsequent generations the prevailing price of the weekly newspaper. He received the equivalent of $2 of our present currency, but did not think it worth while to advertise his price of subscription in the paper itself. This was a neglect to take advantage of an opportunity which found several imitators in the subsequent colonial newspapers. The Boston Gazette and Weekly Journal (1719) was sold for 16s. a year, and 20s. when sealed, payable quarterly, and at the value of currency at that time this was equivalent to $250 in our present money.

The American Magazine, a monthly periodical of 50 pages, founded in 1743, was sold for 3s., new tenor, a quarter, being at the rate of 50 cents, or $2 per annum. The Rehearsal, founded in 1731, was sold originally for 20s., but was reduced from that price to 16s. when [Thomas] Fleet took possession of it in 1733.

The Boston Advertiser was sold for 5s.4d. “lawful money”, and the Boston Chronicle (1767) for 6s.8d.—“but a very small consideration for a newspaper on a large sheet and well printed,” according to [Isaiah] Thomas, but likely to be regarded as a high price for a similar newspaper in these days.

The Christian History, weekly, 1743, was sold for 2s., new tenor, per quarter, but subsequently 6d. more was added to its price, “covered, sealed, and directed.” The American Magazine and Historical Chronicle, a monthly of 50 pages, sold for 3s., new tenor, per quarter, the equivalent of $150 per year.

Nevertheless, 6s.8d. appears to have been the ruling price at this period, for the Salem Essex Gazette (1768) and the Norwich Packet (1773) were vended at that rate. The New Hampshire Gazette (1756) was sold for “one dollar per annum, or its equivalent in bills of credit, computing a dollar this year at four pounds, old tenor”. The Portsmouth Mercury (1765) was sold for “one dollar, or six pounds o.t. per year; one-half to be paid at entrance”.

Thomas Fleet, who discontinued the Weekly Rehearsal in 1735 and began the publication of the Boston Evening Post on a half sheet of large foolscap paper, regarded the prevailing price for newspapers altogether too low, and in a dunning advertisement to his subscribers he declared:

In the days of Mr. Campbell, who published a newspaper here, which is forty years ago, Paper was bought for eight or nine shillings a Ream, and now tis Five Pounds; his Paper was never more than half a sheet, and that he had Two Dollars a year for, and had also the art of getting his Pay for it; and that size has continued until within a little more than one year, since which we are expected to publish a whole Sheet, so that the Paper now stands us in near as much as all the other charges.

In Pennsylvania the prices of newspapers were more uniform than in New England. The Philadelphia American Weekly Mercury, the first paper founded in that city, and the first outside of New England, being the third in the colonies, was sold for 10s. per annum. The Philadelphia Gazette (1733) was sold for the same price, as was also the Philadelphia Journal (1766), the Chronicle (1767), and the Ledger (1775). The Philadelphia Evening Post, founded in 1775, and issued three times a week, was sold at a price of two pennies for each paper, or 3s. the quarter. The Dutch [actually German] and English Gazette was sold for 10s. in 1749, when it was a weekly publication, and for 5s. in 1751, when it became a fortnightly publication.

The New York Weekly Journal (1733) was sold for 3s. the quarter. The Virginia Gazette (1766) was 12s.6d. per year [Purdie and Dixon offered that price in 1770, William Rind the same in 1771]. There was a notable increase in prices during the war in several cases, and the New Jersey Gazette, which was founded in 1777, fixed its price at 26s. per annum.

Supplementing North’s rundown, here are the subscription prices I found this spring:

• New-England Courant under (nominally) Benjamin Franklin, 1723, 12s. per year or 4d. each issue.
• New-York Mercury under Hugh Gaine, 1756, 12s. per year, rising to 14s. in 1757 to defray the cost of a provincial stamp tax, plus another 7s.6d. for delivery to Connecticut.
• Massachusetts Spy under Zechariah Fowle and Isaiah Thomas, 1770, 5s. 
• Massachusetts Spy under Thomas alone, 1774, 6s.8d. unsealed, 8s. “sealed and directed.” Thomas continued to charge that price after moving to Worcester in 1775.
• Pennsylvania Packet under John Dunlap, 1771, 10s.
• North-Carolina Gazette under James Davis, 1775, 16s.
• New-York Packet under Samuel Loudon, 1776, 12s.

Hannah Snell and the Press Gang

Hannah Snell (1723-1792) was a native of Worcester in England. In 1747, her husband having deserted her and their child having died in infancy, she borrowed a brother-in-law’s clothes and name and enlisted in the British marines.

