Boston in 1774 with Notes from Later

Cortney Skinner alerted me to this item in the New York Public Library’s digital images collection.

It’s a leaf from Isaiah Thomas’s Royal American Magazine in early 1774 that featured Paul Revere’s engraving of the eastern shore of Boston with Royal Navy ships in the harbor.

This page from the American Antiquarian Society reports that the magazine included a key for this frontispiece inside on page 40. That key identified the labeled landmarks along the water’s edge and the ships. (Though the latter were simply “1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8 Ships of War. 9 and 10. armed Schooners.”)

However, this copy of the print was removed from the magazine, and sometime in the early 1800s someone created his or her own key in the margins.

Here’s the handwritten key along the left side; if the key from 1774 said something different, I put that information in brackets:

A- is Long Whf.
B- is Hancock’s Whf.
C- is North Battery
D- is Fort-hill Battery [South Battery]
E- is Fort-Hill
F- is Fosters Whf. [Wheelwright’s Wharf]
G- is the Province house [Beach Hill]
H- is Tilteston’s Whf. [Hubbard’s Wharf]
I- is Hallowell’s Ship Y’d [Hollaway’s Ship-Yard]
K- is [blank] [Walker’s Ship-Yard]
L- is Gee’s Ship Yard [Tyler’s Ship-Yard]
M- is [blank] [Island Wharfs]
N- is [blank] [ditto]

Originally there was no key for the meetinghouse and church spires dominating the top of the image, but the annotator put a lot of effort into labeling them. And I put a fair amount of effort into reading those labels, including some in pencil that required raising the contrast on those parts of the scan.

The results are:

Hollis St. Ch.

Summer St. Ch. [Though was a term for Trinity Church, that building had no steeple; this spire was the New South Meetinghouse on Summer Street.]

First Ch. Federal St.
now Dr. Channings [Rev. William Ellery Channing preached to this congregation from 1803 to 1842; this building was replaced in 1809.]

Old So. Ch. Washington
St. Dr. Eckley’s [Rev. Joseph Eckley’s tenure at Old South ended in 1811.]

Old King’s Chapel

Province house
Beacon light
Old Brick ch. now [?]
Joy’s buildings Cornhill
Sq.
Town house at head
of State St.

West Ch. (Howard’s) [Rev. Simeon Howard died in 1804, and a new church was erected on the site in 1806.]
Faneuil Hall
Brattle St. ch.

New Brick ch. Hanover
St. Dr. Lathrop’s [Rev. John Lathrop died in 1816.]

Ch. in No. Square site
now built over with
dwelling houses. In 1775
it was distroyed. [This was the Old North Meetinghouse.]

Christ Ch. Salem St. [Now best known as Old North Church.]

Dr. Elliot’s Hanover
St. [Rev. Andrew Eliot died in 1778, Rev. John Eliot in 1813.]

Those labels offer some clues about when the notes were written. The annotator put Old South on “Washington St.,” and that stretch of the street wasn’t officially renamed Washington until 1824. For the Federal Street Church still to be “now Dr. Channings” means that the labels predate 1842. So let’s say around 1830.

It’s a bit confusing that the annotator included the names of some ministers who were dead by that date. I suspect the notes were an attempt to identify who presided over those meetinghouses during the Revolutionary War, at the approximate time of the picture. In the case of Howard, Lathrop, and the older Eliot, they were indeed preaching under those spires in 1774, but Eckley wasn’t installed at Old South until 1780.

Dr. Eliot’s Gossip about Boston’s Ministers

Yesterday I started quoting from Dr. Ephraim Eliot’s notes inside a copy of an 1821 pamphlet in the Harvard library. That pamphlet is a sermon about the split of the New North Meeting-House’s congregation in 1719, a major event in Boston.

Eliot was the youngest son of the Rev. Andrew Eliot (1718-1778), a later minister of the New North Meeting. And the family clearly put some of the blame for the split on one of the ministers at the Old North Meeting:

The difficulties at the new north [meeting-house] were more owing to Cotton Mather & his influence than to any others. Increase [Mather] was in his dotage. He [Cotton] was afraid of [Rev. Peter] Thachers popular talents, joined & directed the opposition & thought to get them into his parish. if he had thought of their building another meeting house, he would have been quiet.

Instead, the group that split off from the New North formed a new congregation and built the New Brick Meeting-House, attracting some members from the Mathers’ church.

