“A Fire broke out on board the fine large Store-Ship”

While looking at the diary of Thomas Newell this spring, I was struck by this dramatic entry for 29 May 1773, 252 years ago today:

King’s store-ship burnt in this harbor. The inhabitants greatly surprised, fearing there was a great quantity of gunpowder on board. Thousands retired to the back part of the town, and over to Charlestown, &c.; but no powder happened to be on board.

John Rowe mentioned the same event in his diary, but he was out of town fishing during the panic, so his entry doesn’t preserve the same excitement.

For more detail I turned to the newspapers. Here’s the straightforward report in the 3 June Boston News-Letter:

at Noon, a Fire broke out on board the fine large Store-Ship, (which had been laying in this Harbour for several Months past commanded by Capt. [John] Walker, having Stores for the Navy) which soon communicated to the Masts, Rigging and Turpentine on the Deck, and before any Assistance came, her upper Works were almost wholly in a Blaze; so that little or no Attempt was made to extinguish it:—

The Boats from the Men of War, with some from the Town, towed the Ship over to Noddle’s Island, where, after scuttling her, she was left to burn to the Water’s Edge.—

The Fire, it is said, was occasioned by some Coals falling from the Hearth of the Cabouse on to the Deck, which had lately been pay’d over with Turpentine, and spread with such Rapidity that nothing could be taken out of her:—

The Captain, with his Wife and two Children, who usually kept on board, likewise a Boy (the other People belonging to her being ashore) were obliged to be taken out of the Cabin Windows, without being able to save the least Thing but what they had on:—

A report prevailing at the Time of the Fire, that a large Quantity of Powder was on board, put the Inhabitants in general into great Consternation, for fear of the Consequences that might arise from an Explosion thereof; but being afterwards assured that none was in her, they became perfectly easy, and the Hills and Wharfs were covered with Spectators to view so uncommon a Sight.

Some of the Stores in the Hold, such as Cordage, Cables, and Anchors, which were under Water before the Fire could reach them, will be saved.

A “caboose” was originally a ship’s galley, Merriam-Webster says. Advertisements from eighteenth-century America indicate a “caboose” could be sold separately from a ship, and in 1768 New York a man named Thomas Hempsted was killed by “the Caboose falling on him” as a ship keeled over. So I suspect it also meant the stove and other cooking equipment designed for a ship but not necessarily installed in a dedicated cabin.

The first documented use of the word “caboose” in English was in 1732, and Samuel Johnson didn’t include it in his 1755 dictionary. But everyone reading the Boston newspapers was expected to know what that meant.

TOMORROW: The conspiracy theories.

“Townspeople took four brass cannon”

Here are all the entries from Thomas Newell’s 1774–74 diary that pertain to artillery and thus show the coming of war.

• 4 June 1773: “King’s birthday; general training; the grandest appearance ever known in these parts.”

John Rowe wrote about this same militia exhibition in honor of the king:

Colo. [John] Hancock & Company of Cadets, Major [Adino] Paddock & Artillery, Colo. [John] Erving & the Regiment, Colo. [David] Phipps & Company all made their appearance in the Common — Such a Quantity or Rather Multitude of People as Spectators I never saw before, they behaved very well.

Phips commanded the horse guards.

• 1 July: “Major Paddock’s son drowned at Cambridge River.”

Adino Paddock was a coachmaker as well as commander of Boston’s militia artillery company. His son John was a student in Harvard College’s class of 1776, carrying the family’s hopes to secure their rise into gentility, when he died at age seventeen.

• 15 September: “General training.”
• 22 September: “General training for the last time this year.”
• 12 November: “Workmen began to set another row of elms in the common.”

Paddock instigated the planting of trees along Tremont Street, opposite his coachyard. Years after he had left Boston as a Loyalist, those would still be called the “Paddock elms.”

Gen. Thomas Gage arrived as the new royal governor in May 1774, and the following summer was punctuated by the arrival of more army units, including companies of Royal Artillery:

• 2 July: “A.M. Artillery from Castle William landed, with eight brass cannon, and encamped in the common. 258 sheep given for the relief of this town by the town of Windham, in Connecticut. (I cut my hair off.)”
• 6 August: ”The Scarboro. man-of-war arrived, nine weeks from England; P.M. three transports from Halifax, with the 59th Regiment on board, and company of artillery, and brass cannon, eight days out.”
• 7 August: “A.M. three transports from New York with the Royal Regiment of Welsh Fusileers and detachment of Royal Artillery, and a quantity of ordnance stores, &c.”
• 8 August: “Company of artillery landed; encamped in common.”

Soon after Gage put the Massachusetts Government Act into effect, he had his soldiers remove militia gunpowder from the storehouse in Charlestown. That set off a big reaction in the countryside:

• 1 September: “This morning, half after four, about 260 troops embarked on board thirteen boats at the Long Wharf, and proceeded up Mystic River to Temple Farm, where they landed; went to the powder-house on Quarry Hill, in Charlestown bounds, from whence they have taken 250 half-barrels of gunpowder, the whole store there, and carried it to the castle. A detachment from this corps went to Cambridge and brought off two field-pieces.”
• 2 September: “From these several hostile appearances, the county of Middlesex took the alarm, and on last evening began to collect in large bodies, with their arms, provisions, and ammunitions, &c. This morning some thousands of them advanced to Cambridge, armed only with sticks. The committee of Cambridge sent express to Charlestown, who communicated the intelligence to Boston, and their respective committee proceeded to Cambridge without delay. Thomas Oliver, S[amuel]. Danforth, J[oseph]. Lee, made declaration and resignation of a seat in the new constituted council, which satisfied the body. At sunset, they began to return home. At dark, rain and thundered very hard.”

That “Powder Alarm” uprising prompted Gen. Gage and Adm. Samuel Graves to strengthen Boston’s military defenses against attacks from land.

