The Mystery of Ebenezer Richardson’s Mother

A very long month ago, on the day we reenacted the Boston Massacre for its Sestercentennial, I stopped by the Edes and Gill print shop in Faneuil Hall.

Andrew Volpe was printing his recreation of Paul Revere’s engraving of the Massacre. As proprietor Gary Gregory said, this was the first time in centuries that image was being reproduced on an authentic eighteenth-century press. See an example here.

Volpe had colored some of the prints. I shared my theory about one of the fallen figures being painted with a darker face than others—just how dark varies from copy to copy—to represent Crispus Attucks.

Gary told me about something I hadn’t come across pertaining to the fatal events of early 1770, and I’m still puzzling over it.

The 19 Dec 1771 Massachusetts Spy included this item referring to Ebenezer Richardson:

“Last Tuesday se’nnight died suddenly at Stoneham, Mrs. Abigail Richardson, mother of the noted Esquire Richardson, now under conviction of murder, and whose habitation is now, as it has long been, in Suffolk County goal. She has turned out a true prophetess, having often declared, that she should never live to see this ---famous fellow hanged, though she thought his tu---s in iniquity richly deserved it.”

That paragraph was printed within quotation marks, unlike most death notices. But there was no indication of what source printer Isaiah Thomas was quoting from. My only guess on what “tu---s” signified is “tutors.”

The 23 December Boston Evening-Post ran a shorter version of the same news:

DIED.]…At Stoneham, very suddenly, Mrs. Abigail Richardson, Mother of the noted Richardson, now in Goal here, under Conviction for the Murder of young Sneider. She has turned out a true Prophetess, having, ’tis said, often declared, “that she should never live to see him hanged.”

Other New England newspapers also echoed the Massachusetts Spy’s news.

Yet there’s no listing for Abigail Richardson dying in 1771 in the published vital records of Stoneham, nor the other nearby towns the Richardson family had links to.

However, J. A. Vinton’s The Richardson Memorial, a vast but not always accurate genealogy of the Richardson family, states that Ebenezer Richardson’s mother was born Abigail Johnson, widowed in 1735, and remarried in 1747 to “Dea. Daniel Gould, of Stoneham.”

And the Stoneham vital records do list this death under the name Gould:

Abigail, w[idow]. Dea. Daniel, Jan. ––, 1771, in her 65th y[ear].

The Stoneham records also confirm the marriage of Deacon Gould to “Mrs. Abigail Richardson of Woburn” in 1747. The Woburn records show an Abigail Johnson born in 1697 and one married to Timothy Richardson in 1717, data points that fit together. But that would make the widow Abigail (Johnson Richardson) Gould who died in January 1771 seventy-three years old, not sixty-four.

The next mystery is how this death in January 1771 relates to the Massachusetts Spy item from December. That quoted paragraph said Richardson’s mother had died “Last Tuesday se’nnight,” suggesting it was written in early 1771. Did that text take many months to reach Isaiah Thomas? Does quoting from an old letter explain why the newspaper put quotation marks around the old news?

It’s also notable that the letter referred to the woman by a previous surname, not Gould. Does that indicate the writer didn’t know Abigail (Johnson Richardson) Gould personally, but was passing on second- or third-hand information about her death? And if so, was that writer really privy to the woman’s comments about her son being hanged?

When Boston Cracked Down on Drivers

On 11 Jan 1775, the selectmen of Boston sent an order to the Constables of the Town Watch to do what they could to curb “the driving of Slays thro’ the Town, with beat of Drum & other Noises at unseasonable times of the Night.”

That same meeting produced this order:

The following Advertisement was sent to Mr. [Isaiah] Thomas for a place in their Paper — vizt. —

Complaints have been made to the Selectmen that numbers of the Inhabitants have been greatly disturbed by the driving of Slays thro’ the Town, with the beat of Drums & other noises, at unseasonable Times of the Night; To prevent such Disorders for the future, Orders have been given the Constables of the Town Watch to stop such offenders and make Report of their Names, that they may be dealt with as the Law directs.

By Order of the Selectmen
William Cooper Town Clerk
Boston Jany. 11. 1775.

I don’t think that first line is an example of “their” taking a singular antecedent. Rather, Cooper was used to writing such orders for Edes and Gill, who had been the town’s preferred printers for many years. But in these months they were giving business to Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy.

So far as I can tell, the selectmen’s notice didn’t appear in the Spy. Instead, on 12 January Thomas reprinted the town’s traffic by-laws, as Edes and Gill had already done in the 9 January Boston Gazette. Here’s the text of those laws, as confirmed in 1757:

4. And it is further Ordered that henceforth no Cart Dray Trucks or Sled, drawn by either Horse or Horses, Horse & Oxen shall be suffered to pass through any of the Streets and Lanes of this Town but with a sufficient Driver, who shall during such Passage keep with his said Cart Dray Trucks or Sled, and carefully observe & attend such Methods as may best Serve to keep said Horse or Horses or Oxen under Command, and shall have the Thill-horse by the head; and whatsoever Carter or others undertaking to drive any Cart Dray Trucks or Sled, shall during such passing through the Streets and Lanes as aforesaid either ride in said Cart Dray Trucks or Sled, or otherwise neglect to observe and attend the Rules prescribed in this Order, such Carter Driver or Owner of such Cart Dray Trucks or Sled shall forfeit and pay the Sum of eight shillings for every such Offence.

5. And it is further Ordered that no Slay shall be drove in the Streets of this Town without Bells fastned to the Horses that draw the same, and whoever shall offend herein shall forfeit the Sum of ten shillings for every Offence. Great Dangers arising oftentimes from Coaches Slays Chairs and other Carriages on the Lord’s days as the People are going to or coming from the several Churches in this Town, being driven with great Rapidity, and the Public Worship being oftentimes much disturbed by such Carriages driving by the sides of the Churches with great force in time thereof.

6. It is therefore Voted and Ordered that no Coach Slay Chair Chaise or other Carriage shall at such time be driven at a greater rate than a foot pace, on Penalty of the Sum of ten shillings, to be paid by the Person driving, or if he be a Servant or Slave by his master or Mistress. . . .

9. And it is further Ordered that no Person whatsoever shall at any time hereafter Ride or drive a Gallop or other swift Pace within any of the Streets Lanes or Alleys of this Town, on Penalty of forfeiting the Sum of five shillings for every such Offence.

Was all this interest in traffic a response to the sailors’ procession with a plow on 6 January? Or perhaps the target was rowdy British army officers riding in and out of town. Either way, the “beat of Drum” shows that the selectmen saw a different type of nuisance from what their predecessors had dealt with.

How Newspapers Covered the Fight at the Clarke House

The fight at the Clarke house on School Street on the night of 17 Nov 1773 offers a good test case of colonial Boston’s highly politicized press.

The next morning, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, a Whig newspaper, put all the blame for the violence on the Clarkes:

Last evening a number of people assembled before the house of Richard Clarke, Esq; one of the Tea Commissioners, and huzzaed, upon which a musket was fired from his house among the populace, which so enraged them that they broke his windows, &c.