Eliot had other critical things to say about Cotton Mather in his marginal notes. On page 18 he wrote:

No greater enemy to the quakers existed. In his account of the witchcraft of John Goodman’s children, He says, that shewing them a bible or carrying them into his study, would instantly bring them out of their fits, the sight of a book of quakerism or the [Anglican] book of common prayer would throw them into horrid convulsions.

An Irish woman was hanged in Boston in 1688 on the testimony of the Goodman children.

Eliot recorded even juicier gossip about some of Boston’s other pre-Revolutionary ministers which I don’t recall seeing elsewhere. On page 23 and then page 41 he wrote about what the Rev. Samuel Checkley (1695-1769) of the New South Meeting was known for:

for eating; he was the largest man in Boston, & his mouth was always full, & his jaw going when not preaching. My father used to say, he hated to preach after Checkley, on acct of the cracking of raisin seeds under his feet with which the floor of the pulpit was always covered. While the people were singing, he was chomping plumbs. . . .

Checkley lost his popularity more from his gourmandising disposition than any other way. he laid out all his money in tidbits, cakes, Raisins, oysters, &c. & ran in debt for other things. To such a degree that his parish chose a committee to get from him a schedule of his debts, which they paid. But he was ashamed to note the debt he owed in small shops for gingerbread &c. Those creditors became noisy, & another committee was chosen to receive & pay all such claims.

Checkley’s daughter Elizabeth became the first wife of Samuel Adams.

And about the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton (1705-1777), minister of the New Brick Church starting in 1754:

So high did his vanity carry him that when asked by Mr. Eliot to exchange, he observed that his people would consent to hear no other parson. His popularity burned out. But the parish dwindled more from his being a violent Tory, & the Bosom friend of Gov [Thomas] Hutchinson, who was one of his parish. Many people would not worship at the New Brick because of that circumstance.

Thus, in 1777 the shrinking New Brick Meeting had a building but no pastor while the Old North Meeting had no building but a popular pastor—the Rev. John Lathrop (1740-1816). They worked out the obvious solution, thus starting to reverse the splits of the early decades.

TOMORROW: A few more tidbits from Dr. Eliot’s notes.

[The photograph above, courtesy of the Boston Public Library’s Flickr stream, shows the house in the North End where Dr. Ephraim Eliot grew up. It was originally built by the Rev. Increase Mather after the fire mentioned yesterday.]

Dr. Amos Windship and the Christ Church Pew

Boston’s Anglican churches were rebuilding themselves in the 1780s. Not physically—they weren’t dismantled in whole or in part like some of the Congregationalist meeting-houses. But the war had made some of their richest members leave town, and they had to redefine their relationship with the king and Church of England.

That created openings for men like Dr. Amos Windship, who joined the congregation of Christ Church (now called Old North) in Boston’s North End. He was a warden starting on 28 May 1787, and a vestryman from 21 Dec 1789, deeply involved in church business.

Since 1777, William Montague had read in the Christ Church pulpit. Dr. Ephraim Eliot called him “a low bred man, of much cunning but mean literary abilities. He was a favorite among the lower class of the people.” Montague visited England in 1789, returning in August 1790 with the musket ball that supposedly killed Dr. Joseph Warren.

Some of the wealthier congregants took advantage of Montague’s absence to go to Halifax in 1790 and invite the Rev. Dr. William Walter (1737-1800) to become their minister. He had been rector at Trinity Church before the war, leaving Boston with the British military in 1776.

When Montague returned, he found himself in the position of assistant. He still preached a lot since Walter had also agreed to be minister at the Episcopal church in Cambridge. But there was soon conflict between the two men and their followers.

In March 1792 Montague asked to resign, citing “those who call themselves the Doctor’s [i.e., Walter’s] friends” and “the unchristian and abusive conduct of some towards me,—their constant endeavor to injure my Character and good name.” He went out to the Episcopal church in Dedham, where he spent a lot of his ministerial time on real-estate deals. Decades later, the congregation there asked him to step down.

During his trip to England, Montague had gotten into some sort of embarrassment. Eliot wrote that the man became

acquainted with some buckish English clergymen, who wishing to put a trick upon their raw Yankee brother, had introduced him into bad company.

