“Lurks about the wharves of this city”

Page 3 of William and Thomas Bradford’s Pennsylvania Journal for 13 Oct 1773 included a notice of a meeting of the American Philosophical Society and a proclamation from Gov. John Penn that the Crown had approved two bills the colonial assembly had passed back in March 1772 (a divorce and a naturalization).

In between those items was this announcement:

WHEREAS the infamous EBENEZER RICHARDSON, convicted of PERJURY and MURDER, has, at the instance of his special friend, Charles Paxton, been sent to this city as a pensioner to the —honorable Commissioners at Boston; and in consideration of his many special Services, has by them been rewarded with a quarterly payment, out of the money levied on the Americans, by an Act of Parliament, without their consent:

And whereas the said RICHARDSON, rioting in the spoils of his country, lurks about the wharves of this city, seeking an opportunity to distress the Trade of Philadelphia, and enslave America: And, in order more effectually to answer his vile purpose, has intimately connected himself with a certain T———, a Tide-Waiter here, who publicly declared “he would not only associate with the VILLAIN, EBENEZER, but with the DEVIL himself, if so ordered by the COMMISSIONERS,”

Now it is expected, that all Lovers of Liberty, in this Province, will make diligent search after the said RICHARDSON, and having found this Bird of Darkness, will produce him, tarred and feathered, at the Coffee-House, there to expiate his sins against his country, by a public recantation.

TAR AND FEATHERS.

N.B. The above RICHARDSON appears to be a man of 40 years of age, is about 5 feet 4 or 5 inches high, pretty thick and broad a-cross the shoulders, has a very ill countenance, and down look, [Cain’s Phyz,] mostly wears a flopped hat, a piss burnt cut wig, and a blue surtout coat, with metal buttons.

That’s quite a display of rhetoric. It makes something sinister from Richardson’s job in the Customs service: he “lurks about the wharves,” aims to “distress the Trade,” receives “a quarterly payment” (i.e., his salary). The item links him to “the DEVIL,” “Cain,” and a “Bird of Darkness.” It also contains the only physical description of the man that I’ve seen, not at all flattering. 

This article appears to have been written in Philadelphia by someone not fully familiar with Richardson’s long history in Massachusetts, picking up cues from Boston newspapers. The man was never “convicted of PERJURY,” to my knowledge. Bostonians called him a perjurer, including at the start of the riot at his house, because he’d deceived the public about his child with Kezia Hincher for several crucial months, and because painting him as a habitual liar let them cast doubt on his reports about smuggling and other activity.

The invocation of “TAR AND FEATHERS” is also striking because that public punishment hadn’t shown up in Philadelphia yet. Indeed, many Americans, even Whigs, viewed those incidents as New Englanders going too far. But the next month a broadside warning river pilots against bringing tea into Philadelphia would be issued by “THE COMMITTEE FOR TARRING AND FEATHERING.” (Or “Committee of Taring and Feathering,” as the next paragraph put it, showing the locals behind this threat were still working out details.)

Lastly, this newspaper notice overtly confronts the royal Customs service. It names one of the agency heads in Boston, verges on calling those men “[dis]honorable,” and refers to a local tide waiter by an initial everyone on the Philadelphia waterfront would recognize. That last seems like a clear threat.

TOMORROW: Results.

How Long Have Facts Been Stubborn Things?

On 4 December 1770, John Adams wound up his speech in defense of the soldiers tried for murder after the Boston Massacre by saying:

I will enlarge no more on the evidence, but submit it to you.—Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact; if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their own defence; if it was not so severe as to endanger their lives, yet if they were assaulted at all, struck and abused by blows of any sort, by snow-balls, oyster-shells, cinders, clubs, or sticks of any kind; this was a provocation, for which the law reduces the offence of killing, down to manslaughter, in consideration of those passions in our nature, which cannot be eradicated. To your candour and justice I submit the prisoners and their cause.

The words “Facts are stubborn things” are among the most useful and memorable things John Adams ever said.

But Adams didn’t coin that phrase. He was repeating an adage that the jurymen had probably already heard.

Quote Investigator found a close variant on the phrase in a 1713 book titled titled Treason Unmask’d:

But Matters of Fact are stubborn Things, and no Fact can be more certain, than that his See Was full of him, while between December 6, and January 10, he had committed several Treasons, and was put into Custody for them.

And an exact version in The Political State of Great Britain, November 1717:

But Facts are Stubborn Things And therefore, when he comes to the Proof of his Charge, I have a Right to demand of him, to keep to those Four Particulars which I have just now mentioned.

Other examples from the eighteenth century include E. Budgell’s Liberty and Progress from 1732, Bernard Mandeville’s An Enquiry into the Origin of Honor, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War from the same year, a 1747 essay on Field Husbandry, and Tobias Smollett’s translation of Gil Blas, published in 1748.