Over the next three years Snell participated in an abortive expedition to Mauritius and then a long campaign in India. Reportedly she was wounded multiple times to her legs and groin, and at one point whipped on her bare back. Nonetheless, Snell maintained her identity as a male until the ship returned to London, when she revealed her secret to her shipmates.

And then Snell made a deal with a London publisher for her story. The Female Soldier turned Snell into a celebrity. Engravers issued prints of her in her uniform. Prince William, the Duke of Cumberland, ensured that she received a military pension.

With Britain at war off and on throughout the century, Snell’s story was frequently republished to encourage martial patriotism from all British subjects. Isaiah Thomas put a version into his almanac for 1775 as Massachusetts prepared for armed rebellion, reusing an old cut of a woman holding a musket. (For more about that image, see my article here.)

In January 1771 the Oxford Magazine published a new anecdote about Hannah Snell, by this point in her mid-forties, a pub owner, and a mother of two new children by a new husband. The item appears to have come from a British newspaper dated 2 January:

Friday last a press gang was very busy at Newington-butts, and having impressed a poor countryman from his wife and children, the distressed woman followed her husband with lamentations, which induced many women to sally from their houses; among the Amazons was the famous Hannah Snell, who immediately demanded the captive from the Lieutenant; he refusing, and bad words ensuing, she collared and shook him; two sailors advanced to rescue their officer, whom she beat, and challenged to fight any of the gang with fists, sticks, or quarter-staff, only let her be permitted to pull off her stays, gown and petticoats, and put on breeches, declaring she had sailed more leagues than any of them; [“]and if they were seamen, they ought to be on board, and not sneak about as kidnappers; but if you are afraid of the sea, take Brown Bess on your shoulders, and march through Germany as I have done: Ye dogs I have more wounds about me than you have fingers. By G—d, this is no false attack; I’ll have my man[”]; and accordingly took the poor fellow from the gang, and restored him to his wife.

Thus did the long petticoats, headed by a veteran virago, overcome the short trowsers.——

Mrs. Snell has a pension of 50 l. per annum left by the late Duke of Cumberland, for her many manly services by sea and land.

That story was soon circulating in America as well. It appeared in the 25 Mar 1771 New-York Gazette, the 28 March Pennsylvania Journal, the 2 April Connecticut Courant, the 11 April Massachusetts Spy by Thomas, and the 19 April New-Hampshire Gazette.

In addition to giving us another glimpse of Snell, that article is notable for being one of the earliest print appearances of the phrase “Brown Bess” (or “brown Bess,” as the Pennsylvania Journal rendered it).

TOMORROW: But it wasn’t the very earliest appearance.

Isaiah Thomas and a Woman of Pleasure

In 1786, the London bookseller Thomas Evans wrote to Isaiah Thomas, who had finally established himself as a printer in Worcester: “The Memoirs of a W. of P. which if you must have, [I] must beg you will apply to some of the Captains coming here, as it is an article I do not send my Customers if I can possibly avoid it.”

John Cleland’s erotic novel The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill, had been published in London in 1748-49 by “G. Fenton,” otherwise unknown. On 11 Dec 1752, Garrat Noel advertised that book for sale in the New-York Gazette; its title appeared at the end of a long list of books that started with “Bibles.” By that point, however, Cleland and the reputed printers had been prosecuted for obscenity, and the publication driven underground.

Which is not to say Fanny Hill had disappeared—there were several British editions over the next thirty years, but most were still credited to “G. Fenton” since the authorities could do nothing to him.

Did Thomas ever get his hands on the book? He definitely did, as the American Antiquarian Society’s Past Is Present blog showed a few years back.

…the marbled boards…covering AAS’s copy of Jonas Hanway’s Advice from Farmer Trueman to His Daughter Mary…are actually unbound, unused copies of John Cleland’s quite vicious Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (popularly known as Fanny Hill).

Marcus McCorison, AAS President Emeritus, bibliographer, and author of an essay on early American printing of Fanny Hill, has pointed to the “curious juxtaposition of pious works” bound with such risqué words. Perhaps an impertinent binder, with a supply of marbled Fanny Hill sheets at his side and a Hanway book to bind, covered this copy of Advice From Farmer Trueman. The binder may never have thought that the marbling would wear away, expose Cleland’s words, and reveal the binder to be quite the ironist.

That posting goes on to note that McCorison also found that “In 1814, AAS founder Isaiah Thomas bound many of his newspapers in pages from Fanny Hill.” So Thomas had copies.

