On the Trail of Capt.-Lt. John Goldfinch

In Lt. William Browne’s deposition about the Boston Massacre, quoted yesterday, The senior officer in the 14th Regiment that he referred to was “captain lieutenant [John] Goldfinch.”

By courtesy, captain-lieutenants and lieutenant-colonels were addressed by the higher version of their rank, so Capt.-Lt. John Goldfinch usually shows up in records from colonial Boston as just “Captain Goldfinch.”

Goldfinch provided his own deposition what happened on 5 Mar 1770, describing how he broke up a fight earlier in the evening and then responded to the military alarm after the shooting.

The captain-lieutenant said nothing in that document about his most significant role in the Massacre, however. Between those two episodes he chose to ignore wigmaker’s apprentice Edward Garrick calling out to him to pay his barber’s bill. (In court Goldfinch said he’d just paid that bill, so recently that he still had the receipt in his pocket, but he wasn’t about to answer an apprentice shouting in the street.)

Young Garrick was the opening witness in the trial of Capt. Thomas Preston, and an anonymous observer for the Crown reported his testimony this way:

Edward Gerrish. . . . I heard a noise about 8 Clock and went down to Royal Exchange lane. Saw some Persons with Sticks coming up Quaker lane. I said Capt. Goldsmith owed my fellow Prentice. He [Pvt. Hugh White] said he was a Gentleman and would pay every body. I said there was none in the Regiment.

I used that passage in my early article about the politicization of Boston’s youth and elsewhere. But quoting it is always hindered by the fact that it calls the officer “Goldsmith” instead of Goldfinch. Then again, the document calls the boy “Gerrish” instead of Garrick.

Most likely the note-taker got the names wrong. It’s also possible young Garrick didn’t remember the captain-lieutenant as accurately as he believed.

But in looking for clues about William Browne this month, I found that people got Goldfinch’s name wrong a lot.

The 22–29 Sept 1759 Universal Chronicle in London reported the promotion to lieutenant in the 14th Regiment of Joseph Goldfinch. Likewise, he appeared on the 1767 Army List as Lt. Joseph Goldfinch.

Goldfinch’s deposition in A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance at Boston, printed in 1770, was signed Capt.-Lt. John Goldfinch. In all the other parts of the Massacre trial records but Garrick’s testimony, people agree his last name as Goldfinch.

Then the 1771 Army List listed Capt.-Lt. John Goldsmith.

On the 1772 list he was back to Capt.-Lt. John Goldfinch.

On 2 Mar 1772, the War Office reported that John Goldfinch had resigned his post as captain-lieutenant, to be replaced by Lt. John Stanton.

In the period of the long s that looked a lot like an f, it must have been easy to confuse the names of Goldfinch and Goldsmith. But the shift from Joseph to John is weird. Sadly, considering that the name John Goldfinch is a lot less common than William Brown(e), I haven’t found more about this man.

Lt. Browne “hearing the drum beat to arms”

Yesterday I finally noted that Capt. William Browne, who was in the thick of the action in early 1775 as a spy and an army officer, had also been in Boston from 1768 to 1770. He was then a lieutenant in the 14th Regiment.

In fact, we might have Capt. Browne’s description of the night of the Boston Massacre.

After that confrontation, the army and the Loyalist justice of the peace James Murray compiled testimony from soldiers and officers about their side of the conflict. Customs Commissioner John Robinson carried those depositions to London, where they were published in a book titled A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance at Boston.

One of those depositions, dated 13 March, reads:

I William Brown, junior, lieutenant in the 14th regiment of foot, do swear, that on the evening of Monday the 5th of March, 1770, being in company with lieutenant [Daniel] Mattear, ensigns [William] Napier and [Henry] Hallwood, in the quarters appropriated for part of the officers of the 14th regiment, between the hours of nine and ten o’clock, I was alarmed with an extraordinary ringing of bells, and the words “Turn out,” which continued some time, and then ceased a little; but on the bells beginning to ring again, and hearing the drum beat to arms, I prepared to go to the barracks;

at this time, captain lieutenant [John] Goldfinch coming in, the gentlemen then ready went along with him, leaving lieutenant [Alexander] Ross and myself, who presently followed. All along Queen’s-street, and King-street, we were pursued by a number of people with clubs and sticks, calling out, “Here goes two more; kill them, kill them;”

on turning into Quakers-lane, I received a blow across the neck with a stick thrown at me, another being aimed, passed with great violence, and numbers rushing in, I was separated from lieutenant Ross, and followed with the cries, “Down with him, kill him, kill him,” and other opprobrious language, to the middle of Green’s-lane, where they left me; from thence I got safe to the barracks.

