“A particular Account of all the Plans of Operation”

In 1772, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson entertained thoughts of peeling John Hancock away from the Boston Whigs, thus depriving that party of major financial support.

With troops no longer stationed in town and no new taxes coming from London, the populace wasn’t feeling so many irritants. Samuel Adams had a hard time finding issues to rally people around. Hancock, his political instincts flowering, recognized that reality and stopped supporting militant actions.

I don’t think Hutchinson ever had a real chance of winning the young merchant to the side of the royal government—Hancock was too eager for popular acclaim. But the governor did throw out some favors.

One was giving Hancock the command of the Company of Cadets. Hancock loved the title “Colonel” and the chance to design new uniforms for that militia unit.

Hutchinson’s tactic seemed to bear fruit after a confrontation in May 1773. Hutchinson hosted a public dinner with the Customs Commissioners among the guests and the Cadets as his honor guard. Two of those young men, Moses Grant and James Foster Condy, left the ranks and joined the crowd yelling at the Commissioners. Hancock publicly took the position that military discipline had to overrule political positions and expelled Grant and Condy from the company.

Later that same month, at the start of the legislative term, the Massachusetts General Court elected a new Council. Hancock made the list, as he had before. This time, Gov. Hutchinson approved his name. He probably hoped the grateful merchant would become a more sedate member of the upper house.

On the day before the Council election, however, Hancock had visited Edmund Quincy’s house. Abigail Adams was there, and she reported to her husband John that Hancock “gave before a large Company of both Sexes…a particular Account of all the Plans of Operation for tomorrow, which he and many others had been concerting.” By that point the letters from London had been circulating among top Whigs and were no doubt part of those plans.

On 27 May, Secretary Thomas Flucker came to the house chamber with Gov. Hutchinson’s invitation for Hancock and select other members to move across to the Council.

Hancock declined.

A week later, on 2 June, Samuel Adams revealed the “Hutchinson letters” to the house. Hancock took the job of chairing the committee of the whole that discussed those documents. He apparently drafted the committee’s conclusion that they had been designed to “introduce arbitrary Power into the Province.”

When the Massachusetts Spy ran the first report on that ominous closed-door session, it also stated:

We are desired to inform the public, that the Hon. John Hancock, Esq; commander of the Cadet company, and ten of the members, then present, were against the late vote for expelling two of their members.

Hancock thus signaled that he was on the side of the popular protest, free from the governor’s influence.

Going through the Motions on Election Day

On 25 May 1768, 250 years ago today, Election Day finally arrived in Boston.

At 9:00 A.M. the towns’ representatives to the Massachusetts General Court gathered in the Town House and took their oaths of office. They unanimously reelected Thomas Cushing as the assembly’s speaker and Samuel Adams as the clerk.

At 11:00, Gov. Francis Bernard walked over from his official residence, the Province House, escorted by two upper-class militia units: the Horse Guards under Col. David Phips and the Cadets under Lt. Col. Joseph Scott. Bernard received Cushing and approved the assembly’s choice, and then everyone walked a block to the Old Brick Meeting-House to hear a sermon by the Rev. Daniel Shute (1722-1802) of Hingham.

Shute had chosen to speak on Ezra 10:4: “Arise: for this Matter belongeth unto thee; we also will be with thee: be of good Courage; and do it.” While hearing that exhortation to action, the gentlemen got to sit for a long time. According to merchant John Rowe, “This was a very long sermon, being one hour & forty minutes.”

Then came the midday dinner. Boston’s town meeting had barred the use of Faneuil Hall as long as the governor invited the Commissioners of Customs to dine. Many of the Cadets had said they wouldn’t participate in any such event, either. But Gov. Bernard was not about to back down on an issue of respecting the royal prerogative.

Therefore, there were two dinners on that Election Day. As the 26 May 1768 Boston News-Letter reported, Bernard and Cushing “together with the Council, and several other Gentlemen, went in Procession to the Province House, (preceded by the Militia Officers, and escorted by the Cadets,) where an elegant Dinner was provided by His Excellency…”

Meanwhile, “A public entertainment was provided at the British Coffee-House, where the militia Officers, Troop of Guards, and Company of Cadets dined, & where also many loyal Toasts were drank.” There were also traditional cannon salutes from the North and South Batteries and Castle William.

