Why Was Samuel Emmons Called to Testify?

On 28 Nov 1770, the attorneys prosecuting eight soldiers for the Boston Massacre called Samuel Emmons to the witness stand.

According to defense counsel John Adams’s notes on the trial, Emmons’s testimony consisted entirely of:

I dont know any of the Prisoners. Nor anything.

Prosecutor Robert Treat Paine wrote Emmons’s name in his notes and then crossed it out. The published record of the trial, prepared from John Hodgson’s shorthand notes, didn’t mention Emmons at all.

Hiller B. Zobel’s The Boston Massacre quotes Emmons as adding, “I was not in King Street. My brother was.” However, those words don’t appear in the many documents transcribed in The Legal Papers of John Adams, co-edited by Zobel. I don’t see an Emmons brother among the other witnesses.

So why was Samuel Emmons on the witness list?

I think the answer appears in the 1 Jan 1764 Boston News-Letter, where Emmons advertised:

TAR-WATER,
MADE of Genuine Tar, to be sold by Samuel Emmons, Ropemaker, in Milk-Street, nigh the Foot of the Rope-Walks.

Bishop George Berkeley and other authorities promoted water infused with tar as a medicine. Tar was also used in preparing ropes for use on ships, so a ropemaker might well have a supply around. Emmons’s advertisement put him in the part of central Boston where John Gray’s ropewalk stood.

Thus, Emmons was almost certainly a witness to the big brawls between ropemakers and soldiers on 1 and 2 March, one of the events that raised tensions before the Massacre. Three of the soldiers on trial—Mathew Kilroy, William Warren, and John Carroll—were involved in those fights, as was victim Samuel Gray.

It looks like the prosecutors put Samuel Emmons on their list of possible witnesses as part of a plan to make the ropewalk fight a significant part of their case, just as it played a big role in the town’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre. Later on 28 November they called ropemaker Nicholas Feriter to the stand; he described being involved in the fight and seeing Kilroy and Warren on the other side.

In a modern trial, those prosecutors would have learned more about what Samuel Emmons did and didn’t have to say before calling him to the stand. But Samuel Quincy and Paine didn’t have the time and personnel that modern prosecutors command. Who knows what the jury made of his remark?

More about Samuel Emmons appears in Robert Love’s Warnings, by Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger. In 1753 he married Rachel Love, daughter of town employee Robert Love. They had their children baptized in the West Meetinghouse. In the 1780s Samuel became disabled because of “several touches of the Palsey,” and Rachel supported the family by keeping a small shop with a liquor license.

“David Bradley, came down with me to the corpses”

On 5 Mar 1770, eleven days after David Bradlee saw Ebenezer Richardson shooting out of his house, there was a confrontation between soldiers and civilians in King Street. That became, of course, the Boston Massacre.

Among the people on the scene was Benjamin Burdick, Jr., constable of the town house watch. He testified about what he saw in multiple forums. Burdick’s most detailed account appears in the town’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, and in part it says:

I then looked round to see what number of inhabitants were in the street, and computed them to be about fifty, who were then going off as fast as possible; at the same time I observed a tall man standing on my left-hand, who seemed not apprehensive of the danger he was in, and before I had time to speak to him, I heard the word “Fire!” and immediately the report followed, the man on my left hand dropped, I asked him if he was hurt, but received no answer, I then stooped down and saw him gasping and struggling with death. I then saw another man laying dead on my right-hand, but further advanced up the street.

I then saw the soldiers loading again, and I ran up the street to get some assistance to carry off the dead and wounded. Doctor Jos. Gardner, and David Bradley, came down with me to the corpses, and as we were stooping to take them up, the soldiers presented at us again; I then saw an officer passing busily behind them. We carried off the dead without regarding the soldiers.

At the soldiers’ trial the shorthand expert John Hodgson, who was a relative newcomer to town and didn’t know everyone, quoted Burdick this way:

When the Molatto man was dead, I went up, and met Dr. Gardner and Mr. Brindley. I asked them to come and see the Molatto, and as we stooped to take up the man, the soldiers presented their arms again, as if they had been going to fire, Capt. [Thomas] Preston came, pushed up their guns, and said stop firing, do not fire.

