Three Decades of Historical Context

The Saga of the Brazen Head started in 1730 with the first appearance of brazier James Jackson in the Boston newspapers, and it’s reached the year 1759.

What else was happening in New England in three decades? If we look at readily available timelines of Massachusetts history from FamilySearch.org or the World Atlas, we find the answer was: Nothing.

Of course, plenty did happen in those years. There weren’t dramatic changes in political constitutions, empire-ending wars, life-changing inventions, and the like, but there were events for Mary Jackson and her family to worry about and celebrate. So here, after some quick cramming, is the historical context for the saga so far.

The first of those decades occurred under the government of Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745) in Britain and Gov. Jonathan Belcher (1682-1757, shown here) in Massachusetts. Walpole used European alliances to maintain international peace. That produced a lull in Britain’s wars with France and other Catholic powers of Europe, and thus relatively easy trade, fishing, and frontier settlement for British colonists in New England.

Belcher wasn’t as dominating as Walpole, but he was able to remain governor of both Massachusetts and New Hampshire for over a decade starting in 1729. Being a royal governor was a tough job. One answered to the Crown and its demands while feeling pressure from the colony’s politicians and people to serve their interests instead. And British society being what it was, governors also kept an eye out for their own economic well being.

Belcher had some advantages in being a Congregationalist merchant born in Boston and thus like his most wealthy constituents. But he couldn’t keep everyone happy forever. The royal government thought Belcher should do more to stop people felling New England tree trunks reserved as masts for the Royal Navy. (Some of Belcher’s friends benefited from this harvest.) In addition, the shortage of hard cash produced local pleas for more paper currency while the Crown wanted control over the money supply.

In 1739, Walpole couldn’t hold back the clamor for Britain to enter the War of Jenkins’ Ear. After three further years of declining popularity and military failures, he resigned.

That same war opened an opportunity for William Shirley (1694-1771, shown here), an Englishman who had moved to Massachusetts and become a critic of Gov. Belcher. He recruited troops for an early campaign in the Caribbean and so impressed London that the Crown made Shirley governor of Massachusetts in 1741. (Belcher eventually won the post of governor of New Jersey instead.)

Both Belcher and Shirley had to deal with the local campaign for the Massachusetts Land Bank. In 1740 the General Court overrode their opposition and authorized that private organization to issue bills of credit, which functioned as paper currency. Then Parliament outlawed the bank. With the Massachusetts economy in danger, Shirley and the legislature managed to bring about a soft landing for the former bank’s managers and creditors.

Those developments affected Mary Jackson and some of the people around her. All the dispute over paper money brought in papermaker Richard Fry, of course. And all those bills of credit meant Massachusetts currency was losing value.

Mary’s husband James died in 1735 while returning from a visit to Samuel Waldo’s development in southern Maine, which grew during that peaceful decade. Waldo also had a contract to supply masts to the Royal Navy, so he wanted Gov. Belcher to protect the navy’s exclusive rights. When that didn’t happen, Waldo started promoting Shirley for higher office. However, once war broke out, the Maine frontier became vulnerable to attack from both sea and land, and Waldo’s settlements shrank.

In the early 1740s, Britain’s war with Spain expanded beyond Jenkins’ Ear to become the War of the Austrian Succession or, as North Americans called it, King George’s War. In 1745 Gov. Shirley organized an attack on the French fortification at Louisbourg. The British army and navy gave only lukewarm support to that effort, but it succeeded—Massachusetts’s greatest military triumph. Decades later, the province’s Patriots still pointed to that moment as proof that they could defend themselves against the royal army.

Another effect of King George’s War was the Royal Navy impressing more sailors in Boston. In 1747, Commodore Charles Knowles (shown here) seized dozens of sailors, setting off days of riots. Huge crowds surrounded Gov. Shirley, twice at his house and once at the Town House in central Boston, close to the Brazen Head. He tried to call out the militia against the crowd, only to realize that the militia regiment and the crowd were the same men. The Massachusetts Council had to resolve the crisis, with Knowles releasing the sailors and the crowd releasing the naval officers they had grabbed.