WILLIAM BROWN, junior,
Lieutenant of the 14th regiment.

I say this might be the same officer as the man who was later Capt. Browne of the 52nd because the Army Lists for 1767 and 1771 show there were two lieutenants named William Browne in the 14th during its time in Boston.

When I first saw “William Brown, junior,” I thought that might indicate this man’s father was also named William Brown, offering another (thin) clue to his identity. But it’s also possible that the deponent used “junior” to distinguish himself from the older Lt. Browne in the same regiment.

All of the officers Browne named, plus Ens. Andrew Lawrie, provided similar testimony. Capt. Goldfinch also described breaking up a fight earlier that night, and Ens. Napier said a woman told him the bell-ringing “war to raise the inhabitants against the soldiers.” All that could easily be read as evidence of Bostonians being hostile and violent toward British army officers for no reason.

Closer reading shows, however, that Lt. Browne and his colleagues went out into the street after the Massacre. They heard a long stretch of bells, shouting, and other cacophony. Then the noise “ceased a little” as the crowd absorbed the effect of the shots. Finally, the officers heard more bells along with the army drums summoning all the soldiers to their barracks. Browne and his fellows in the 14th headed for those buildings, running into townspeople upset that soldiers had shot a dozen of their neighbors.

TOMORROW: The frustrating Capt. Goldfinch.

When I Paint My Massacre

This week the history painter Don Troiani unveiled his depiction of the Boston Massacre. Troiani is known for his careful research, which includes collecting period artifacts and clothing. He was also assisted by some of the New England reenactors who depict this event outside the Old State House museum [in years when it’s not going to be 10°F].

Note the soldiers’ headgear. Cpl. William Wemys (in the dark surtout or overcoat at the left) and Pvt. Hugh White (next to him) were from the 29th Regiment’s regular infantry companies while the other men were from the grenadier company. Often they’ve all been lumped together as grenadiers.

In recent years researchers have speculated, based on the Henry Pelham engraving and on British army paperwork, that the grenadiers of the 29th wore cocked hats like regular infantrymen since their distinctive tall caps didn’t arrive before they sailed for Boston. However, new research suggests the grenadiers of the 29th did receive their caps in time, so Troiani depicted those men wearing period caps.

Troiani also made an artistic choice to depict the scene from behind the soldiers, putting the viewer literally on their side of the confrontation. We don’t see the men and boys—some aggressive, some not—being shot off the side of the canvas.

The press release announcing this painting seems to lean even further to the side of the soldiers. It says of Pvt. White, “Having witnessed Edward Garrick verbally assault Lieutenant – Captain [sic] John Goldfinch, he reprimanded the youth with a strike to his head with his firelock.” Thus, Garrick’s rude words become an “assault” while White’s actual violence is a “reprimand.”

The same paragraph goes on to quote John Adams’s description of the crowd that gathered in response to the violence: a “motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs.” But it doesn’t cite Adams by name or note that he was speaking as the soldiers’ defense attorney—i.e., that description was one side of a courtroom argument. What, we might ask, would this same event look like from the other side?

Troiani usually makes his paintings available as prints through W. Britain, and I assume this one will appear there soon. Meanwhile, the research behind this painting will also be on display tonight at this year’s reenactment. [ADDENDUM: Alas, canceled because of the frigid forecast.]

Pvt. Joseph Whitehouse’s Story about Capt. Goldfinch

Yesterday I described how Jane Crothers, an eyewitness to the Boston Massacre, married Pvt. Joseph Whitehouse of the 14th Regiment later in March 1770.

Whitehouse also went to Christ Church (Old North) that month for the baptism of a child of another 14th Regiment soldier, George Simpson, on 14 March. Christ Church was one of Boston’s three Anglican churches, preferred by the soldiers from Britain and Ireland.

By the end of that month, the 14th Regiment had moved to Castle Island in Boston harbor, thus no longer inside the town of Boston and in daily contact with its civilians. They were still there in August, and Pvt. Whitehouse was one of the soldiers who lined up to give testimony to justice of the peace James Murray (shown here) about how badly the locals had treated them.