And then the editor of Eliot’s manuscript for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts chose to omit a few lines. Just when it was getting good! Whatever happened, Dr. Windship had heard about it, and told other people in Boston.

By that time, Dr. Windship himself had been gotten in trouble with Christ Church. In 1791 he borrowed the Treasurer’s Ledger, and when he gave it back it now assigned pew number 30, in the back of the church, to him. Senior warden James Sherman wrote an angry note in the book:

this May Certifie all Whom it may Concern That the above Pew No. 30 was from the first settlement of Christ Church in Boston devoted wholy to the use of His Excelence the Governor and other Gentlemen and so continued untill August 1791 at which time this Ledger was in the Possession of Doctor Amos Windship who had borrowed it of James Sherman Senr Warden of said Church in order to settle his account with the Revd. Mr. Montague

he the sd. Windship kept it near a month and when returned “Governors Seat” as it stood above and as it was before was erased and “Dr. Amos Windship” as it now stands was wrote in its Stead with the account under it which account was brought from folio 91 which was erased about the middle of the lead, for which I the Subscriber as Warden and for the Honor of said Said was obliged to Lay the Same before the Attny. General and what followed may be seen by turning to a Meeting of the Proprietors of said Church Monday September 26th. 1791.

The two pages in question had apparently been treated with “some form of acid.” Attorney General James Sullivan advised the church to bring Windship to court, but in October the doctor admitted he had altered the ledger, saying it “was an error in judgement (and for which, I am very sorry).”

Dr. Windship started attending the Rev. Dr. John Lathrop’s New Brick Meeting. But he’d been involved with Christ Church long enough to move Maj. John Pitcairn’s body.

TOMORROW: At last! Mucking about with Maj. Pitcairn’s body!

Ministers Telling Stories About Each Other

Boston 1775 promises gossip about the people of Revolutionary Boston, so for new material I’ve gone to a rather gossipy bunch: New England clergymen. Both of these tales involves descendants of the most imposing New England clergymen of all, Increase and Cotton Mather.

The Rev. Dr. James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) passed on an anecdote from his namesake, step-grandparent, and guardian, the prominent early Unitarian minister James Freeman (1759-1835, shown here, courtesy of the Unitarian Universalist Association):

I was once walking with Dr. John Clarke, and we met Mather Byles. He took my arm and said,—“Now we have the whole Bible here. I am the Old Testament, you, Mr. Clarke, are the New Testament, and as for Mr. Freeman, he is the Apocrypha.”

The Rev. Dr. Byles’s inability to resist a witticism was one reason he dropped out of favor with his congregation during the Revolutionary War.

The Rev. Samuel Mather (1706-1785) was Cotton’s son and biographer, and thus at the very top of the region’s Congregationalist orthodoxy. In an 1847 letter printed in the Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit, the Rev. Dr. Charles Lowell (1782-1861) passed on this picture of the man:

Dr. John Lathrop, of Boston, related to me the following anecdote of Dr. Samuel Mather, whom he knew well, being a member of the same Ministerial Association with him for many years:—At a certain meeting of the Association, Dr. Mather talked nearly the whole time; and, when the members were about to disperse, the Doctor said very emphatically,—“Well, Brethren, I don’t remember that I ever knew a pleasanter meeting of the Association than this.”

I understood the anecdote as pointing to the prominent infirmity in Dr. Mather’s character.

Mather also had difficulty with his congregants. He presided over the North Meeting-House for a decade until 1742, when the worshipers “New Light” leanings conflicted with his “Old Light” sensibility. Mather and a quarter of the congregation then formed a new meeting, Boston’s tenth, on North Bennet Street.

Mather and Byles were two of the three Congregationalist ministers who remained in Boston through the siege of 1775-76, the third being the Rev. Dr. Andrew Eliot (1718-1788). Only Byles was a political Loyalist, however, and even he refused to leave the country.

Old North Meeting-House Pulled Down

One of the many false notes in The Patriot, the Mel Gibson movie about the Revolutionary War, was the scene of British soldiers burning a church with American civilians inside. No such atrocity took place in that war, though some American attacks on Native American towns in upstate New York became quite vicious.

However, the British army did burn one prominent house of worship in occupied Boston. On 16 Jan 1776, selectman Timothy Newell recorded the start of what he probably thought counted as an atrocity:

The Old North Meeting house, pulled down by order of Genl. [William] Howe for fuel for the Refuges and Tories.