When King George’s War ended in 1748, Britain returned Louisbourg to France. Massachusetts was still trying to get the royal government to reimburse the costs of its military campaign. One of the men who had funded that expedition was Samuel Waldo. He decided that Shirley wasn’t working hard enough to pay back his inflated expenses, so Waldo joined the governor’s political enemies. Among those foes were Dr. William Douglass, who decades before had opposed smallpox inoculation, and young political journalist Samuel Adams, son of a Land Bank director.

In 1749 Gov. Shirley sailed for London in order to deal with Waldo’s complaints. Shortly afterward, a large amount of gold and silver coin arrived in Boston harbor—the Crown had finally reimbursed the province with specie. Thomas Hutchinson, then Speaker of the Massachusetts House, wrote a law to use that hard cash to retire paper currency that had lost value. That put Massachusetts’s economy on a sounder footing. Henceforth, businesspeople like Mary Jackson distinguished between current pounds, which kept close to face value, and inflated “Old Tenor” money.

Gov. Shirley resumed his post as governor of Massachusetts in 1753. He seems to have been happiest as a war governor, and was soon preparing for another fight against France. After the death of Gen. Edward Braddock in 1755, Shirley was even commander-in-chief of British forces in North America for a while. But the Seven Years’ (or French and Indian) War brought the governor no military miracle like the Louisbourg expedition. He feuded with other commanders like Sir William Johnson, his own western campaign failed, and officials in London took against him. In 1756, Gov. Shirley was sacked. (Like Belcher, he did manage to become governor somewhere else—in the Bahamas.)

Also in 1756, hundreds of French Acadians came ashore in Boston, expelled from Nova Scotia. Their ships had actually arrived in the harbor in December 1755, but Gov. Shirley refused to let them land, and half those refugees died on their ships that winter. For the next decade, the population of Massachusetts contained a category of “French neutrals.”

This was also the period of religious fervor in colonial America later dubbed the “Great Awakening.” The Rev. Jonathan Edwards led revivals at his meetinghouse in Northampton starting in 1733 and published Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in 1741. The Rev. George Whitefield preached up and down the North American coast in 1740, 1745, 1751, and 1754. Many New England Congregationalist meetings were roiled by splits between “New Light” and “Old Light” ministers and congregations. As Anglicans, the Jackson family was probably less affected by those disputes.

In 1757 a new royal governor arrived from London: Thomas Pownall (1722-1805). He had close contacts—i.e., his younger brother John—in the Secretary of State’s office, and a lot of big ideas about how the empire should run. He viewed the British constitution as subordinating the military power to the civil, even in wartime. He wanted to balance imperial needs and local rights. Pownall became a favorite of the Massachusetts merchants and Whigs but had a standoffish relationship with the man appointed lieutenant governor under him—Thomas Hutchinson.

Early in 1759, Pownall led a new campaign to conquer and settle the Penobscot region. Samuel Waldo came along and died that May, back on his Maine holdings. The previous year, British military forces had retaken Louisbourg. In July 1759, Gen. Jeffery Amherst finally took Fort Ticonderoga. In September, Gen. James Wolfe defeated Gen. Montcalm at Québec. Together with British and allied victories at Guadeloupe, Madras, Minden, and Quiberon Bay, these victories made 1759 an “annus mirabilis.” Boston celebrated along with the rest of the British Empire.

TOMORROW: Calamity at the Brazen Head.

Richard Fry’s Greatest Scheme

Before going on with The Saga of the Brazen Head, I’ll zip through what happened with Richard Fry.

Under his contract for the paper mill with Samuel Waldo and Thomas Westbrook, Fry had to pay £64 a year. But making paper on the Maine frontier didn’t bring in huge profits, and the whole province was in a cash crunch. Fry managed to send his landlords fifty reams of paper in place of specie, but that wasn’t £64 in cash, was it?

Waldo and Westbrook sued Fry and won a judgment of £70. They had the sheriffs in Maine seize the paper-making equipment. And they had Fry clapped into the Boston jail as a debtor around the start of 1737. In response, Fry claimed that Waldo and Westbrook had taken that action only after they had tried to buy him out and he refused.

