“The Villain that murdered Colo: Parsons Brother is here”

Back here I described the family of the Rev. Jonathan Parsons of Newburyport, including his fourth son, Thomas Parsons, who disappeared in 1772.

The third son, Samuel Holden Parsons, became an attorney in Lyme, Connecticut. He prospered, getting elected to the colonial assembly, and then moved to New London. At the start of the Revolutionary War Parsons raised a regiment and marched north.

Parsons served through the siege of Boston and in the spring of 1776 led his troops south through Connecticut to defend New York.

Soon after Continental officers detained Basile Boudrot (alias Dugan) on suspicion of murdering Thomas Parsons and his crew, someone sent the news to Col. Parsons.

The next trace of Boudrot that we have is therefore Gen. Philip Schuyler’s 12 June letter from Albany to Gen. George Washington:

The Villain that murdered Colo: Parsons Brother is here. The Colo: desired Me to send him to New York I wait Your Excellency’s Directions.

Washington replied on 24 June:

As Colonel Parsons has requested you to send the Person who is supposed to have murdered his Brother, I have no objection to your doing it, if you judge it necessary. He, from what I have been told, designs to apply to Congress, for instituting some Mode of Trial for the Offence.

Schuyler (shown here) proceeded on that course. On 11 July, John Holt’s New-York Journal reported:

Last Sunday [7 July] one Bazel Bonderot, a native of Nova-Scotia, was brought to this city from Canada, charged with being a principal in the murder of Captain Thomas Parsons, and eight other persons, in Nova-Scotia, in February 1772.

Soon after this murder was perpetrated, he fled his country, and has been wandering from place to place ever since, till last April, when he was providentially detected by Captain Hector McNeil, properly secured, and sent forward to receive the just reward of his crimes.

He was yesterday sent on from this city to Newbury Port, the place where Captain Parsons last lived, for examination and trial.

That article was reprinted in several newspapers, and eventually in the 19 July Essex Journal of Newburyport.

That same issue of the Essex Journal reported:

This Morning, between 6 and 7 o’clock, departed this life after a long tedious illness, the Rev. JONATHAN PARSONS, in the 71st year of his age, and in the 31st of his MINISTRY in the PRESBYTERIAN Church, in this Town—His remains to be interred on Tuesday next, at three o’clock in the afternoon.

It’s not clear whether the minister heard about the capture of his son’s alleged killer before he died.

TOMORROW: Deliberations in the Congress.

Parson Parsons and His Sons

Jonathan Parsons was born in West Springfield in 1705, the son of a church deacon. As an adolescent he “worked at a trade,” but a Yale tutor named Jonathan Edwards persuaded him to try college.

Parsons graduated at the late age of twenty-four. He then studied more theology under Edwards, who had become the minister at Northampton.

In 1731 Parsons took the pulpit himself in the town of Lyme, Connecticut. He married Phebe Griswold, from a prominent local family, and they started having children—thirteen in all, but six died in infancy.

The children who grew up were four sons, born every two years from 1733 to 1739 (Marshfield, Jonathan, Samuel Holden, and Thomas), and three daughters, born 1748 to 1755 (Phebe, Lucia, and Lydia).

At Lyme the Rev. Mr. Parsons also got caught up in the “New Light” revival inspired by his old mentor Edwards and further inspired by the Rev. George Whitefield, who came through town in 1740. Parsons was soon known for his energetic preaching and evangelical outreach.

In 1745 the minister’s fervor grew too much for his congregation, and they decided on a separation. Parsons moved his family to Newbury to preach to a small “New Light” congregation that set itself up as Presbyterian, independent of New England’s independent network.

That meeting grew, erecting what’s now called the Old South Presbyterian Church in Newburyport in 1756. Whitefield died during a visit to Parsons in 1770 and was buried in its crypt. The minister’s wife Phebe died later the same year. He married the widow Lydia Clarkson of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1771. 

Of the Parsons sons, Marshfield and Samuel Holden moved back to their birthplace of Lyme. Marshfield was a merchant and with his succession of four wives kept a tavern. Samuel Holden graduated from Yale and became a lawyer. Jonathan, Jr., and Thomas kept Newbury as their base and went to sea.