• 3 September: “Four large field-pieces were dragged from the common by the soldiery and placed at the only entrance into this town by land. The Lively frigate, of twenty guns, came to her mooring in the ferry-way between Boston and Charlestown.”
• 5 September: “Artillery training.”
• 15 September: “Last night all the cannon in the North Battery were spiked up: it is said to be done by about one hundred men (who came in boats) from the man-of war in this harbor.”
• 17 September: “Last night, townspeople took four brass cannon from the gun-house near very near the common.”

Newell conflated two events in that last entry. Maj. Paddock’s militia artillery had two gunhouses, each containing one pair of small cannon. As other sources show, persons unknown spirited away the two cannon in the old gunhouse on the night of 14–15 September. When Royal Artillery officers opened the new gunhouse on 17 September, they discovered its two cannon were gone, too.

Newell’s diary entry shows that many Bostonians knew about those events even though they were never reported in the newspapers or in Gen. Gage’s letters to the government in London.

• 20 September: “Some cannon removed (by the man-of war’s men) from the mill-pond.”

People had tried to smuggle these guns up the Charles River, but their boat got hung up on the dam that formed the Mill Pond and they had to abandon it.

• 3 October: “Artillery training for the last time this year.”

Since the train’s weapons had vanished, and most of the company’s men were refusing to serve under Maj. Paddock, there probably wasn’t a lot of artillery training accomplished that day.

• 22 October: “This morning, about 7 o’clock, after three days’ illness, Mr. William Molineaux died, in the fifty-eighth year of his age. (A true son of liberty and of America.) It may with truth be said of this friend, that he died a martyr to the interest of America. His watchfulness, labors, distresses, and exertions to promote the general interest, produced an inflammation in his bowels, of which he died. ‘Oh, save my country, Heaven,’ he said, and died.”

Molineux was involved in many acts of resistance, and among the last was buying four cannon from Duncan Ingraham, Jr., in September or October 1774. Those guns were sent out to four rural towns to be equipped for use by spring. 

• 23 October: “This day four transports arrived here from New York, with a company royal artillery, a large quantity of ordnance stores for Castle William, three companies of the Royal Regiment of Ireland, or the 18th Regiment, and the 47th Regiment on board.”

This one document thus shows us both sides of the political conflict preparing for military action—with cannon.

Ultimately those efforts led to the British army’s march to Concord and to war. I’ll tell that story at the Scituate Historical Society this week.

Thursday, 15 May, 7–8:30 P.M.
Secrets on the Road to Concord
G.A.R. Hall, 353 Country Way, Scituate

Admission is $15, or $10 for society members. Reservations are recommended, but payment will be accepted at the door. I look forward to meeting folks there.

TOMORROW: Thomas Newell and the tea.

Sconyers on Boston’s Street Lamps, 18 Mar.

Old North Illuminated is living up to its name by hosting an online presentation by Jake Sconyers on the topic “They Burnt Tolerable Well: The Tea Party & Boston’s First Street Lamps” on Tuesday, 18 March.

The event description says:

In the 1770s, Boston was in a state of transformation and upheaval. While we mostly think of the American Revolution as the driver of this whirlwind of change, a technological revolution was happening at the same time. The introduction of street lamps in Boston had a profound effect on how people behaved at night.

The political revolution and the technological revolution were intertwined, with the effects of one impacting the other—including at pivotal moments like the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party.

Sconyers will touch on these “burning” questions:

• How did Boston’s very first street lamps survive a shipwreck and the Boston Tea Party?
• Why did Boston decide to buy English oil lamps for the streets but fuel them with American whale oil?
• Why did Boston vote to let its new street lamps sit dark after just a few months of illumination?
• How did the Boston Port Act affect the cost of street lighting?

Not to mention how the events of April 1775 might have been different if Boston’s main streets had been lit up at night.

Jake Sconyers is the host of the HUB History podcast, formerly cohosted by Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North. The podcast has discussed these lamps, but I don’t recall it addressing all these details.

Register for this online event with a donation of any amount to Old North Illuminated through this webpage.

Looking at Lexington and Concord through Eighteenth-Century Eyes

Last month Alexander Cain at Historical Nerdery announced a resource for people researching the Battle of Lexington and Concord ahead of next spring’s Sestercentennial: a list of links to eyewitness accounts of the day.

That listing will be very useful, and it can grow. Perforce these are texts that have been digitized in one way or another. I’m sure that more lurk within books, newspapers, and letters. It’s a matter of ferreting them out and/or digitizing them in usable forms.

For instance, here is the list’s link to Gen. Thomas Gage’s instructions to Lt. Col. Francis Smith for the march to Concord on 18–19 April.

We also have what appears to be Gage’s notes or first draft of those instructions, quoted in General Gage’s Informers (1932) by Allan French. A digital version of that book can be borrowed from the Internet Archive, at least for now. Look on pages 29–30.

Since the Massachusetts Historical Society has scanned merchant John Rowe’s diaries, we can see his response to the news coming into Boston here. A transcription of what a descendant thought were the most important parts of that diary was published a century ago. Among the details one can find only in the handwritten journal is that on 20 April Capt. John Linzee, R.N., dined and spent the evening at Rowe’s house after fending off an attack on his ship on the Charles River.

It’s possible to identify the sources of some anonymous accounts. One resource on the list, Ezekiel Russell’s “Bloody Butchery by the British Troops” broadside, includes text headlined “SALEM, April 25.” Those paragraphs commence: “LAST Wednesday, the nineteenth of April, the troops of his Britannic Majesty commenced hostilities upon the people of this province…”

The preceding paragraphs come with a source citation—not coincidentally, to Russell’s own Salem Gazette newspaper. But Russell didn’t give his competition publicity by revealing that he took the second and longer passage from Samuel Hall’s Essex Gazette for 25 April. That text was later imperfectly transcribed in Peter Force’s American Archives.

The 3 May Massachusetts Spy on the list includes an unsourced story about what happened “When the expresses [from Boston] got about a mile beyond Lexington.” That story matches one that William Dawes’s family recalled hearing from him, revealing that Dawes was probably printer Isaiah Thomas’s source.

Among the lately revealed visual resources is this hand-drawn map in the Library of Congress. I’m convinced by Ed Redmond’s hypothesis that Ens. Henry DeBerniere created this map ahead of the march to Concord. It thus offers a look at what British army officers knew of the countryside west of Boston. (I discussed details of that map starting here.)

