A “Christmas eve” in John Adams’s Imagination

On 23 July 1813, John Adams wrote to his son-in-law, William Stephens Smith, then serving in the U.S. House of Representatives.

That letter was about political affairs, with the war going badly for the U.S. of A., but another big theme was how no one appreciated John Adams.

In making that case, the former President drew up a picture, possibly conjectural, of a Christmastime tradition among certain Boston gentlemen of the mid-1700s:

Remember the fate of Cassandra. The prophet of ill ’tho’ as true as a goose’s bow is always detested. I also have been now and then reckoned among the minor prophets. Not a bone of any Goose ever picked by Jo Green, Nick Boylston, & Master Lovel on a Christmas eve, tho’ they had Nat Gardner for a guest, and exhausted all their wit, Gibes, & Jokes upon it, ever foretold an approaching winter, with more certainty that I have foreseen two or three small events in the course of my Life, such as the American Independence, & the result of the french revolution for example. But I was always execrated for it; & persecuted worse than the hebrew prophets, when they were set in the stocks.

“Jo Green” was Joseph Green (1706–1780), known for his biting literary wit. That seems to have manifest mostly in semi-anonymous verse poking at the Rev. Mather Byles, Sr., and anything new in town, like Freemasons. After a career as a merchant, Green took a post in the Customs service and then had to evacuate town as a Loyalist.

“Nick Boylston” was Nicholas Boylston (1716–1771), Green’s even more wealthy business partner. He and Green, both bachelors, owned houses near each other on School Street. Boylston is best known these days for his portraits by John Singleton Copley (one shown above). For those he posed as a wealthy man of learning, wearing a casual banyan and nightcap and leaning on a book. But I don’t recall any example of Boylston’s own writing or wit.

“Master Lovel” was John Lovell (1710–1778), master of the South Latin School for decades. He, too, was known for writing poetry, in his case serious verse and in various languages. Like Green and Boylston, Lovell’s surviving portrait shows him in a nightcap instead of a formal wig, signalling that he was concerned more with learning than with commerce. He, too, left Boston with the British troops in March 1776.

“Nat Gardner” was Nathaniel Gardner, Jr. (1719–1760), regarded in the 1750s as Boston’s leading poet, particularly in Latin. He was Lovell‘s usher, or assistant master, at the grammar school. Gardner died at forty-one and was soon largely forgotten. In 1989 David S. Shields wrote a study designed to bring him and his work back “from limbo.”

The appearance of Gardner at this Christmas Eve gathering shows that Adams was imagining a scene in the 1750s, when he himself was a university student, country schoolmaster, and legal trainee. He wouldn’t have been invited.

Nonetheless, Adams left a picture of how Boston’s small intellectual crowd spent their Christmas Eves, exchanging witticisms over a roasted goose.

Seeing London with Nathaniel Balch

I’ve long puzzled over why hatter Nathaniel Balch chose to sail to Britain in May 1775, a month after war broke out in Massachusetts.

Balch may have been planning the trip for a while for business or personal reasons and just didn’t want to cancel, even in wartime.

But John Andrews’s letter (quoted yesterday) suggests that the price of the passage was unusually high. Passengers paid Capt. John Callahan extra to sail the Minerva across the Atlantic without a full cargo.

Like a lot of Bostonians, Balch had good reason to get out of the besieged town before it came under attack. But he didn’t take his wife and five children with him. He also still owned real estate in Providence, so he probably could have found refuge for the whole family in America.

Balch doesn’t appear to have been so deeply involved in politics that he would need to go to London to lobby for a patronage job, like his fellow traveler Samuel Quincy, or to talk with British opposition politicians on behalf of the Boston Whigs, as his friend Josiah Quincy had just done.

I know of no documents from Balch explaining his motives for the voyage—no letters, diary, business accounts, memoir.

We have a few glances of what Balch actually did in London after arriving on that ship full of Loyalists. They come from the diary of Samuel Curwen, a Loyalist from Salem who had crossed the ocean after a visit to Philadelphia. On 31 July, Curwen wrote:

Went in company with Messrs. I[saac]. Smith, N. Balch, J[oseph]. Greene Esq. and Berry [or was this John Barrell?], Colburn Barrell, a Mr. Peacock, a Glass Dealer in Fleetmarket Street, our Guide and young Oliver, to the [word?] Flintglass house over blackfryar’s bridge where we saw a drinking glass formed, completely made, ink bottles and smelling bottles, from which place returning we proceeded through a paved ally so called on this Side the Bridge to a glass grinder and polisher, whom we saw work. Dined at Kingshead Jury Lane, the glass grinder worked in a loft up 50 or 60 stairs. From dinner we repaired to St. Paul’s…

(A rumor was going around London that day that Lord North had shot himself. It was false.)