“Mr. Brindley” is clearly the man Burdick knew as “David Bradley.”

The tailor David Bradlee was thus at three violent political events in Boston in the space of five months: the tarring and feathering of George Gailer on 28 Oct 1769, the fatal confrontation at Richardson’s house on 22 Feb 1770, and the Massacre.

Furthermore, Bradlee was willing to walk under the guns of the British troops to help pick up Crispus Attucks’s body.

We write a lot about the Boston “crowd” and the “Sons of Liberty” as a collective actor, but of course that group was made up of individual people. David Bradlee was evidently one of those people. He did the work of resisting Crown authority at the street level. He was part of the crowd that genteel political leaders like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and William Molineux relied upon.

COMING UP: The Bradlees and the Tea Party.

Watchman Langford “in King-street that evening the 5th March”

Yesterday we saw rookie town watchman Edward G. Langford dealing with the influx of British soldiers—and, more troublesome, British army officers—into Boston in 1768.

On 5 Mar 1770, Langford saw the conflict between the local population and the army come to a head in front of the Customs house on King Street, a short walk from the watch-house that was the base for his nightly patrols.

Langford was called to testify at the trials of Capt. Thomas Preston and the enlisted men. Here’s the record of his testimony from the latter trial, as taken down by John Hodgson:

Q. Was you in King-street that evening the 5th March?

A. Yes. The bells began to ring, and the people cryed fire: I run with the rest, and went into King-street; I asked where the fire was; I was told there was no fire, but that the soldiers at [James] Murray’s barracks had got out, and had been fighting with the inhabitants, but that they had drove them back again. I went to the barracks, and found the affair was over there.

I came back, and just as I got to the Town pump, I saw twenty or five and twenty boys going into King-street. I went into King-street myself, and saw several boys and young men about the Sentry box at the Custom-house. I asked them what was the matter. They said the Sentry [Pvt. Hugh White] had knocked down a boy [Edward Garrick]. They crowded in over the gutter; I told them to let the Sentry alone. He went up the steps of the Custom-house, and knocked at the door, but could not get in. I told him not to be afraid, they were only boys, and would not hurt him. . . . The boys were swearing and speaking bad words, but they threw nothing.

Q. Were they pressing on him?

A. They were as far as the gutter, and he went up the steps and called out, but what he said I do not remember.

Q. Did he call loud?

A. Yes, pretty loud.

Q. To whom did he call?

A. I do not know; when he went up the steps he levelled his piece with his bayonet fixed. As I was talking with the Sentry, and telling him not to be afraid, the soldiers came down, and when they came, I drew back from the Sentry towards Royal-exchange lane, and there I stood. I did not see them load, but somebody said, are you loaded; and Samuel Gray…came and struck me on the shoulder, and said, Langford, what’s here to pay.

Q. What said you to Gray then?

A. I said I did not know what was to pay, but I believed something would come of it by and bye. He made no reply. Immediately a gun went off. I was within reach of their guns and bayonets; one of them thrust at me with his bayonet, and run it through my jacket and great coat.

Q. Where was you then?

A. Within three or four feet of the gutter, on the outside. . . .

Q. How many people were there before the soldiers at that time?

A. About forty or fifty, but there were numbers in the lane.

Q. Were they nigh the soldiers?

A. They were not in the inside of the gutter.

Q. Had any of the inhabitants sticks or clubs?

A. I do not know. I had one myself, because I was going to the watch, for I belong to the watch.

Q. How many soldiers were there?

A. I did not count the number of them, about seven or eight I think.

Q. Who was it fired the first gun?

A. I do not know.

Q. Where about did he stand that fired?

A. He stood on my right, as I stood facing them: I stood about half way betwixt the box and Royal-exchange lane. I looked this man (pointing to [Pvt. Mathew] Killroy) in the face, and bid him not fire; but he immediately fired, and Samuel Gray fell at my feet. Killroy thrust his bayonet immediately through my coat and jacket; I ran towards the watch-house, and stood there.