McCorison argued that those papers came from an edition of the novel printed in northern New England around 1813, once again credited to “G. Fenton.” In 1817 the printer Anson Whipple of Walpole, New Hampshire, had 293 copies of Fanny Hill in stock. The following year, someone complained to the governor of New Hampshire about copies being sold there, and over the next few years authorities in Massachusetts and New York prosecuted half a dozen men for selling copies of the book.

And who had bankrolled Anson Whipple in his printing business, sent him stock to sell, and remained his senior partner until 1817? None other than his father-in-law, Isaiah Thomas. Some book historians therefore think Thomas was secretly involved in publishing Fanny Hill for American readers after all.

Isaiah Thomas’s Travels and Togs

When Isaiah Thomas reached Halifax in early 1765, he didn’t have much. That’s what happens when you leave your apprenticeship early. Having worked for printer Zechariah Fowle for nine years, the sixteen-year-old knew he was taking a risk.

According to his grandson Benjamin Franklin Thomas, “He used to say, not without satisfaction in the contrast with his affluent condition in later life, that his linen was reduced to one check shirt, and that the only coat he had he sent to a tailor to turn, and the tailor ran away with it.”

But we know that Thomas built up his wardrobe quickly. In 1846 the Portsmouth Journal and Boston Courier reported that builders had discovered a document inside an “old building belonging to Mr. Supply Ham.” It was “a marble covered memorandum book” with the inscription “Isaiah Thomas His Book 1766,” and its text recorded the young printer’s travels and compensation:

Left Mr. Fowle the 19th of September 1765, and sat sail the next Day about 10 o’clock for Halifax, and arrived there on the 24th Day about 10 o’clock, which was just four Days from the Time I left Boston.

Went to Mr. [Anthony] Henry’s and engaged work with him for 3 Dollars per month and he to find me Boarding, Washing, &c. Work extremely scarce.

Received of Mr. Anthony Henry the following Articles, viz.
1 Pair of Broadcloth Breeches 0 15 0
Two pair of Stockings 7 0
1 pair of Shoes 8 0
Two Check Shirts 16 0
1 Pistereen 1 0
1 Bottle of [torn] 1 0
Two Dollars in Cash 10 0
To 1 yard of Black Shallon 4 0
To 1 yard of Blue Ditto 3 9
______________________
Halifax Currency 3 5 9

Work’d with Mr. Henry 5 months, 3 Weeks and 3 Days. Sailed from Halifax the 19th day of March, 1766, and arrived at Old York [Maine] the 27th (at Dark) of said Month.

Work with Mr. [Daniel] Fowle of Portsmouth [New Hampshire] 13 Days.

Friday, April 10, 1766. Came to work with Messrs. [Thomas] Furber & [Ezekiel] Russell for eight Dollars per month and my Board.

Received of Messrs. Furber & Russell 5 yards & half of Black Serge at 9 Shillings Lawful money per yard 2 9 6.

Thomas later said that friends in Boston recognized his work in Furber and Russell’s newspaper. He suggested that was the quality of his typesetting, but it may have been his woodcuts. Or Daniel Fowle may simply have written to his brother Zechariah that his wayward apprentice had reappeared, hungry for work. In any event, the Boston printer invited young Isaiah to return.

Thomas’s grandson wrote, “On his arrival at Portsmouth the people were celebrating with great enthusiasm the repeal of the Stamp Act.” But 27 March was too early for that. The young printer might have stayed in Portsmouth through that town’s celebration in May, but it’s also possible that he returned to Boston just in time for its big celebration on 19 May, and the memory got garbled.

According to Benjamin Franklin Thomas, back in his old master’s shop the teenager “gets along quietly for a few weeks. In July 1766, on the day of the funeral of Jonathan Mayhew [11 July], whom the whole town followed to his grave, he has fresh trouble, but the difficulty is compromised and he lives with him once more. He remains but a few weeks and then, with the full consent of his master, leaves his service finally.”

Isaiah Thomas’s next stop: Wilmington, North Carolina.

The Stamp and the Printer’s Devil

I’ve been pointing out how some of Isaiah Thomas’s stories of defying the Stamp Act while working as an underaged journeyman printer in Nova Scotia don’t stand up to scrutiny. On the other hand, we know that the sixteen-year-old did sometimes express his dislike of that law in a quite visible way.