In particular, Thomas Parsons had a son by his first wife, Mary Gibson, and four daughters by his second wife, Sarah Sawyer. The New-Hampshire Gazette shows a captain named Thomas Parsons sailing out of Portsmouth harbor:

• on the Charming Sally to Guadaloupe in 1762.
• on the Success to Dominica and the West Indies in 1769.
• on the Three Friends to the West Indies and Guadaloupe in 1770.

In February 1772, according to secondary sources, Capt. Thomas Parsons took a schooner out of Newburyport for another voyage to the Caribbean. He never came home.

TOMORROW: Mystery off Cape Sable.

Newburyport Newspapers

Through Alexander Cain of Untapped History, I learned about this database of digitized documents from Newburyport, Massachusetts.

At the top are the links to (as of today) 646 pages from the 1770s and 1,131 from the 1780s. Those are mostly pages from Newburyport’s only newspaper at the time, the Essex Journal. Or, to give it the full original name, the Essex Journal and Merrimack Packet: Or, the Massachusetts and New-Hampshire General Advertiser.

The format of this newspaper database is different from any I’ve seen before. Clicking on each page opens up first a terrible O.C.R. transcription, then a full page image. The images are quite readable, so thumbing through is a fine way to immerse oneself in the life of a small New England port during the Revolutionary period.

The story of the Essex Journal starts with Isaiah Thomas and his ambition to franchise his Massachusetts Spy operation the way that Benjamin Franklin had sponsored and profited from other newspapers two generations before. Newspaper printers could benefit by building networks to share news, mail, advertising, and bookselling. Often those networks were built along family lines. Thomas was at a disadvantage without many relations, but he did have apprentices.

According to Thomas himself, he launched the Essex Journal in 1773 “At the request of several gentlemen, particularly the late rev. Jonathan Parsons [1705-1776].” Which is to say, Thomas supplied the printing equipment but stayed in Boston looking after his own newspaper and Royal American Magazine.

The actual printer in Newburyport was a young man named Henry-Walter Tinges. Facts about him are hard to come by. According to Thomas, he was “born in Boston” but “his parents were Hollanders,” or Dutch. Suffolk County probate records show that a Henry Tinges was assigned a guardian in 1767. He apprenticed first with John Fleeming and then, perhaps after the Boston Chronicle folded, with Thomas. Presumably he came of age in 1773 and was ready to manage his own shop.

Thomas and Tinges started collecting subscriptions for the Essex Journal in December 1773, distributing a sample issue for free. A lot of the early advertisers were Boston merchants—perhaps Thomas had given them a deal to advertise in both the Massachusetts Spy and the Essex Journal. The initial plan was to publish on Saturdays, but in response to public feedback the newspaper appeared on Wednesdays.

In August 1774, with Boston under army occupation for the second time, Thomas “sold the printing materials to Ezra Lunt, the proprietor of a stage” between Newburyport and Boston who thus had an interest in promoting local business. Lunt was a Newburyport native, thirty-one years old. Tinges remained the junior partner.

That arrangement lasted until May 1775, when Lunt became a captain in Col. Moses Little’s regiment of the Massachusetts army. According to local lore, “a stirring discourse from Rev. Jonathan Parsons” had prompted Lunt and his men to volunteer. The company saw action at the end of the Battle of Bunker Hill, acting as a rear guard during the provincial retreat off the Charlestown peninsula. After the war, Lunt joined the Yankee exodus to the Ohio Territory and died in the town of Marietta.

Meanwhile, back in Newburyport, Tinges had a new senior partner: John Mycall (1750-1833). According to Thomas, Mycall was “born at Worcester, in England; and was a schoolmaster at Almsbury”—Amesbury, where he had married in 1772. A “man of great ingenuity,” within a year he was able to manage the press himself and publish the Essex Journal under his own name. Probably during this time he took on his nephew William Hoyt (1759-1812) as an apprentice.

Henry-Walter Tinges remained in Newburyport at least into January 1777, when his intention to marry Eunice Knight was announced. According to his old master Thomas, at some point he went “to Baltimore, and from thence to sea, but never returned.”

In February 1777, Mycall had to stop publishing the Essex Journal, apparently due to paper shortages and business uncertainty. The Newburyport database therefore has no local material from 1778 until 1784, when Mycall restarted the newspaper. It continued for another ten years, published by either Mycall or Holt, until Mycall finally retired in 1794, first to rural Harvard and then to bustling Cambridge. And that was the end of the Essex Journal.

But the Newburyport database continues uninterrupted with the town’s new newspaper, the Morning Star.