On 25 August, Whitehouse stated:

That about the latter end of February 1769, he was assaulted in the Streets of Boston by a mob of the townsmen, throwing pieces of Ice and snow-balls at him, calling him Scoundrel, Lobster, bloody back’d dog and much more abusive language, to all which he made no reply.

And further deposeth, that on the 5th. March last in the Evening as he was going to the barracks, he saw a number of the inhabitants striking Capt. Goldfinch who was lying on the ground, his sword taken away, and his face very much bruised, on his attempting to assist him, the mob immediately fell on him, and beat him in such a manner, that it was with much difficulty he reached the barracks.

Capt.-Lt. John Goldfinch of the 14th also played a major role in the events that led up to the Massacre. According to George R. T. Hewes, an apprentice at John Piemont’s shop dressed the officer’s hair in December, and the barber promised that apprentice that he could have the payment for that job. But then Goldfinch didn’t pay immediately, nor, it seems, as soon as the bill came due in three months.

So as Capt. Goldfinch passed by the Customs house on King Street on the evening of 5 March, apprentice Edward Garrick heckled him about the bill. He “owed my fellow Prentice,” Edward called. In fact, by that evening Goldfinch had paid the bill—so recently he still had the receipt in his pocket. But he disdained haggling on the street with an apprentice, leaving Pvt. Hugh White to put an end to the topic by clonking Edward on the head.

Goldfinch was one of the many people who testified about what happened that night. He gave a deposition for A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance at Boston, published in London. He testified at the soldiers’ trial. He had every reason to describe the Boston crowd as violent.

Yet Goldfinch never described being personally assaulted, knocked to the ground, “his face very much bruised.” He never described his sword being taken away. Instead, his story was about finding a brawl going on outside the barracks rented from Justice Murray, reestablishing order there, and then hearing the shots from King Street.

Was Pvt. Whitehouse mistaken about which British officer he saw “lying on the ground” and tried to help? That seems unlikely. And if that were so, we would expect to see Goldfinch or another officer complain about that assault on a colleague. The whole point of the Fair Account pamphlet and the depositions collected at Castle William was to paint the townspeople as violent. But there’s no complaint about such an incident on 5 March.

I suspect Pvt. Whitehouse correctly suspected what his superiors wanted to hear about the locals, and knew that Goldfinch was somehow involved in the King Street incident. So he came up with this story of the captain under attack. Whitehouse’s tale is one reason I’m as skeptical about the soldiers’ depositions as I am about the Bostonians’ testimony to their own friendly magistrates.

COMING UP: Don Hagist traces Pvt. Whitehouse’s military career.

King Street on the 5th of March 1770

As night fell on the 5th of March, 1770, small groups of British soldiers and Boston workers resumed the fights of the previous week. These confrontations coalesced into a big brawl around “Murray’s barracks,” named for the man who had rented his widowed sister’s idle distillery to the army to house much of the 29th Regiment.

King Street in the center of town was still peaceful, though. Teenaged apprentice Edward Garrick was standing there, near the shop where he worked for wigmaker John Piemont. Capt. John Goldfinch of the 14th Regiment passed by. Edward yelled out that the officer had not paid his barber’s bill.

Capt. Goldfinch showed young Edward the receipt he had in his pocket and— No, of course he didn’t. The captain did have a receipt in his pocket, but he was a British officer and gentleman, and he didn’t deign to reply to a greasy barber’s boy yelling in the street. (Grease was a necessary ingredient in shaping and styling wigs.) Especially with all the insults that Bostonians had yelled at the army since 1768.

Nearby, at the mansion rented by the Customs Service for its office, stood Pvt. Hugh White of the 29th Regiment. He was thirty years old and had served in the British army for eleven years. [Thanks to Don Hagist for alerting me to the British National Archives online record that contained that info.] Though Capt. Goldfinch ignored the barber’s boy, Pvt. White didn’t. He told the teenager that the officer “is a gentleman, and if he owes you any thing he will pay it.” Edward, who had visited with other soldiers of the 29th the night before, replied that there were no gentlemen in the 14th regiment.

Then Edward’s fellow apprentice Bartholomew Broaders arrived with a young woman on each arm. Those women, probably teenagers as well, were servants in the Customs House. The father of one of them had asked Bartholomew to escort the girls to the apothecary. Edward joined the party, and all four young people went into the mansion’s kitchen for a visit.