Above is an image from the American Antiquarian Society (which Thomas founded) of the 13 Feb 1766 Halifax Gazette. It clearly shows the revenue stamp, meaning Thomas couldn’t have disposed of all those stamps by that date as he later claimed. But it also shows a small woodcut that Thomas himself probably created, with a devil poking its pitchfork into the stamp.

Around the stamp are these added words:

Behold me the Scorn and contempt of AMERICA pitching down to Destruction

Devils clear the Way for B——s and STAMPS.

In addition, the Canadian printing scholar Marie Tremaine found December 1765 copies of the Halifax Gazette that had, in place of or on top of the stamp, “a skull and crossbones” in black and “a death’s head” in red.

Some printers included such images of death within every copy of their newspapers during those turbulent months, as in this example from Maryland. In contrast, by stamping his images over the printing, Thomas gave himself more flexibility. He could have the devil poke at the stamp on some copies but leave that image off others, perhaps those sent to local officials.

That brings us to an evidentiary problem. Nearly every surviving copy of the Halifax Gazette from this period is housed at either the American Antiquarian Society (built from Thomas’s own collection) or the Massachusetts Historical Society. Are those copies typical, or were those ones that young Thomas put his special decoration on, knowing he would keep them to himself or send them off to a colony where the Stamp Act was already dead? We can’t tell.

We do know that royal officials in Nova Scotia disliked the Halifax Gazette’s treatment of the Stamp Act enough to take printing jobs away from its publisher, Anthony Henry. He gave up publishing the newspaper in mid-1766. The officials then encouraged a newcomer to the province to launch the Nova-Scotia Gazette.

Meanwhile, having caused as much trouble in Nova Scotia as he dared, young Thomas had caught a ship headed south.

TOMORROW: Isaiah Thomas’s travels.

“All the stamped paper for the Gazette was used”

Here’s another story that the respected master printer Isaiah Thomas told about his misadventures as a sixteen-year-old in Nova Scotia in 1765.

Back in Boston, the anti-Stamp Act demonstration and riot of 14 August ensured that no official was willing to distribute stamped paper. The imperial government avoided shipping any of the valuable commodity into the port. The law therefore never went into effect in Massachusetts as scheduled on 1 November. Newspapers continued to appear on ordinary paper.

In contrast, Thomas recalled, stamped paper was plentiful at Anthony Henry’s Halifax Gazette:

A short time before the exhibition of the effigy of the stampmaster, Henry had received from the stampoffice, the whole stock of paper that was sent ready stamped from England, for the use of the Gazette.

Thomas here recalled the printer receiving the stamped paper before the colony’s sole demonstration against the new law, which we know from other sources happened before the law went into effect. That’s a logical sequence, and more evidence that, as I discussed yesterday, Thomas was wrong to suggest his 5 December newspaper printed after the law had prompted the demonstration.

Back to the paper supply:

The quantity did not exceed six or eight reams; but, as only three quires were wanted weekly for the newspaper, it would have been sufficient, for the purpose intended, twelve months.

In the eighteenth century a quire was 24 pages, a ream 20 quires. So Thomas was saying that Henry had 3,000 to 3,500 sheets at hand but needed only 72 each week. At another point in his history of printing Thomas wrote, “Not more than seventy copies were issued weekly from the press.” Henry thus appeared to have about a year’s supply of paper with a stamp suitable for newspapers.

That calculation assumed each copy of the newspaper appeared on a full sheet. The earliest issues of the Halifax Gazette had been half-sheets of paper because there hadn’t been enough news, advertisements, or subscribers to justify more. But printing the newspaper on half a sheet of stamped paper would mean only half the copies would bear the necessary stamp.

Thomas wrote that the Stamp Act prompted Henry to expand the Gazette to a full sheet folded in two to make four pages—the standard size of a great North American newspaper. However, in A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints Marie Tremaine suggested that Henry was already publishing four-page issues.

In any event:

It was not many weeks after the sheriff, already mentioned [and doubted], made his exit from the printing house, when it was discovered that this paper was divested of the stamps; not one remained; they had been cut off, and destroyed. On this occasion, an article appeared in the Gazette, announcing that “all the stamped paper for the Gazette was used, and as no more could be had, it would, in future, be published without stamps.”

Such notices did appear in some other North American newspapers, but Tremaine didn’t report such a statement in any issue of the Halifax Gazette.

At another point in his history Thomas returned to the mysterious vanishing stamps, stating:

the stamps were [removed], unknown to him [Henry], by the assistance of a binder’s press and plough, cut from the paper; and, the Gazette appeared without the obnoxious stamp, and was again reduced to half a sheet.