Waldo recruited another man to continue the paper manufactory as an employee. Then he turned on Westbrook, forcing him out of the partnership. Calling himself “hereditary lord of Broad Bay,” Waldo recruited more settlers in Europe.

Among the people who came to America at Waldo’s invitation were the German ancestors of Christopher Seider. However, whenever Britain went to war with France, which happened in 1744 and again in 1757, the Maine frontier became a risky place to live and the settlements emptied out. Waldo died in 1759. Some of his holdings descended to his daughter Hannah and then to her daughter Lucy, wife of Henry Knox.

Meanwhile, back in the Boston jail, Richard Fry produced a steady stream of petitions complaining about his Maine landlords, the sheriff and undersheriff who’d taken his stuff, and the jailer who’d locked him up.

On 22 May 1739 Fry placed yet another advertisement in the New-England Weekly Journal:

This is to inform the Publick, that there is now in the Press, and will be laid before the Great and General Court, a Paper Scheme, drawn for the Good and Benefit of every individual Member of the whole Province; and what will much please his Royal Majesty; for the Glory of our King is in the Happiness of his Subjects: And every Merchant in Great Britain that trades to New-England, will find their Account by it; and there is no Man that has the least Shadow or Foundation of Common Reason, but must allow the said Scheme to be reasonable and just:

I have laid all my Schemes to be proved by the Mathematicks, and all Mankind well knows, Figures will not lye; and notwithstanding the dismal Idea of the Year Forty One, I don’t doubt the least seeing of it a Year of Jubile, and in a few Years to have the Ballance of Trade in Favor of this Province from all Parts of the Trading World; for it’s plain to a Demonstration, by the just Schemes of Peter the Great, the late Czar of Muscovy, in the Run of a few Years, arrived to such a vast Pitch of Glory, whose Empire now makes as grand an Appearance as any Empire on the Earth, which Empire for Improvement, is no ways to be compared with this Royal Majesty’s Dominions in America.

I humbly beg Leave to subscribe myself,
A true and hearty Lover of New-England,
Richard Fry.

Boston Goal, May 1739.

What was he on about now? Fry was issuing A Scheme for a Paper Currency to solve the specie crisis and promote the local economy. Backing up the new printed money, he wrote, would be the output of “Twenty Mills” built around Boston harbor. When Fry had first announced his scheme the previous August, even calling a meeting of investors at the Green Dragon Tavern, he had only seventeen mills in mind.

One might question the value of economic advice from a man who had gone bankrupt in England and was in jail for debt. But those circumstances didn’t daunt Fry. We can read his proposal, plus a couple of the petitions he wrote in the same years, in this book. Other documents from him are in the Clements Library.

Fry’s scheme wasn’t the only attempt to address the province’s specie shortage. In 1740, Boston businessmen set up the Massachusetts Land Bank, which issued private paper currency based on land holdings. The royal government and its supporters, led by Thomas Hutchinson, worked to stifle that enterprise, and in 1741 Parliament outlawed it. Some historians have traced the enmity between Hutchinson and Samuel Adams, whose father was a Land Bank investor, to that controversy.

Fry of course saw nothing wrong with paper currency (and one suspects he hoped to win the contract to supply the paper). But he no doubt preferred his own approach to issuing it. And as long as the provincial authorities opposed the Land Bank, he was ready to take advantage of that. In December 1740 Fry pointed out to Gov. Jonathan Belcher and his Council that his jailer was dealing in Land Bank currency. (A sample shown above.)

Richard Fry died in 1745, his finances still a mess. He left a wife and at least one child.

Milestones of Greater Boston, Then and Now

Last week Matt Rocheleau reported for Boston.com on the state government’s plan to restore a colonial milestone along Harvard Avenue in Allston that was damaged by a truck. I knew that Charles Bahne, author of the just-published Chronicles of Old Boston, has studied milestones and other early road markings around Boston, so I asked him for his reaction. Charlie kindly supplied this guest blogger essay.