In contrast, Richard Draper’s Boston News-Letter, friendly to the royal government, blamed the crowd and said nothing about a gunshot:

Last Evening a Number of Persons assembled in School-Street, they broke the Windows and did other considerable Damage by throwing large Stones into the House of the late Middlecot Cook, Esq; near King’s Chappel, now belonging to Dr. Saltonstall of Haverhill, and occupied by Richard Clarke, Esq;

Eight days later, the News-Letter published a much longer account, quoted here. That one did mention the pistol shot, but as a response to the violent crowd and in the context of detail about damage to the house. That report clearly came from someone inside the house.

Three newspapers came out on Monday, 22 November. I already quoted the emotional account from the Clarke family that appeared in Mills and Hicks’s Boston Post-Boy.

The Fleet brothers’ Boston Evening-Post, which tried to stick to the political center in the Whig town, stated:

Last Wednesday Evening a number of People assembled before the House of Richard Clarke, Esq; in School-Street, and being irritated by a Musket or Pistol being fired at them out of the House, they broke the Windows, and did other Damage.

And finally there was the Boston Gazette. Its printers, Benjamin Edes and John Gill, worked closely with the town’s government and the radical Whigs. The 22 November Boston Gazette report on the fight at the Clarkes was:

Nothing.

Edes and Gill devoted almost all their space for local news to publishing about the town meetings against the tea that the consignees declined to attend. They wanted to portray the town as united, orderly, and not given to violence.

Only after the Boston News-Letter published its report from inside the Clarke house did the Boston Gazette mention that fight. In the 29 November issue the Whig paper ran one short paragraph at the bottom of a page:

We have not Room this Week to publish the Answer to an Account inserted in Draper’s last Paper respecting the Transactions at Mr. Clarke’s the 17th Instant [i.e., this month]; but we can assure our Readers from a Gentleman of Veracity who was a Spectator, That that Account was false in almost every Sentence, and that Mr. Draper himself knew it to be so.

The next issue of the Gazette contained no such “Answer.” Like other cries of “fake news” presented without any actual evidence of misreporting, this claim couldn’t convince anyone whose mind wasn’t already made up.

The Devil and George Gailer

Here’s a final note on the riotous events of 28 Oct 1769—the merchants’ confrontation with printer John Mein and the tarring and feathering of sailor George Gailer.

In 2011 Dr. Caitlin G. D. Hopkins shared a passage from a letter by Elizabeth Cumings, a shopkeeper who witnessed both events from inside nearby buildings. Cumings, from a Concord family, hadn’t had much formal education, so her spelling offers a fun challenge.

Here’s what Cumings had to say about the attack on Gailer:

it was Dark our house shut up & we alon trimbling lick Courds [“trembling like curds,” I think], when a larg Mob of ful a thousand Man & boys aranged themselves befor our Dorr & on a Kart a Man was Exibited as we thought in a Gore of Blod; & poor meen [John Mein] we was shure was the sufrer but we was happyly mistaken it was an informer they had caught the moment Meen found Shalter, & instintly posted him on a kart tard him all over the town then fathered him all under our windo thin carid him threu the town obliging him to carry the lantren in his hand & calling to all the inhabitince to put Candles in their Windoes

Elizabeth Cumings and her older sister Ame were becoming unpopular for defying the non-importation movement. Hopkins has also shared her analysis of the Cumings sisters’ situation in “Enemies to Their Country”:

After Mein’s escape, the crowd had caught a suspected customs informer, George Gailer, who was beaten, tossed into a cart, and jostled through the streets. At strategic points along the route, men poured buckets of tar over Gailer’s bare skin, scalding his flesh and filling his wounds with hot, gummy resin. When the torturers “aranged themselves befor [the Cumings’] Dorr,” they applied this treatment once more, this time finishing it off with feathers. As they moved away, down Cornhill, someone thrust a lantern into Gailer’s hand, obliging him to stay conscious, lest he drop the flame and set himself afire.

In his legal filing, Gailer didn’t mention the lantern or any fear of being set on fire. Instead, he emphasized how the crowd beat him. And I’m not convinced that the purpose of the lantern was to threaten Gailer with being burned.

Indeed, the crowd could simply have held a flame to the feathers. The Customs officer Owen Richards later testified that in 1770 a mob “put him into a Cart, Tarr’d and Feathered him, then set the Feathers on Fire on his Back.”

Richards’s account was probably the source for the “Recipe” for tar and feathers in Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion including the lines: “Then hold a lighted Candle to the Feathers, & try to set it all on Fire; if it will burn so much the better. But as the Experiment is often made in cold Weather; it will not then succeed.”

My immediate thought of seeing Cumings’s description of Gailer being made to hold a lantern was the Pope Night wagons. In 1767 Pierre Eugène du Simitière sketched three wagons in Boston. In the back of all three was an oversized effigy of the devil, and all three devils held lanterns out in one hand. Du Simitière’s image of the North End gang’s devil appears above, dangling his lantern off the back of the wagon.

Judge Oliver, Isaiah Thomas, and other witnesses also wrote of those devil figures being covered with tar and feathers. In other words, the 29 October mob turned George Gailer into a living preview of one of the effigies that would roll around town on 6 November, a little over a week away.

[Incidentally, this month I got to see Caitlin Hopkins speak about the extended Vassall family and their slaveholding at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters in Cambridge. She has also turned in a report to the Harvard University administration about the college’s links to slavery, which seems like it should be issued as part of the newly announced initiative.]

“A young Lad (belonging to the Office) fir’d a Gun”

The report of someone inside John Mein and John Fleeming’s print shop firing a gun at Boston’s first tar-and-feathers procession on 28 Oct 1769 raises a number of questions.

First is the matter of how many guns were involved. Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette reported “a Gun was fired from thence and two others snap’d at them [i.e., someone fired blank shots] just as they got by.” However, the pro-governor Boston News-Letter stated simply that “a Gun was fired from one of the Windows.” So was there one shot or three?

A Crown informant named George Mason reported this version of events:

As soon as the Mob had got as far as Mr. Meins Printing Office and dwelling House (which is near Liberty Tree) they made a Halt, and as I’m very credibly informed endeavour’d to force the Door (I’m certain of this they broke the Windows) upon which a young Lad (belonging to the Office) fir’d a Gun loaded with nothing but Powder with a view to intimidate them from any further violence, this had not the desired effect, for immediately after they recover’d from their fright, they burst the Door open in earnest, and likewise forc’d the Locks and Doors of the inner appartments in search of Mein. Some mischief was done to his Books &c and two Guns were taken away by Persons in the Neighborhood who are well known to Mr. Meins Servants

The Boston Gazette stated: “they bro’t off three Guns, two of them well charg’d, as Evidence.” So it looks like both sides agree that at least one shot was fired, the crowd confiscated at least two guns, and no one was injured.

The next question is who fired that shot. Mason identified the shooter as “a young Lad (belonging to the Office)”—i.e., a printer’s apprentice or devil. The newspapers said the crowd found no one inside the house, so Mason apparently had inside information.

Isaiah Thomas wrote later that Nathaniel Mills was an apprentice to John Fleeming. He was a week shy of twenty years old during this riot, however, and therefore probably not still considered a “young Lad.”