Tremaine indeed found copies of the Halifax Gazette printed on half-sheets in mid-December 1765. Some of those copies had no stamps on them. However, at least one copy from that same period did have the stamp. Furthermore, James Melvin Lee’s History of American Journalism stated:

A copy of The Halifax Gazette for February 13, 1766, for example, has on the upper left-hand corner of the fourth page the red halfpenny stamp with the word "America" also in red above it.

That hard evidence suggests that Thomas sometimes cut the full sheets in half, and thus took the risk of issuing copies without stamps, but his story of some mysterious person slicing away all the stamps was an exaggeration. He was still printing on stamped paper months after that material had become taboo in Massachusetts.

TOMORROW: Isaiah Thomas’s own stamps.

“And what I say, you may depend is Fact.”

On 21 Nov 1765, the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter ran this item from Nova Scotia in a roundup of reports on protests against the Stamp Act:

At the late Exhibition of a Stamp man’s Effigies at Halifax, were the following Labels: On the Stamp-man’s Breast, was affixed his Confession, viz.

Behold me hanging on this cursed Tree,
Example to those who would Stamp men be.
It was for the Sake of Gain I took this Place;
The more the Shame, O pity my sad Case.
B—e was the Auther of this cursed Act,
And what I say, you may depend is Fact.
But alas! the Devil is too sly;
Instead of Gain has left me here to die.

Whosoever carries this away is an Enemy to his Country.

What greater Glory can this Country see
Than a Stamp-master hanging on a Tree.

On one Pocket the following. B—e’s Speech:

O mourn with me my poor and wretched State
I now repent; but alas! too late.
America I sought to overthrow,
By stamping them to Death, you all must know,
But Pitt o’erthrew my Schemes, did me confound,
And brought my favourite Stamp-Act to the Ground.

On the Stamp-man’s Right Arm, A.H.
On a Board Lord B——e with Satan dictating him.

The hanging effigies strung with poetic labels, the blame for the Earl of Bute and praise for William Pitt, the invocation of the devil—those were all elements of the standard anti-Stamp iconography established in Boston on 14 August.

The most distinctive detail about the Halifax effigy was the label with initials “A.H.” That pointed to Nova Scotia’s stamp agent, Archibald Hinshelwood.

Another deviation from the norm was that the Halifax protesters never got around to burning their effigy. It went up on 12 October, hung overnight, and, despite its warning label, was carried away by two gentlemen for disposal in the morning.

To assess Isaiah Thomas’s account of this demonstration, the most important detail is the date. Halifax’s protest took place two weeks before the Stamp Act was to take effect and eight weeks before Thomas issued his first issue of the Halifax Gazette with mourning bands. His actions as a young printer therefore could not have prompted the action.

TOMORROW: More games printers play.

A Sixteen-Year-Old Standing up to the Sheriff?

According to Isaiah Thomas, writing his History of Printing in the first decade of the 1800s, his decision to print the 5 Dec 1765 Halifax Gazette with mourning borders to show (someone’s) displeasure with the Stamp Act had a significant effect in Nova Scotia.

It “made no trifling bustle in the place,” he modestly stated. Writing of his sixteen-year-old self in the third person, Thomas described what happened next:

Soon after this event the effigy of the stampmaster was hung on the gallows near the citadel, and other tokens of hostility to the stamp act were exhibited. These disloyal transactions were done silently and secretly; but they created some alarm;—a captain’s guard was continually stationed at the house of the stampmaster to protect him from those injuries which were expected to befall him. It is supposed the apprehensions entertained on his account were entirely groundless. . . .

An opinion prevailed that Thomas not only knew the parties concerned in these transactions, but had a hand in them himself; on which account, a few days after the exhibition of the stampmaster’s effigy, a sheriff went to the printing house, and informed Thomas that he had a precept against him; and, intended to take him to prison, unless he would give information respecting the persons concerned in making and exposing the effigy of the stampmaster.

He mentioned, that some circumstances had produced a conviction in his mind, that Thomas was one of those who had been engaged in these seditious proceedings. The sheriff receiving no satisfactory answer to his enquiries, ordered Thomas to go with him before a magistrate; and he, having no person to consult or to give him advice, in the honest simplicity of his heart was going to obey the orders of this terrible alguazil; but, being suddenly struck with the idea, that this proceeding might be intended merely to alarm him into an acknowledgment of his privity of the transactions in question, he told the sheriff he did not know him; and demanded imformation respecting the authority by which he acted.