Founders Online shows the adage was used in America as well. On 17 May 1764, Gov. John Penn reminded the Pennsylvania Assembly:

As Facts are stubborn Things, and Truth does not stand in Need of any Colouring or Disguise, nothing more is necessary, in order to set the Controversy between us in its true Light, than to take a short and summary Review of the Transactions which gave Rise to it.

Benjamin Franklin, responding on behalf of the Pennsylvania assembly on 30 May, repeated the phrase:

But now you chuse to pass all over with a “silent Disregard,” reflecting probably on the Maxim you had before advanced, that “Facts are stubborn Things,” and despairing, it seems, by any “Colouring” to “disguise the Truth.”

John Adams himself used the adage again in a letter to Elbridge Gerry on 6 Dec 1777:

The rapid Translation of Property from Hand to Hand, the robbing of Peter to pay Paul distresses me, beyond Measure. The Man who lent another an 100 £ in gold four years ago, and is paid now in Paper, cannot purchase with it, a Quarter Part, in Pork, Beef, or Land, of what he could when he lent the Gold. This is Fact and Facts are Stubborn Things, in opposition to Speculation.

And Samuel Hoffman wrote to Alexander Hamilton on 28 Oct 1799:

It is a common observation that “Facts are stubborn things”—& I conclude it was on this ground that Lieut. Col. Smith advised me rather to resign quietly my Commission than risk the Event of a Court Martial…

(The facts in that case being that Hoffman had hidden a ten-dollar bill from a fellow lieutenant but insisted it was just a joke. He was dismissed.)

John McMurtry: “He did not know it was loaded”

On 1 Dec 1775, Pvt. Aaron Wright, stationed in Cambridge, wrote in his diary about a fellow rifleman:

John M’Murtry, in Capt. [James] Chambers’ company, killed John Penn, by his rifle going off, when, he says, he did not know it was loaded. He was cleaning the lock, and put it on and primed it to see how she would “fier.” It shot through a double partition of inch boards, and through one board of a berth, and went in at Penn’s breast, and out at his back, and left its mark on the chimney. Penn put his hand on his breast, and as he turned round, fell down dead, and never spoke more.

I haven’t been able to find out anything more about John Penn.

John McMurtry was in his early twenties. He grew up in Somerset County, New Jersey, but went to Pennsylvania to sign up with a rifle company after the Continental Congress started to raise troops for its newly adopted army in June 1775.

After the shooting, McMurtry reenlisted in the Continental Army for the following year. In fact, he was promoted to corporal on 1 July 1776. According to his pension application, he saw action at White Plains, Trenton, Brandywine, Paoli, and Germantown.

McMurtry recalled becoming a sergeant major and then an ensign on 1 Oct 1779. He resigned from the army on 1 Aug 1780. But then, he said, he went to Philadelphia and signed aboard a privateer named the Fair America under Capt. Stephen Decatur.

McMurtry and his new wife settled in what became Tennessee. He died in 1841. His pension application did not mention John Penn or any other event of note during the siege of Boston.

Who Said “Hang Separately”?

In his Memoirs of His Own Time, first published in 1811, Alexander Graydon wrote:

Both the brothers, John and Richard Penn [shown here], had been governors of Pennsylvania; the former being in office at the beginning of hostilities.

By yielding to the torrent, which it would have been impossible to withstand, he gave no offence, and avoided reproach; though it was deemed expedient to have him secured and removed from Philadelphia, on the approach of the royal army in the year 1777. Mr. Richard Penn, having no official motives for reserve, was even upon terms of familiarity with some of the most thorough-going whigs, such as General [Charles] Lee and others:

An evidence of this was the pleasantry ascribed to him, on occasion of a member of Congress, one day observing to his compatriots, that at all events “they must hang together:”

“If you do not, gentlemen,” said Mr. Penn, “I can tell you that you will be very apt to hang separately.”

Wait a minute! Didn’t Benjamin Franklin say that?

Indeed, Jared Sparks wrote in his biography of Franklin:

There is also another anecdote related of Franklin, respecting an incident which took place when the members were about to sign the Declaration. “We must be unanimous,” said [John] Hancock; “there must be no pulling different ways; we must all hang together.”

“Yes,” replied Franklin, “we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

But Sparks published his biography from 1836 to 1840, a quarter-century after Graydon had credited Richard Penn with the same line.

The editor of a later edition of Graydon’s memoir noted Sparks’s claim and added, “It has been ascribed also to Mr. John Penn, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and a member of Congress from North Carolina. Who shall settle the knotty point!”

Well, of course, this is America. Anything witty from the 1700s? We believe it had to come from Franklin.