TOMORROW: A source from May 1775.

“The Majority were four to One against them”

On 28 June 1774, the Boston town meeting witnessed “long Debates” about the committee of correspondence’s call for a non-consumption agreement, according to town clerk William Cooper’s record.

In his diary the merchant John Rowe confirmed, “The Debates very warm on both sides.” Unlike the previous day, alas, he didn’t record any of the speakers.

But the group urging a repudiation of the committee consisted mainly of major merchants, some with positions within the royal government. They worried that this boycott, on top of the Boston Port Bill, would doom the town’s economy.

The leaders of the Whigs, in reply, argued that standing up to Parliament’s Coercive Acts by not buying any more from Britain was their best way to force the repeal of those laws.

Eventually the meeting held a vote on the merchants’ motion to censure. Cooper recorded that “a great Majority” voted against repudiating the committee.

Rowe expressed disappointment, at least in his diary:

the Committee are wrong in the matter. The Merchants have taken up against them, they have in my Opinion exceeded their Power & the Motion was Put that they should be dismissed. the Gentlemen that made & supported this Motion could not Obtain their Vote, the Majority were four to One against them.

this affair will cause much evil one against the other. I wish for Peace in this Town I fear the Consequences.

The Whigs then sought to affirm the town’s support for the committee by offering their own motion:

That the Town bear open Testimony that they are abundantly satisfied of the upright Intentions, and much approve the honest Zeal of the Comittee of Correspondence & desire that they would persevere with their usual Activity & Firmness, continuing stedfast in the Way of well Doing

A “Vast” majority approved that.

After that, Samuel Adams returned to the chair, the committee on employing the poor said they were once again not ready to report, and the meeting adjourned until July.

That was the last attempt of the Boston Loyalists and/or merchants to curb the Whigs electorally, and they fell far short. Which wasn’t a surprise. The Whigs won every vote along the way, even on matters like which men would go ask if the gathering could move to the Old South Meeting-House.

The Boston town meeting would remain stalwart and implacably opposed to the royal administration until the war began.

COMING UP: Protests against the protest.

“Town Meeting. Nothing done but Harangue.”

As recounted yesterday, in May 1774 the Boston town meeting named merchant John Rowe to its committee to formulate responses to the Boston Port Bill.

Rowe attended committee meetings on 14 and 16 May. In his diary he noted who else came but nothing more.

In contrast, Rowe had a lot to say about what happened on 17 May:

This morning Genl. [Thomas] Gage Our New Governour landed from the Castle after having breakfasted with Admiral [John] Montague on board the Captain Man of Warr—he was saluted by the Castle & the Captain Man of Warr & Rec’d at the Long Wharf by Colo. [John] Hancock’s Company of Cadets.

The [militia] Regiment was under arms in King street. The Company of Grenadiers made a good appearance. Capt. [Adino] Paddock’s Company of Artillery & Colo. [David] Phipps Company of [horse] Guards were also under arms in King street.

He came to the Town House, had his Commission Read by the Secretary [Thomas Flucker] & took the Usual Oaths—from thence he was escorted to Faneuil Hall where a good Dinner by his Majesty’s Council. There were but very few Gentlemen of the Town asked to dine there.

That last remark was Rowe consoling himself that he wasn’t invited. But the next day Rowe got to write: “I waited on Genl. Gage this morning who Received me very Cordially.”

Rowe had already expressed hope that the new governor would soften the blow of the new law: “God Grant his Instructions be not severe as I think him to be a Very Good Man.”

Notably, on the same day Gage received Rowe, the merchant skipped the next session of the town meeting. “I was so Busy I could not attend.”

He never mentioned sitting down with the town committee again. We can see Rowe’s allegiance solidify by the end of the month.

• 24 May: “The Merchants met at the Town House on Business of Importance.”
• 30 May: “I paid the General a visit this morning. Town Meeting. Nothing done but Harangue.”
• 2 June: “I met the Gentlemen Merchts at the West Side of the Court House in Boston.”

TOMORROW: More merchants’ voices.

“Spent most part of the Day with the Town Committee”

The merchant John Rowe had an unusual perspective on the crisis of the Boston Port Bill.

On the one hand, he cared most about his business and trimmed his politics accordingly. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson suspected him of being behind all sorts of nefarious deals, but the local crowd considered him “a great Tory.”

I suspect Rowe also liked being liked, “trimming” to play to his current audience. During the big public meetings on the ships full of East India Company tea, he made an offhand remark about mixing tea with saltwater. That got him applause, and the crowd believed he’d come over to the radicals. Privately Rowe was upset, but he didn’t try to clarify his stance.

In those same months Rowe was spearheading a complex and costly effort to import and install Boston’s first street lamps. He seems to have long hoped to be elected to public office, and here he was visibly serving the public. How long could he keep that up?

On 10 May 1774, the same day Boston reelected its representatives to the Massachusetts General Court, the town received the first shocking news of the new law. Rowe went back to that day’s diary entry to add: “The Harmony Capt. Shayler arrived from London & brings the Severest Act ever was Penned against the Town of Boston.”

Three days later, with the news confirmed, Rowe lamented the “Late Act of Parliament for Blocking up the Harbour of Boston which is & will be a Great Evill.”

On that day, Boston called a sudden town meeting, ultimately choosing a committee to recommend what to do. The citizens put Rowe on that committee. In fact, he was the second man named, right after Samuel Adams.

This committee of eleven included gentlemen from various groups:

• radical Whigs: Dr. Joseph Warren, William Molineux, along with Adams.
• more centrist politicians: Thomas Cushing, William Phillips, Henderson Inches.
• lawyers: John Adams, Josiah Quincy, Jr.
• merchants: Thomas Boylston, Nathaniel Appleton, and Rowe.

There was, to be sure, some overlap in those groups, particularly the centrists and merchants.