Three of those men and one more got together on 22 August:

Went to Bow with Nathaniel Balch, lying beyond White Chappell, from whence we took Coach, 2 Miles in order to see the China Manufacture, but the clerk received and dismissed us very cavalierly, with an abrupt answer, that he should not show it to us.

We met J. Berry and Mr. Silsbee at the door having trudged it afoot, returned by Bromley, stopping at Mile End, we took a bowl of punch and some bread and cheese, and from thence walked together to the Exchange, where J.B. and Mr. S. departed together.

Mr. B. and myself entered Lamp Chop House in Bartholomew Lane, took each a porringer of broth, and after taking a Survey of different rooms in the Bank, departed each for his lodgings, I being weary and lame.

Those expeditions might indicate that Balch was studying English manufactures. Then again, that might just have been a sort of sightseeing that businessmen from the provinces did.

On 24 August, Curwen, Balch, Silsbee, Isaac Smith, “John Berry and his Brother,” and “Capt. Martin” took a boat up the river to Barnes, then hiked through Kew Gardens and Richmond to Hampton Court Palace. Curwen thought the royal family should get out there more often. “Out of hatred to his grandfather the last excellent Geo. 2, the present King seems to make it a point to hate every object of his worthy grandfather’s approbation,” he wrote. The next day the men took a coach on to Windsor Castle as well.

Finally, on 28 August Balch called on Curwen “to go to Mr. Gilbert Harrison’s to dine from whence we went to puddledock.” Curwen visited the “Herald’s office” to inquire about his coat of arms, and there the men had tea.

The diary of former governor Thomas Hutchinson shows that in those same months he often saw people that Balch had sailed with, but he never mentioned meeting Balch. That might indicate a political gap between them, or perhaps just a social gap between a hatter and a governor.

The genial hatter’s reason to be in London that summer remains a mystery.

TOMORROW: Home again.

Friends of the Royal Government on Liberty Tree

I want to go back to that first report of the naming of Liberty Tree in Boston on 11 Sept 1765. That happened on a Wednesday, which meant the first newspaper to carry the story was Richard Draper’s Boston News-Letter—which supported the Crown.

Knowing that political perspective helps in interpreting some details of its description:

on the Body of the largest Tree was fixed with large deck Nails, that it might last (as a Poet said, like Oaken Bench to Perpetuity) a Copper-Plate with these Words Stamped thereon, in Golden Letters, THE TREE OF LIBERTY, August 14. 1765. A Report of these Decorations collected a great many of the Inhabitants who were at Leisure, where they were saluted with the Firing of a Number of Chambers, and regaled with a Plenty of Liquor.

The line “like Oaken Bench to Perpetuity” first appeared in a mock ballad titled “A Full and True Account of How the Lamentable Wicked French and Indian Pirates Were Taken by the Valiant Englishmen,” published A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (Boston: 1744). The verse containing that line was popular enough that John Randolph of Roanoke quoted it in a letter in 1820.

The “Poet” has been identified as either the Rev. Mather Byles or the merchant Joseph Green (shown above, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts), both men known for their wit and their support of the Hutchinson-Oliver party. The newspaper report’s emphasis on the protesters being “at Leisure” and its mention of “Plenty of Liquor” likewise show that this wasn’t a positive description of that demonstration. It was a sneering complaint.

Indeed, the newspaper went on to complain:

It should have been mentioned above, that after 1 o’Clock some of the Train of Artillery brought down some Cannon, placed them before the Town-House and fired several Rounds; but we hear that this was done without any Order or Leave from the Commander in Chief [i.e., Gov. Francis Bernard], or even giving Notice to the Governor and Council, who were then sitting in the Council-Chamber, of their Intention.

That would indeed have been startling for Bernard and his advisors to suddenly hear cannon go off right outside. After all, it was only a month since the the first anti-Stamp Act rally had led to a march through the ground level of that same building.

TOMORROW: The Boston Gazette responds on Monday.

How Hutchinson Learned Latin and French

This is Thomas Hutchinson writing in the third person about himself as a young man:

When he left College [1727] he went into his father's counting house, and became a Merchant Apprentice, from 17 years to 21. He saw how much he had neglected his studies at College, and applied to his schoolmaster, (…whose tuition he was under about five years), and desired he would allow him to spend two or three evenings in a week in going over some of the Latin Classicks, which he readily consented to. In a short time he acquired a relish for the Latin tongue, which he never lost.

Soon after he put himself under M. [Andrew] Le Mercier, the French Minister, and then began to learn the French tongue; but Monsieur [Louis] Langloiseier, arriving at Boston soon after, in Gov. [William] Burnet's family, & Mr [John Henry] Lidius of Albany, who had lived and married in Canada, and Mr [Peter] Chardon, a young gentleman of fortune from London, being also in Boston, a French Club was formed, of which the three gentlemen above named were members, and Mr [Jeremiah] Gridley, the Lawyer, Mr Jo[seph]. Greene, [John] Lovell, and two or three more New England young gentlemen were members, & the whole conversation was to be in French.