Another possibility, though I’ve found no direct evidence, was John Howe (1754-1835). He had just turned fifteen in October 1769, still too young for militia service. I can’t show that he worked for Fleeming, but he did become a Sandemanian, and Fleeming was the only Boston printer of that faith. If I were writing a historical novel, I’d put young Howe into that building.

The Boston Gazette report is clear that the shot from the print shop caused people in the procession to break in. Mason’s account says the opposite: when members of the crowd “endeavour’d to force the Door,” a frightened boy inside fired the gun. Both sides had every reason to present themselves as the party under threat, indeed many incentives to think of themselves as the party under threat, so I don’t see any way to work that out.

It’s notable that the Boston Gazette made no mention at all of the merchants’ confrontation with John Mein earlier in the day. That makes that paper’s claim that someone fired a gun “for what Reason we know not, as no injury seemed designed them,” more than a little disingenuous. When the whole town was buzzing that your boss, already unpopular, had fired a pistol recklessly in public and was being hunted by the authorities, you could reasonably worry about being injured.

The Boston Post-Boy also declined to report in detail on the confrontation with Mein in its 30 October issue, saying, “as we are informed a Warrant has been issued upon the Occasion, we do not think it proper at present to give a particular relation of the Circumstances of that Affair.” That looks like a cop-out, but at least those printers gave a legal reason.

One last observation about the gunshot from the printing office: this was the third instance of gunfire in Boston in one week of October 1769. There would be more, most memorably in late February and early March of 1770. In all those cases, the shots were fired by employees or supporters of the Crown. Not until late 1774, as the Massachusetts Government Act provoked violence against mandamus Councilors, did any Whig or Patriot fire at a supporter of the royal government. (It’s not clear what James Otis, Jr., was shooting at when he fired out his windows in April 1770.)

That pattern reflects how the Crown supporters were heavily outnumbered. The soldiers marching home from the Neck on 24 October were under assault from a crowd, albeit one trying to enforce a writ. Four days later, John Mein was surrounded by a crowd. The young lad inside Mein’s office apparently felt threatened by a crowd. Months later, Ebenezer Richardson saw his house being attacked, and Pvt. Edward Montgomery had just been knocked down by something thrown from a mob when he shouted to his fellow soldiers to shoot on 5 Mar 1770.

Firing a single-shot musket without a bayonet was a desperate move. It raised the level of violence and the anger of the other side while leaving the shooter essentially defenseless for the next minute at least. Those gunshots show how desperate some Bostonians were feeling.

COMING UP: George Gailer’s experience.

The “Hutchinson Letters” Published at Last

I’ve been tracing the maneuvers in 1773 around the “Hutchinson letters.” Benjamin Franklin sent those documents to the speaker of the Massachusetts house under conditions of secrecy. The Massachusetts Whigs nibbled away at the edges of that promise until in June they just decided to publish.

Edes and Gill issued the letters about Massachusetts in pamphlet form. (Their first edition omitted the letters from others about Connecticut and Rhode Island.) Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy reprinted them all over the following weeks. Here is a British reprinting of the letters, plus a defense of them and an attack on Franklin for divulging them.

In order of publication, those documents were:

• Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, 18 June 1768, on the Liberty seizure and riot.
• Hutchinson, August 1768, on protests against the Customs Commissioners.
• Hutchinson, 4 Oct 1768, on unrest and the landing of the regiments.
• Robert Auchmuty to Hutchinson, 14 Sept 1768, warning about a death threat (enclosed with the above).
• Hutchinson, 10 Dec 1768, on actions of the Massachusetts Council.
• Hutchinson, 20 Jan 1769, on Parliament’s relationship to Massachusetts. (This is the letter that stated, “There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties.”)
• Hutchinson, 26 Oct 1769, on the non-importation boycott and Gov. Francis Bernard’s departure.
• Secretary Andrew Oliver (shown above), 7 May 1767, on the problems of an elected Council, his salary, and other matters.
• Oliver, 11 May 1768, on protests against the lieutenant governor and Customs Commissioners.
• Oliver, 13 Feb 1769, with ideas for changing the Council to be independent of the lower house.
• Oliver, 12 Aug 1769 from New York on colonial business, non-importation, and his appointment.
• Customs Commissioner Charles Paxton, 20 June 1768 from H.M.S. Romney, on the Liberty riot. (Very short.)
• Nathaniel Rogers (Hutchinson’s nephew), 12 Dec 1768, seeking Oliver’s position if Hutchinson moved up to become governor and Oliver moved up to become lieutenant governor.

As Hutchinson pointed out after the publication, his letters never proposed new laws or changes to the Massachusetts charter. (Oliver mused on such possibilities, and the letters from Rhode Island and Connecticut were open about change.) Hutchinson’s phrase “an abridgment of what are called English liberties” came after a lament about the distance between North America and London; in his mind, it was a statement of regrettable fact, not a prescription.

Neither Hutchinson nor Oliver suggested sending troops into Boston to keep order. As Hutchinson noted, his report on the Liberty riot couldn’t have reached London until the ministry already had those plans under weigh.

Finally, Hutchinson pointed out that in the year before these letters leaked, he had engaged in a public debate with the Massachusetts house about the relationship between the elected colonial government and the royal authorities, making the same points he had made in his letters. So how could he have engaged in a secret conspiracy?

Nonetheless, the letters destroyed Hutchinson’s credibility and political career in Massachusetts.

TOMORROW: What was wrong with the letters.

“The people of the town had grown very uneasy“

The 3 June 1773 issue of the Massachusetts Spy broke the news that the Massachusetts General Court was considering “some extraordinary discoveries” and how “some men in power would appear infamous to the highest degree.”

In the same issue, printer Isaiah Thomas ran this item:

A report is propagated in town, which we are well informed had its birth in his Majesty’s Castle-William, that a formidable mob will make an appearance to-morrow evening. However the enemies to our rights and privileges may wish this to be the case, yet let them be told, that a people who are blessed with such a Legislature as the present, have no need to take the punishment of traitors into their own hands.

The allusion to Castle William pointed to the army regiment stationed on that fortified island, or the Customs officials who occasionally took refuge there. If there had indeed been a rumor, the newspaper was blaming the royal government instead of the Whigs. And if there hadn’t been, it was starting the rumor and blaming the royal government anyway.

At the same time, however, the Spy was trying to keep public anger from turning violent, assuring readers to keep their faith in the legislature.

Behind closed doors that legislature was forming a response to the bundle of letters that speaker Thomas Cushing had received from Benjamin Franklin in London. One step was publication—on 10 June the house contracted with Edes and Gill to print over 300 copies of the letters. Another was a formal resolution, adopted on 16 June and also sent to the printers.

According to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, the most prominent writer of those letters, the General Court was actually dragging its feet in order to keep the public on edge and riled up. In his persona of disinterested historian Hutchinson would later write that already

…the people of the town had grown very uneasy at being so long alarmed with a declaration of measures of so dangerous, as well as criminal tendency and design, without an opportunity of forming any judgment upon them.