To his credit, Rowe actually participated in the committee discussions. On 14 May he “Spent most part of the Day with the Town Committee at the Representatives Room” inside the Town House and then went back on 16 May. Boylston and Appleton didn’t attend either of those meetings, so Rowe was the merchants’ voice.

Not that the discussions was productive. On 18 May, the committee reported back to the town that they had received “several Proposals & plans” but hadn’t had time to digest them. The ongoing meeting pushed them to hurry and come up with solutions.

Rowe never recorded attending any more of those committee discussions. Instead, he began to pay more attention to other sources of authority in town. As I wrote back here, he declined an invitation to chair the town meeting, and expressed deep disagreement with it—privately, of course.

TOMORROW: Here comes the general.

For and Against the Committee of Correspondence

During Boston’s town meeting session on 27 June 1774, town clerk William Cooper didn’t record who spoke.

But the merchant John Rowe did.

In his diary, Rowe listed the defenders of the standing committee of correspondence as:

• Samuel Adams.
• Dr. Joseph Warren.
• William Molineux.
• Josiah Quincy, Jr.
• Dr. Thomas Young.
• Benjamin Kent (1708–1788), a lawyer. He was a Whig, but he had Loyalist relatives and after the war he actually moved to Canada to be with his children.

Aside from Kent, those names are familiar to Boston 1775 readers. They were most of the town’s most visible Whig leaders. All but Kent had been named to the committee of correspondence back in 1772.

Speaking “against the Behaviour of the Committee” were:

• Harrison Gray (1711–1794, shown here), treasurer of Massachusetts, merchant.
• Thomas Gray (1721–1774), merchant, elected to the General Court for one term in 1764, half-brother to Harrison Gray.
• Samuel Elliot (1739–1820), merchant, later president of the Massachusetts Bank.
• Samuel Barrett (1722–1798), merchant, occasional town official, later a justice of the peace.
• John Amory (1728–1803), merchant, owner of a distillery.
• Edward Payne (1721-1788), merchant, shot during the Boston Massacre, later in marine insurance.
• Francis Green (1742–1809), merchant, British army veteran.
• Ezekiel Goldthwait (1710–1782), insurance broker, former town clerk, clerk of the courts, registrar of deeds.

Those men were evidently representing Boston’s merchants, not the friends of the royal government. Most of them weren’t politically active. Only Harrison Gray, Green, and Goldthwait had signed the addresses to the royal governors that spring. Gray and Goldthwait did have major government appointments, but they tried to present themselves as moderate centrists serving both the people and the Crown.

We don’t know what paths Thomas Gray would have chosen when war broke out and when the British military left Boston because he died after a carriage accident in November 1774. But we do known the political choices of all the other men.

Harrison Gray, Amory, and Green left Boston with the redcoats, becoming Loyalists. Amory and Green eventually returned to Massachusetts, however.

Elliot, Barrett, Payne, and Goldthwait stayed in Massachusetts, some serving in civic offices under the new republican order. Barrett appears to have thrown in with the Patriots just a couple of months after this town meeting, participating in the Suffolk County Convention and taking on wartime tasks for the state. In contrast, Goldthwait retired from public life.

The argument of this group was likely that, while it was important to stand up for liberty and protest unjust laws, the Boston committee of correspondence’s methods had been too confrontational and led the town into trouble. It was time to back off, settle accounts for the Tea Party, and reopen for business.

John Rowe himself wrote privately: “the Committee are wrong in the matter. The Merchants have taken up against them, they have in my Opinion exceeded their Power.” But he didn’t speak up in the meeting himself.

COMING UP: Mutual resentments.

When Adams Chaired the Boston Town Meeting

Friday, 17 June 1774, turned out to be the last day the Massachusetts assembly met under the Crown.

Before Gov. Thomas Gage shut them down, Samuel Adams and his allies used that session to authorize a delegation from the colony to the Continental Congress, as I’ve just recounted.

On the same day, there was the continuation of a town meeting in Boston. Some of that port’s merchants had started to grumble against the Whigs’ insistence that no one should pay for the tea destroyed in December (or in March, for that matter).

Adams was officially the moderator of that ongoing meeting. Expecting “a warm engagement” with the conciliatory party, Dr. Joseph Warren urged Adams to return to Boston to wield the gavel. But he was was stuck “at Salem, attending the Business of the General Court.”

At 10:00 A.M., the meeting began in Faneuil Hall. The first order of business was appointing a temporary moderator in Adams’s place. The gathering’s unanimous choice was James Bowdoin, a wealthy merchant, learned man, and genteel political leader for the Whigs.

A committee of three men went to Bowdoin’s home near Beacon Hill. He wasn’t there.

The meeting then selected merchant John Rowe to moderate. This was an unusual choice because Rowe was not a Whig stalwart. Nor was he really a Loyalist stalwart. He was a “trimmer,” adjusting his political sails according to the prevailing winds and what looked most advantageous to his business.

Perhaps the public remembered Rowe’s remark back in December about mixing tea and saltwater—the first public suggestion of that method of resolving the standoff over the East India Company cargo. Secretly Rowe appears to have regretted that remark and tried to keep a low profile afterward. So he would hardly want to chair a town meeting making controversial decisions.

In his diary Rowe wrote: “I was much engaged & therefore did not accept.” But he added a remark showing his real attitude: “The People at present seem very averse to Accommodate Matters. I think they will Repent of their Behaviour, sooner or later.”

Back at Faneuil Hall, the gathering moved on to vote for a gentleman who had never moderated the Boston town meeting before. In fact, he later said he usually kept away from town meetings. But he had represented Boston for one year in the Massachusetts General Court.

This was John Adams. Per the record, “a Committee of three Gentlemen” went to him with news of their choice, and Adams “gave his Attendance accordingly.”

TOMORROW: John Adams in the chair.

Boston’s “party who are for paying for the tea”

June 1774 was a tense time in Boston. At the start of the month the harbor was closed to trade, with Royal Navy warships enforcing that rule.

Army regiments were arriving: the 4th Regiment on 10 June, the 43rd Regiment on 15 June. These troops joined the men Gen. Thomas Gage had brought with him in May.

