Conversations to Watch and Texts to Read

At the start of the month I participated in a couple of online conversations recorded for history.

First was the “Onesimus and Rev. Cotton Mather: Race, Religion, and the Press in Colonial America” organized by the Freedom Forum. This was part of a series titled “Religious Resolve,” and it focused on the response to smallpox in Boston in 1721. Here’s the recording.

Here are some of the texts and studies we mentioned in this discussion: 

• John Adams’s account of being inoculated against smallpox in 1764.
• Abigail Adams’s account of having her household inoculated in 1776.
• Benjamin Franklin’s remarks on his son not being inoculated, in 1736 and decades later.
• Kathryn Koo’s article “Strangers in the House of God: Cotton Mather, Onesimus, and an Experiment in Christian Slaveholding” (P.D.F. download).
• Lorenzo J. Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776 (1942).
• William D. Pierson, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (1988).
• Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (1996).
• Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (2002).
• Alex Goldfeld, The North End, A Brief History of Boston's Oldest Neighborhood (2009).
• C. S. Manegold, Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North (2009).
• Stephen Coss, The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics (2009).
• Jared Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (2016).

The second recording comes from the Dr. Joseph Warren Historical Society, founded by Christian DiSpigna and Randy Flood. They’ve been posting a series of video interviews with authors and invited me to be a guest host for a conversation with Serena Zabin about her new book The Boston Massacre: A Family History. That recording is here.

In addition to Zabin’s new book, we talked about some older texts, and here’s what I remember:

• Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (1970).
• The Legal Papers of John Adams, edited by L. Kinvin Wroth and Zobel (1965), readable here.
• A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, Boston’s official report on the event, readable here.
• My articles on Pvt. John Moies of the 14th Regiment, starting here.

“Tracking Down Deserters” at Minute Man Park, 17 Sept.

Every year, Massachusetts historical institutions try to make the end of summer a little easier with a flurry of public events in September and October. This month there are so many they’re landing on top of each other.

So over the next week I’ll highlight upcoming local events focused on the Revolutionary period, with links to the hosting organizations. Check out the schedules posted on those websites for listings of even more events.

To start off, I myself will be presenting at Minute Man National Historical Park’s first 18th Century Research Forum on Thursday, 17 September. My topic is “Tracking Down Deserters.” By that I mean not the armies’ efforts to bring men back to the ranks, but the historiographical quest to find those men in the historical records. Here’s the précis:

Men who deserted from the British Army to the Continentals (or vice versa) are among the most intriguing characters of the Revolutionary War. Researching them is especially knotty because sources on their lives are often far apart in perspective, not to mention distance. Furthermore, those men had good reasons to conceal their pasts—so well in some cases that our standard histories still tell their cover stories.

I’ll talk about John Moies, Andrew Brown, and a prominent captain in the Continental artillery. I view these investigations as ongoing, so I hope to speak informally about the research process, and look forward to hearing about other people’s projects and interests.

This event starts at 7:30 P.M. in the Minute Man Visitor Center, 250 North Great Road in Lincoln. All are welcome. Future forums will be held every other month until March.

John Moies, Boston retailer

Pvt. John Moies of the 14th Regiment was convicted of robbing a shop in 1769, as I described in my last two postings. He was sentenced to be whipped and sold into servitude for three years—and his commanding officer got the distinct impression that Pvt. Moies was pleased to get out of the army, even in such a painful way.

Moies probably went to work in Dorchester, then a town just outside Boston. He married Ruth Davenport there on 19 Sept 1771, and town records show "John Moies & his Family" settling in Dorchester that year.

On 3 March 1773, John Moies and Ruth Davenport showed up at Trinity Church, shown here thanks to Julie L. Sloan. It was one of Boston's three Anglican churches (Dorchester had none). The Moises brought two children they wanted baptized: John, born 16 Feb 1772 (or five months after the couple's marriage), and Mary Davenport, born 9 Dec 1772 (a surprising ten months after her brother).

Between 1774 and 1780, John and Ruth Moies had five more children baptized at Trinity. One, named James, died a day afterwards, only ten days old. Two others were named John, indicating that the couple's first two sons of that name did not live long, either. That leaves four children who might have grown to adulthood. John Moies also acted as sponsor at the baptism of another family's baby, Joshua Convers Hyde, in 1777.