The sheriff answered that he had sufficient authority; but, on being requested to exhibit it, the officer was, evidently, disconcerted, and showed some symptoms of his not acting under “the king’s authority”—however, he answered, that he would show his authority when it was necessary; and again ordered this “printer of sedition” to go with him.

Thomas answered, he would not obey him unless he produced a precept, or proper authority for taking him prisoner.

After further parley the sheriff left him, with an assurance that he would soon return; but Thomas saw him no more; and he, afterward, learned that this was a plan concocted for the purpose of surprising him into a confession.

That sounds like the young printer taking a daring and noble stand for the freedom of the press in Nova Scotia. But the problem with this story is that the dates don’t add up.

TOMORROW: Nova Scotia’s anti-Stamp demonstration.

The Halifax Gazette in Mourning

I was in the middle of relating the teen-aged Isaiah Thomas’s misadventures with the Stamp Act in Halifax last month when anniversaries, events, and my book publication interrupted.

So even though the sestercentennial of the Stamp Act crisis is happily behind us, I’m going to finish up those stories.

We left Isaiah Thomas at work in Anthony Henry’s shop in late 1765, printing the Halifax Gazette. Richard Bulkeley, the editor of that weekly newspaper, who was also the royal secretary of Nova Scotia, had told the young printer to stop saying the people of that province opposed the Stamp Act.

So Thomas began to run steady reports from newspapers to the south about how people in those other provinces opposed the Stamp Act. According to Marie Tremaine’s Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, “a quarter to a half of each issue consisted of reports from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia about resistance to the Stamp Act.”

The 31 October Pennsylvania Journal was one of several North American newspapers that printed thick dark lines around all its columns when the law was taking effect, as shown above. (For more detail, see this article at the Journal of the American Revolution.) That style was usually a sign of public mourning. In 1765, it became a less than subtle way to mourn the death of liberty because of the new tax.

Thomas wanted to do the same with the Halifax Gazette, but he couldn’t do that directly without angering his newspaper’s sponsor. Instead, he wrote:

We are desired by a number of our readers to give a description of the extraordinary appearance of the Pennsylvania Journal of 30th [sic] of October last, (1765). We can in no better way comply with the request than by the exemplification we have given of that journal in this day’s Gazette.

Then he recreated the black borders. And he kept those thick black borders in every issue of the Halifax Gazette from 5 December onward.

TOMORROW: Isaiah Thomas stands up to the sheriff?

The “young Newenglander” and the Stamp Act

On 21 Nov 1765, the Halifax Gazette ran an item suggesting that the people of Nova Scotia opposed the Stamp Act, which had taken effect that month.

According to Isaiah Thomas’s History of Printing in America (1810):

This paragraph gave great offence to the officers of government, who called [printer Anthony] Henry to account for publishing what they termed sedition. Henry had not so much as seen the Gazette in which the offensive article had appeared; consequently he pleaded ignorance, and in answer to their interrogation informed them that the paper was, in his absence, conducted by his journeyman. He was reprimanded and admonished that he would be deprived of the work of government, should he in future suffer anything of the kind to appear in the Gazette.

Most of Henry’s business consisted of jobs for the provincial government, so losing that contract was a serious threat. But he didn’t bring his journeyman under control.

It was not long before Henry was again sent for on account of another offence of a similar nature; however he escaped the consequences he might have apprehended, by assuring the officers of government that he had been confined by sickness; and he apologized in a satisfactory manner for the appearance of the obnoxious publication. But his journeyman was summoned to appear before the Secretary of the Province; to whose office he accordingly went.

Now here we run into a problem knowing exactly what happened because the only account comes from Isaiah Thomas’s book, and the young journeyman causing trouble was Isaiah Thomas himself. Writing in Worcester more than forty years later, with those Halifax men distant and dead, he could tilt the story as he remembered it or wanted it remembered without fear of contradiction.

In this case, Thomas left out a pertinent fact about the royal secretary of Nova Scotia, Richard Bulkeley. That army veteran was also the major backer of the Halifax Gazette and for many years had overseen its news coverage. Bulkeley didn’t print the paper, but he had a legitimate interest in what appeared in it. (If a government official overseeing a newspaper seems like a conflict of interest, it was, but that was how most of Boston’s newspapers got launched in the early 1700s, too.)

Thus, when Bulkeley summoned Thomas to his office, he was both a government official and the young printer’s boss. But in his history of printing Thomas chose to present himself as up against royal authority alone:

Thomas was probably not known to Mr. Secretary, who sternly demanded of him what he wanted.