Hutchinson’s history of Massachusetts complained that the legislature “adjourned for three days…and kept the publick in suspense from Thursday to Tuesday, every day producing a new report of passages in the letters, more and more criminal.” In fact, the legislature met six days out of every week in June with the single exception of Monday, 7 June.

Nevertheless, Hutchinson was correct in discerning that “the principal design of this whole proceeding was to make the governor obnoxious to the people of the province.” And it was working.

TOMORROW: How Mr. Hancock made his move.

“The Tendency and Design of the Letters”

On 2 June 1773, the lower house of the Massachusetts General Court listened to a reading of the bundle of letters that Benjamin Franklin had sent from London.

The record doesn’t show whether Samuel Adams did the reading as the assembly’s clerk, but he certainly orchestrated the moment.

Members noted that the authors of those letters included Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, Customs Commission Charles Paxton, and Admiralty court judge Robert Auchmuty. All royal appointees who had advocated accepting Parliament’s new taxes and other laws.

The representatives decided to make themselves into “a Committee of the whole House” to discuss what to do next, then broke for midday dinner.

At three o’clock the members returned to their chamber. Speaker Thomas Cushing stepped down from the chair, and member John Hancock took his place as chair of the committee of the whole. At the end of the discussion, Hancock put forward this report:


That it was the Opinion of the Committee, that the Tendency and Design of the Letters read in the Forenoon and committed to their Consideration, was to overthrow the Constitution of this Government, and to introduce arbitrary Power into the Province.

The men in the chamber approved that accusatory statement by a vote of 101 to 5. The next morning, they decided, they would choose a committee of nine to make a formal response to the letters.

All that happened on a Wednesday. Two print shops in Boston were preparing newspapers to be published on Thursday morning.

Richard Draper’s Boston News-Letter had detailed reports on the opening days of the legislative session, including the house’s vote to form a committee of correspondence and the Council’s reply to the governor’s opening address. (Ordinarily the two houses would reply together, but this year the house had declined.) The News-Letter had no mention of the letters.

Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, on the other hand, laid out the Whig line:

For several days past some extraordinary discoveries have been talked of, which were expected to amaze the whole province. Hints have been thrown out, that the characters of some men in power would appear infamous to the highest degree; all seemed to be a general surmise and expectation, until yesterday about eleven o’clock before noon, when the galleries in the Commons House of Assembly, were ordered to be cleared of all present.

This confirmed the general opinion, and we are well informed, that very important matters will soon transpire, which will bring many dark things to light—gain many proselytes to the cause of freedom—make tyrannical rulers tremble, and give occasion for the whole people to bless the providence of God, who causeth the wicked man to fall into the pit he hath digged for another.

Way to raise expectations, Mr. Thomas.

COMING UP: More maneuvers around secret letters.

“Now they all in Heaps of Ashes lay”

The woodcut image above appeared on another religious response to the fire that started at the Brazen Head: a broadside ballad titled A Poem on the Rebuke of GOD’s Hand In the Awful Desolation Made by Fire in the Town of Boston, on the 20th Day of March, 1760.

Like the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew’s sermon, quoted yesterday, the ballad started with the Biblical verse of Amos 3:6: “Shall there be Evil in a City, and the LORD hath not done it?”

Then came 87 lines of verse. Here’s a sample:

Then can we clear ourselves, a’n’t we to blame
Who sin without Remorse, and cast of Shame
And pay no Rev’rence to his holy Name?—
This is the Cause He sent this Judgment down,
This awful Desolation! on the Town.
The North-west-wind, and Flame he did employ,
Our stately Habitations to destroy.
What spacious Structures stood but th’ other Day,
And now they all in Heaps of Ashes lay,
I know not how to write, or to express
The awful Time, or paint the sad Distress
Of those our Friends who did to Bed retire
And wak’d surrounded by a Flame of Fire!--

This broadside moved on to a long and equally fiery description of the Day of Judgement. Mayhew, who wasn’t an entirely enthusiastic Calvinist, didn’t get to that topic until nearly the end of his sermon.

The broadside was issued by the print shop of Zechariah Fowle and Samuel Draper on Marlborough Street. Two years later Fowle and Draper used the same woodcut to illustrated another broadside about fire: The Dying Confession and Declaration of Fortune, a Negro Man, Who was Executed in Newport, (Rhode-Island) on Friday the 14th of May, 1762, for Setting Fire to the Stores on the Long Wharf.

The block of wood carved to print this image actually survives, and in 2005 Early American History Auctions put it on the market—and on the internet. The firm titled it “The Angel of Death and the Great Boston Fire.” Since no one actually died in the 1760 fire, I think the figure in the sky is more likely one of the “Obsequious Angels” that the poem describes accompanying the Almighty on the Day of Judgment.

There are several mysteries associated with the Rebuke of GOD’s Hand broadside. First, the poem is signed with initials that have been read as “A.F.” and “A.J.”—more likely the latter. Mid-twentieth-century bibliographers guessed that was Andrew Johonnot. There were two genteel men of that name in Boston at the time, father (1705-1760) and son (1735-1804). However, I see no indication that either was in the habit of writing poetry.

Another question is who created the woodcut. Young Isaiah Thomas was apprenticed to Fowle at the time, and he later described learning how to cut such blocks—not well, but as well as anyone else in town. However, it’s always possible that this cut wasn’t made just after the 1760 fire but had been part of the printers’ armament for years.

Finally, in 1900 the city of Boston reproduced a somewhat ragged copy of this broadside in a printed collection of town papers about the fire. William S. Appleton displayed that sheet at a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society. But that was apparently the only surviving copy, and nobody knows where it is now.

COMING UP: Relief efforts.

“A Comedy of Three Acts, Never Before Printed”

When I read the broadside seeking money to print William Clarke’s play The Miser: or, The Soldier’s Humour in 1768, I thought the (very few) published interpretations of this artifact were all wrong.

This wasn’t a sincere solicitation for a new play, I theorized. It didn’t really come from Pvt. William Clarke of the 29th Regiment. Elisha Brown didn’t print it, as many bibliographers had guessed. Instead, it was a satire using the format of a play proposal to comment on the recent Manufactory siege. In early 1770 the Boston Chronicle played the same game, running an advertisement for a tragedy called The Witches to criticize the non-importation protests roiling the town.

In the case of The Miser, I theorized, the broadside preserved some jokes that the people of Boston recognized but which are lost to us today. “The SOLDIER’S HUMOUR, A Comedy of Three Acts, As it is acted by his Majesty’s Servants,” had to refer to the actions of the king’s soldiers in town. Pvt. Clarke, named on the sheet, must have made himself notorious in some way. And the last paragraph’s reference to “ELISHA BROWN, at the Manufactory-House,” drove home the joke. After all, it was silly to think that a private soldier would be publishing a three-act comedy in Boston, selling copies through a cloth weaver whose family had just been fighting off the army.

But on 27 Feb 1769, a notice appeared in both Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette and Green and Russell’s Boston Post-Boy (this version of the text from the latter):

This Day Published,
(Price Eight Pence, covered in blue Paper,)
And sold by Ezekiel Russell, at the New Printing-
Office, a few Doors Northward of Concert-Hall,
Hanover-Street: The
MISER:
Or, The
Soldier’s Humour.
A
COMEDY
Of Three Acts,
Never Before Printed:
By WILLIAM CLARKE, of the 29th Regiment.
Non possum placeto Omnibus.