Q. Where did Killroy stand?

A. He stood on the right of the party.

Q. Was he the right hand man?

A. I cannot tell: I believe there were two or three on his right, but I do not know. . . .

Q. Did you see any thing hit the soldiers?

A. No, I saw nothing thrown. I heard the rattling of their guns, and took it to be one gun against another. This rattling was at the time Killroy fired, and at my right, I had a fair view of them; I saw nobody strike a blow nor offer a blow.

Q. Have you any doubt in your own mind, that it was that gun of Killroy’s that killed Gray?

A. No manner of doubt; it must have been it, for there was no other gun discharged at that time.

Q. Did you know the Indian that was killed?

A. No.

Q. Did you see any body press on the soldiers with a large cord wood stick?

A. No.

Q. After Gray fell, did he (Killroy) thrust at him with his bayonet?

A. No, it was at me he pushed.

Q. Did Gray say any thing to Killroy, or Killroy to him?

A. No, not to my knowledge, and I stood close by him.

Q. Did you perceive Killroy take aim at Gray?

A. I did not: he was as liable to kill me as him.

Langford’s testimony was important in positively identifying Pvt. Mathew Kilroy as the soldier who had fatally shot ropemaker Samuel Gray. Kilroy was one of the only two defendants convicted of manslaughter and branded as a felon.

Edward G. Langford remained on the town watch payroll until November 1772. The last record I found of him showed that he died on 26 Mar 1777, aged thirty-eight. He was buried out of Trinity Church. Five years later a Mary Langford, perhaps his widow or his sister, was licensed to retail alcohol to support herself.

Alexander Gilles Edits His Hymnal

Glenda Goodman reported this find at Trinity College’s library on the Junto blog in July, but it didn’t really hit me until Slate Vault picked up on it (and posted bigger images).

A man named Alexander Gilles went through a copy of Isaac Watts’s Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament and changed every reference to royalty and Britain so the hymns fit better with the republican values of the new U.S. of A.

Gilles used an edition of Watts published by Scottish immigrant John Hodgson in Boston in 1772. Many of his changes, Goodman reports, match those in an edition issued by John Mycall of Newburyport in 1781; a “committee of ministers” edited that version for Mycall, another immigrant bookseller. But Gilles went further, looking not just for words like “Britain” and “king” but also for ideological or geographic details.

When lines seemed too British, Gilles composed new ones, so:

He bids the ocean round thee flow
Not bars of brass could guard thee so.

became:

He bids the seas before thee stand
To guard against yon distant land.

That “distant land” was, presumably, Watts’s own country.

In the 1800s Congress considered petitions for pensions from Alexander Gillis, an “officer of the Revolution,” and his children. He lived in New York and, according to one of those documents, had been “an Indian spy.” I don’t know if he could have been the man who edited this hymnal. But he didn’t get a pension.

Richard Palmes’s Last Word

As Neil L. York quotes in The Boston Massacre: A History with Documents, Richard Palmes published his own version of his testimony about the Boston Massacre in the 25 Mar 1771 Boston Gazette because “the sentiments of the People seems various concerning the Testimony I gave.”

That apparently meant that neighbors were accusing him of saying things that had helped to acquit Capt. Thomas Preston and most of the soldiers, and caused the last two soldiers to be convicted of manslaughter instead of murder. Specifically, Palmes took issue with the version of his testimony that shorthand expert John Hodgson had published in Boston early that year.

What are the important differences between the two versions of Palmes’s testimony? Aside from details of wording, they appear in these questions about Pvt. Edward Montgomery, the first soldier to fire. Hodgson’s version:

Q. Are you certain that Montgomery was struck and sallied back before he fired?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you know whether it was with a piece of ice or a club?
A. No.

And Palmes’s version:

Q. Are you sure Montgomery was struck and sallied back before he fired?
A. I tho’t he stept back when it hit him.
Q. Do you know whether it was a piece of ice, or a club?
A. It was something resembling ice.