Many of the town’s merchants, fearing for their livelihood, were trying to devise a way to pay for the East India Company tea destroyed in December, compromising with the Crown and getting back to business.

The “no taxation without representation” crowd thought that would be giving in to an unjust power grab by Parliament.

Just as the Boston Whigs had organized opposition to landing that tea in meetings of “the Body of the People” rather than official town meetings, Boston’s business community had their own big but unofficial gathering.

Merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary on 15 June:

This Evening the Tradesmen of the Town met to Consult on the Distress of this Place

There were Upwards of eight hundred at this meeting – they did nothing being much Divided in Sentiment

Dr. Joseph Warren reported to Samuel Adams, who was in Salem with the Massachusetts General Court:

This afternoon was a meeting of a considerable number of the tradesmen of this town; but, after some altercations, they dissolved themselves without coming to any resolutions, for which I am very sorry, as we had some expectations from the meeting.

We are industrious to save our country, but not more so than others are to destroy it. The party who are for paying for the tea, and by that making a way for every compliance, are too formidable.

However, we have endeavored to convince friends of the impolicy of giving way in any single article, as the arguments for a total submission will certainly gain strength by our having sacrificed such a sum as they demand for the payment of the tea.

I think your attendance can by no means be dispensed with next Friday. I believe we shall have a warm engagement. . . .

You will undoubtedly do all in your power to effect the relief of this town, and to expedite a general congress; but we must not suffer the town of Boston to render themselves contemptible, either by their want of fortitude, honesty, or foresight, in the eyes of this and the other colonies.

Back on 30 May, the Boston town meeting had adjourned to Friday, 17 June. Warren wanted Adams back in Boston by then to chair that session. But Adams was busy pulling strings in Salem, and trying to keep those strings invisible from Daniel Leonard.

TOMORROW: Back in Salem, a plan comes together.

John Linzee and “the appearance of mental derangement”

On 4 Oct 1792, about two months after giving birth to her tenth child in Boston, Susannah Linzee died. She was thirty-eight years old.

That baby, named George Inman Linzee, died the following 21 March.

His next oldest sister, Mary Inman Linzee, died on 18 May.

Within a year, retired Royal Navy captain John Linzee had lost his wife and their two youngest children. He was still responsible for six older children.

(The oldest, Samuel Hood Linzee, was by then a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He had gotten a head start in the seniority system by being listed as his father’s servant and senior clerk aboard H.M.S. Falcon in 1775, when he was less than two years old.)

The death of Linzee’s wife also led to him losing his house on Essex Street in Boston. The merchant John Rowe had left it to his niece Susannah in his will, but only after the death of his widow, Hannah Rowe.

Rowe had her own house nearby, but she decided to reclaim this one now that Susannah hadn’t survived to inherit it. In July 1794 the widow told the court she owned the

House & Land…demised to the said John Linzee for a Term that is past, after which it ought to return to her again, but the said John Linzee still withholds the said House & Land & their appurtenances

She sued the retired captain for £1,000. Sheriff Jeremiah Allen certified that he had “attached a chair as the property of the within named John Linzee and left a summons at his last and usual place of Abode.”

John William Linzee’s 1917 history of the family reprints a couple of documents from that court case but doesn’t show how it was resolved. He declared, “this disagreement was of short duration,” pointing to how Hannah Rowe left bequests to the Linzee children. However, that will was written in 1803, after John Linzee had died. It would be just as consistent with Hannah Rowe strong-arming him out of the scene and raising her great-nephews and great-nieces herself.

In fact, there’s evidence that the death of his wife cast Linzee into a depression that alienated him from people. The merchant Samuel Breck, who praised the captain as “a good officer” in earlier years, recalled:

At her death the eccentricities of the captain assumed the appearance of mental derangement. He retired to a small box in the neighborhood of Milton, where he lived entirely by himself, rode out armed, and tapped his cider-cask by firing a ball into the head.

As he was seldom to be seen at home, he fixed a parcel of hooks in his kitchen for the butchers to hang their meat on, giving a standing order to put daily a joint upon one of the hooks. It so happened on one occasion, when he was detained in Boston about a fortnight by sickness, that he found on his return home fifteen or sixteen pieces of meat hanging around the walls of his kitchen.

Linzee died in 1798. He left his estate, worth almost $18,000, to his children and grandchildren and asked to be buried next to his wife.

The Linzees’ oldest daughter, Hannah, married Thomas C. Amory. Their son John Inman Linzee served as treasurer of Massachusetts. A granddaughter married a grandson of Dr. John Warren, a great-granddaughter married a grandson of Paul Revere, and, as I wrote here, another granddaughter married a grandson of William Prescott.

Capt. John Linzee’s Ties to Boston

This is the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.

Among the Massachusetts Historical Society’s unique artifacts from that event are the crossed swords of Col. William Prescott from the provincial troops and Capt. John Linzee from the Royal Navy, as highlighted here.

Those weapons were donated by the historian William Hickling Prescott, his wife Susannah, and her cousin. William was a grandson of the colonel. Susannah was a granddaughter of the captain.

Though born in England and serving the king, Capt. Linzee had strong ties to Boston. In 1772, while master of H.M.S. Beaver, he married Susannah Inman of Cambridge, favored niece of John and Hannah Rowe.

The Linzees started having children. The first was born in Plymouth, England; the second back in Boston during the siege; the third on the Delaware River, reportedly during a battle which it didn’t outlive.

The Linzees’ fourth child was born at Barbados, the next four in Plymouth. The captain had a busy war.

Susannah Linzee’s father, Ralph Inman, had left Boston in the evacuation of 1776. Her stepmother, Elizabeth (Murray Campbell Smith) Inman, never left. She kept hold of their property, which is how he could return to his Cambridge estate when the fighting died down.

John Rowe also never left. When that merchant died in 1787, he bequeathed Susannah Linzee some Boston property. She came back to America, and the Linzees’ ninth child was born in Boston in 1789.

The following September, Capt. Linzee sailed H.M.S. Penelope into Boston harbor, writing to Gov. John Hancock that he intended to salute the flag of the U.S. of A. with thirteen guns if the battery at the Castle would reciprocate.