Ezekiel Russell and his wife Sarah were printers who had no newspaper in pre-Revolutionary Boston but kept busy printing two other things: crowd-pleasing ballads about recent events and whatever authors or sponsors were willing to pay for. Isaiah Thomas, who worked briefly for Ezekiel Russell as a runaway apprentice in 1766, had little praise for the shop’s publications in his history of printing.

But the Russels actually issued a lot of interesting material—they were bold or desperate enough to take chances. Ezekiel Russell was the printer, though not the publisher, of the Censor magazine supporting the royal administration in the early 1770s. The Russells issued Phillis Wheatley’s first proposal for a collection of poems and James Swan’s argument to abolish slavery. They partnered with Joseph Greenleaf when he decided to go into printing. They published the disabled young almanac-maker Daniel George and the female poets Hannah Wheaton and Jenny Fenno.

And the Russells evidently published Pvt. William Clarke’s comedy, The Miser, exactly as proposed in December 1768. Clarke must have raised enough money through Elisha Brown and other people passing out his broadside proposal (no doubt printed at the Russell shop, not in the Manufactory). Maybe the customers were British military gentlemen—that seems more likely than Bostonians investing in an unproduced play by a soldier.

It’s still a mystery how Elisha Brown came to be soliciting advance orders for Clarke. I suspect an important factor is that, just as Clarke was an unusual redcoat with literary ambitions, Brown wasn’t a typical Boston craftsman. I believe the Browns were English by birth, bringing their weaving skills to Massachusetts. Elisha Brown might therefore have been more open to working with a soldier and peddling a play than the sons of Puritans.

Unfortunately, no copies of The Miser are known to have survived. That comedy wasn’t the end of Pvt. William Clarke’s literary ambitions, however, or of his adventures in Boston. It looks like he’ll play a notable role in Serena Zabin’s upcoming book Occupying Boston: An Intimate History of the Boston Massacre.

“Pre-Revolutionary Newspaper Wars” in Jamaica Plain, 4 Dec.

On Tuesday, 4 December, I’ll speak at the Loring-Greenough House in Jamaica Plain on the topic of “Boston’s Pre-Revolutionary Newspaper Wars (and What They May Tell Us About Today’s News Media).”

This is part of the site’s “Tuesday in the Parlor” lecture series. Here’s the description we came up with:

In the period leading up to the Revolution, colonial journalists produced a lively array of print publications aimed at keeping the populace informed about—or inflamed by—the political news of the day.

On the left were The Boston Gazette and The Massachusetts Spy while The Boston News-Letter, The Boston Chronicle, and Boston Weekly Post-Boy espoused viewpoints from the right. The Boston Evening-Post tried to maintain a centrist voice. The newspaper business could be a nasty and dangerous one, prompting rivalries between printers and occasional violence.

Join us for J. L. Bell’s enlightening talk about the how America’s early news medium operated in the volatile pre-Revolutionary environment and the significance of this history for today’s information media.

We’re scheduled to start promptly at 7:00 P.M. After the talk, there will be a book signing and light refreshments.

Tickets for this event are $5 for members of the Loring-Greenhough House and $10 for the public, plus a small processing fee to Eventbrite. Folks who join now will of course enjoy discounted tickets for events all the coming year.

“They well know that a guinea never glistened in my eyes”

Because there was barely any copyright protection in early America, once a piece of writing was published, basically any other printer could publish it just by going to the trouble of setting it in type again.

Joseph Delaplaine’s short biography of Samuel Adams reappeared in whole or in part in books from Thomas Rogers’s A New American Biographical Dictionary (1824) to The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans (1839) and John Sanderson’s Biography of the Signers to the Declaration of Independence (1847). Some compilers even credited Delaplaine.

An abridged version, including the bribe story, appeared in The Family Magazine, or Monthly Abstract of General Knowledge in 1837, a version issued by Eli Taylor of Cincinnati.

That might have prompted the editor of the Cincinnati Evening Post, Ebenezer Smith Thomas (1775-1845), to publish his own reminiscence of Adams. Thomas was a nephew of Isaiah Thomas and apprenticed with him in the early republic. From Massachusetts he moved on to South Carolina, Maryland, and finally Ohio, editing and publishing newspapers.

In his last of many years as head of the Cincinnati Evening Post, E. S. Thomas published a series of essays about famous events and men he had encountered. These articles were collected and republished as Reminiscences of the Last Sixty-Five Years in 1840.

Thomas started with a profile of John Hancock, and sometime early in October or November 1837 turned his attention to Samuel Adams. I can’t access the Cincinnati Evening Post for that year, but the profile was reprinted in the Newark Daily Advertiser on 16 November and then in many other newspapers around the U.S. of A.

Thomas addressed the question of royal authorities trying to bribe Adams this way:

It is recorded of Mr. Adams, that a large sum was offered him by agents of the British government, to take sides with it against his native land, but it was indignantly spurned, and on a subsequent occasion, when a similar circumstance was alluded to, he exclaimed, “they well know that a guinea never glistened in my eyes.” It was well for our country, and for mankind, that there were such men, in whose eyes guineas did not glisten; they appear to have been raised up for the occasion, and having accomplished the great work given them to do, have disappeared from the face of the earth, and there have arisen in their stead, a race of men so unlike them, that it seems scarcely possible they can be the descendants of such sires. 

This passage merely alludes to the actual bribery, not offering concrete details about who made the offer or when. But it’s evidence that in later years Adams and people around him discussed how he had refused such an offer.


So did Gen. Thomas Gage really send John Fenton to Adams with a warning not to continue opposing the Crown and a promise of reward if he stopped, as Delaplaine had written? I suspect that Adams believed Gage had done so, even if Fenton was acting on his own or just feeling him out. And I have absolutely no doubt that Adams spurned any such offer. Which was, after all, the point of the story. 

(The photo above shows E. S. Thomas’s bookplate in one of his own copies of his Remininscences, later owned by the sculptor Daniel Chester French, on sale through North Star Rare Books of Great Barrington.)

Conceptions of Medicine and History at the A.A.S.

Here are couple of interesting programs coming up at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester in the next couple of weeks.

Tuesday, 24 April, 7:00 P.M.
“The Medical Imagination in the Early United States”
Sari Altschuler

The checklists and clinical algorithms of modern medicine leave little space for imagination, and yet we depend on creativity for the advancement of medicine—to diagnose unusual conditions, to innovate treatment, and to make groundbreaking discoveries. We know a great deal about the empirical aspects of medicine, but we know far less about what the medical imagination is, what it does, how it works, or how we might train it. It was not always so.

Sari Altschuler will return to A.A.S. to discuss her new book, The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American doctors understood the imagination to be directly connected to health, intimately involved in healing, and central to medical discovery. Literature in particular provided physicians and other health writers important forms for crafting, testing, and implementing theories of health. Reading and writing poetry trained judgment, cultivated inventiveness, sharpened observation, and supplied evidence for medical research, while novels and short stories offered new perspectives and sites for experimenting with original medical theories.

