“A Tragi-comic Farce, Called the present Times!”

Page 7 of the 8 May 1770 issue of Anthony Henry’s Nova Scotia Chronicle was nearly entirely taken up with what looks like an extraordinarily detailed advertisement for a play.

It began:

Just ready for the PRESS,
A Tragi-comic Farce,
Called the present Times! Some of the Characters in high Life, some in low. It is proposed to be acted by a Set of Comedians shortly expected; at a new Theatre in the enchanted Castle, at the Palace of the Sons of Liberty. Those who subscribe for Six Copies, will have the Seventh gratis; each stitched and bound, with a Variety of elegant Cuts, done by a masterly Hand! As there are already 5000 subscribed for, those who hereafter may be desirous to be out of that Number are requested to direct their Letters, (Post paid) to Don Joseph Azevedo at the Pontac Coffee House, HALIFAX, where Subscriptions are taken in.

The one mention of this newspaper item that I’ve found in books appears to treat it as authentic evidence of theater in Canada. But its real nature is revealed by the paragraphs that follow.

The Characters chiefly attempted are as follows.

William the Knave, introducing the Spinning Wheels, &c., &c. with a Bill of Taxation in his Hand (in order to support Home Manufactures) of Six Pence L[egal] M[oney] per Head on the whole P[rovince] of M[assachusetts] B[a]y; a great Procurer of Affidavits.

Thomas Trifle, Esq; Leading a drunking Man with a Glass of New-England Rum in his Hand, as a Cordial Specifick against all Disorders, lately chosen a great Officer for Indian Affairs.

Simple John, Lieut. Mandarin, demanding Audience of the Heads of the Junto, exclaiming against his Brother Commissioners of the Tribute Money to be collected—Treating the Rabble with good Chear in Hopes of reigning once more alone.

Back in October 1769 the Boston printer and bookstore owner John Mein had printed “Outlines of the characters of…the Well-Disposed” in his Boston Chronicle, lampooning leaders of the non-importation movement in highly personal terms.

That article used “William the Knave” as its label for William Molineux, an insult repeated in the 12 Feb 1770 Boston Chronicle. “Spinning Wheels” and public money “to support Home Manufactures” were allusions to Molineux’s publicly-funded scheme to employ women to make cloth in Boston. The merchant had also been busy helping to promulgate the depositions about the Boston Massacre.

The same “Outlines” article called Thomas Cushing, chairman of the merchants’ committee for non-importation and speaker of the Massachusetts House, “Tommy Trifle, Esq.”

“Simple John” must mean John Temple, the one Customs Commissioner to side with Boston’s merchants against the rest.

One of the few characters presented in a positive light was “John Plain Dealer, a Bookseller flying the Country.” A later entry mentions “Lieut. Col. Thomas Shears, his Valour is well known by his formal Attack on John Plain Dealer…”

Soon after that “Outlines” article appeared, a group of Boston merchants threatened Mein in the street. When the printer pulled out a pistol, Thomas Marshall, a tailor and militia officer not involved in the initial confrontation, swung at him with a shovel. Mein went into hiding and soon fled Boston.

“John Plain Dealer” obviously meant John Mein himself, and “Lieut. Col. Thomas Shears” meant Thomas Marshall.

This whole page in the Nova-Scotia Chronicle was a continuation of an argument that had started in Boston more than half a year before.

TOMORROW: More characters.

Adm. Benjamin Hallowell Carew, R.N., a Son of Boston

Last month David Morgan’s Inside Croydon website profiled a notable British naval figure who grew up in pre-Revolutionary Boston.

Adm. Benjamin Hallowell Carew was one of the sons of Loyalists who joined the British military during the American War and remained in it through the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

Morgan writes:

He was an American, born in 1761 in Boston to a family who were supporters of the British in the difficult years before the American War of Independence. Hallowell’s father, also named Benjamin, had also seen service in the Royal Navy, and had become a Commissioner of the Board of Customs in the port of Boston. His mother, Mary Boylston, was a second cousin of John Adams, who would go on to become the second President of America. . . .

The Hallowells of Boston lived a comfortable life by the standards of the time, with enough income to be able to employ one of the great American portrait painters of the day, John Singleton Copley, to produce family portraits.

Distance from Boston led Morgan into some geographical errors in describing the Hallowells’ houses. On 26 Aug 1765, an anti-Stamp Act mob damaged the Customs official’s house in Boston. He also owned a mansion in the Jamaica Plain part of Roxbury which was more secluded and safe. (J.P. and Roxbury are separate neighborhoods now, but in colonial times Roxbury was the town, Jamaica Plain simply an area within it.)

