“The affair of breaking Mr. Hulton’s Windows at Brookline”

Yesterday we left Henry Hulton under attack in his home in Brookline.

Hulton, one of the five Commissioners of Customs for North America appointed in London, had been woken on the night of 19 June 1770 by a man claiming to have a letter for him. He wrote later that he “slipt on my breeches and waistcoat,” grabbed his sword, and went to a window.

After a brief exchange, Hulton slammed down the window on the man’s hand. Then that man and others stationed all around the house beat in the first-floor windows with clubs.

Hulton wrote:

The family immediately rose in the greatest consternation, and Mrs. H opening the Window shutter in her room had a large stone thrown at her which happily missed her. Imagining the people would break into the house, and seek to murther me I ran to the Servants’ room at the head of the back Stairs with my sword in my hand, leaving two Servant Men at the bottom.

The commissioner’s servants included both white and black people, the latter almost certainly enslaved. And those were his ground-floor defense against the mob. Also in the household were Hulton’s wife Elizabeth; their two children, Thomas and Henry, Jr., both under the age of three; and his sister Ann.

Ann Hulton wrote the next month:

I could imagine nothing less than that the House was beating down, after many violent blows on the Walls and windows, most hideous Shouting, dreadful imprecations, and threats ensued. Struck with terror and astonishment, what to do I knew not, but got on some Clothes, and went to Mrs. H.’s room, where I found the Family collected, a Stone thrown in at her window narrowly missed her head. When the Ruffians were retreating with loud huzzas and one cryd he will fire—no says another, he darn’t fire, we will come again says a third—Mr. and Mrs H. left their House immediately and have not lodged a night since in it.

Her brother recalled the men outside “swearing, ‘dead or alive, we will have him.’” Eventually, though, that crowd left, and Henry and Elizabeth Hulton “retired to a Neighbour’s house till daylight, and passed the following day at Mr. John Apthorp’s at little Cambridge,” now Brighton. (That house may have survived into the early 1900s as one of the houses on the John Duncklee estate.)

Ann wrote:

The next day we were looking up all the Pockit Pistols in the house, some of which were put by, that nobody could find ’em and ignorant of any being charged, Kitty was very near shooting her Mistress, inadvertently lets it off. The bullets missed her within an inch and fixed in a Chest of Drawers.

A fellow Customs Commissioner, William Burch, learned of the attack and moved with his wife to Castle William (shown above). After hearing about that, Henry “came home the following morning, and carried the Children and part of the family from Brooklyn to the Castle,” arriving on 21 June. They squeezed into the quarters reserved for the governor with the other commissioners, lower Customs officers, and their relatives and servants.

Back in Brookline, locals discussed who had carried out the attack. Ann Hulton reported:

And for the honour of the Township we lived in, I must say, the principal People, have of their own accord taken up the affair very warmly, exerting their endeavors to find out the Authors, or perpetrators of the Villainy.

They have produced above twenty witnesses, Men in the Neighborhood who were out a Fishing that night, that prove they met upon the Road from Boston towards my Brother’s House, Parties of Men that appeared disguised, their faces blacked, with white Night caps and white Stockens on, one of ’em with Ruffles on and all, with great clubs in their hands. They did not know any of ’em, but one Fisherman spoke to ’em, to be satisfied whether they were Negroes or no, and found by their Speech they were not, and they answered him very insolently. Another person who mett them declares, that one of ’em asked him the way to Mr. H’s house, and another of ’em said he knew the way very well.

After all, you may judge how much any further discovery is likely to be made, or justice to be obtained in this Country, when I tell you that the persons who were thus active to bring the dark deed to light, were immediately stop’d and silenced, being given to understand (as I’m well informed) that if they made any further stir about the matter, they might expect to be treated in the same manner as Mr H. was. However, so much is proved as to clear Mr H. from the charge of doing himself the mischief, one would think.

On 21 June, acting governor Thomas Hutchinson issued a proclamation describing the assault on the Hultons’ house and offering a £50 reward for identifying the perpetrators. The 25 June Boston Post-Boy and 28 June Boston News-Letter printed that proclamation in full. The 25 June Boston Evening-Post reported on it. The Boston Gazette ran one sentence saying that Hulton’s windows had been “broke by Persons unknown” with no mention of the reward.

On 4 October, the News-Letter said, a sea captain returned from London with word that news of the violence on 19 June—the carting of Patrick McMaster and the mobbing of the Hulton house—“Causes great Uneasiness among our Friends at Home.” With the Boston Massacre trials coming up, the Massachusetts Whigs were under pressure to prove that their society was law-abiding. At the time, the Hultons were still living at the Castle for their own safety.

Sopha, So Good

Was the Rev. Samuel Peters correct about when upper-class families in American port towns started to prefer sofas over beds where couple could bundle? Peters dated that shift to 1756, or about when he graduated from Yale College.

I tested his suggestion by looking for references for “sofa” (or “sopha,” as Peters spelled the word) in Readex’s Archive of Americana database. This was hampered by the fact that a search for “sofa” brings up a lot of false positives. The tricky long s of the 1700s and the less than crisp and uniform images mean that the program proudly fetches words like “Sold,” “so far,” “Snow,” and so on. (In fact, it probably fetches “so on.”) So these findings might well be incomplete.

The first reference to a “sofa” as a piece of furniture that I found in colonial American newspapers was a story about the Persian ambassador to the Turkish court published in Boston’s New-England Weekly Journal for 7 July 1741. The same anecdote was retold in the 10 Sept 1741 Pennsylvania Gazette, this time with the “sopha” spelling.

Moving westward, an anecdote from London in the Boston Evening-Post of 6 Jan 1766 describes the Duke of Dorset lying on “a large sofa.” Such references indicate that printers expected their Americans readers to know what the word sofa meant. But it was still associated with faraway households.

In the 4 July 1754 Pennsylvania Gazette, James White, “Upholsterer and Undertaker, lately arrived from London,” listed “sofa’s” among “all sorts of furniture” he could make. John Brinner, “Cabinet and Chair-Maker, from London,” put “Sofa Bed, Sofa Settee, Couch, and city Chair Frames” near the end of the long line of goods he offered in the 31 May 1762 New-York Mercury. Upholsterer John Brower used the spelling “sopha” in the 20 May 1766 New-York Gazette.

Perpetuating the stereotype, the new piece of furniture caught on later in Boston. The first mention I found in the newspapers come from an Anglican family with immense wealth from Caribbean slave-labor plantations. On 10 May 1773 the Boston Evening-Post advertised the sale of the estate of John Apthorp, including:

A large Sopha and ten Chairs, covered with the best crimson Silk Damask, and four large Window Currains of the same.

A small Sopha and five Chairs of the same Damask, in the Chinese Taste.

So whether or not Peters’s story about “a sopha is more dangerous than a bed” was fully accurate, it does make sense for rural New Englanders of the 1760s to have associated sofas with wealthy, suspiciously fashionable households in the port towns.

COMING UP: More on bundling.

(The sofa shown above, courtesy of the Traditional Fine Arts Organization, is dated to Virginia in 1790-1805, or a generation after Peters published his story.)