Sari Altschuler is assistant professor of English and associate director of the Humanities Center at Northeastern University. Her research focuses primarily on American literature and culture before 1865, literature and medicine, disability studies, and the health humanities, broadly understood. Her talk is cosponsored by the Franklin M. Loew Lecture Series at Becker College.

Tuesday, 1 May, 7:00 P.M.
“Antiquarian America: Isaiah Thomas and the Ends of History”
Peter S. Onuf

Isaiah Thomas intended for the A.A.S. to play a critical role in promoting the future progress of the new American nation’s epochal experiment in republican government. Thomas and his colleagues were convinced that the success of that experiment depended on comprehensively collecting any evidence—from Indian antiquities and other “curiosities,” portraits, maps, manuscripts, and anything in print—that would illuminate the life of present as well as past for their future successors. The American Antiquarian impulse was cosmopolitan and progressive, eschewing the didacticism and patriotic exceptionalism of nationalist historiography and so anticipating the contemporary turn toward scientific, “objective” accounts of social and cultural development.

Peter S. Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia, and also senior fellow at Monticello’s Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. He is the author, co-author, and editor of numerous books, including Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs,” and Jeffersonian Legacies. This year Onuf is the A.A.S.-Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence.

These programs take place in Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury Street in Worcester. There is on-street parking available on Regent Street and at the lot at 90 Park Avenue. They are open to the public free of charge. Books will be available for sale and signing after the program.

Enoch Brooks’s Curious Bible

On 1 May 1785, Enoch and Hannah Brooks of Princeton, Massachusetts, had a son. The couple already had children Elisha (born in 1772), John (1774), Ezra (1776), Samuel (1779), and Hannah (1781).

Enoch Brooks had been the town’s assessor for four years before becoming its treasurer from 1780 until 1816, with only a couple of years off. He had also been a minuteman in 1775 and at some point a militia officer.

The Brookses named their new baby Enoch, after his father. (Another son, Stephen, would come in 1787.)

As little Enoch approached his fourth birthday, someone bought him a very special present: a copy of A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, or, Select Passages in the Old and New Testaments, Represented with Emblematical Figures, for the Amusement of Youth.

On the first page someone wrote in large, clear letters:

Enoch Brooks’
Book
Princeton
March, 13th. 1789.

As shown on the interior page above, this book retold stories from the Bible in rebus form. Isaiah Thomas had issued it from his Worcester press in 1788, copying a volume published in London five years before. (The British edition had in turn been modeled on German picture Bibles, which went back to the late 1600s.)

To create his edition, Thomas had to collect or commission 500 small woodcuts—more than had appeared in any other American book up to that time. But he could reuse those illustrations in other publications. Thomas found children’s books blending entertainment and instruction to be a lucrative field in the new American republic. Ultimately he published more than a hundred titles, most copied like this one from British originals.

Only four copies of Thomas’s Curious Hieroglyphick Bible are known to have survived the little hands of their early owners. Enoch Brooks’s copy is now at the Library of Congress, digitized for all.

As for young Enoch Brooks himself, he grew up in Princeton, married Polly Gregory in 1816, and had children of his own. Like his father, he held town office. He died in 1859. His wife lived until the age of ninety-nine, dying in 1890. Their gravestones stand side by side in Princeton’s Meetinghouse Cemetery.

Newburyport Newspapers

Through Alexander Cain of Untapped History, I learned about this database of digitized documents from Newburyport, Massachusetts.

At the top are the links to (as of today) 646 pages from the 1770s and 1,131 from the 1780s. Those are mostly pages from Newburyport’s only newspaper at the time, the Essex Journal. Or, to give it the full original name, the Essex Journal and Merrimack Packet: Or, the Massachusetts and New-Hampshire General Advertiser.

The format of this newspaper database is different from any I’ve seen before. Clicking on each page opens up first a terrible O.C.R. transcription, then a full page image. The images are quite readable, so thumbing through is a fine way to immerse oneself in the life of a small New England port during the Revolutionary period.

The story of the Essex Journal starts with Isaiah Thomas and his ambition to franchise his Massachusetts Spy operation the way that Benjamin Franklin had sponsored and profited from other newspapers two generations before. Newspaper printers could benefit by building networks to share news, mail, advertising, and bookselling. Often those networks were built along family lines. Thomas was at a disadvantage without many relations, but he did have apprentices.

According to Thomas himself, he launched the Essex Journal in 1773 “At the request of several gentlemen, particularly the late rev. Jonathan Parsons [1705-1776].” Which is to say, Thomas supplied the printing equipment but stayed in Boston looking after his own newspaper and Royal American Magazine.

The actual printer in Newburyport was a young man named Henry-Walter Tinges. Facts about him are hard to come by. According to Thomas, he was “born in Boston” but “his parents were Hollanders,” or Dutch. Suffolk County probate records show that a Henry Tinges was assigned a guardian in 1767. He apprenticed first with John Fleeming and then, perhaps after the Boston Chronicle folded, with Thomas. Presumably he came of age in 1773 and was ready to manage his own shop.

Thomas and Tinges started collecting subscriptions for the Essex Journal in December 1773, distributing a sample issue for free. A lot of the early advertisers were Boston merchants—perhaps Thomas had given them a deal to advertise in both the Massachusetts Spy and the Essex Journal. The initial plan was to publish on Saturdays, but in response to public feedback the newspaper appeared on Wednesdays.

In August 1774, with Boston under army occupation for the second time, Thomas “sold the printing materials to Ezra Lunt, the proprietor of a stage” between Newburyport and Boston who thus had an interest in promoting local business. Lunt was a Newburyport native, thirty-one years old. Tinges remained the junior partner.

That arrangement lasted until May 1775, when Lunt became a captain in Col. Moses Little’s regiment of the Massachusetts army. According to local lore, “a stirring discourse from Rev. Jonathan Parsons” had prompted Lunt and his men to volunteer. The company saw action at the end of the Battle of Bunker Hill, acting as a rear guard during the provincial retreat off the Charlestown peninsula. After the war, Lunt joined the Yankee exodus to the Ohio Territory and died in the town of Marietta.

Meanwhile, back in Newburyport, Tinges had a new senior partner: John Mycall (1750-1833). According to Thomas, Mycall was “born at Worcester, in England; and was a schoolmaster at Almsbury”—Amesbury, where he had married in 1772. A “man of great ingenuity,” within a year he was able to manage the press himself and publish the Essex Journal under his own name. Probably during this time he took on his nephew William Hoyt (1759-1812) as an apprentice.

Henry-Walter Tinges remained in Newburyport at least into January 1777, when his intention to marry Eunice Knight was announced. According to his old master Thomas, at some point he went “to Baltimore, and from thence to sea, but never returned.”

In February 1777, Mycall had to stop publishing the Essex Journal, apparently due to paper shortages and business uncertainty. The Newburyport database therefore has no local material from 1778 until 1784, when Mycall restarted the newspaper. It continued for another ten years, published by either Mycall or Holt, until Mycall finally retired in 1794, first to rural Harvard and then to bustling Cambridge. And that was the end of the Essex Journal.