Moies's name shows up as a taxpayer on Boston's 1780 "Takings" list, and in 1781 the town granted him a license to sell liquor as a retailer (as opposed to a tavern-keeper) at "the Head of Long Lane." Furthermore, in 1783 John Moies made out a deposition that stated:

in the month of March 1776 I was desired of John Andrews to go into Mr. Samuel Elliot's Store in Wilsons Lane and to watch there in order to prevent the British Soldiers then in town from plundering the goods in the store. When I first entered I found the floor covered near two feet deep with bound books, pamphlets, and books in sheets, very much torn and defaced. The books appeared to have been taken out of four or five trunks of boxes then standing on the floor, other boxes and bales of goods marked with Mr. Elliot's mark were broke open and scattered about the store

Thus, within seven years of Moies's sentence for theft, Boston shopkeepers trusted him to stop British soldiers from looting. (Not that he actually managed to do so.) Other records indicate he lived on Milk Street and, in 1789, served in fire engine company #7. A decade after being arrested in a British army uniform, Moies was an American citizen, working and raising a family in Boston even while the U.S. of A. was at war with Britain.

Moies died in Boston on 12 May 1789, aged forty-nine, his death recorded at Trinity Church. It looks like his son John moved back to Dorchester by 1798, having children there with his wife Mary.

John Moies, British private and prisoner

In May 1769, John Moies was about twenty-nine years old, a private in His Majesty's 14th Regiment of Foot, stationed in Boston. He was also one of six soldiers brought up on charges for (as I described yesterday) robbing the shop of John Carnes. The indictment listed these stolen goods:

• 40 shillings in coins
• 22 pairs of men's shoes
• 36 woolen stockings
• 3 pairs of black mitts
• 20 watch seals
• various amounts of fabric, ranging from "25 yards of holland" worth £6 to "one yard of cambric" worth 8 shillings

The editors of The Legal Papers of John Adams point out that "the minutes [of the case] contain no direct evidence of theft, only the circumstantial evidence of possession of the stolen goods." Since the list above differs from what Carnes advertised as missing, however, I think the indictment probably described what goods the prosecution could prove thieves had taken—i.e., what people had recovered or testified to.

In any event, there was enough evidence for the Boston jury to convict Moies of theft. (Of the other five soldiers, four were never tried and the last acquitted.) Moies was sentenced to a whipping of "20 stripes on the naked back" and ordered to pay Carnes triple damages—a whopping sum of £78.13s.6d.

Since Moies couldn't possibly pay that amount, the court quickly ruled under an old Massachusetts law that Carnes was "fully authorized and impowered to sell and dispose of said John Moyse to any of His Majesty's subjects for the space and term of three years." British commanders fumed about a soldier being sold into servitude this way. From New York, Gen. Thomas Gage suggested that a soldier in that situation should be rescued by force and hidden on a navy warship, writing:

Such an infamous piece of Tyranny, savours more of the Meridian of Turkey than a British Province. It is a trite Remark, that these Bawlers against Government under the pretense of Liberty, are always the greatest Tyrants. It is not Tyranny they dislike, they only Squabble for the Power to become Tyrants.

Back in Boston, Gen. Alexander Mackay tried to arrange a settlement between Moies and Carnes, as he had managed to do for another soldier convicted of theft. But his talk with this private shocked him: Moies didn't want to be redeemed. He was apparently glad to go into some sort of servitude. It was "a connivance," Mackay wrote Gage, "in order to secure him his Discharge, or in other words a sort of Legall Dismission from the Regiment." Mackay declared Moies was "a Rascall."

I must add that the muster rolls of the 14th Regiment, which I examined in Britain's National Archives, show that officers continued to list John Moies as in "Prison" until at least May 1772. And during those years the War Office in London continued to send his pay to the regiment's colonel.

The trial of Pvt. Moies is discussed in the second volume of The Legal Papers of John Adams, the commanders' response in The Boston Massacre. I thank Hiller B. Zobel, co-editor of the first and author of the second, for bringing those sources to my attention last year.

TOMORROW: Whatever happened to John Moies?