A.—Nothing, sir.

Q.—Why came you here?

A.—Because I was sent for.

Q.—What is your name?

A.—Isaiah Thomas.

Q.—Are you the young Newenglander who prints for Henry?

A.—Yes, sir.

Q.—How dare you publish in the Gazette that the people in Nova Scotia are displeased with the Stamp Act?

A.—I thought it was true.

Sec.—You have no right to think so. If you publish anything more of such stuff you will be punished. You may go, but remember you are not in New England.

A.—I will, sir.

Thomas still opposed to the Stamp Act. He just had to find other ways of expressing that opposition.

COMING UP: The death of liberty in America.

Isaiah Thomas’s Second Job

In mid-1765 Isaiah Thomas was sixteen years old and apprenticed to the Boston printer Zechariah Fowle. But he was nowhere near Boston. Having worked for Fowle since he was seven, the teenager had gotten fed up and run away.

In Thomas’s own words later, “he went to Novascotia, with a view to go from thence to England, in order to acquire a more perfect knowledge of his business.” Benjamin Franklin had blazed that trail.

In Halifax, Thomas found work with “a Dutchman, whose name was Henry.” This was Anthony Henry, who was actually born in France of German parents. Henry had come to America as a fifer in the British army and settled in Halifax in 1760, taking over the colony’s main print shop the next year.

According to Thomas:

He was a good natured, pleasant man, who in common concerns did not want for ingenuity and capacity; but he might, with propriety, be called a very unskilful printer. To his want of knowledge or abilities in his profession, he added indolence…

Thomas clearly had no more respect for his new boss than for his previous one. He also deemed Henry’s shop antiquated and poorly equipped. But working there gave the teenager a taste of autonomy—Henry appears to have given him free run in printing the weekly Halifax Gazette.

On 1 November, the Stamp Act went into effect in all of Britain’s North American colonies. According to A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints by Marie Tremaine, the issue of the Halifax Gazette published on that date appeared on stamped paper. Its printer’s notice stated, “Advertisements are taken in and inserted as Cheap as the Stamp Act will allow.”

Later that month Thomas was a little more forthright about his opposition to the new law as he reported, “the People of this Province are disgusted with the Stamp Act.”

TOMORROW: And that was enough to get him and his boss in trouble.

Omohundro Institute Conference in Worcester, 23-26 June

On the same weekend as the Dublin Seminar, the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture will hold its 22nd Annual Conference in Worcester. This year’s conference themes are “Native American Transformations” and “Early America at Work.”

The conference starts on the evening of Thursday, 23 June, with an informal social gathering at the Goddard Daniels House of the American Antiquarian Society. The formal sessions start at 9:00 A.M. on Friday at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and run through 12:30 P.M. on Sunday. Here’s one of the many paper panels as an example:

Session 9—Taming Early America: Human-Animal Relationships Along the Blurred Line of Domestication

Chair: Virginia DeJohn Anderson, University of Colorado, Boulder

Whitney Barlow Robles, Harvard University, “‘Liberty Rendered Him Insolent’: Raccoon Pet-keeping as a Laboratory in Early America”

Strother E. Roberts, Bowdoin College, “‘Their Wealth is in Proportion to Their Dogs’: Dogs as Livestock Among Indian Communities of the Seventeenth-Century Northeast”

Tom Wickman, Trinity College, “Yoked for Winter: Oxen, the Anglo-Wabanaki Wars, and the Little Ice Age”

Anya Zilberstein, Concordia University, “Poor Creatures: Corn Feed for People and Other Animals”

Comment: Audience

In addition to the plenary addresses, panels and roundtable discussions, there will be hands-on workshops about the digital tools Omeka and TEI and demonstrations of two ongoing digital humanities projects, the Georgian Papers Programme and the Thomas Broadside Ballads. There will also be an app for the conference made available in May.

Visit the conference page for information about registration and much more.

Naming a Massacre

Bostonians started to call the killings on King Street on 5 Mar 1770 a “massacre” almost immediately, according to the official record. The minutes of the emergency town meeting that started the next day begin:

At a Meeting of the Freeholders and other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston at Faneuil Hall on Tuesday the 6th. Day of March 1770 – 11 O’Clock A:M; occasioned by the Massacre made in King Street, by the Soldiery the preceeding Night . . .

Upon a Motion made it was Voted, that if any of the Inhabitants present could give information respecting the Massacre of the last Night, that they be desired to do it in Meeting, that the same might be minuted by the Town Clerk

That clerk was William Cooper, and it appears he was the person who started to apply the term “massacre” as he took notes at that meeting.