But the Newburyport database continues uninterrupted with the town’s new newspaper, the Morning Star.

The Further Evolution of “The New Massachusetts Liberty Song”

As I discussed back here, in April 1774 the New-York Journal published a new version of “The New Massachusetts Liberty Song” that was actually less strident about Britain than the original. It may have been revised to reflect Whig talking points.

Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy picked up those New York lyrics for the “Poets Corner” in its 26 May 1774 issue, thus bringing the song back to its town of origin.

The next newspaper to run the verses in its “Poet’s Corner” was Timothy Green’s Connecticut Gazette of New London for 24 Feb 1775. That was another rewrite of the original lines, but in a different way. Instead of talking about “Americans,” for example, this version praised and addressed “America.”

The song now started:

Let’s look to Greece and Athens!
And there’s proud mistress Rome;
Tho’ late in all their Glory,
We now scarce find their Home:…

The verse that began by describing Americans as “Torn from a world of tyrants” now started, “Turn then, ye lordly Tyrants…”

And this original verse

We led fair FREEDOM hither, when lo the Desart smil’d,
A Paradise of Pleasure, was open’d in the Wild;
Your Harvest bold AMERICANS! no Power shall snatch away,
Assert yourselves, yourselves, yourselves, my brave AMERICA.

became

We led fair Freedom hither,
Unto a Desart wild;
A Paradise of Pleasure,
Soon opened and smil’d;
Your Harvest’s rich, AMERICA,
No Power shall snatch away.
Preserve, preserve, preserve your Rights Brave N. America.

Finally, the original’s final line about “their Lords, their Lords of brave AMERICA” had turned into “the Laws, the Laws, of NORTH-AMERICA.”

All told, that New London version feels like it was written down from memory by someone who had sung the song a few times. It doesn’t feel like a revision by the original author.

A couple of months later, war had broken out. On 8 May 1775, Ebenezer Watson’s Connecticut Courant of Hartford published “A Song Compos’d by a Son of Liberty” with the date “February 13, 1770”—Josiah Flagg’s original concert. Appropriately, that version had the same lyrics that Edes and Gill had published in their North-American Almanack five years before.

And then the song apparently went underground again for the war.

COMING UP: Who wrote “The New Massachusetts Liberty Song”?

Extracts of Letters from Boston?

On 29 Dec 1774, Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer ran the following items:

Extract of a letter from Boston.

“Every thing is at present quiet here, and the governor takes all possible precautions to keep things so. The people are continually tampering with the soldiers to desert; a corporal of the 38th regiment was last Monday addressed by one of their Agents, he pretended to consent to go off with him, upon which the fellow took him to a house, gave him a suit of plain cloathes and put his regimentals into the saddle-bags, he then put the corporal upon his horse and got up behind; they rode on together till they came to the Fusileers barrack, into which the corporal turned, the fellow instantly jumped off and made his escape, leaving the horse, saddle-bags and clothes, all of which have been given to the corporal as a reward for his wit and spirit.[”]

A Gentleman in Boston, writes to his friend here, of the 12th instant;—

Two ships of the line, viz. the Asia and Boyne, are arrived here, and the Somerset is now firing guns in the offing. The day before yesterday it was moved in Provincial Congress, that arms be immediately taken up against the King’s Troops; but one of the members got up and told them such a move was infamous, when at the same time the Members knew, that neither Connecticut nor any of the southern colonies meant to oppose his Majesty’s arms, on which account the Congress immediately dissolved, and a new one is to be chosen, to meet the tenth of next month.

At Plymouth they are now beating up for volunteers to attack the troops; the parties sent for a parson to pray for them, who refused to comply; but he was obliged to attend on being sent for a second time, on penalty of being shot.

James Rivington was then a strong supporter of the Crown, on his way to being put out of business by a Patriot mob and then sponsored by the royal government in occupied New York through the war.

On 1 Jan 1774, Nathaniel Mills and John Hicks reprinted the entire article in their Boston Post-Boy. In the preceding May they had taken over from Green and Russell and turned the Post-Boy into a strongly pro-government paper.

On 5 January, Isaiah Thomas printed the part about plans to attack soldiers instead of to suborn them in the Patriot Massachusetts Spy, crediting “the New-York Gazette,” but he added at the bottom:

[A d——d lie.]

And indeed there’s no evidence supporting the article’s claims about the congress. If Rivington had actually seen a letter from Boston with that story, he fell for an alarmist rumor—and it’s quite possible he just made it up.

Even so, the letter from “A Gentleman in Boston” was reprinted in several British magazines in early 1775, helping to shape public opinion there.

[ADDENDUM: Follow-up from Don Hagist.]

The Mystery of “Mucius Scævola”

Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy started to publish the essays of “Mucius Scævola” on 30 May 1771, four months after Joseph Greenleaf advertised his property in Abington for sale.

That summer there was a dispute over which Boston printer got the contract to publish the graduating Harvard class’s theses—Richard Draper of the established and government-friendly Boston News-Letter or Thomas of the Spy. Thomas won, which sparked a little newspaper war. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts published a whole article about that dispute, which it’s made available here.

On 8 Aug 1771 the News-Letter offered an essay which described the men behind “the dirty Spy” this way:

What a wretched Triumvirate! a poor shiftless erratic Knight from Abington, a dunghill-bred Journeyman Typographer, and a stupid phrensical Mountebank

Thomas was the “Typographer.” The “Mountebank” was almost certainly Dr. Thomas Young, who many people agreed was writing for the Spy under the name “Leonidas” and was well known for this enthusiasms in both medicine and politics. And the “Knight from Abington” could only be Joseph Greenleaf—it wasn’t that big a town.

The 15 August Spy carried a couple of replies. One insisted that “neither Joseph Greenleaf, Esq; Doctor Thomas Young, nor Mr. Isaiah Thomas” had been involved in composing a statement from the graduating Harvard students. But that’s different from denying that those men were connected to the Spy. In fact, Greenleaf and Thomas had become business partners of some sort.

Another reply in the same issue addressed three pseudonymous or anonymous News-Letter essayists this way:

If by ridiculing and sneering at my character, and maliciously defaming me; you think you have offered a sacrifice of a sweet smelling favour in the nostrils of his Excellency [Gov. Thomas Hutchinson], you may possibly be mistaken; he too well knows your views, he also knows that “Nero’s flatterers, were Nero’s assassins.”

I have one favour to ask of you, that is, that you would not lurk priv’ly to take away my reputation; act like veterans; take the field in open day-light, and to use the language of the Cantabrigian, “Lie on,” make yourselves what mirth you please at my expence, bury none of your talents at defamation, only let the world know your names; subscribe your future productions, and let mankind judge of the truth of the charges by the credibility of the accusers of

J. GREENLEAF

In his article “Tag-Team Polemics,” published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1995, Neil L. York wrote that this was one of three times that Greenleaf denied having anything to do with the “Mucius Scævola” essays.

