The Desk Calendar Contest Answers!

Here are the answers to this week’s Desk Calendar Challenge, challenging readers to identify men related to the American Revolution who were named either William Smith or John Robinson, for the most part.

1) Member of Parliament and Secretary of the Treasury in London from 1770 to 1782, he was Lord North’s principal political fixer.

This was John Robinson (1727-1802). The phrase “before you can say Jack Robinson” appeared in the late 1700s, so some authors have theorized that it referred to this man, but that seems unlikely.

2) Aide-de-camp to Gen. John Sullivan, Gen. Lafayette, and finally Gen. George Washington, he served as a diplomat and a Congressman, and became an in-law to John Adams.

William Stephens Smith (1755-1816), who married the younger Abigail Adams. (Shown here, courtesy of the New York Public Library.)

3) An officer in the Westford militia company in 1775, he took part in the provincials’ advance toward the North Bridge without his men. Eleven years later he returned to Concord to help close the county courts during the Shays’ Rebellion.

John Robinson (1735-1805).

4) Appointed a Commissioner of Customs, he went into hiding after a coffee-house brawl and sailed secretly to London with a set of pro-Crown reports about the Boston Massacre.

Another John Robinson (died before 1783). He was the man who clubbed James Otis, Jr., in 1769. Wondering whether this guy surfaced at Lord North’s side made me notice how many John Robinsons there were.

5) A historian of colonial New York, he railed against the idea of an Anglican bishop for America and sought compromises between Patriots and the Crown. He served as Chief Justice of both New York and Québec/Lower Canada.

William Smith (1728-1793).

6) Born in Charleston, South Carolina, he spent the entire Revolutionary War as an attorney in England. Back in America, he was elected to the first five Congresses under the new Constitution.

William Loughton Smith (1758-1812), as opposed to William Smith (1751-1837), who fought in the Revolutionary War, represented South Carolina in the U.S. House for only one term, and was in the opposite party.

7) Invited to America by Benjamin Franklin, he helped to set up both the University of Pennsylvania and Washington University. He lobbied for an Anglican bishop for America and was driven from Philadelphia as a suspected Loyalist.

The Rev. William Smith (1727-1803), shown at right.

8) By training a carpenter, he had to leave Cambridge, Massachusetts, after the “Powder Alarm.” After convincing the Crown to support a settlement at Penobscot Bay in Maine, where he owned land, he endured a siege by Massachusetts forces.

This is our odd man out: John Nutting (1740-1800).

9) He’s one of America’s leading historians on the poor in the late colonial and early national period, particularly in Philadelphia.

Billy G. Smith, Distinguished Professor of Letters & Science at Montana State University.

10) He died in office after serving for many years as both Speaker of the House of Burgesses and Treasurer in Virginia, and the government discovered he’d embezzled large sums of money.

John Robinson (1705-1766).

11) Theologically liberal minister of the town of Weymouth, Massachusetts, he became an in-law to John Adams.

The Rev. William Smith (1707-1783), father and tutor of First Lady Abigail Adams. Yes, John Adams’s father-in-law and son-in-law were both named William Smith.

And the winner of the Colonial Williamsburg desk calendar for 2013 is commenter G. Lovely! Please send me an email with your surface-mail address, and that prize will be in the mail next week.

John Nutting Finds Work in Boston

Yesterday I described carpenter John Nutting’s decision in September 1774 to leave Cambridge, where he had been born in 1740, and take refuge in Boston, under the protection of the British troops. Soon afterwards, he brought his wife and several children into Boston, too.

Many of those troops needed barracks. Some were living in public buildings, some in tents on Boston Common—and the winter was coming on. (Contrary to a popular misconception, families weren’t forced to host soldiers in their homes under the Quartering Act.) The quartermaster rented some unused warehouses and distilleries, as his predecessor had in 1768, but had to find space for many more regiments.

Gen. Thomas Gage proposed building new barracks for the men. The Boston selectmen tried to make that as difficult as possible, resolving on 24 Sept 1774:

that should the mechanicks or other inhabitants of this town assist the troops by furnishing them with artificers labourers or materials of any kind to build barracks or other places of accommodation for the troops, they will probably incur the displeasure of their brethren, who may withhold their contributions for the relief of the town, and deem them as enemies to the rights and liberties of America, by furnishing the troops with conveniences for their residence and accommodation in this town.

It’s not that the selectmen wanted the soldiers living all over Boston. Rather, they wanted those soldiers moved to the barracks at Castle William on an island in the harbor, or someplace else inconvenient. American Whigs believed that showing the royal authorities how united the people were in opposing the troops and Parliament’s new laws could convince the London government to back down.