As a Customs officer, Benjamin Hallowell was unpopular with the merchants and people of Boston. He may have attracted special resentment because he was from a local family, his father a prominent merchant captain himself. In other words, people might have perceived him as switching sides.

In 1768 Hallowell helped to seize John Hancock’s ship Liberty, and the waterfront crowd physically attacked him, driving him into hiding onto Castle Island. Within the Customs service, however, Hallowell parlayed that treatment into a promotion as the Crown’s replacement for John Temple, a commissioner the administration came to see as too close to the locals.

Commissioner Hallowell was also the target of part of the “Powder Alarm” multitude gathered on Cambridge common on 2 Sept 1774. Leaders of that crowd successfully urged most of the men to leave him alone, but some chased him on horseback all the way across the Charles River bridge, up through Brookline and Roxbury to the gates of Boston.

Naturally, the family didn’t stick around to try their chances in March 1776. Commissioner Hallowell moved to Britain, taking his wife and children.

The next Benjamin's story continues:

Young Hallowell was aged 14 or 15 when he arrived in England, and wasted little time before joining the navy.

Hallowell enjoyed Navy life and was promoted to lieutenant in 1783 having already been involved in the Battle of Chesapeake Bay in 1781, St Kitts in 1782 and the Battle of Dominica later that same year.

Hallowell, by then a Commodore on frigate HMS Minerve, was on board the British flagship HMS Victory with Nelson at the Battle of Cape Saint Vincent in 1797. . . .

By the time of Battle of the Nile in 1798, Hallowell was in command of the 74-gun HMS Swiftsure. The British had hunted down the French fleet all the way from Toulon, via Malta, and tracked them to Egypt.

For how that fight worked out for Hallowell, why Adm. Horatio Nelson sent him a coffin, and finally how his surname became Carew, see the Inside Croydon post.

“The Solicitation and Expectation of such Reward”

I left William Story on his way to London in late 1771 bearing letters of reference from three major political players in Boston—from royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, speaker of the house Thomas Cushing, and house clerk Samuel Adams.

Hutchinson had recommended Story, a former deputy register of the Vice Admiralty Court, to the Secretary of State for the colonies, Lord Hillsborough, and to Sir Francis Bernard, the former governor.

On the other side of the political aisle, Cushing had written a letter to Benjamin Franklin, the house’s agent, and Adams one to Arthur Lee, the house’s alternate agent. Story and Adams had been part of Boston’s political caucus back in the early 1760s.

But then, unbeknownst to Story, Adams had sent a second letter to Lee, warning that since Story might not be trustworthy since he’d also sought a favor from Hutchinson. That could have been a big problem for Story except that Lee viewed Franklin as a rival and never told him about Adams’s warning. 

Story’s patron in Massachusetts, John Temple, was also in London. He’d been a Customs official in Boston but instead of working closely with the royal governors and the other Customs Commissioners he’d allied himself with the local merchants and Whigs, marrying James Bowdoin’s daughter. In late 1770 Temple sailed for London to bolster his position, only to lose his post as Commissioner for being absent. Sometime in 1771, however, Temple secured the position of Surveyor General of Customs in England.  

In sum, everyone was maneuvering around everyone else. In particular, Story and Temple were trying to maintain a foot in both political camps.

Still ignorant of Adams’s suspicions, Franklin happily “introduc’d Mr. Story to a Secretary of the Treasury,” as he told Cushing in a letter on 13 Jan 1772. That connection helped Story with one of his problems: being pressured to pay Massachusetts the value of a worthless note from the late bankrupt Nathaniel Wheelwright, which he had accepted to gratify Temple. 

But Story didn’t just want to escape that debt. Back in 1765, mobs had attacked his house on the same riotous night when they damaged the homes of Hutchinson and Benjamin Hallowell. The Massachusetts legislature had grudgingly recompensed all three men for part of their losses along with Andrew Oliver, attacked earlier. But Hutchinson, Oliver, and Hallowell had also received promotions within the royal bureaucracy. Story, in contrast, had lost his post in the Vice Admiralty Court, possibly for being too close to Temple. 

Now Story wanted “some Appointment in consideration of his Sufferings from the Mob,” in Franklin’s words. Franklin wasn’t optimistic about the chances: “I doubt whether it may be worth his while to attend here the Solicitation and Expectation of such Reward, those Attendances being often drawn out into an inconceivable Length, and the Expence of course enormous.” 