I’m glad to see that the Massachusetts Department of Transportation is overseeing the milestones now, and that the Massachusetts Historical Commission is involved in plans for preserving this one. I’m pleasantly surprised that they have a count of surviving stones— 47 known to exist in situ. I’m sure that there were many more than 99 erected in the colonial era.

The article repeats the myth that the stones mark the “distance from a stone near City Hall in downtown Boston”—referring to the Boston Stone on Marshall Street. All of the colonial stones in the immediate Boston area were erected before 1735, thus before the Boston Stone was set in a public place. The actual zero point was the northwest corner of the Old State House, today’s State and Washington Streets.

It also does not appear that the Allston 6-mile stone was ever part of a mail delivery system; it was erected before the establishment of an official colonial post office and was never along any of the established post roads.

Rather, most of the stones in the immediate Boston area were erected by prominent political figures, such as Samuel Sewall, Jonathan Belcher, and Paul Dudley. I’m guessing that those men saw the milestones partly as a public service, and partly as a billboard advertising their beneficence—just as we see signs near highway construction projects that give the names of government officials today.

There were originally eight milestones along the road from Boston to Cambridge (Harvard Square). Of these, the stones at 1, 2, and 3 miles are now lost. I assume that the 1- and 2-mile stones—and possibly the 3 as well—were lost during the siege of Boston, since they were in a hotly contested area with entrenchments on both sides.

The 4-mile stone still stands on Huntington Avenue in Roxbury. The 5-mile stone is on Harvard Street in Brookline. The 6-mile stone is referenced in this article. The 7-mile stone is on North Harvard Street in Allston. And the 8-mile stone is at the corner of Garden Street & Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge (slightly moved from its original location in the middle of Harvard Square).

I’ve seen the 3-mile stone on Centre Street in Roxbury and the 5-mile stone at Monument Square (Centre & Eliot Streets) in Jamaica Plain. And of course the “Parting Stone” (not a milestone, but it indicates which route went where) stands at Eliot Square in Roxbury.

I have a copy of an article from the Brookline Historical Society in 1909 reporting the location of several then-existing stones along other highways in Roxbury, Dorchester, Milton, Quincy, Braintree, Canton, Jamaica Plain, and Walpole, in addition to the ones I just mentioned. There is an old milestone in Arlington, near Arlington Heights, which reads simply “8,” and I can’t figure out where that number refers to.

The stones referred to in the article along the Boston Post Road were indeed set up under the instruction of Benjamin Franklin, and in some cases directly under his field supervision. They were erected much later than the stones mentioned in earlier paragraphs.

The Post Road follows U.S. 20 west (with a few modern bypasses) from Watertown Square to about Northborough. At that point U.S. 20 diverges to the south of the Post Road, which goes directly through Worcester. West of Worcester the Post Road follows Mass. Route 9 for several miles, then some other highways, and then rejoins U.S. 20 west of Palmer. In the Springfield area some of the Post Road has been designated as Route 20A.

There were two other routings of the Boston Post Road, one going southwest from Dedham towards Hartford, and one going south from Dedham towards Rhode Island. And in the early nineteenth-century another set of milestones was erected along turnpikes, including the Worcester Turnpike, now Route 9.

As for the sad story of the Allston stone, until about fifteen or twenty years ago it was fairly well protected simply because the city had installed parking meters in that block. The meters defined the parking spaces so that the stone was relatively safe from “attack” by motorized vehicles. When the parking meters were removed, the parking spaces were no longer defined, so people continued to parallel-park in spaces of random length and positions. As a result the milestone was frequently hit and scratched by cars and trucks, a fact which I observed circa 1999. Thus I wasn’t wholly surprised to see that this accident had happened last August.

The other surviving stones along the Roxbury-Allston-Cambridge route are all set back behind the sidewalk, relatively safe from vehicular incursions.

Thanks, Charlie! Part of the plan for restoring the Allston stone is to move it back from the road by about a foot, which would provide a little more protection.

TOMORROW: Milestones on the web.