Linzee’s letter also mentioned his “exceeding ill State of Health,” and indeed he was so sick the Penelope sailed away without him while he recuperated in his wife’s house. A few months later, however, Capt. Linzee was back “in perfect health” on his ship along with his two eldest sons.

In the following years, things started to go wrong for Capt. Linzee.

TOMORROW: A British officer in Boston.

“The licentiousness & barbarism of the times”

Another way to look at the mobbing of John Malcolm in January 1774 is through the issue of the rule of law.

At the end of her account of the event, friend of government Ann Hulton wrote:

These few instances amongst many serve to shew the abject State of Governmt & the licentiousness & barbarism of the times. There’s no Majestrate that dare or will act to suppress the outrages. No person is secure there are many Objects pointed at, at this time & when once mark’d out for Vengence, their ruin is certain.

Yet the Massachusetts Spy ended its Whig version of events by saying:

See reader, the effects of a government in which the people have no confidence!

For Hulton, the riotous attack on Malcolm showed that the people of Boston had no respect for the law, or common decency.

And as John Rowe’s diary entry shows, the crowd could intimidate justice of the peace Belcher Noyes from interfering with their violence.

However, people in the crowd would probably have said they were enforcing the law, not breaking it. It was Malcolm who had defied the law by refusing to obey a constable’s writ. It was Malcolm who had started the violence by clubbing George R. T. Hewes. It was Malcolm who had corrupted the law by abusing his authority as a Customs officer.

And as for waiting for the legal system to address Malcolm’s behavior, the Spy story said his attackers expected he would enjoy impunity like “[Ebenezer] Richardson and the soldiers [at the Massacre], and the other friends of government.”

It seems significant that all those cases involved grown men attacking children: Richardson shooting Christopher Seider, Pvt. Hugh White clonking Edward Garrick on the head, and Malcolm threatening the unnamed child whom Hewes defended. (To be sure, all those attacks on children started with children wising off to the men, but that wasn’t a crime.)

We can see the same sort of dueling accusations of lawlessness today. People on both sides of the political aisle say the other side routinely breaks the law and gets away with it through corruption. That makes it all the more important to look at actual evidence, not just rhetoric, since anyone can wail about “the abject State of Governmt.” 

(The picture above is a 1775 engraving of the attack on Malcolm, built off the previous year’s smaller scene shown here. Once again, tea plays a big part in how Londoners understood the event. Another early image of Boston’s destruction of the tea appears at right, and in the lower center a man is urinating into a teapot.)

“Applyed to a particular Justice to Exert his Authority”

On 25 Jan 1774, the day that a Boston mob attacked John Malcolm, the merchant John Rowe wrote this in his diary:

John Malcom having done some violence to A man with A Sword enragd the Multitude that they took him & put him into a Cart, Tarr’d & featherd him—carrying thro the principall Streets of this Town with A halter about him from thence to the Gallows & Returned thro the main Street—making Great Noise & Huzzaing.

I did not see the Numbers attending but tis Supposed by the People that did there were upwards of Twelve hundred people. tis Said that Malcom behav’d with Great Fortitude & Resolution—this was Look’d upon by Mee & Every Sober Man as an Act of Outragious Violence & when severall of the Inhabitants applyed to a particular Justice to Exert his Authority & Suppress the People & they would support him in the Execution of his Duty he Refusd.

As you can see on the original page from the Massachusetts Historical Society, Rowe put a little asterisk next to the word “Justice” and at the bottom of the page this footnote:

B N

After I spent some time identifying that magistrate from those initials, I discovered that Clifford K. Shipton had already done so in his Sibley’s Harvard Biographies profiles.

That reluctant justice of the peace was Belcher Noyes (1709–1785), who lived near Dock Square, the neighborhood where the riot started. After graduating from Harvard College, Noyes followed his father into medicine but soon spent more of his time, and made more of his money, speculating on land in Maine, as documented at the Maine Memory Network above. In 1773 Noyes was in his sixties, not politically active, and clearly reluctant to become involved.

Rowe’s diary entry is also interesting for showing the merchant himself trimming back toward the royal side weeks after he had pleased the crowd in Old South Meeting-House by asking “whether Salt Water would not make as good Tea as fresh.” Here Rowe, for most of his career an active smuggler, takes the side of Customs Surveyor Malcolm.

The Disappearance of the King’s Speech

On the last day of the year 1775, Boston merchant John Rowe, staying inside besieged Boston, wrote in his diary:

The Niger man of War Capt. Talbot is arrivd in Nantasket Road & has brought the King’s Speech dated the 26 October

On 26 October, George III had opened Parliament with a traditional “most gracious speech.” That tradition continues today, but now everyone knows that what the monarch reads is the program of the current prime minister and his or her cabinet, not a personal statement.

Back in 1775, the king still had a role in politics, at least at a personal level—i.e., the prime minister had to be someone he got along with. But already British politicians expected George III not to be setting policy but reflecting it. Fortunately, on the American question the king, Lord North, and the other ministers saw eye to eye.

That was a disappointment for some Americans who had still hoped the monarch would overrule his supposedly misguided and/or corrupt ministers and negotiate with their Continental Congress. Instead, George III read:

Those who have long too successfully laboured to inflame my people in America by gross misrepresentations, and to infuse into their minds a system of opinions repugnant to the true constitution of the colonies, and to their subordinate relation to Great-Britain, now openly avow their revolt, hostility, and rebellion. They have raised troops, and are collecting a naval force; they have seized the public revenue, and assumed to themselves legislative, executive, and judicial powers, which they already exercise in the most arbitrary manner, over the persons and properties of their fellow subjects.

And although many of these unhappy people may still retain their loyalty, and may be too wise not to see the fatal consequence of this usurpation, and wish to resist it, yet the torrent of violence has been strong enough to compel their acquiescence till a sufficient force shall appear to support them. . . .

It is now become the part of wisdom, and (in its effects) of clemency, to put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions, For this purpose, I have increased my naval establishment, and greatly augmented my land forces . . .