John Nutting was a carpenter who had built houses in both Cambridge and around Penobscot Bay. He knew other men with building skills. He needed work. So, as he later told a delegation from the Loyalists Commission:

he undertook the building Barracks, &c. & brought 40 men from the Country to work for the Troops. . . . At this time no workmen were to be had at Boston, & his conduct in procuring workmen & carrying on the public works made him so disagreeable to the people of Boston, that he could not stir without a guard.

Another of Nutting’s submission to the Loyalists Commission provided a more detailed account:

Several members of the Rebel Committee called on him and used every perswasion and promised every advantage to induce him to quit the King’s Works; but after finding their Entreaties without effect they proceeded to Violence;

a Mob the next day having concealed themselves, seized on your Memorialist on his Way from thence to his Lodgings in Boston and after almost killing him put him on board a Boat under charge of Four men with directions to convey him to Cambridge to be examined by the Committee then sitting there;

but, fortunately for your Memorialist, thro’ perswasion and a small consideration they were prevailed on to set him at Liberty near Cambridge from whence he returned to his Duty at the Lines; in passing from whence to his Lodgings or otherways, General Gage was pleased in future to furnish him with a Party of Men to protect him from the Insults of the Inhabitants.

Nutting added that he “continued in the Public Works about Six Weeks before the evacuation of Boston.” I suspect he left for his land in Maine at that time because his name doesn’t appear on the list of locals who evacuated with the British military in March 1776.

Nutting was unusual among those Loyalists, as I think he recognized when he later described himself as “the first person of an American that entered into the King’s service when the troubles began.” By that he probably meant that few people with old New England, Congregationalist roots were going to work for the Crown in 1774.

But once Nutting had thrown his lot in with the king, he didn’t go back. He was formally banished by the Massachusetts General Court in 1778. Nutting continued to work for the Crown through the war and finally settled in Newport (now Brooklyn), Nova Scotia, where he died in 1800.

John Nutting: Loyalist Carpenter

This is the anniversary of the Powder Alarm, the brief uprising of New England militiamen in 1774 that presaged the Battle of Lexington and Concord the following April. One of the men caught up in that event was John Nutting (1740-1800), a Cambridge carpenter and militia officer. The local historian Samuel Francis Batchelder published an article about Nutting in 1912.

Nutting was born into a poor branch of an old New England family, and trained as a housewright. He married his master’s daughter Mary Walton and started having children with her in 1762, having bought land on the east side of what’s now Massachusetts Avenue opposite Waterhouse Street, very close to Cambridge Common. In the 1760s he did a substantial £140 worth of work on Elmwood, the mansion of future lieutenant governor Thomas Oliver (shown here).

Nutting also invested in land and houses up at Penobscot Bay in Maine, and got himself overextended financially about 1770. He mortgaged his Cambridge properties and stopped making payments for his pew in the Congregationalist meeting-house. Early in 1774, Nutting joined Christ Church—one of only a few Anglican churches in the province.

Because Nutting had served in the Massachusetts militia during the French & Indian War, first marching west at age seventeen, it was natural for his neighbors to choose him as a militia officer. His new religious affiliation might have made him seem reliable to Crown officials; the relatively few Anglicans in Middlesex County were clearly more supportive of the royal government than the Congregationalist majority. And that combination of circumstances put Nutting in a delicate position.

In the late summer of 1774, as large crowds closed western county court sessions and held meetings in defiance of the Massachusetts Government Act, Gov. Thomas Gage decided he had to take control of the province’s supply of gunpowder stored in a stone tower in what is now Somerville. This is Nutting’s account of what happened to him next.

He was quiet until August, 1774, when he was required by Colonel [David] Phipps [who was also Middlesex County sheriff] to assist him in removing the gun Powder from Cambridge to Boston [on 1 September], which he did, although the Mob, desired & insisted that as an officer of Militia he should prevent the ordnance stores from being moved.

This conduct made him very obnoxious to his Countrymen—he was obliged to fly to Boston

Nutting didn’t state exactly when he left Cambridge, at least not in this testimony to Commissioners who visited Canada in 1785 to interview Loyalists. But the Powder Alarm involved up to 4,000 men crowding into Cambridge on 2 Sept 1774 and demanding apologies from everyone who was assisting the royal governor. That event revealed that Gage no longer exercised any authority in Massachusetts beyond the gates of Boston. And unlike Phips, Oliver, and other high officials, Nutting wasn’t protected by the society’s traditional deference to gentlemen. It looked like a good time for a “precipitous Retreat.”

TOMORROW: John Nutting finds work in Boston.