Palmes wanted his neighbors to know that he did not say Montgomery “sallied back,” or staggered, but that he deliberately stepped back. He also said that private was most likely hit by ice rather than wood. In both details, Palmes downplayed the violence Montgomery had suffered.

Or rather, Palmes insisted that Hodgson had made him overstate that violence: “Mr. Hodgson confounds my remembrance in such manner, that I could not determine the difference between a piece of ice and a club, for what purpose this fetch, judge impartial reader!”

After Palmes’s testimony the court recalled another witness, James Bailey, and asked if he still believed that Montgomery fell down after being hit by the object. Bailey reaffirmed that he did. Palmes commented: “I imagine this evidence was bro’t to invalidate my declaration in court; but I assure the world upon the oath I then took, that Montgomery did not fall until he attempted to run his bayonet thro’ my body; which was about the time the last gun went off.”

Which version was accurate? In his earlier testimony Palmes had consistently spoken of “a piece of snow or ice” being thrown. Even someone taking notes for the Crown at the soldiers’ trial recorded that. So Hodgson’s report that Palmes said the object might have been a club seems suspect.

However, that anonymous note-taker also reported that Palmes had remarked about the ice hitting the soldier, “whether it staggered him back or he only stepd back I cant tell”—more doubt about Montgomery stepping back than Palmes himself later acknowledged.

In any event, by publishing his version of his testimony in the Boston Gazette, Palmes got the last word.

TOMORROW: Until the 21st century.

Richard Palmes Gives More Testimony—and This Time It’s Personal

After providing testimony for an inquest on 6 Mar 1770, apothecary Richard Palmes testified four more times about the Boston Massacre:

• He provided a deposition for Boston’s official report on the event, titled A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre.
• A polished version of Palmes’s inquest testimony, written in the week after the shootings, appeared in A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance at Boston, printed in London in response to the Short Narrative. Palmes’s original text was broken up into sentences with standardized punctuation, but only one small detail was added.
• Palmes was a (probably reluctant) defense witness at Capt. Thomas Preston’s trial.
• He was a prosecution witness in the soldiers’ trial.

Furthermore, we have three versions of Palmes’s testimony at Preston’s trial:

• an anonymous account of the trial that Gov. Thomas Hutchinson procured and sent to London, now stored in the British National Archives. Slightly different transcriptions, apparently from different copies, appear in the third volume of The Legal Papers of John Adams and in Neil L. York’s The Boston Massacre: A History with Documents.
• notes from special prosecutor Robert Treat Paine, also published in the Adams Legal Papers.
• Palmes’s own statement of what he’d said about hearing an order to fire, as published in the 25 Mar 1771 Boston Gazette and reprinted in York’s book.

Palmes formatted his account in question-and-answer form, like the recently published transcript of the soldiers’ trial, but that text also broke off for the note “as per Narrative,” referring to the Boston report. Thus, it’s unclear whether those questions and answers were really based on contemporaneous records or if Palmes wrote out what he remembered (or wanted to remember) months later. He didn’t present his whole testimony, just the portion about whether Preston might have ordered his men to shoot into the crowd.

As for the soldiers’s trial, the situation is even more complicated. Palmes’s testimony survives in four forms:

• brief notes from the same report to London mentioned above.
• trial notes from defense attorney John Adams.
• the transcript of the proceedings by shorthand expert John Hodgson, published by John Fleeming.
• Palmes’s own version, published in the 25 Mar 1771 Boston Gazette, with specific complaints about Hodgson’s accuracy.

There’s an old saying that a person with one watch always knows what time it is, and a person with two watches never does. A historian with one source can report what people said; a historian with two sources can’t.

TOMORROW: The points Palmes wanted to emphasize.

“The Art of SHORT-HAND taught to Perfection”

Parliament’s order to close the port of Boston to transatlantic traffic was designed to hurt the town’s economy. John Hodgson’s business as a luxury bookbinder probably started to suffer, and on 4 July 1774 he advertised a new service in the Boston Post-Boy:

STENOGRAPHY,
Or the Art of SHORT-HAND taught to Perfection.