When the unhappy and deluded multitude, against whom this force will be directed, shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy!

In particular, the king mentioned “friendly offers of foreign assistance,” which everyone understood to mean hiring soldiers from German states.

The Boston News-Letter, the only newspaper still being printed in Boston, ran the speech on the front page of its 11 Jan 1776 issue.

By that time the speech had already been printed in Newburyport in the Essex Journal for 5 January, ostensibly taken from a London newspaper dated 23 Oct 1775. (That was three days before the speech was delivered. But some American broadsides reported the king spoke on 27 October, one day late.)

The letters from the Continental headquarters on 3–4 January show that the very first Massachusetts printing of that speech had been back at the very start of the year. The royal authorities printed “a volume” of copies and delivered them to the Continental lines in Roxbury.

And that brings me to the last mystery of the incidents I’ve been discussing: What happened to all those broadsides?

According to some standard early-1900s guides to material published in the colonies, the king’s speech was “Printed by John Howe, in Newbury-Street.” Howe was the young printer managing the Boston News-Letter press for Margaret Draper. However, his edition of the speech was known from only one copy in the collection of the New York Public Library. (The British Library has another copy, according to WorldCat, but its own systems are down after a ransomware cyberattack.)

Washington told John Hancock he would “Inclose one [copy], of many, which were sent out of Boston yesterday,” but the Library of Congress doesn’t appear to have a copy now. Neither do the Harvard libraries, the Massachusetts Historical Society, or the American Antiquarian Society, three major repositories of Revolutionary material in this region.

Where did all the other copies go? I picture Howe and his assistants working through New Year’s Eve to produce the “great number” of copies to cow the rebels, and then those rebels showing their disdain for the king’s words by recycling the paper or using it in their latrines.

Ending the Year by Burning Tea

In my write-up of the Charlestown tea burning, I mixed up the date of the town meeting when everyone agreed to stop selling tea (28 Dec 1773) with the date the townspeople burned their stocks of tea (31 December, or 250 years ago today).

That in turn led to misdating when a crowd from Boston confiscated Ebenezer Withington’s tea in Dorchester.

I’ve corrected those postings.

To my chagrin, I found that I’d actually flagged a source to discuss on this date, but while traveling during this holiday season I overlooked that draft.

So here is a timely account of the events of 31 Dec 1773 from our old friend, merchant John Rowe:

The People of Charlestown collected what Tea they could find in The Town & burnt it in the View of a thousand Spectators.

There was found in the House of One Withington of Dorchester About half a Chest of Tea

the People gathered together & took the Tea Brought it into the Common of Boston & Burnt it this Night about Eleven of Clock—

This is Supposed to be part of the Tea that was taken out of the Ships and floated over to Dorchester—

Rowe’s recounting (probably second-hand) adds a couple of details to the newspaper report: the large crowd in Charlestown and a more precise timing of the tea-burning on Boston Common.

Overall, these incidents show that, despite fears of how the London government would react to the destruction of East India Company property, Bostonians were closing out the year by getting more strict about enforcing their tea boycott on everyone.

“And all servile Labour is forbidden”

Thursday, 25 Nov 1773, 250 years ago today, was a holiday in Massachusetts.

About a month earlier, Thomas Hutchinson had issued this proclamation, printed on broadsides as shown at University Archives auction house:

Massachusetts-Bay. }

By the Governor.

A PROCLAMATION for a Publick Thanksgiving.

Whereas it is our incumbent Duty to make our frequent publick thankful Acknowledgement to Almighty GOD our great Benefactor, as well for the Mercies of his common Providence as for the distinguishing Favours which at any Time he may see meet to confer upon us:

AND WHEREAS among many other Instances of the Favour of Heaven towards us of a publick Nature in the Course of the Year past, it hath pleased God to continue the Life of our Sovereign Lord King GEORGE—of our most Gracious Queen CHARLOTTE and of the rest of the Royal Family—to succeed His Majesty’s Councils and Endeavours for Preserving Peace to the British Dominions—to continue to us a good Measure of Health—to prosper our Husbandry, Merchandize, and Fishery:

I HAVE therefore thought fit to appoint, and I do, with the Advice of His Majesty’s Council, appoint Thursday the Twenty-fifth Day of November next to be a Day of Publick Thanksgiving throughout the Province, exhorting and requiring the several Societies for Religious Worship to assemble on that Day, and to offer up their devout Praises to GOD for the several Mercies aforementioned, and for all other Favours which He hath been graciously pleased to bestow upon us, accompanying their Thanksgivings with fervent Prayers that, after they shall have sang the Praises of God, they may not forget his Works.

And all servile Labour is forbidden on the said Day.

GIVEN at the Council-Chamber in Boston, the Twenty-eighth Day of October, in the Fourteenth Year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord GEORGE the Third, by the Grace of GOD, of Great-Britain, France, and Ireland, KING, Defender of the Faith, &c. Annoq; Domini, 1773.

By His Excellency's Command,
Tho’s Flucker, Secr’y.

T. Hutchinson.

GOD Save the KING.

BOSTON: Printed by RICHARD DRAPER, Printer to His Excellency the Governor, and the Honorable His Majesty’s Council. 1773.

New Englanders expected to observe some autumn Thursday as a Thanksgiving, with sermons in the daytime and a big family dinner. However, the date of that holiday wasn’t set by the governors until the fall.

In 1773, between the governor’s proclamation and Thanksgiving Day there had been two small riots over tea, Hutchinson’s sons and the other consignees were keeping low profiles, and everyone was on tenterhooks waiting for the first East India Company cargo to arrive.

According to merchant John Rowe, that Thanksgiving saw “Dull heavy Raw Weather.”

“The party at the North End were victorious”

I started looking into what happened in Boston on 5 Nov 1773 because I was curious about who the designated villains of that year were.

Did the Pope Night processions display effigies of Thomas Hutchinson, Andrew Oliver, and other Loyalists whose letters to Thomas Whately had been leaked earlier that year?

Did the gangs hang dummies of those old stand-bys, the Customs Commissioners? Or the Gaspée Commission?