The week before, most of the Cadets were refusing to promise to participate in the Election Day pageantry. Maj. John Hancock had reportedly torn up his commission, and company members talked about replacing Lt. Col. Scott as their commander. But, most likely because of an after-hours meeting that Thomas Flucker facilitated between Hancock and Gov. Bernard, the Cadets did escort the governor after all. The separate dinners meant they didn’t have to sit down with the Customs Commissioners.

There may have been another part of the deal. On 2 June, the News-Letter reported:

His Excellency the GOVERNOR hath appointed JOHN HANCOCK, Esq; to be first Major of the Independant Company of Cadets, and WILLIAM COFFIN, jun. Esq; to be second Major of the said Company.

Hancock already held the rank of major; I don’t know if becoming “first Major” was a promotion. Nor can I tell if he participated in the Cadets’ procession on Election Day or sat that one out. But, even after his vocal protest, Bernard restored Hancock’s high rank.

Hancock may have come around to the position that the Cadets should respect the office of the governor even when they disagreed with his actions. In May 1773 there was another controversy over the presence of the Customs Commissioners at an Election Day gathering. Two Cadets, Moses Grant and James Foster Condy, clubbed their muskets and participated in the raucous protest outside. By then Hancock had become the colonel in charge of the company, and he booted Grant and Condy out.

In the end, the public dispute about the Customs Commissioners and the dinner was symbolic. But Election Day was also about allocating real political power.

TOMORROW: Electing the governor’s Council.

Samuel Adams in Mezzotint

In May, Boston 1775 reader Judy Cataldo sent me this tidbit from the Boston Gazette, dated 3 Apr 1775—two weeks before the shooting in Lexington:

In a few days to be Published, (Price Half a Dollar)
A fine Mezzotinto Print of that truly worthy Patriot S.A. the size of the Print 14 inches by 10 and half, Executed and Published by and for Charles Reek and Samuel Okey, in Newport, Rhode Island, to whom Letters sent will be duly answered; and to be sold by Edes and Gill, and James Foster Condy, in Boston.

Just two months before, Bloomsbury Auctions in New York had resold one of those mezzotints, as recorded (and pictured) on Live Auctioneers. Its description reads:

In this portrait [Samuel] Adams is standing in front of a table with a paper in his hand, engraved with the words “Instructions from ye Town of Boston”—probably referring to his famous Circular Letter. [Actually, I bet that showed the town meeting’s instructions to its representatives to the Massachusetts General Court. Adams often had a hand in writing those instructions as well as in carrying them out.]

Below the title are eight lines of verse in two columns celebrating Adams’s opposition to the Intolerable Acts [sic]:

When haughty North impress’d wth proud Disdain,
Spurn’d at the Virtue, which rejects his Chain;
Heard with a Tyrant Soon our Rights implor’d,
And when we su’d for Justice sent the Sword:
Lo! Adams rose, in Warfare nobly try’d,
His Country’s Saviour, Father, Shield & Guide,
Urg’d by her Wrongs he wag’d ye glorious Strife
Nor paus’d to waste a Coward-Thought on Life.

The painting by J. Mitchell after which the mezzotint was designed was based on J. S. Copley’s portrait of Adams now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts [and originally painted for John Hancock]. Samuel Okey had only a very short working life in the Americas: he engraved and published in Newport from 1773-1775, and had returned to London by 1778.

Quite likely Okey was simply giving the New England market what he and Reak thought it wanted rather than expressing his own politics.

On the other hand, the men who sold this print in army-occupied Boston were big Adams fans. Benjamin Edes and John Gill were the printers of the Gazette, and two of the busiest radicals in town. James Foster Condy was a bookseller and Tea Party veteran. He was, friends of the royal government noted, “Cashiered [as a] Cadet for Abusing one of the Honourable Commissioners of his Majesties Customs” while in uniform. Being forced out of that prestigious militia company only made him popular, and Boston’s town meeting appointed Condy to the large committee promoting the Continental Congress’s boycott of British imports.