That’s not how I read Greenleaf’s reply. He wasn’t denying anything, except that his opponents’ attacks would win them favor with the governor. He challenged his opponents to drop their anonymity. Sure, it would be hypocritical to issue that challenge while continuing to publish under a pseudonym, but Greenleaf didn’t confirm or deny he was “Mucius Scævola.”

Likewise, the other two “denials” never really denied that connection. On 22 November, as I quoted yesterday, Greenleaf disingenuously said that he couldn’t imagine why he had received a summons from the Council after “Mucius Scævola” called the governor a “USURPER.” In the 13 Jan 1772 Boston Gazette, Greenleaf went further in an addendum to a letter about the whole controversy:

P. S. A secret has leaked out, it is said, it was my duty as a magistrate, to have prevented the publication of the Piece signed Mucius Scævola! But I have no such connections with Mr. Thomas or any other Printer, as give me a right to restrain him or them in any publication, though I must confess, that if I had power to restrain the Press, I should have no inclination to hinder Mucius, or even Chronus, or Impavidus, from laying their sentiments before the public.

Greenleaf thus denied “connections with Mr. Thomas”—but only connections which would give him legal authority as a justice of the peace to restrain the press. We know he really was in business with Thomas.

In that postscript Greenleaf wrote of “Mucius” in a way that implied the writer was separate from himself. Likewise, in a 2 Jan 1772 essay in the Spy “Mucius Scævola” reproached Gov. Hutchinson for how he had treated “J. Greenleaf, Esq”:

I argued this point with you in a former paper, and you summoned Mr. Justice Greenleaf to appear before you in council to answer to it. He knew you had again gone beyond your last, and treated your summons as it deserved.

Those remarks certainly imply that Greenleaf didn’t want to be identified as “Mucius Scævola,” but they’re not direct denials.

In Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts, Richard D. Brown accepted the implication of Greenleaf’s Gazette postscript and wrote that the governor went after him because he “had made no attempt to suppress an inflammatory piece by [Dr. Joseph] Warren in Isaiah Thomas’ Spy.” I suspect that mixes up the 1771 controversy with the similar dispute over one of Warren’s essays in 1768, which I noted here. In his recent biography of Warren, Samuel Forman took Brown’s opening to ascribe all the “Mucius Scævola” essays to Warren. I’m not convinced by that reading of the evidence.

Rather, I think Greenleaf’s replies show how carefully he avoided making a direct statement about whether he was “Mucius Scævola.” He played dumb about why the Council would want to see him. He fudged his connection with Thomas. He challenged his opponents to give up their anonymity first. But he never stated that he hadn’t written the essay everyone was talking about, which he could have done at any time if he were really being unjustly accused. Anyone observing political interviews today can see him silently sidestepping the big question he didn’t want to answer.

It’s true that we have no claim from either Greenleaf or Thomas (shown above in old age) that Greenleaf wrote as “Mucius Scævola.” But neither did they or any contemporary ever name someone else as that writer. Thomas did acknowledge that Greenleaf became his partner in some ventures and wrote effective political essays. If those weren’t the “Mucius Scævola” pieces in the Spy, where are they?

The Abington Resolves that Greenleaf penned in 1770 declared that Parliament’s new laws were “a mere nullity” because they didn’t come from proper authority. “Mucius Scævola” called the governor’s decrees “null and void” for the same reason. And in his January 1772 response over his own name, Greenleaf declared the Council’s summons “WHOLLY illegal” and not worth “paying any obedience to.” That was his go-to argument.

Hutchinson and other supporters of the royal government were convinced that Greenleaf was “Mucius Scævola,” even if they couldn’t prove it. For almost two centuries, historians accepted that assessment. No one before Brown ascribed those essays to Dr. Warren. Even York, while writing that Greenleaf denied authorship, treated him as “Mucius Scævola.” And unless more evidence turns up, I’m giving him credit, too.

Joseph Greenleaf and “the Council-chamber in Boston”

On 16 Nov 1771, the day after Joseph Greenleaf declined to meet with Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and the Massachusetts Council (on the understandable grounds that his teen-aged son was dying), the Council issued a formal summons for him:

You are required to appear before the Governor and Council, at the Council-chamber in Boston, on Tuesday the tenth day of December next, at ten of the clock in the forenoon, then and there to be examined touching a certain paper called The Massachusetts Spy, published the fourteenth day of November, 1771; whereof you are not to fail at your peril.

Greenleaf’s name didn’t actually appear in that issue of the Spy. The essay that angered the governor was signed “Mucius Scævola,” and Hutchinson was convinced that was Greenleaf’s pen name.

In an article in the 13 Jan 1772 Boston Gazette, Greenleaf laid out his response:

This proceeding alarmed me, as I judged it WHOLLY illegal, for I could have no idea of the legality of erecting a court of INQUISITION in this free country, and could find no form for such a citation in the province law books: My duty to my country therefore forbad my paying any obedience to it, especially as it might hereafter be used as a precedent.

I should be very unwilling to be thought a despiser of the laws of my country, I religiously submit to them all, “not only for wrath, but for conscience sake.” [Romans 13:5] I have not such a mistaken notion of liberty, as to think it consists in a freedom from obligation either to the laws of nature or of the laws of the land: But the freedom I now contend for is, a right of resistance, or rather withholding my obedience, when unlawfully commanded.

Greenleaf had the summons printed in the 22 November Massachusetts Spy. “I know not the design of it, nor why it is sent to me rather than to any body else,” he wrote. That and other Whig newspapers began to run essays in support of him.

On 10 December, Greenleaf didn’t go to the Town House as demanded. (The empty Council Chamber appears above, courtesy of the Old State House Museum.)

The Council minutes for that date therefore stated:

His Excellency having acquainted the Board at their last meeting, that Joseph Greenleaf, Esq; a Justice of the Peace for the county of Plymouth, was generally reputed to be concerned with Isaiah Thomas, in printing and publishing a News-Paper, called the Massachusetts Spy, and the said Joseph Greenleaf having thereupon been summoned to attend the board on this day, in order to his examination touching the same, and not attending according to summons, it was thereupon unanimously advised, that the said Joseph Greenleaf be dismissed from the office of a Justice of the Peace, which advice was approved of and consented to by his Excellency, and the said Joseph Greenleaf is dismissed from the said office accordingly.

That notice was printed in the newspapers. Hutchinson had found a way to punish someone for the essay that called his a “USURPER,” even if he had to take a roundabout route to that result.

Greenleaf’s response in the Boston Gazette was a legal argument that royal commissions couldn’t be repealed that way:

…if a Justice of the Peace may be dismissed from his office, because he refuses to be examined about a common News-Paper by any Court, but one legally impowered to summon and examine him, if he may be dismissed, because he is “supposed by people in general” to be concerned with a Printer, or any other person, that the governor has conceived a dislike to, we are in a pitiable case.

Greenleaf went on to say that losing the job of magistrate “gives me no uneasiness, for by leaving the County where I had jurisdiction [Plymouth], I voluntarily relinquished it.” Yet he insisted, “I still have jurisdiction when I please to take my seat on the bench at the Court of Sessions.” So he wasn’t fired—he quit. And he could take that back any time.

TOMORROW: Was Greenleaf really “Mucius Scævola”?