It looks like some officials in London told Story that he had a better chance of landing a royal salary through Hutchinson. So that spring he sailed home. Traveling with him was a Massachusetts-born protégé of Franklin named Edward Bancroft, who made only a short visit in Boston before heading back to London. 

(During the war, Bancroft served as Franklin’s secretary in Paris. But he was really a spy for the British. In 1777, Arthur Lee, by then another American diplomat in Paris, accused Bancroft of corresponding with the enemy. But since by this time no one trusted Lee, Franklin continued to rely on Bancroft. His spying didn’t become public until 1891.) 

After landing in Boston in June 1772, William Story went to Gov. Hutchinson and told him he wanted an appointment, preferably a lucrative one. Hutchinson declined to offer any position. According to the governor, Story then “let me know that he hoped he should not be obliged to make publick the substance…of some writings of mine he had seen in London.” 

As I said, everyone was maneuvering around everyone else.

TOMORROW: Writings from London.

When William Story Sailed to London

On 2 Oct 1771, the speaker of the Massachusetts House, Thomas Cushing, wrote a letter to that body’s lobbyist in London, Benjamin Franklin.

Though the letter enclosed some legislative news, Cushing was really writing a reference for the man who would carry it to Britain, William Story. Story is an intriguing character because for several years he worked both sides of the political divide in Boston.

In 1763 John Adams listed Story among the members of the Boston political caucus, along with his cousin Samuel, his great-uncle William Fairfield, host Thomas Dawes, John Ruddock from the North End, and other men.

But Story was also a royal appointee, deputy register of the Vice Admiralty Court. That made him a target on 26 Aug 1765, when an anti–Stamp Act protest blew up into an attack on the homes of officials who had nothing to do with that law, including Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson. And William Story.

Those gentlemen asked the Massachusetts General Court to compensate them for their losses. The legislature did so only reluctantly and partially since most of the money would have gone to Hutchinson. Out of the £136 Story asked for, he received £97. Thus, he had a solid reason to resent the Boston Whigs and the General Court.

On the other hand, Story also had a grievance against the Customs Commissioners, and that was the main reason he crossed the Atlantic in the fall of 1771. Cushing’s letter to Franklin laid out the issue:

This will be handed you by William Storey Esqr. who will deliver you the Votes of the last sessions of the General Court.

He goes home to sollicit for releif from the Difficulty under which he at present labours; Natha. Wheelwright Esqr. during Mr. Storeys being Deputy Register in the Court of Admiralty had a Vessell and Cargo Seized and Condemned in said Court from which judgement he appealed; However the Vessell and Cargo were Sold at Public Auction at which Mr. Wheelwright was a Considerable purchaser.

Sometime in the early 1760s, the Customs service seized Wheelwright’s ship and goods for smuggling and put them up for auction. But Wheelwright himself was top bidder on a lot of the stuff, thus regaining ownership, perhaps at a bargain price. (Not a bargain when compared to getting away with the smuggling, but possibly still low enough to be profitable.)

Furthermore, Wheelwright made this purchase with the support of a top Customs officer:

Mr. [John] Temple the surveyer General, with a View of favouring Mr. Wheelwright as much as possible directed Mr. Storey, as he Informs me, to take Mr. Wheelwrights note of hand, in lieu of the Money, p[er?] amount of such goods as he purchased payable [as] soon as the affair of the appeal was fully determined.

At the time, Bostonians traded Wheelwright’s personal notes like cash, so it didn’t seem like a big risk for Story to accept one as payment. But in January 1765 Wheelwright went suddenly, spectacularly bankrupt, and dragged a considerable swath of Boston society down with him.

After some Time Mr. Wheelwright failed and has never been able to Discharge his Note. The Kings Advocate [Samuel Fitch?] has sued Mr. Storey for the Money. Mr. Storey thinks [torn: it would be unreaso?]nable and unjust to oblidge him to pay it, [torn: when he?] Acted in Consequence of orders received from the Surveyer General.

He has applied to the Commissioners of the Customs here, but as it was a Matter transacted before their appointment they can do nothing about it, he therefore has undertaken this Voyage in order to apply for releif to the Commissioners at home. Any assistance you may afford him by your Advise or thro your Influence with those before whom this matter may lie I shall esteem as a favor.