By the end of that town meeting that afternoon, Cooper was writing the phrase “horrid Massacre.” On the afternoon of the 12th, that had become “the late horred Massacre.” The latter meeting had chosen a small committee headed by James Bowdoin to write Boston’s official report on the event, which had the title A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston.

In choosing that word, Boston Whigs strengthened the links they perceived between them and government reformers in London. The term echoed the Massacre of St. George’s Fields, which had taken place in London in May 1768. A crowd had turned out to show support for the radical politician John Wilkes. Magistrates “read the Riot Act,” ordering the people to disperse. When they didn’t, soldiers fired at the crowd, killing six to eleven people.

A related question is when the term “Boston Massacre” arose. At the end of 1770, Isaiah Thomas published his first Massachusetts almanac, to cover the following year. He had Paul Revere produce a new version of the image he’d taken from Henry Pelham, this time as a woodcut rather than an engraving. Harbottle Dorr pasted that picture in his newspaper collection beside the first reports of the shootings. That example is discolored by glue, but we can see the label “BOSTON MASSACRE” at the top. That phrase also appeared in advertisements for the almanac.

Another label, John Johnson of Minutemen and Their World has pointed out, was “Preston’s Massacre,” after Capt. Thomas Preston, acquitted in late 1770 of having ordered soldiers to fire into the crowd. That phrase appeared in the 5 Mar 1771 issue of Salem’s Essex Gazette, exactly one year after the event. A week later, Edes and Gill reprinted that text in their Boston Gazette, filled out with large display type, dark borders, and a description of Boston’s first-anniversary memorial events.

The war that followed a few years later brought several more events labeled as “massacres”: the Paoli Massacre, Baylor Massacre, Waxhaw Massacre, Cherry Valley Massacre, Sugarloaf Massacre, Pyle’s Massacre, and Gnaddenhutten Massacre. Most of those events were actually fights between the two armies in which one side was really successful at wiping out the other. Only a couple involved attacks on unarmed civilians, with the Gnaddenhutten attack the worst atrocity.

Bartholomew Green, “inoffensive” Customs Employee

Over the next couple of days I’ll highlight some folks caught up in the Boston Massacre who don’t get a lot of attention: the employees of the Customs service who were in the building behind the shooting.

As I quoted back here, the father of that family was Bartholomew Green, trained by his own father as a printer but making his living spotting ships as they came into Boston harbor. The source of that information, Isaiah Thomas, also reported, “he had some office in the custom house.”

The Customs service rented a house on King Street near the Town House from the widow Grizzell Apthorp. The Green family lived in the building, apparently supplying housekeeping and meals for the Customs staff working there. Green might also have been a tide-waiter or some other low-level employee during the day; Treasury Department records could preserve more detail.

When four British army regiments arrived in town in the fall of 1768, Boston’s Whigs began to send a series of reports about how horrible they were to newspapers in other American ports. Oliver M. Dickerson collected these heavily slanted dispatches in a 1936 book titled Boston Under Military Rule. One item dated 26 Jan 1769 described a concert the night before that British army officers had attended:

Some officers of the army were for a little dancing after the music, and being told that G[overno]r B[ernar]d did not approve of their proposal, they were for sending him home to eat his bread and cheese, and otherwise treated him as if he had been a mimick G[overno]r; they then called out to the band to play the Yankee Doodle tune, or the Wild Irishman, and not being gratified they grew noisy and clamorous; the candles were then extinguished, which, instead of checking, completed the confusion; to the no small terror of those of the weaker sex, who made part of the company.—

The old honest music master, Mr. [Stephen] D[e]bl[oi]s, was roughly handled by one of those sons of Mars; he was actually in danger of being throatled, but timously rescued by one who soon threw the officer on lower ground than he at first stood upon; the inoffensive Bartholomew Gr—n, who keeps the house for the Commissioners, presuming to hint a disapprobation of such proceedings, was, by an officer, with a drawn sword, dragged about the floor, by the hair of his head, and his honest Abigail, who in a fright, made her appearance without an head dress, was very lucky in escaping her poor husband’s fate.

Thus, as of January 1769 the Boston Whigs considered Green “inoffensive,” despite his work for the hated Customs Commissioners. Or at least they were ready to portray him that way if it made rowdy army officers look bad.

[The picture above is said to show Concert-Hall as it appeared in the mid-1800s; it might have been expanded since 1769.]