The Subscriber having for twenty years past practised, in public and private, Mr. Weston’s most approved Method of this truly useful Art, flatters himself that he had acquired a thorough Knowledge of the same: And, at the Request of a Number of Gentlemen, proposes (if suitable Encouragement is given) to open a School for the Instruction of those that are desirous of becoming Proficients therein.

This Art is useful to every Person, more especially those in great Business, Gentlemen of the Clergy, Law, &c, both for Dispatch in what they write for their own Memory, and concealing what they would not have be open to every Eye; also for common placing, or writing down what is most remarkable in any Book which may happen to be lodged in their Hands for a short Time; it is also very useful for seafaring Men and Travellers for keeping a Journal of all Occurrences. By this Art as much may be writ in one Hour, and in one Page, as otherwise in six Hours and six Pages. It is a most useful and necessary Qualification for all young Persons, and is a great Help and Ornament to their other Learning and Accomplishments.

Those who have practised any other Method of Short-Hand, will find it well worth their Pains to change it for this, as a great many have done (and the Subscriber for one) by Reason of its being so very speedy and legible, which are the two most essential Properties of Short-Hand, and the principal Design of the Art; for by this Method Joining Rules are taught, by which may, in every Sentence, be joined two, three, four, five, six, seven or more Words together in one, without taking off the Pen; and each of these Sentences are writ in Half the Time and Half the Room that they can be writ disjointed.

Hodgson invited people to look at samples of the shorthand writing “at his House near Liberty-Tree, or at the Printing-Office in School-Street.”

James Weston (1688-1751) had published his manual Stenography in London in 1743, along with an edition of the Book of Common Prayer as shown above; the latter book is viewable through Google Books and Rider College. Hodgson’s practice in that shorthand had allowed him to take such thorough notes on the trial of the soldiers after the Boston Massacre.

Hodgson remained in Boston through the siege, though many other people linked to the court party left with the troops. In April 1776, the town asked Sheriff William Greenleaf to arrest him and fifteen other suspected Tories. Though he was released on bond, the Massachusetts General Court investigated those men’s loyalties.

Apparently Hodgson went back to his work as a bookbinder. Isaiah Thomas recalled that he died in 1779, but in fact he lived until March 1786. His death notice in the Continental Journal said he “died very suddenly,” suggesting that he was still active and in good health till the end.

John Hodgson, court transcriber and bookbinder

Here is the advertisement for printer John Fleeming’s most famous publication: the transcript of the trial of soldiers after the Boston Massacre. Fleeming advertised that pamphlet on 27 Dec 1770, though it wasn’t available until 21 January.

The man who transcribed the proceedings was John Hodgson, an immigrant from Scotland like Fleeming. By the end of the trial his hands were so tired that he couldn’t get down Robert Treat Paine’s summary arguments for the prosecution. Some people—Richard Palmes, John Adams—complained that the printed transcript was inaccurate. But trial transcriptions were almost unheard of in America then, and Hodgson created the best record we have of that important event.

Isaiah Thomas later included Hodgson on his list of Boston booksellers, saying he had opened a shop on Marlborough Street (part of the town’s central artery) in 1762:

Hodgson…was bred to bookbinding in Scotland, and became a good workman. He was chiefly employed in this business, but sold a few books. By permission of the court, he took, in short hand, the trial of the soldiers who were concerned in the massacre at Boston, on the evening of the 5th of March 1770.

In the 2 Jan 1764 Boston Evening-Post, Hodgson advertised that he “Binds Books of all Kinds, gilt or plain,” and also “sells Books, Stationary, Plays, &c. &c.”

In October 1765, Hodgson was one of three trustees for the weaver Elisha Brown when he declared bankruptcy in a wave of insolvencies. Three years later, during a dispute over turning the Manufactory into barracks for the British army, Brown and his family defied the royal authorities by refusing to leave that building. By that point Hodgson was working for a bookseller and printer on the other side of the political divide.