In these ways he acquired a competent knowledge of the Latin & French, accustoming himself to reading authors in both languages, and at length he found very little difficulty in either.

Le Mercier, a native of Caen educated in Geneva, was minister of the Huguenot church in Boston, which faded after his death. Eventually that building on School Street became the town’s first Catholic church.

As Hutchinson noted, Langloiserie arrived in Boston with the new governor in 1728, but left for London on the sudden death of his patron. He came back, opened a French school in 1730, and started tutoring Harvard students in the language in 1733.

Lydius was a Dutch-born dealer in western lands, not always equipped with legal titles.

Chardon was a merchant of Huguenot ancestry whose name remains in New Chardon Street.

Gridley, Green, and Lovell were all New England-born Englishmen like Hutchinson, learned and upper-class. Gridley became the province’s leading lawyer and leader of the Freemasons. Greene was a merchant also known for his satirical verse. Lovell was the master of the South Latin School for decades.

Of these men, all who survived until the Revolution became Loyalists. (Well, Lydius was already in Britain in 1776, either seeking to validate his land claims or hiding out from the many people who had bought deeds from him.)

Joseph Green, John Hamock, and the Freemasons

Yesterday I shared a bit of a scatological attack on Freemasonry published on the front page of the Boston Evening-Post on 7 Jan 1751. That attack included not only a poem but a woodcut illustration obviously commissioned for that poem. Who went to all that trouble?

By that time, Boston’s first Freemasons lodge had been established for nearly two decades. I’ve read conflicting reports of whether they had had public marches, but clearly they had one on St. John’s Day near the end of 1749.

The next year, a local wit named Joseph Green (1706-1780, shown here in a 1767 Copley portrait) published two editions of a pseudonymous pamphlet titled Entertainment for a Winter’s Evening…, satirizing the very notion of Freemasons going to church and poking fun at individual members. Those lines closed with a scene of the Freemasons entering their temple, out of public view. The author, invoking the muse Clio, promised to “tell the rest another time.”

Therefore, it was logical for people to read the Boston Evening-Post poem as the next installment of that series, describing the Freemasons’ secret rituals in scatological terms while professing to be a “Defence of MASONRY.” A merchant named Benjamin Hallowell (father of the highly unpopular Customs official with the same name) said the new poem definitely came from Green. According to Steven Bullock’s Revolutionary Brotherhood, the Freemasons met, threatened a boycott of the Evening-Post, and asked Lt. Gov. Spencer Phips, the province’s highest royal official, for permission to sue.

Then on 21 January the Evening-Post published Green’s denial that he’d written the “Defence of MASONRY” poem, criticizing Hallowell for spreading a “scandalous and malicious lie.” To be fair, the “Defence” wasn’t up to Green’s standard. He really was a good poet, and his allusions far more subtle—his pamphlets included helpful footnotes so readers could see how clever he was. Furthermore, the “Defence” was addressed “To Mr. CLIO,” or Green, rather than by him.

So who did write the “Defence”? David S. Shields’s Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America points to a wine merchant named John Hamock (or Hammock). He was in business from 1735 to his death in 1769. He was a warden of Christ Church, raising money for its bells in 1744, and in 1758 he rented the space under the Town House as his wine cellar.

In the 15 Jan 1750 Boston Post-Boy Hamock had advertised his wines by implying that other merchants’ wares were unhealthy and signing himself “John Hamock, V.D.” Other ads showed that meant “Vini Doctor,” a claim for special authority, though more often a joke appellation college students bestowed on each other. Hamock didn’t have a college education, but he seemed to have pretensions—and for the snobbish Green that was a provocation.

A poetic critique titled “To V.D.” appeared in the 30 July Post-Boy. The author took the opportunity to swipe at another of Green’s frequent targets, the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, Sr.:

Whist---softly---for fear
Doughty B**** should hear;
If he does, with his pen he’ll chastise you.
I know you will cry,
Scar’d by B****! Not I,
Do your worst, Sir, for H****k defies you.

Thus, “To V.D.” was both addressed to Hamock and put words in his mouth.

Hamock might then have published the “Defence of MASONRY” poem in early 1751 to get Green in trouble. And it did: for the only time in his career Green had to publicly discuss his writing, if only to deny he’d written this item. Hamock might also have been trying to show “Mr. CLIO” that he could satirize the Freemasons in verse, too.

It looks like Boston’s Freemasons just happened to be caught in the crossfire between two men feuding for their own reasons. The movement and many local members had ties to Europe instead of old Puritan families, so they made an easy target in Boston. In fact, Green went back to satirizing the Freemasons four years later with a pamphlet titled The Grand Arcanum, Detected.