Knowing Your Enemy by Name

The two pieces of testimony I quoted over the last two days have something in common besides how they both described violence between locals and soldiers near the ropewalks in central Boston.

In both cases the person describing the 3 Mar 1770 fight, putting all the blame on those nasty people on the other side, could also name one of those opponents.

Archibald McNeal wasn’t just menaced by unknown grenadiers, identifiable only by the wings on their uniforms. Rather, he referred to “One of the grenadiers, named Dixson.”

Pvt. John Rodgers didn’t say he was attacked by three anonymous Bostonians. He fingered one of them as Joseph Shed, whom we can identify as a carpenter.

That pattern reflects the extensive ties between soldiers and civilians that Serena Zabin explores in The Boston Massacre: A Family History. Since late 1768 soldiers had been living in Boston, a town of only 16,000 people. People saw each other on the streets, in taverns, in churches. In some cases soldiers worked part-time alongside locals. Their wives boarded with local homeowners. More than a few redcoats wooed or married Boston women.

As a result, some civilians knew some soldiers as individuals, and vice versa. They may not have liked each other, but their relationships went deeper than simply redcoat and local.

Another example of this phenomenon that Zabin highlights is the case of James Bailey, a sailor who was at the 3 March ropewalk confrontation and at the Massacre two days later.

At the ropewalk, Bailey was a bit of a provocateur, asking young McNeal why he didn’t answer the grenadiers’ taunts. (And then, not having a weapon to counter the soldiers’ bludgeons either, Bailey shut up.) But he could also be friendly to a soldier.

On King Street, Bailey testified, he spotted Pvt. Hugh White standing guard outside the Customs office and being badgered by angry boys. [Rightly so, I’d say, but that’s another story.] “I went up to him because I knew him, and to see what was the matter,” the sailor said—i.e., what was all this ruckus about?

When I first went up to him, I said, what is the matter? He said he did not know. The boys were throwing pieces of ice at him, and after I went to him, they threw no more; I stood with him five or six minutes.

Bailey was actually “standing along with the Sentry, on the Custom-house steps,” in effect shielding White from attack. During that time, the sailor recalled, “He said very little to me, only that he was afraid, if the boys did not disperse, there would be something very soon, he did not mention what.”

Pvt. White, in turn, looked out for Bailey. When more soldiers arrived from the main guard, one of them was Pvt. John Carroll. Bailey recognized him from the ropewalk a couple of days before, and it’s quite possible Carroll recognized him. Bailey stated:

When the soldiers came down, Carrol came up to me and clapt his bayonet to my breast, and White said do not hurt him. . . .

Montgomery…was the very next person to me, close to me. When White told him not to hurt me, he took his hand and pushed me right behind him.

Bailey was one of the witnesses who said Pvt. Edward Montgomery fired the first shot after being hit, though he disagreed with other witnesses on what happened just before that. Bailey had such a close-up view of the shooting because Pvt. White perceived him as friendly.

“There is one Soldier a Coming, knock him down”

Here’s another piece of testimony about the spillover brawls on 3 March.

John Rodgers was a private in His Majesty’s 29th Regiment of Foot. In July 1770 he testified to a magistrate in New Jersey about the fight, signing his deposition with a mark.

According to Rodgers:

on the Third of March Last as he was walking From the Grenadier Barracks, to General [John] Pomeroys, Barracks opposite to the Rope Walks, There was four or five Men standing together one of whom said, there is one Soldier a Coming, knock him down, upon which Joseph Shed, an Inhabitant and two more Men Came out of a House Opposite the Rope walk’s with Faulchins in their Hands & Knock’d this Deponent Down, Fractur’d his Scull, & Broke his Arm, without any the least provocation and one of the Same Men cryed out, Damn him Kill him,

this Deponent knowing he should get no Redress, made no further Complaint,

“Faulchins” appears to mean “falchions,” which were either curved swords, like scimitars, or billhooks, the non-lethal weapon that Boston watchmen sometimes carried. Either way, Rodgers blamed locals for an unprovoked violence.

The assailant Rodgers identified was Joseph Shed (1738–1812), a carpenter whose name doesn’t otherwise come up in the record of the Boston Massacre. However, in the earliest published list of men involved in the Boston Tea Party from 1835, the second name is Joseph Shed. After the war he was a prosperous grocer in Boston said (by his family) to be close to Gov. John Hancock. Pvt. Rodgers’s deposition appears to be the first document to tie Shed to the resistance against the Crown.

Was Rodgers involved in the confrontation described by Archibald McNeal (as I quoted yesterday)? McNeal was quite clear that three grenadiers came to his father’s ropewalk looking for a fight, though the actual violence might have been short-lived. In that case, Rodgers’s description was misleading.

But perhaps Rodgers was unlucky enough to walk through the same neighborhood after that fight, without companions or bludgeons, and thus became prey to Shed and his friends seeking revenge.

Or perhaps the confrontation Rodgers described took place earlier in the day, and the three grenadiers went to the ropewalk neighborhood looking for revenge on Shed and company but couldn’t find them, so they threatened young McNeal.

According to Rodgers, he made it back to his barracks with a fractured skull and a broken arm, yet didn’t lodge any complaint. Surely injuries that extensive would have mattered to his officers? Did he exaggerate his pains for Crown officials months later and hundreds of miles away, when there might pressure to do so and little fear of contradiction?

I don’t think we can answer those questions definitely, but these two accounts of the fight on 3 Mar 1770 show how the stupid argument that started between two men, ropemaker William Green and Pvt. Patrick Walker, kept sucking in more people.

TOMORROW: Naming names.