Yes, the army burned this church only after dismantling it, with no one killed or even injured.

Old North Meeting-house is on the left in this 1768 picture, marked B. The taller, grander steeple to the right is Christ Church, which inherited the “Old North” nickname after the war and is now commonly called Old North Church.

The Old North Meeting was the second oldest in Boston, preceded only by the “Old Brick” Meeting in the center of town. By the Revolution, there were two other Congregationalist meetings in the North End. The New North meeting had split from Old North in 1714, and then the New Brick had split from New North in 1719. In the years before the war, most Bostonians called Old North “Mr. Lathrop’s meeting,” after the Rev. John Lathrop (1740-1816), who became its minister in 1768.

Decades later, the congregation ascribed the destruction of their meeting-house to a particular enmity of a British general. An 1899 church history quoted the Rev. Thomas Van Ness this way:

I am not surprised to learn that as early as 1774 Lathrop, from this pulpit, said, “Americans, rather than submit to be hewers of wood or drawers of water for any nation in the world, would spill their best blood”; nor does it seem strange that the British general, in speaking of The Second Church, should call it “a nest of traitors.”

Lathrop did indeed say in a Thanksgiving sermon in late 1774:

Americans, who have been used to war from their infancy, would spill their best blood, rather than “submit to be hewers of wood, or drawers of water, for any ministry or nation in the world.”

The latter phrase was a direct quotation from the First Continental Congress’s address to the people of Great Britain, carefully cited in the printed edition of Lathrop’s sermon. The Congress in turn alluded to the Book of Joshua. So this sentiment wasn’t particular to Lathrop.

Lathrop definitely supported the Patriot cause. In 1771, he preached a sermon on the Boston Massacre subtly titled “Innocent Blood Crying to God from the Streets of Boston.” The 1842 History of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, by Zachariah G. Whitman, stated:

In June, 1774, the Ar. Co. held their election, when the late Dr. John Lathrop delivered an excellent and patriotic discourse. It is related, that while Dr. Lathrop preached, British troops were in the vicinity, and a sentry was placed on the pulpit stairs, lest any thing rebellious should be expressed. One fact the compiler remembers, viz: to have heard Dr. L. say, when he was accused of advancing sentiments inimical to his country [i.e., the U.S. of A.], that no one certainly could doubt his patriotic spirit, for he had preached republicanism with a British sentry, armed, on the pulpit stairs, to watch what he said; but he did not mention the occasion.

As for the “nest of traitors” line, however, I haven’t found any source for that quotation earlier than the church’s 1899 history. Other writers in the same book use the phrase “nest of hornets” instead, and authors disagree about whether Gen. Howe or Gen. Thomas Gage uttered those words.

It’s possible that the British authorities really didn’t like Lathrop and the Old North Meeting. It’s also possible that those authorities pulled down the meeting-house simply because it was an old, deserted wooden building, and they needed firewood in the middle of winter. The 1 Jan 1776 Pennsylvania Packet printed a dispatch from Cambridge dated 21 December which said:

That on the 14th instant [i.e., this month] Gen. Howe issued orders for taking down the Old North Meeting House, and one hundred old wooden dwelling houses and other buildings, to make use of for fuel.

Lathrop and many of his congregants had moved out of town and were no longer in a position to object.

In 1849, the Rev. Dr. John Pierce of Brookline wrote a letter about Lathrop that was later printed in the Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit:

In 1775, when Boston was in possession of the British army, he set out to find a refuge in his native place [Norwich, Connecticut]; but, as he was passing through Providence on his way to Norwich, proposals were made to him to supply a destitute congregation there, to which he consented.

Upon the opening of Boston, in 1776, however, he returned; and, in the mean time, the ancient house in which he had been accustomed to preach had been demolished and used as fuel. It was ninety-eight years old; but was considered, “at its demolition, a model of the first architecture in New England.”

Mr. Lathrop accepted an invitation from the New Brick Church, to aid their Pastor, Dr. [Ebenezer] Pemberton, then in a declining state. And, after Dr. Pemberton’s death in the following year, the two Societies united; and, on the 27th of June, 1779, he became their joint Pastor. In this relation he continued during the remainder of his life.

So a good thing came out of the destruction of the Old North Meeting-House: its minister and congregation doubled up with one of the nearby meetings, and eventually the two became one.