Or might the young organizers have had the flexibility and speed to turn their wrath on the tea consignees, who had started to attract political attention only a couple of days before the holiday?

I’m sorry to say I didn’t find an answer to that question. I can report that the merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary that the 5th of November was “Very Quiet for A Pope Night.” There were no recorded attacks on the tea agents’ or other officials’ homes.

I suspect the town fathers clamped down on the youths’ celebrations that year as they tried to present a respectable resolve to the world through their official town meeting.

I did find who won that year’s brawl between the North End and South End gangs. On 11 November Isaiah Thomas printed this article in the Massachusetts Spy:

It has long been customary in this town, on the fifth of November, for a number of the lower class of people to carry about pageantries, in derision of the Pope and the Devil and their Powder Plot; and it has likewise been customary for the parties, North End and South, to try their skill at ‘Blows and Knocks,’ and the victory declared to them who should take away the other’s Pope, that being the name given to the pageantry

This year the party at the North End were victorious, which caused the South to give out word, ‘as the saying is,’ that they would on the Monday evening following ‘at them again:’

The consequence of this was, as we are credibly informed, that the Tea Commissioners, fearing the mobility intended paying them a visit, removed most of their valuable effects and their persons, from their respective places of residence, and left their houses guarded, within, by a number of men; but, ‘the wicked flee when none pursue,’—‘a guilty conscience needs no accuser.—

We are well assured, that neither nobility nor mobility had the least intention of disturbing them at that time.

“Mobility” was a somewhat cheeky term for the common people, and the source of the word “mob.”

The South End Gang couldn’t counterattack until the evening of Monday, 8 November (250 years ago today) because the two previous evenings were considered part of the Sabbath. But there’s no sign anyone really tried to renew the fighting that year.

Incidentally, that 5 November entry from John Rowe’s diary also lists “Mr. Wm. Burnet Brown Esq of Virginia” among the people he dined with. Back in 2019 I wrote, “Brown returned to Virginia [after he got sucked into the coffee-house brawl with James Otis, Jr.], and I’ve seen no evidence that he ever visited Massachusetts again.” But now I’ve seen evidence that he did.

A Duel on Noddle’s Island

On 9 Oct 1773, 250 years ago today, two British military officers fought a duel on an island in Boston harbor.

The Boston Evening-Post published two days later reported:

Last Saturday towards Evening, a Duel was fought on Noddle’s Island, with Pistols, between Captain Maltby of the Glasgow Man of War, & Mr. Finnie, late Lieutenant of Marines on board the same Ship, when the latter received a Ball thro’ his Neck, but it is thought will not prove mortal.

The merchant John Rowe recorded this duel in his diary, saying: “Lieut. Finney is wounded in the Breast & t’is thought mortally,” but the newspaper had better information.

I haven’t found a clue about why those two officers quarreled. The Boston Post-Boy ran the same paragraph about their duel and immediately added:

This Morning the Glasgow Man of War, Capt. Maltby, sailed for South-Carolina.

Presumably Lt. Finnie was left behind to recover, and everyone was happier. The Glasgow arrived in Charleston harbor on 22 November.

Lt. William Finnie had joined the Marines on 30 Sept 1759, according to the 1773 Army List. I’ve found nothing else definite about him.

William Maltby (c.1725–1793) had joined the Royal Navy by 1751 and passed the lieutenant’s exam in 1758. Over five years he had commanded the Nautilus, Favourite, and Aquilon before being assigned the Glasgow at the end of 1771.

Capt. Maltby’s most prominent act in those years was evacuating the small British force at Port Egmont when the Spanish Navy showed up in force in June 1770. The British eventually regained that first perch on the Falkland Islands.

Capt. Maltby later brought the Glasgow back to New England in 1774, but ran into trouble again. Before dawn on 10 December, the frigate ran aground near Cohasset.

TOMORROW: On the rocks.

“Went to See Bates Performance on Horsemanship”

On 8 Sept 1773, as described back here, Jacob Bates debuted his equestrian exhibition in Boston.

The merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary that day:

This Afternoon Mr. Bates performd for the first Time horsemanship. A Great many People attended him—

It doesn’t look like Rowe himself was there, but he certainly heard about the event.

Nonetheless, it looks like Bates didn’t attract the same size of audiences in Boston as he had in the American cities to the south. His shows spanned three months in Philadelphia, almost two in New York. But after less than a month in Boston, he was preparing to move on.

The equestrian’s 27 September ad told the public: “As Mr. BATES’s Stay in Town will be but short, he will go thro’ all his Performances at the above Time.”

And also, using a rare spelling of a rare term for a riding school, the ad stated: “The Manage, where he Rides, to be Sold.” As at New York, Bates wanted to sell off the lumber he had used to define and shield his riding area.

The 4 October Boston Post-Boy carried this notice:

Positively the last Time here.
Mr. BATES
Will perform To-Morrow,
if suitable Weather, if not the first fair Day after:

As the Evenings are Cold, the Doors will be opened at Two o’Clock, and he mounts precisely at Three.

He is extremely obliged to the Gentlemen of Boston, who have countenanced him in his Performances.

TICKETS to be had at the usual Places.

With that news, John Rowe finally set out to see the show. On 5 October the merchant wrote in his diary:

Afternoon Mr. Parker Mrs. Rowe & My Self went to See Bates Performance on Horsemanship

hes A smart Active & Strong Man & does every thing to General Acceptance

That mention of “General Acceptance” is significant because the “Mr. Parker” who accompanied the Rowes to the exhibition space at the bottom of the Mall was Samuel Parker, then under consideration to be a minister at Trinity Church, where Rowe was a warden. Parker eventually did become rector at Trinity, later Episcopal bishop of Boston.

To be sure, Anglicans like Rowe and Parker didn’t have the same distrust of theatricals as their Puritan neighbors in New England. Nonetheless, Rowe’s praise for Bates shows that not everyone shared the hostility of the anonymous author of the “Bates & his Horses Weighed in the Balance” pamphlet.

COMING UP: One more stop for Bates and his horses.