Meanwhile, Capt. Goldfinch arrived at Murray’s barracks. As the senior officer on the scene, Goldfinch broke up the brawl, shoving and ordering soldiers indoors. Merchant Richard Palmes and Dr. Thomas Young, the most radical of Boston’s Whig leaders, told locals to go home.

Back at the Customs House, one young woman’s brother came into the kitchen and told the barber’s boys that it was getting late. Having spent about an hour inside, Bartholomew and Edward went back out onto King Street. They headed home quietly and— No, that would be too sensible. Edward Garrick started complaining about Capt. Goldfinch’s bill again.

But Pvt. White ignored him and— No, of course he couldn’t let that go. The sentry called Edward over. “I’m not afraid to show my face,” said the apprentice, and walked up. White clonked the boy on the side of the head with the butt of his musket.

Edward staggered back and burst into tears. Bartholomew yelled at White, demanding “what he meant by thus abusing the people”—elevating an individual attack into tyranny. A sergeant chased the apprentices away with his sword, but they found another young wigmaker, Richard Ward. Soon several teenagers were running around the center of town, telling people about the sentry’s assault. One witness recalled them yelling, “you Centinel, damned rascally Scoundrel Lobster Son of a Bitch”!

It had been only a week since Boston’s huge funeral for Christopher Seider, a boy about eleven years old shot dead by a Customs officer. Now folks heard about the man guarding the Customs office abusing another boy. Naturally, this upset people. While some passersby told the boys to disperse, others joined them or at least stopped to watch. (Among the men who eventually joined the throng was Robert Paterson, a sailor whose trousers had been cut by the same shot that killed Seider.)

A town watchman named Edward Langford arrived. He told the apprentices “to let the Sentry alone” and told that soldier “not to be afraid, they were only boys, and would not hurt him.” But around the same time, some of the boys had gotten into the First Meeting and started ringing its bell—the town’s fire alarm.

The crowd swelled quickly as people arrived with their fire buckets. Some private fire companies rolled their engines toward the center of town. It soon became clear that there was no fire, but people spread the news about the big fight at Murray’s barracks, about the sentry at the Customs House. The crowd grew larger and angrier—at least 200 people.

Pvt. White sent two messengers from the Customs House to the Main Guard on the other side of the Town House, asking for reinforcements. Eventually the senior officer there, forty-year-old Capt. Thomas Preston, sent a squad of seven privates under Cpl. William Wemms. After a few more minutes, Preston followed.

All those reinforcements were grenadiers of the 29th. Two of the privates—Edward Montgomery and James Hartigan—had wives in Boston. Three—Mathew Kilroy, William Warren, and John Carroll—had been involved in the fights between soldiers and ropemakers at the end of the previous week. They pushed through the crowd to White’s side, poking men with their bayonets and shouting, “Damn your blood, stand out of the way.”

The soldiers ranged themselves in an arc around the Customs House door. By this time the barber’s boys all seem to have gone home. Among the people toward the front of the crowd were Samuel Gray, one of the brawling ropemakers, watching happily. Bookseller Henry Knox, young and burly, buttonholed Capt. Preston and warned him, “For God’s sake, take care of your men.” Richard Palmes and other gentlemen reminded Preston that without a magistrate he had no legal authority to order his men to fire.

Then twenty or thirty sailors and dock workers arrived from Dock Square. A gentleman had told them that the Customs service was behind all of Boston’s troubles—a common political position. On their way from the docks these men had picked up stout sticks from a pile of firewood. They moved through the crowd to the front, close enough for one sailor, a man of African and Native American ancestry over six feet tall, to grab a bayonet and jerk it back and forth. Benjamin Burdick, Constable of the Town House Watch, arrived, carrying a broadsword at his wife’s insistence. He yelled at the locals to stand back for their own good. Some civilians were throwing snowballs, ice, and lumps of coal.

Someone in the crowd threw a stick. It hit Pvt. Montgomery, on the right side of the line of soldiers, and knocked him down. He scrambled back to his feet, fired his musket, and yelled, “Fire!” His comrades responded by shooting, not together but in a ragged sequence. One man didn’t fire—probably Cpl. William Wemms, on the far side of the line.

At first many in the crowd didn’t believe the soldiers’ guns were loaded. But the tall sailor collapsed in the gutter, two balls through his chest. Samuel Gray fell dead on watchman Langford’s foot. Other men and teenagers were also struck, some in the front of the crowd, some in the back, one on his doorstep across the street. Each musket had probably contained two balls, so the seven shots produced a dozen wounds.