Temple actually was one of the Customs Commissioners from 1767 to 1771, when he sailed to Britain himself in search of even better prospects. But the other Commissioners hated and distrusted him, so they happily disavowed any promise that he had made to Story a decade before.

I would just mention that Mr. Storey was a Considerable Sufferer in the time of the Stamp Act by having his House and Furniture much Damaged by the Mob, who distroyed most of his Books and Papers amoung which there were some relative to the Seizure above mentioned, and for want of which he is fearfull he shall be a great Sufferer.

He had some Compensation made him by our General Court but as all the rest of the Sufferers at that time excepting Mr. Storey, have been Consider’d and in some way or another Compensated by the Government at home he hopes he shall have the more favourable hearing relative to this Matter.

Story was thus hoping for some cash from the royal government, as well as being shielded from the lawsuit over Wheelwright’s payment. And, even though he was carrying letters from some of Massachusetts’s leading Whigs, Story might have taken a new royal appointment as well.

TOMORROW: Samuel Adams’s doubts.

“He wanted a free conversation with us”

After his fight with James Otis, Jr., became a big deal, Customs Commissioner John Robinson published his version of what had led up to it. That account was dated 7 Sept 1769 and appeared in Green and Russell’s Boston Post-Boy four days later.

According to Robinson, on Friday, 1 September, he arrived at the Board of Customs’s meeting room in Concert Hall about 10:30 A.M. and was told that Otis had come by that morning and asked to speak to him and a fellow Customs Commissioner, Henry Hulton. After Hulton came in, the two men sent “Green the Messenger”—probably Bartholomew Green—to find Otis.

About 11:00, Otis arrived at the door with Samuel Adams. The board’s secretary invited him in, but he declined. The two Commissioners went to the door, and Robinson said:

Your servant, Gentlemen; pray what is your business with us?----

Mr. Otis answered, that he wanted a free conversation with us:

I replied, It is necessary that we should first know upon what business, Will you not walk into a room Gentlemen?

He answered, that his business was of such a nature, that it could not be transacted in our own houses, and he could not mention it until he met us: and he proposed, that each of us should bring with him a friend, and he would bring a friend with him.

I then asked him, whether his business was official?

He answered, he did not understand what I meant by official:

I replied, does it relate to us as Commissioners?

He said, it is related to his character, he wanted a free conversation with us on that subject, and that he was to meet Mr. [William] Burch [another Customs Commissioner] at the coffee-house the next morning at seven o’clock.

I answered, that as I lived in the country, I did not know whether I could attend at that time, and Mr. Hulton [who lived in Brookline] said the same in respect to himself.

Mr. Otis then said any other time will do.

We answered, we would see him at a convenient opportunity, and then parted.

I share that all to show the genteel, even arch, tone of the interaction, and to suggest how frustrating it must have been to figure out what Otis was on about. It’s notable that he didn’t have a particular beef with Robinson—he was making the same approach to three of the five Commissioners. (Of the remaining two, John Temple was a political ally of the Whigs and Charles Paxton a longtime foe, so Otis probably didn’t see approaching them as worthwhile.)

The next morning, Robinson decided he’d go to the coffee house at the same time as Burch, but he arrived late, closer to 7:30, and found Burch coming out. He and Otis ended up alone in a back room sharing a “dish of coffee.” [Because you need some kind of caffeine for a breakfast meeting.]

Finally Otis got to his grievance. In Robinson’s recollection he said:

I am informed that I have been represented to government by your Board, as a rebel and a traitor, and I have two or three questions to put to you, that I think, as a gentleman, I have a right to an answer, or at least to ask. The first is, whether your Board as Commissioners, Gentlemen, or in any other manner, ever represented me in that light, in any of their memorials or letters to the Treasury.

There had been another leak from London, and Otis was taking things personally.

TOMORROW: The Customs Commissioners’ reports.

“Unaffected Gaiety” on the Repeal of the Stamp Act

News that Parliament had repealed the Stamp Act arrived in Boston on 16 May 1766, as described yesterday. That quickly set off a public celebration.

The town’s newspaper printers collaborated on a broadside announcing the news from London (readable in more detail through the Massachusetts Historical Society).

The 19 May Boston Gazette reported:

It is impossible to express the Joy the Inhabitants in general were in, on receiving the above great and glorious News—

The Bells were immediately set a Ringing, and the Cannon fired under Liberty Tree and many other Parts of the Town. Colours were displayed from the Merchants Vessels in the Harbour, and the Tops of many Houses.

