New London’s Liberty Riot

Newport, Rhode Island, wasn’t the only New England town that saw disturbances connected to the Customs sloop Liberty in July 1769. There was also violence in New London, Connecticut.

In fact, the whole affair started with action off New London. Treasury Department documents that Joseph R. Frese cited in this article from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts reveal more details than I knew last week.

On the morning of 16 July, Capt. William Reid of the sloop Liberty stopped two vessels in Long Island Sound about three miles from the New London lighthouse. One was the brig Thames, commanded by Joseph Packwood. The other was the sloop Sally, commanded by Edward Tinker. Both those ships were based in New London, but the Thames was nominally sailing from Haiti to New York.

As some New England newspapers reported, Reid suspected that Packwood had unloaded some of his Haitian rum and sugar onto Finker’s sloop so it could be landed secretly on the Connecticut coast and the Customs department couldn’t collect duties on it. Then he’d deliver the rest in New York.

Reid put his own men onto the brig and sloop and led the little fleet into Newport. Packwood, Finker, and most of their crewmen had to make their way home in boats. Soon after Packwood landed, he and the owner of the Thames, Nathaniel Shaw, Jr., set out for Newport. We know what happened there on 19 July. By the next day, the Liberty was wrecked, the Thames released for lack of evidence, and the Sally illegally “rescued.”

Back in New London, the waterfront crowd went hunting for the local Customs officers whom they held responsible for those seizures. Deputy Collector John Miller and Comptroller Thomas Moffatt reported that on 24 July “several People” threatened a tidesman named Barnabas Willson. They wrote, “on this occasion We said what We then thought was proper to him & took such steps as inclined Us to hope and beleive that no mischief would happen to him, but We were mistaken if not deceived.” Dr. Moffatt had been the victim of mobbing during Newport’s Stamp Act riots, so he should have known better.

Whatever “steps” those officials took, it wasn’t enough for Willson’s sake. In “the twilight of the Evening of the 25th,” the crowd came looking for him again, as well as another tidesman named John Bloyd. The Customs officers wrote of Bloyd:

not finding him at home they suspected he was in the House of Mr Collector [Duncan] Stewart where they repaired and demanded him but being denied and refused admittance by a Maid Servant from the Window of an upper Chamber they broke forcibly into the House search’d every where and found him on the House top, from which they led him through the Street near the Episcopal Church and there questioned him concerning the Information given to Captain Reid and chiefly about some Rum seized & afterwards stolen at East Haddam a year and a half ago then they dismised him without further Injury

The crowd turned back to Willson. That man himself later told justice James Murray of Boston:

they seized this Deponent Drag’d him thro’ the Streets, strip’d him of his Cloaths, tied him to a sign Post (having cut off his Hair) and then gave him Thirty two severe lashes with a Whip.

By then it was “about Eleven OClock at night.” Some of the rioters went to find Thomas Dare, the Customs office surveyor—a social step up from the tidesmen. Those men took Dare to the place where they had tied up Willson. They “questioned him concerning the late seizure and seemd disposed to Use him very roughly, but were prevented by the Interposition of some who either rescued or beg’d him off.”

Finally, the New London crowd attacked the top local Customs official symbolically, the same way Bostonians had done in June 1768 and Newporters had done a few days before. The men

repaired to Mr Stewart’s Wharf seized the Boat hauld her ashore hoisted her sails with all Appurtenances except the Iron Ballast which they threw on shore, then drag’d her in triumph to a rising ground near the Town where they burnt her, on the Morning of the 26th very early

That makes a total of four burned boats, with the Liberty itself still to come.

Miller and Moffatt reported that “poor Willson set out on foot for Boston who can inform your Honors more exactly of this Mob and of what has been said and done to him.” In Boston, Willson testified to Justice Murray and reported to the Commissioners of Customs, who gave him £2.5 for his troubles.

Surveyor Thomas Dare “thought it best to retire for the present,” his colleagues reported, though by the end of 27 August they expected him to “return here this day and We have some assurance that he will not be insulted.”

TOMORROW: The Customs service strikes back.

The Privilege of Printing Parliamentary Debates

Every so often I’ve mentioned how in the 1760s the British press was wary of reporting the exact language of Parliament’s debates.

There’s no official record of the debate over the Stamp Act, for instance, or the debate to repeal it. Instead, we have to rely on private letters and memoirs, which often disagree. (Of course, official records can also disagree with letters and memoirs, and with what legislators actually said.)

In 1767 the bookseller John Almon offered a Political Register which reported on the Earl of Camden’s speech against the Declaratory Act the year before. But Almon protected himself by referring only to how “L— C——” spoke to the “B—— p———” on the issue of taxing the “A——— c——.” And he never published a second volume because of government pressure.

This portrait of London alderman Richard Oliver is another document of that debate over open government. As the website of Britain’s ArtFund explains:

In 1771 a messenger of the House arrested [John] Miller, the printer of the London Evening Post, for a breach of privilege for publishing Parliamentary debates. Richard Oliver, an Alderman of Billingsgate Ward and MP for the City[,] was a magistrate on the case together with Brass Crosby, the Lord Mayor, and Alderman John Wilkes.

The Court released Miller[,] but Crosby and Oliver were ordered to attend the House of Commons, where their actions were declared a breach of privilege. Both were committed to the Tower of London in March and not released until the end of the Parliamentary session in May.

While in the Tower both Crosby and Oliver had their portraits painted by Robert Edge Pine, a portrait and history painter who was a supporter of Wilkes and a man of strong radical sympathies. In consequence of Crosby and Oliver’s stand against the House, no attempt has since been made to prevent publication of parliamentary speeches.

The transcripts that Miller printed came from Almon. Around that same time, the government also prosecuted those two men for reprinting the Letters of Junius, winning convictions but losing the political battle. In 1774, Almon established the Parliamentary Register as a regular publication, and soon the British public felt entitled to know what Members of Parliament were saying.

This fight for press freedom was closely tied to the debate over Britain’s policy toward America. Almon supported American autonomy. Oliver was one of the few M.P.’s to vote against the Boston Port Bill in 1774 (as well as a distant cousin of Massachusetts lieutenant governor Thomas Oliver). The artist Pine, who briefly tutored Prince Demah, and the printer Miller both moved to America around the end of the war.