The crowd fell back. Constable Burdick tried to take charge for the town, fetching a doctor and another man to carry away the bodies and then trying to memorize the soldiers’ faces. People carried dead and wounded men to taverns, doctors’ offices, or their homes. Capt. Preston swatted up his men’s muskets to stop them from firing again, then marched them back to the Main Guard. Hearing the shots from blocks away, Capt. Goldfinch said, “I thought it would come to this.” His wigmaker’s receipt was still in his pocket.

Piemont’s Boys Visit the Barracks of the 29th

Though soldiers and locals had brawled in Boston on the 2nd and 3rd of March, the town was quiet on the 4th. After all, it was the Sabbath.

That evening, three young wigmakers went to visit a co-worker—but not just any co-worker. One of those fellows, Richard Ward, recalled:

on the Lord’s day evening preceding the fifth day of March instant, about dusk, he went to see one Mr. Dines (who is a soldier of the 29th regiment, and work worked, when he was not upon duty, in Mr. John Piemont, peruke maker’s shop, with the deponent, a journeyman to said Piemont); the said Dines lives near the barracks at New Boston [i.e., the western wing of the peninsula]; when your deponent was there, he heard one of the officers of the said 29th regiment say to the sergeants, “Don’t let any of your people go out unless there be eight or ten together.”

I’m not sure Ward was a journeyman, as he described himself, since his co-worker Bartholomew Broaders later called him a “fellow-apprentice.” Here is Broaders’s recollection of the same visit:

he went up to see Patrick Dines, a soldier of the 29th regiment, who worked with Mr. Piemont, and in Dawson’s room heard Sergeant Daniels say, that the officers said, since patience would not do, force must. And the soldiers must not bear the affronts of the inhabitants any longer, but resent them, and make them know their distance; and further, that the inhabitants would never be easy, and that he should desire to make the plumbs fly about their ears, and set the town on fire around them, and then they would know who and who were of a side—

said Daniels asked Edward Garrick, fellow-apprentice to the deponent, if he knew where he could get a stick that would bear a good stroke?

Garrick replied, you must look for one.

I interpret young Garrick’s reply to mean, “If you want a club, that’s your problem; leave me out of it.”

What’s so interesting about this episode is the friendly relationship between these apprentices and their fellow worker Dines, and by extension to the rest of the 29th. The young men had apparently gone to socialize with some of the soldiers occupying their town. Officers and sergeants seem to have felt no compunction about speaking frankly in front of the apprentices. Garrick resisted being drawn into the fights of the previous two days, but he doesn’t seem to have complained about Sgt. Daniels to anyone.

In contrast, Garrick and his fellow Piemont apprentices had a grudge against another British military man: Capt. John Goldfinch of the 14th regiment. According to the 1835 book Traits of the Tea-Party:

Mr. [George R. T.] Hewes states...there was a barber at the head of the street [King Street], on the north side, named Piemont, a Frenchman, who usually kept several apprentices; that some of the British officers were in the habit of resorting there; that one of them had come there some months previous, to dress by the quarter, whose bill Piemont promised to allow to the boy who shaved him, if he behaved well; that the quarter had expired, but the money could not be got, though frequent applications had been made for it...

The custom of the time was to give people three months (“the quarter”) to pay their bills; if Goldfinch’s bill became overdue in early March, then he’d had his head shaved in early December. Piemont’s promise may therefore have been a version of the other small bits of money apprentices collected toward the end of the year: at Pope Night, through tip boxes, through New Year’s verses. In any event, in early March those apprentices were getting impatient.

The next time Edward Garrick saw Capt. Goldfinch, he yelled to any and all passersby that the officer “owed my fellow Prentice”! That was Monday evening, on King Street.

(Today’s illustration, showing a barber’s boy being rejected and ejected for trying to collect on a bill, is from the 1896 novel Under the Liberty Tree, by James Otis [real name: James Otis Kaler]. Click on the illustration for a closer look. In that fictional retelling of the riots in Boston in February and March 1770, the barber’s boy is named Hardy Baker, and he’s a troublemaker. Many accounts of the Boston Massacre, fiction and nonfiction, depict the barber’s boys as deliberately provoking British soldiers. But I think the situation was a lot more nuanced than that, as shown by their visit to the barracks the night before.)