Almost every Countenance discovered an unaffected Gaiety on the Establishment of that Liberty which we were in the utmost Hazard of losing.

The “Cannon fired under Liberty Tree” must have been two small brass guns owned by the new Boston militia artillery company led by Adino Paddock. The “Colours” on display everywhere where variations on the British national flag.

The Whigs who had opposed the new tax so fervently weren’t the only ones glad that it was gone. John Temple, the Surveyor General of the Customs service in the port of Boston, must have been relieved to announce that he and his colleagues no longer had to worry about the unenforceable law.

Even Gov. Francis Bernard summoned his Council to share the news. He gave orders for the batteries in Boston, Charlestown, and Castle William to fire salutes in celebration of the news. He also invited those gentlemen to come to his official residence, the Province House, to toast the king’s health on the evening of Monday, 19 May.

That was perhaps a way to rise above the town’s official celebration, which at an afternoon meeting the selectmen scheduled for that same Monday evening. As a town meeting had already decided, there would be an illumination throughout Boston—candles in all the windows. (The governor authorized the Town House and Province House to be illuminated as well.) And there would be fireworks on the Common.

And those weren’t the last leaders heard from. On the evening of 16 May Boston’s “Sons of Liberty” had “a meeting…in Hanover Square,” near Liberty Tree, and “unanimously Voted”:

1. That their Exhibition of Joy on the Repeal of the Stamp Act be on the Common.

2. That the Fire Works be play’d off from a Stage to be erected near the Work-House Gates.

3. That there be an Advertisement published on Monday next, of the intended Exhibition, the place where, and the Time when it will end.

Thus, even as Bostonians prepared to celebrate their restored political unity with Britain, different levels of authority—the governor, the selectmen, and the Sons of Liberty or Loyall Nine—were jockeying to own the celebration.

A Child’s Memories of the Doctors’ Riot of 1788

A few days back I mentioned William Alexander Duer’s New-York as it Was, During the Latter Part of the Last Century, published in 1849.

Duer (shown here in a copy of a daguerreotype) was born in 1780, son of the British-born Patriot politician William Duer and grandson of the Continental general William Alexander, Lord Stirling.

Duer called the doctors’ riot of 1788 the “public occurrence that made the earliest, if not the deepest impression upon my memory.”

His retellings of events included details he couldn’t have been privy to at the time, and thus must have heard secondhand or taken from previous accounts. But he also described some dramatic moments that he or his family personally witnessed, recalled with the enthusiasm of a seven-year-old.

For example, the clash of an upper-class militia company on horseback and the crowd:

Never shall I forget the charge I saw made upon a body of the rioters by [Capt. John] Stakes’s light-horse. From our residence opposite St. Paul’s, I first perceived the troop as it debouched from Fair, now Fulton-street, and attacked the masses collected at the entrance of the “fields,” whence they were soon scattered, some of them retreating into the church-yard,—driven sword in hand through the portico, by the troopers striking right and left with the backs of their sabres.

And the wounding and care of Gen. Steuben:

The Baron de Steuben was struck by a stone which knocked him down, inflicted a flesh wound upon his forehead, and wrought a sudden change in the compassionate feelings he had previously entertained towards the mob. At the moment of receiving it, he was earnestly remonstrating with the Governor against ordering the militia to fire on the people; but, as soon as he was struck, the Baron’s benevolence deserted him, and as he fell he lustily cried out, “fire! Governor, fire!”

[Footnote:] Upon the occasion mentioned in the text, he was brought bleeding into my father’s house, accompanied by most of the cortege which had assembled at the gaol, and there being no surgeon to be had, my mother [Catherine Duer] staunched his wound, of which the old soldier made very light, and bound up his head. After his departure, Governor [George] Clinton amused the company by relating the above anecdote.

Duer thus left us both a delicious story about Steuben and the provenance for it: from Gov. Clinton to his mother and thence to him.

Another eyewitness, not so young, was William Dunlap (1766-1839), whose history of New York was posthumously published in 1840. He wrote that during the doctors’ riot, “The house of Sir John Temple, the British consul, in Queen Street, was with difficulty saved. It was said ‘Sir John’ was misinterpreted ‘Surgeon.’”

Temple was James Bowdoin’s son-in-law, a friendly Customs official in Boston before the Revolution, and the most likely conduit for Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s letters to Benjamin Franklin. However, I can’t find any confirmation from Temple’s published papers for his house being mobbed in 1788.

TOMORROW: What about the medical student who started all the trouble?