According to Thomas, Hodgson “gave up his shop in 1768, and was, afterward, employed by John Mein,” yet another arrival from Scotland. Mein managed a bookstore, and partnered with Fleeming in publishing the Boston Chronicle. He was a loud and cutting opponent of the local Whigs, and in late 1769 a crowd of angry businessmen drove him out of town. Hodgson published one short letter in the 26 October Chronicle about that small riot, supporting Mein.

Eventually Hodgson went back out on his own, announcing in the 30 July 1772 Massachusetts Spy that he had moved into “the shop Mr. John Greenlaw lately improved.” His ad in the 18 Oct 1773 Boston Post-Boy says:

Bookbinding in its various Branches.

JOHN HODGSON
Hereby informs the Public,
That he carries on his Business of Bookbinding at his Shop, near Mr. Philip Freeman, jun. near LIBERTY-TREE.

ANY Orders Gentlemen in Town or Country may choose to favour him with, in the above Branch, he promises to execute as neat as any London Binding, and on the most reasonable Terms.

N.B. Gentlemens Libraries, or a single Book, regilt, cleaned and made look as well as new.—All Orders from the Country shall be strictly attended to.

TOMORROW: John Hodgson and the coming of war.

Christopher Monk's Catstick

While attorneys at the trial of soldiers for the Boston Massacre questioned blockmaker James Brewer, as described over the past week, one lawyer for the defense, John Adams, was taking notes. He summarized some significant parts of Brewer’s testimony like this:

Kit. [Christopher] Monk was there. I turned round to speak to Kit. Monk, and they fired and K. faltered. [Pvt. Mathew] Kilroy struck me upon the Arm with his Bayonet as they came round before they were formed. The Firing began upon the Right. I thought it was the Man quite upon the right. Kilroy struck at me. Saw no blows, nothing thrown. Monk had a Catstick in his Hand. Heard no Names called, no Threats, no shouts, no Cheers, till the firing.

What’s a “catstick”? John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms (published in 1849) defines that object this way:

Catstick. A bat or cudgel, used by New England boys in a game at ball. It is known by the same name in England, though used for a different play. I have never heard the word except here in Rhode Island.

A catstick was thus a small wooden bat, perhaps the size of those miniature bats sold as souvenirs. (The one pictured above, available from the Oddball Mall, features Nomar Garciaparra in a Red Sox uniform. I wonder why those haven’t sold out.)

Here’s the real mystery. The detail that “Monk had a Catstick in his Hand” does not appear in the published record of Brewer’s testimony. It first saw print when Adams’s notes were published in the third volume of Legal Papers of John Adams. What explains the discrepancy? I can imagine two scenarios.

First, the shorthand expert who privately transcribed the trial, John Hodgson, might have missed that part of Brewer’s testimony. Adams and merchant Richard Palmes both claimed Hodgson had made serious mistakes. Hodgson did not capture Robert Treat Paine’s summation for the Crown because the courtroom was so crowded and his hand so cramped. The Whigs already suspected Hodgson’s neutrality since he was a Scottish immigrant employed by a printer who supported and was supported by the Customs service.

But Brewer testified early in the trial, and Adams said Hodgson’s notes on the witnesses’ remarks were fine. (I suspect his notes on Adams’s summation were fine as well, and that speech simply wasn’t as brilliant as Adams wanted to remember.) Testimony that young Kit Monk had been carrying a stick, especially from a prosecution witness, would have helped the defense, so it seems unlikely that Hodgson would have missed it. Furthermore, that detail doesn’t fit with Brewer’s other testimony: he was busy denying that he’d seen any civilian on King Street with any stick.

My second scenario, therefore, is that Adams might have heard about Monk’s catstick from some other source. As he took notes on Brewer’s testimony, the attorney responded to the blockmaker’s denials by, perhaps indignantly, inserting a contradictory fact. But because no witness testified about the catstick, Adams and his colleagues never got to introduce that detail into the trial.

COMING UP: So what did New England boys use a catstick for? Besides possibly brawling with soldiers, of course.